Another late post! Life intrudes!!

We were going to play some surrealist games tonight but due to my dropping the ball, we’re going to read some short pieces by Bruno Filippi instead. The text can be found HERE. Let’s plan to discuss “The Free Art of a Free Spirit”, “The Federation of Sorrow”, and “Il Me Faut Vivre Ma Vie” this evening; though as always, just read as much as you’re able or inclined to. You might also look at the translator’s intro by our good friend and Renzo Novatore’s piece in memory of Filippi if you want more info on the iconoclast in question.

Forward, marvelous rascals!

This week it’s back to James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games. We’ll discuss chapters four and five: “A finite game occurs within a world” and “Nature is the realm of the unspeakable”. Altogether both of those are less than thirty pages, and this will position us nicely to finish the text when we return to it for the last time in early July. If you still need a copy, you can download one HERE.

Sorry about the super late post this week folks. Tonight we’re talking about George Herriman and his seminal comic strip Krazy Kat. For reading material, I found quite the motherlode: .cbz scans of all the volumes of Krazy & Ignatz, the anthology series collecting all the different periods of Herriman’s comic published by the venerable Fantagraphics. There are twelve full volumes of this series, and it takes forever to convert them to pdfs, so for simplicity’s sake I’m just going to post two of my favorites. Each volume has some interesting essays on the comic and its creator as well as tons of the strips themselves, so let’s just read as much as feels appropriate to each of us and discuss it tonight. I’m also going to post two short pieces on Krazy Kat, though unfortunately I wasn’t able to find the piece from Arsenal we were discussing last time. Read what you will and be there to discuss it tonight at 7:30! Links to the PDFs for tonight can be found by CLICKING HERE. And if you want to grab the other volumes in the Fantagraphics series, click HERE.

UPDATE: I wish I had found it earlier, but I was able to track down Franklin Rosemont’s piece on Krazy Kat. It’s from the publication “Surrealism and its Popular Accomplices”, where it begins on pg 58. I’ve added it to the files found on the first link above. It’s not very long and if you get a chance to read one essay before tonight (alongside looking at some of the old strips), I would make it this one.

Next week we’re starting what may be an extended biweekly dive into surrealism, and who better to kick it off with than Benjamin Péret? Here’s a few pieces of his courtesy of one of our participants: ENJOY

(edit: somehow the files got saved as pages docs instead of pdfs. they’ve now been reuploaded to the link above as pdfs; sorry about that!)

Another reminder that we’re meeting from 7:30-9:30pm each Tuesday for the next few months. As always, join us as http://meet.jit.si with room name bastardanarchy.

Lastly, here is the infamous photo from La Révolution Surréaliste no. 8, captioned “Our Collaborator Benjamin Péret Insulting a Priest”:

Super late post this week—-deal with it! We’re continuing with chapter 2 of James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games

Tonight we’re going to experiment with pushing things back half an hour, so 7:30-9:30 tonight. Join us on http://meet.jit.si then, room name ‘bastardanarchy’. Til then, toodleoo fuckers!

Thanks to our new participants and and those we hadn’t seen in a while for joining us last night — hope you will all make a habit of it!

We really liked James P. Carse’s book Finite and Infinite Games (see below), so in two weeks we’re going to pick back up with that, but next time we’ll revisit an old classic: On the Poverty of Student Life, the text which essentially took the Situationist International from an obscure groupuscule mired in the ashes of the Lettrist avant garde to an organization that would become synonymous with the uprisings of May 1968 and leave indelible marks in the annals of art, revolt, and criticism.

One of our participants will be providing a little historical context and background to the SI for those of us who haven’t encountered them before. If your hunger is still not glutted, you might read Bob Black’s essay on the SI.

Next week we’ll take a look at Chapter 1 of James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games. Hope you’ll join us via Jitsi Meet (http://meet.jit.si or on your app store) — room name is “bastardanarchy”. As usual, we’ll get started around 7pm on Tuesday. See you then!

It’s going to be hard to top last week’s reading, but I’m optimistic! This week we’ll read a short essay on the 3rd/4th century egoist thinker Yang Chu. Thanks to John and Jason for hooking up the PDF.  You can also read this introduction on him if yer hankerin fer more!

Just a reminder, we are experimenting with using Jitsi Meet (https://meet.jit.si or download on your app store) to open the study group up to all who can’t attend bc of the pandemic. The room name is “bastardanarchy” and we get started at 7:00 or shortly thereafter every Tuesday night. Drop in and join our conversation if you like!

We’re having some trouble finding the Yang Zhu stuff, so instead we’ll look at the Lang Gore piece from Modern Slavery that also came up last time. PDF is HERE.

and as a bonus, here’s a PDF of some flyers and posters by Anti Authoritarians Anonymous (Dan Todd & John Zerzan)… enjoy!

If you happen to find this page first, instead check out our our established website, which is issue-prone. At the moment, the usual site seems to be up and running, but in the event it goes down temporarily or for good, the readings will be posted here instead. And that right there is what you call a CONTINGENCY PLAN.