"A few weeks ago I went into the city to see a revival of Tom Stoppard’s 1974 play Travesties, in which Henry Carr, an elderly English civil servant, looks back on his time as a diplomat in Zurich in 1917, where he was witness to the various antics of James Joyce (composing Ulysses), Tristan Tzara (fomenting Dada), and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (plotting communist revolution). The play is a delightful, disorienting romp, but at its heart — somewhere between the sublimely apolitical aestheticism of Joyce and the burning political rage of Lenin — is a question that has occasioned endless thought over the past two centuries: what is the relationship between literature and politics? Does the 'revolution of the word' have anything to do with revolution in the world? ... The first two decades of the last century, when modernism was remaking European art and literature and popular revolution was remaking much of Europe, were the heyday of artistic 'manifestos': Marinetti’s futurist manifesto of 1909, the Vorticist manifestos Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound published in Blast in 1914, Hugo Ball’s Dada Manifesto of 1918, and so forth. ..."
Jacket2
W - One Big Union (concept)
amazon: The OBU Manifestos
2010 April: Little Red Songbook, 2016 September: Don't Mourn-Organize!: Songs of Labor Songwriter Joe Hill (1990), 2017 January: The Rebel Girl, 2017 March: Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
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