Litteraria Pragensia

at the heart of Europe, the cutting edge in critical & cultural theory

[Litteraria Pragensia @Litteraria]

Check out our unique titles, many now free as PDF↓ https://t.co/HLpHeGU24C incl work by Bataille Žižek Cixous Stiegler Ireland Ascot Havel Topol Wark Ulmer Lovink Kroker Bratton Drucker Bök Birringer Strickland DuPlessis Vischer Bockris Resnik Murakami Ginsberg Spivak Theall+++

[Erratum @press_erratum]

Odd books, and the work of keeping them alive: in conversation with Ansgar Allen of Erratum Press
https://t.co/PMZsjxAiX6

[Litteraria Pragensia @Litteraria]

Because "open access" sounds like something Trump wld boast about having, our books are "free love" instead.

[Louis Armand @LouisArmxnd]

Cunningly disguised by one @DavidVichnar as a critical anthology of PRAGUE DADA, this incendiary device was left at my door last night & is presently blowing my mind. It'll blow yrs, too. Summon the Real Presence of PRAGUE DADA via @Litteraria Pragensia Books

[David Vichnar @DavidVichnar]

After ten years in the making, the first copy of COOK YOUR GRAMPAS: PRAGUE DADA has arrived.
Here it is photographed in four different positions, partly to prove that it is a real, 3D object and not some elaborate avantgarde rumour. 466 pages of a century of Prague Dada. Several kilos of manifestos, photomontage, cabaret, sabotage, pataphysics & weaponised nonsense loaded onto this nifty vessel.
It exists, with corners, and it can even stand up unaided. Even if I tried I could hardly be prouder.

"Here WAS Prague Dada, here IS Prague Dada. Avant-incubator>>intnl breeder reactor. Displode us some more of yr fissile material, a 21st century gobstopper."—Ansgar Allen

"If there isn't the saying "scratch a Czech and you'll find a Dadaist" there ought to be. As twentieth century Europe wove a rope out of bourgeois platitudes, nationalist marching songs and political rants to hang itself with, this wonderful anthology shows that the Czech Dadaists continued to intervene in the ceremony with heroic insouciance."—Zeese Papanikolas

"A very valuable anthology. […] Overall, this book should force some serious rethinking not only of the alleged absence of Dada in Prague, but of the wider historiography of Devětsil, Poetism, & the Czech avantgarde. It is an important contribution to art-historical scholarship."—Derek Sayer

Free pdf downloadable & print version available from: https://t.co/xNLzXQ2ePM

[Tom Bowden @motnedwob]

Mail call!

[David Vichnar @DavidVichnar]

K současnému dění na FFUK, které můžu jako drtivá většina z vás jen z povzdálí sledovat:
Nejdřív translatologie. Teď divadelní věda, estetika, filmová a hudební věda, pedagogika, andragogika, asijská studia, sinologie, a spolu s tím desítky pracovních míst. „Optimalizace“ FF UK začíná nabývat poněkud obludných rozměrů.
Chronické podfinancování humanitních věd je písničkou až příliš obehranou. Méně pochopitelné je, proč na ně fakulta odpovídá tím, že během léta, navíc bez skutečné akademické diskuse a bez srozumitelné představy o budoucnosti, začne likvidovat či slučovat obory, jejichž odborná tradice vznikala desítky let.
Malý obor není obor zbytečný. Univerzita není podnik a její smysl nespočívá v co nejefektivnější správě úvazků. Jestli má být odpovědí na dlouhodobé politické podfinancování humanitních věd jejich postupná samolikvidace zevnitř, pak za jejich odpůrce odvádíme práci sami.
A po tom, čím FF UK před dvěma a půl lety prošla, je mimořádně tristní sledovat, jak rychle se ze slov o péči, solidaritě, akademickém společenství a o tom, jak "to spolu zvládneme", stala řeč o „optimalizaci“, rušení a propouštění.
Solidarita už nestačí, tyto plány je třeba odmítnout. Veřejně, společně a dřív, než se z „optimalizace“ stane hotová věc. Tohle bude naše fakulta ještě dlouho.
=======================
À propos of the current goings-on at the Faculty of Arts, which, like the overwhelming majority of you, I can only watch from the sidelines:
First Translation Studies. Now Theatre Studies, Aesthetics, Film and Music Studies, Education, Adult Education, Asian Studies, Sinology, and together with these, dozens of jobs. The “optimisation” of the Faculty of Arts is beginning to assume rather monstrous proportions.
The chronic underfunding of the humanities is a tune all-too-often sung. Less comprehensible is why the Faculty should respond by spending the summer, without genuine academic debate or any intelligible vision of its future, dismantling or merging disciplines whose expertise has taken decades to build.
A small discipline is not a redundant one. Nor is a university a business whose purpose is the efficient management of FTEs.
If the answer to the chronic political underfunding of the humanities is their gradual self-liquidation from within, we are doing their opponents’ work for them.
And after everything the Faculty went through two and a half years ago, there is something particularly grim about watching the language of "care, solidarity, academic community," and of how "together we'll make it," give way so quickly to “optimisation”, closures and redundancies.
Solidarity is no longer enough, these plans need to be opposed. Publicly, collectively, and before “optimisation” becomes a fait accompli. We’ll be living with the Faculty this creates for a long time.

[Ansgar Allen @AnsgarAllen]

cook your grampa

[Louis Armand @LouisArmxnd]

A superb examination of 20th-century experimental writing in the vein of Joyce. We need something like this, beyond the ethno/Joycean constraint, for the 21st century...

[Louis Armand @LouisArmxnd]

Read Rick Harsch!

