New Sea Urchin chapbook: George Bacovia – Furnace

19.08.2019

New Sea Urchin chapbook:

Cuptor, subtitled Iulie (=July) was first published in 1906 in the literary journal Romanul literar and republished as part of Bacovia’s renowned compilation Plumb ten years later. The dark and morbid imagery of the poem make it an example of Romanian Francophile Symbolism, which was influenced by Baudelaire and his translations of Edgar Allan Poe. Having been taught German at an early age, Bacovia was not only familiar with Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe but also with Friedrich Nietzsche and other precursors of German Expressionism. Furnace is then as much a Symbolist as an early Expressionist poem. The poem, now handsomely published in the series of Sea Urchin chapbooks, is a cruel love song carrying whiffs of putrefaction under a sledgehammer sun. Furnace is an instant heat stroke.

New: Brion Gysin – Let the Mice in

19.08.2019

New in our Moloko Print catalogue:

Brion Gysin – Let the Mice in

Brion Gysin‘s Let the Mice in was first published by Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press in 1973. In his editor’s note to that edition Jan Herman wrote that the book brings together texts written in the early 1960s and photographs to document part of literary history, notably the use of cut-ups as a writing method. Cut-ups can be traced back to the Dadaists but were re-invented, elaborated and popularised by Brion Gysin and his friend William Burroughs in Paris in the early 1960s. Their first cut-ups were published in Minutes to Go, a collaboration with Sinclair Beiles and Gregory Corso, which was published by Jean Fanchette’s Two Cities Editions in 1960. Herman explains that the cut-up as a literary method is clarified in Let the Mice in and that the book can be considered a companion to its earliest experiments. Let the Mice in contains essays, actual cut-ups, photos, poems and works by Gysin and his friends that not only document a now famous aspect of literary history but most of all give insight into the skein of avant-garde, semi-scientific, magical and psychedelic influences that lay at the heart of Gysin’s artistry.

Ralf Friel’s Moloko Plus press has now published a facsimile of the original 1973 edition of Let the Mice in and has extended it with a foreword by Douglas Field and extra photos of Gysin. This hardcover edition of Gysin’s manual, beautifully designed by Robert Schalinski, is another valuable contribution by Moloko Plus to the study of cut-ups and their literary importance.

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New from Moloko: Richard Brautigan

07.08.2019

New in our Moloko Print catalogue:

Richard Brautigan – Sombrero vom Himmel

Sombrero vom Himmel is Moloko’s German translation of Richard Brautigan’s Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel. The novel, first published in 1976, follows three storylines that interact, entwine and hilariously spiral out of control. One storyline follows the hero, a heartbroken comedy writer, who has just discarded the opening sentences of a new story and finds himself tormented by memories and fantasies of a former Japanse lover. The second story line follows the Japanese lover, sound asleep and dreaming of her deceased father with a cat purring by her side. And the third elaborates the writer’s discarded story about a black sombrero that has miraculously fallen from the sky and has landed in an American town, where its appearance arouses strong feelings that culminate in a full-blown riot. The novel flits from one storyline to another and develops in slow, circular motions into an absurd tale about… yes, about what? About next to nothing, actually: a single hair that brings back haunting memories of a lost lover, a purring cat that triggers dreams in a sleeping woman, an icy sombrero that somehow gives rise to scenes of gross but hilarious violence. Brilliant descriptions, but what are they? Does all this only take place inside the hero’s mind? Are these neurotic fantasies and fears whirling across the paper? Or what? Only the mysterious sombrero – cold and immobile at the heart of the story – knows.

William Levy – The Fortunate Traveller
Illustrated by Michael Blümel)

06.05.2019

New in our Moloko+ catalogue:

William Levy – The Fortunate Traveller

In 1594 Elizabethan satirist Thomas Nashe published ‘The Unfortunate Traveller’. This picaresque novel, the first of its kind in Britain, was set on the continent and followed its protagonist’s adventures through a string of European towns. In graphic descriptions Jack Wilton, a court page, testified to the “wonderful spectacle of bloodshed” that 16th-century Europe had become and doing so allowed Thomas Nashe to expose the religious and political hypocrisy of his days. William Levy, who has been familiar with the works of Nashe since the 1960s, has now coined a collection of his erotic stories ‘The Fortunate Traveller’. In that way Levy’s tales, published on various occasions over the years and now compiled by Moloko Plus, form a loose but in content and style coherent series of picaresque adventures with the author himself as a horny protagonist. While picaresque novels traditionally use frog’s perspectives, low viewpoints from the fringe, to present readers with distorted and hilarious images of the higher layers of society, Levy’s perspective is rather outside-in. Levy offers the reader glimpses of bedrooms that he shared with attractive women in Amsterdam, Paris, Prague, Ohio, Baltimore and Vilnius, at the same time satirizing the incrowd, the “haute riff-rafferie of the demimonde“, among whom several figures of the counterculture. “History without gossip is a dry biscuit”, Levy once explained. And that is very true: his latest erotic picaresque novel is not only to a large extent autobiographical but sheer voyeur’s and eavesdropper’s delight to boot. More →

Moloko Plus and the ‘Muspilli Rökrökr Mashup’ project

04.05.2019

In the summer of 1999 German poet Bert Papenfuß and musician Rex Joswig spent a holiday together in Feldberg, Germany. They didn’t do much work, according to Papenfuß, but Rex Joswig asked his friend to write a text for him to put to music, ‘something with the Bible’ Roswig added. Papenfuß didn’t feel like working from Bible texts but revived an older idea of his to rework the ninth-century poem ‘Muspilli’, an incomplete and apocalyptic Old High German text which is kept in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

Last year Bert Papenfuß combined his 1999 ‘Muspilli special’ and his earlier political rap ‘Rökrökr’ into a ‘Muspilli Rökrökr Mashup’ and added footnotes to the new poem so extensive that they formed a text in itself. That same year Papenfuß’s poem was read by Ines Burdow, Rex Joswig and Bert Papenfuß himself, recorded in a studio in Berlin and set to music by the Berlin bands Tarwater and Herbst In Peking. These two pieces now make up the opening tracks of the CD and double-LP that Moloko Plus has devoted to the ‘Muspilli Rökrökr Mashup’ project, followed by the full text of Papenfuß’s footnotes read by Ensemble Sockenschuß, who are again Ines Burdow, Rex Joswig, Bert Papenfuß plus Jule Böwe. Collaborations of Papenfuß and the bands The Same (Helmar Kreysig and Rex Joswig), and Duo Elektrokohle (Rex Joswig and Frank “Trötsch” Tröger) complete this fantastic release. Muspilli Rökrökr Mashup. A modern Book of Revelation. Save your soul or learn about its doom!