A Blog of Bosh

The Wizard of Oz: An American Fairytale
A Library of Congress Exhibition.

Braccelli: Bizzarie di Varie Figure
The Bizzarie (Livorno, 1624) can rightly lay claim to being a prime exemplar of the artistic enigma � a work truly without precedent or explanation beside itself. Its sensuous imagery, occupying a dreamlike space between thought and form, made it an underground sensation amongst twentieth-century artists and connoisseurs. The art historian Sir Kenneth Clark (1903�83) was instrumental in the rediscovery of Braccelli, and the poet Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) drew parallels between these etchings and the revolutionary artistic agendas of Dada and Surrealism.
[This is a very nice book of illustrations, about 50, which, while probably not quite nonsensical, have a lot in common with later nonsense illustration. While the reproduction is good, it is hard to appreciate the small pictures.]
Octavo Edition

My soul is a strange factory
TRY this. Your first sentence is “Time is money” and your last sentence is “Thyme is funny”. Write the story – long or short – that joins the two. Be imaginative, but please stick to plausible leaps and bounds. And while you’re at it, make it a novel, and – why not? – a novel in verse. Use rhyming couplets. Done it? Then you’ve got the hang of the strange “procedure” of Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), a millionaire, an outrageous dandy, a homosexual who liked to stay tightly shut up in the closet and a sincere believer in his own genius. You should now find Mark Ford’s elegant, intense and detailed guide to the many huge works that Roussel produced with his phono-syntactic machine at least meaningful, if not completely irresistible.
booksonline

ALISON LURIE: The Oddness of Oz
The year 2000 is the centenary of a famous and much-loved but essentially very odd children’s classic: L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. Those who recall the story only from childhood reading, or from the MGM film, have perhaps never realized how strange the original book and its sequels are.
The New York Review of Books