Albert Kahn, the French banker and philanthropist who decided to photograph the entire globe in 1909 using the latest autochrome technology, is endlessly fascinating for many reasons… including the incredible color photographs that still exist from the project. David Okuefuna’s THE DAWN OF THE COLOR PHOTOGRAPH presents these beautiful images as well as some of the story behind Kahn. Richard B. Woodward writes about Kahn in the Wall Street Journal, and the article includes an incredible slideshow of images. Check out the article and slideshow here. James F. X. O’Gara writes a very interesting review of the book and the darker side of the project in The Weekly Standard.

Perhaps it’s the economy. Perhaps it’s the continuing avalanche of bad news. There could be many reasons that the strange and sometimes disturbing fairy tales of dada artist Kurt Schwitters seem to be hitting the spot with some reviewers and book buyers these days.

Quinn Latimer reviews the book on Bookforum.com, noting:

“Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales, which translates twenty-eight of Schwitters’s tales into English for the first time, provides the satiric mix of the familiar and the fantastic with which fairy tales regularly operate. As with Schwitters’s celebrated collages and assemblages, however, the tales’ expected elements are shattered and reassembled into riotous, deeply weird wholes. Beautiful maidens, destitute peasants, kindly farmers, and anthropomorphized animals are subject to a brutality both heretical and bruisingly familiar. That the horrors of World War I and the Holocaust bookended the writing of these tales comes as no surprise. Narratives are reliably brought to savage conclusions: A peaceful man who must decapitate a body in order to free an enchanted virgin is tripped up by his own gentility and is himself sent to the gallows; a “good man” who lets a hungry insect sting him is then sucked dry by a swarm of mosquitoes. The end.”

Hmm. This is the kind of stuff that is really resonating with readers in San Francisco. LUCKY HANS AND OTHER MERZ FAIRY TALES, translated and introduced by Jack Zipes, made the City Lights hardcover bestseller list in June. Here is a post on the Stolen Apples site with the bestseller list.

PUP author James Cuno debates Christopher Hitchens on whether the Elgin Marbles should be returned to Greece or remain in The British Museum. I read Hitchens’s moving and convincing piece in Vanity Fair about his visit to the new Greek museum, but I am also swayed by Cuno’s arguments about the importance of encyclopedic museums and protecting artifacts from less than ideal circumstances in their source countries (see the Iraq museums being looted, or deliberate attempts by new regimes or religions to destroy artifacts of earlier times).

Over the past two weeks Andrei Codrescu has visited Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, New York, Boston, and Princeton to lecture and sign copies of The Posthuman Dada Guide. Many predict the author tour will be phased out in future years, but by all accounts, Andrei’s tour was incredibly successful. One of the interesting things to note about author tours now is that there is a parallel virtual tour taking place via blog posts, twitters, facebook, and online videos. Here… a virtual recounting of his tour culled from the web.

First, the New York Public Library event featuring Henry Alford and Paul Holdengraber with real-time drawings by Flash Rosenberg. (April 13, 2009).

Then on to Seattle’s Town Hall (April 22), City Lights in San Francisco (April 26)and Los Angeles (April 28) to participate in the Public Library’s ALOUD series (video available from fora.tv).

Also in Los Angeles, Andrei experienced Ten Minutes at Zócalo.

Back up to Portland for an event at Powell’s (April 30) for which we find many mentions at twitter and a thank you note in the “notes” section of Andrei’s facebook page.

[Updated 5/12/09] Here is video, courtesy of PDX Justice of Andrei’s event at Powell’s:

Then out to the East coast where The Big Red Apple mentions attending Andrei’s event with St. Mark’s Bookshop (May 4) at the Solas Bar in New York, which was coincidentally the name of the restaurant in Boston where Andrei and some of his audience went to eat fish and chips after his lecture at the Public Library (May 5).

The last stop on the tour found Andrei in Princeton at Labyrinth Books. In an otherwise flawless tour, this was the one stop where the planes and trains did not cooperate and Andrei was late, but as owner Dorothea noted — how better to start a dada event than to piss off the audience! The discussion was fantastic and prompted me to post a new spam hall of shame item this morning. Kim Nagy of Wild River Review was on hand and posts her thoughts here.

Is this the future of the book tour?

In case you missed this wonderful event with Andrei Codrescu and Ooana Sanziana Marian at the LA Public Library, here is video provided by fora.tv.

Tonight, Andrei will present on the subject of his book The Posthuman Dada Guide at Labyrinth Books in Princeton, NJ. Join us if you can!

Here, James Cuno interviews Neil MacGregor about the origins of the British Museum and the role of encyclopedic museums through history, a subject further explored in MacGregor’s contribution (To Shape the Citizens of “That Great City, the World”) to the edited volume Whose Culture?

You may also be interested in reading Hugh Eakin’s take on both Whose Culture? and Who Owns Antiquity? (James Cuno’s solo-authored work on the subject of antiquities and nationalism) in the May 14th issue of the New York Review of Books.

On April 13th, I attended a wonderful session at the NYPL on How to Live Dada. The participants were PUP author Andrei Codrescu (The Posthuman Dada Guide), Henry Alford, and Mark Twain (AKA Paul Holdengraber). The discussion ranged from Dada to final words to meat bodies with many dips into The Posthuman Dada Guide along the way. Flash Rosenberg drew a real-time illustration of the evening and in this brief snippet, you can really get a feel for the entire segment which is available at the Live at the NYPL web site.