[David Vichnar @DavidVichnar]

After ten years, numerous detours, several arguments, a few denunciations & more than one attempt to declare its subject nonexistent, the thing is finally real.

“Cook Your Grampas”: PRAGUE DADA overturns a century of received wisdom that Dada passed the Czech lands by.
Across 466 lavishly illustrated pages, this critical anthology reconstructs an international, multilingual scene in which Czech, German, Romanian, Serbian and other avantgardes collided—and where poetry, theatre, typography, photomontage, cabaret, political sabotage and weapons-grade nonsense became difficult to tell apart.

The cast is formidable and frequently unhinged:
Jaroslav Hašek founds a political party devoted to moderate progress within the bounds of the law;
Walter Serner loosens the last remaining screws of European civilisation;
Melchior Vischer fires the novel through the brain;
Raoul Hausmann races a typewriter against a sewing machine;
František Halas orders us to cook our grampas;
Voskovec and Werich turn theatrical idiocy into an exact science;
John Heartfield weaponises the photographic image against fascism;
Tristan Tzara, Václav Havel, (the late) Milan Knížák, Josef Hiršal, Bohumila Grögerová and the Teplice pataphysicians carry the assault forward.

Proving, though it seems to have been in doubt for so long, that in Prague, Dada remained what its founders wanted but never quite managed to make of it: an unfinished project.

COOK YOUR GRAMPAS: PRAGUE DADA may bear my name as editor & translator, but from the beginning it has also been a shared wager. @LouisArmxnd had faith in the project long before its eventual dimensions (or its decade-long gestation) could have been foreseen.

Our jointly written introduction gave the book not only its critical framework but much of its polemical impetus: the conviction that Prague was no provincial echo of Zürich or Berlin, but one of Dada’s most volatile laboratories.

Louis' contribution was no less material. He designed & typeset the entire 466-page object, sourced, restored & arranged its extraordinary visual archive, and gave the book the form in which it could finally exist.

What might have remained an unruly mountain of translations, documents, manifestos, poems, plays, essays & obscure historical debris became, through his work, an even more unruly, but genuinely beautiful, book.

To the friends, writers, editors & reviewers reading this: should any of you wish to take a closer look, a review PDF will be dispatched with great pleasure, just say the word.

For more information, the freely available pdf, and ordering details, please visit https://t.co/xNLzXQ2ePM

[Louis Armand @LouisArmxnd]

@DavidVichnar Find it here (print + PDF): https://t.co/RLetTTZkuY

[Louis Armand @LouisArmxnd]

What began in 2015 with the first English translation of the long-neglected FIRST DADA NOVEL (Melchior Vischer's SECOND THROUGH BRAIN, written in Prague, 1920) has culminated, after a decade's further research & translation work, in @DavidVichnar's COOK YOUR GRAMPAS: PRAGUE DADA.

[Anti-Oedipus Press @antioedipusp]

Aryan Kaganof has written a rigorous, in-depth essay on @LouisArmxnd’s ENTROPOLOGY called "The Entropic Real." Read it here:

https://t.co/5DyRHW53mb

[D. Harlan Wilson @dharlanwilson]

“Biography is a novel that dare not speak its name.” —ROLAND BARTHES, “Réponses”

https://t.co/5he9EpTNk9

@routledgebooks @tandfonline

[Tom Bowden @motnedwob]

An Interview with Rick Harsch https://t.co/k86SW3UDLr

[Louis Armand @LouisArmxnd]

Highly engaging & sharp reading of ENTROPOLOGY by Aryan Kaganof, to whom I extend my thanks for doing the book this service & raising so many very salient points.

https://t.co/3pTTafM6kd

[Louis Armand @LouisArmxnd]

“History is an act of sailing to a shore that isn't there.” Rick Harsch

[Equus Press @EquusPress]

I.M. RICK HARSCH
We are heartbroken to learn of the death of Rick Harsch, & bid farewell to a magnificent writer, a fearless publisher, & one of the warmest, brightest, most generous people we have had the privilege to know.

Through Corona\Samizdat, Rick conducted his tireless literary operations from Izola, Slovenia. From that unlikely hub he unleashed on the unsuspecting world some unruly, uncompromising, & criminally overlooked writing with an enthusiasm entirely his own.

His solidarity with fellow independent presses was equally uncompromising. In his wonderfully digressive YouTube videos, he devoted time & attention to several Equus books, discussing them with the wit & infectious passion that made him such a rare reader & advocate for a common cause.

In October 2024, he joined us in Prague for the Prague Microfestival, bringing with him that unmistakable mixture of erudition, mischief, outrage & immense human warmth. We were enormously fortunate to visit Rick in Izola last February, to see the place from which Corona\Samizdat carried out its improbable & essential work, & to enjoy his company, conversation, & boundless hospitality.

Rick was one of the great independents: a writer and publisher who understood literature not as a career structure or marketplace, but as a form of selfless friendship & stubborn collective life. His loss leaves the small-press community immeasurably poorer, and all of us who knew him bereft.

Our love and deepest condolences go out to his family, friends, writers, readers, & the entire Corona\Samizdat community.

The mission continues, as it must.
But without Rick, it will be a lonelier one.
Ave atque vale.

[Louis Armand @LouisArmxnd]

My last photographs of Rick Harsch (Izola 6.2.25)

[Alex Houen @alexhouen]

BLACKBOX MANIFOLD 36 also features a section in memory of J. H. Prynne: poems by Louis Armand, Aaron Kent, John Kinsella, Drew Milne, Chris Nealon, Redell Olsen, Ian Patterson, Tracy Ryan, Verity Spott, Marjorie Welish, John Wilkinson, & others.
https://t.co/VCuALXw8vY