Personally my favorite quote from this particular segment is “You invite Dada to the party, but you don’t marry Dada…” from Henry Alford.

Robert Fulford considers the intertwined issues of art nationalism and museum rights in his column for The National Post from this past weekend.  He prominently features Whose Culture? an edited collection of musings from museum directors and philosophers that continues the controversial work James Cuno initiated in Who Owns Antiquity?

Andrei Codrescu, author of The Posthuman Dada Guide, will participate in a highly unusual event at the New York Public Library on April 13th at 7:00 PM (thanks MM). Readers of PUP Blog will be pleased to learn they can get discounted tickets ($10.00 + $1.50 service charge) if they order tickets at smarttix.com and use the code LIVDAD.  Hope you can join us for what will, no doubt, be a memorable evening. More on this, below.

The Event:

An evening of gentlemen bearing questions and channeling the great books that will answer them! Elder aerialist sages, minstrels, and the Dance of the Seven Veils! Tristan Tzara and Charlie Chaplin will be in the audience!

Andrei Codrescu’s “The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess” will be Codrescu’s chief oracle in this orgy of bibliomania. Codrescu was introduced to Mark Twain by Nikola Tesla in the novel Messia@.

Is old age a form of Dada expression? Recounting examples of odd behavior from Henry Alford’s “How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People,” they will talk about how old age can be a wonderful time to become Dada. Paul Holdengräber will make a cameo appearance as Mark Twain.

The Co-Conspirators:

	Andrei Codrescu’s new books are “The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess” and “Jealous Witness: New Poems.” He is the author of forty books of poetry, fiction, and essays, and the founder of “Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Life & Letters.”
	Henry Alford is the author of “How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth).” He has written for the “New Yorker,” “Vanity Fair,” and the “New York Times” for more than a decade.
	By the end of his life in 1910, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) published more than 30 books. Twain’s new book is “Who Is Mark Twain? by Mark Twain Himself, Never Before Published!”
	Flash Rosesenberg is a freelance photographer and Artist-in-Residence for LIVE from the NYPL. She will create a projected REAL TIME conversation drawing of the evening.
	Max Rada Dada will be performing his “Unexceptional Tricks.” His performance at the Library is part of his “Veil of Happiness” Sideshow Detour 2009 in NYC which will happen from Wall Street to the Metropolitan Museum.

Enjoy these high-profile celebrity “endorsements” for The Posthuman Dada Guide by Andrei Codrescu:

“Synthesizing seemingly unrelated phenomena such as electricity, magnetism, and even optics was revolutionary in its time, but we have vastly expanded our inquiries into kinship to account for the most abstract materials, such as language. This Guide reveals with elegant simplicity the marriages of opposites conducted by artists and reformers in the social arena of the past century.”
—James Clerk Maxwell, author of A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field

“To the Shasta daisy, the Fire poppy, the July Elberta peach, the Santa Rosa plum, the Flaming Gold nectarine, the Wickson plum, the Freestone peach, the Burbank potato, the spineless cactus, and the plumcot, you can now add The Posthuman Dada Guide. What I did with plants and seeds, this Guide does with ideas.”
— Luther Burbank, author of The Training of the Human Plant

“If I weren’t on an astral plane busy with the production of Angel Salt (a substance indispensable for the correct functioning of angel wings), I would draw on my previous work with ur-language to praise this Guide for keeping open the tunnel beneath the post-Babel pandemonium in order to allow a few lucid adventurers to travel unimpeded.”
— Aleister Crowley, painter, astrologer, hedonist, bisexual, drug experimenter, and social critic

“This book made me feel naked, and that’s one thing I know. I’m naked even now in a place I can’t describe. I’m so glad this book got to me somehow. Congratulations!”
— Josephine Baker, “Bronze Venus,” “Créole Goddess,” “The Black Pearl”

“I will tell you what really happened if after you read this scurrilous book you let me punch you hard. I read myself all the time but I rarely get this worked up. Bring it on, mother! It’s no great feat to blow your nose in the handkerchief of eternity. Keeping us alive is the only crime, and this book does it.”
— Arthur Cravan, author of The Surf on Q Beach at Night

**Taken from the front matter of THE POSTHUMAN DADA GUIDE.

Vanity Fair notes that Andrei Codrescu’s The Posthuman Dada Guide “prescribes the [Dada] movement as an antidote to the soul-sucking tyranny of the 21 Century,” in Elissa Schappell’s Hot Type column in the April issue. Brief, but accurate!

Publishing today, there are also features about the bookin the Village Voice (”A pleasing secret history”) and the New Orleans Times-Picayune (”A guidebook to a strange new era”).

Andrei Codrescu’s The Posthuman Dada Guide was reviewed by Carly Berwick in the Los Angeles Times this past weekend. The first paragraph perfectly sums up why this book is so important right now:

The job is gone, the 401(k) is gutted, college tuition is due, and “Grey’s Anatomy” is a shadow of its former self. Can’t decide whether to cry or laugh? Laugh at absurdity, laugh at hardship, laugh at poverty, says Andrei Codrescu in his maddening, enlightening, self-contradictory, highly amusing new book, “The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess.” It’s what dada — the manic, prankish art-cult of wartime and depression — advises.

If you are in the Houston area, you may be interested to hear that Andrei will read and sign copies of The Posthuman Dada Guide at The Menil Collection tonight at 7:00 PM.