Petrol Voices & Pearly Puddles: Notions of Collage and Place in The Making of an Urban Sequence

1. Petrol Voices & Pearly Puddles: Notions of Collage and Place in The Making of an Urban Sequence Steven Hitchins Contempo Series 22nd February 2011

2. Picasso, Guitar and Sheet Music, 1912

3. Guillaume Apollinaire, from ‘Rue Christine Monday’ (1913): Those pancakes were delicious The tap is running A dress as black as her nails It’s absolutely impossible Look Sir The malachite ring The ground is covered with sawdust So it’s true The redhaired waitress was abducted by a bookseller (Oliver Bernardtrans., Apollinaire: Selected Poems, pp. 47-8)

4. ‘We have only the barest indication of how to integrate these different elements as signs (of something else), and Apollinaire’s concept of simultaneity seems to immerse us in the event he evokes so as to prevent us from immobilising its components in a recognisable form.’ Peter Nicholls, Modernisms, p. 121

5. Guillaume Apollinaire, from ‘Zone’ (1913): Here you are in Marseilles among the watermelons Here you are in Coblenz at the Sign of the Giant And here you are in Rome under a Japanese medlar-tree Here you are in Amsterdam with a girl whom you think is beautiful and who is ugly (Oliver Bernardtrans., Apollinaire: Selected Poems, p. 23)

6. Photograph of ‘La Zone’, Paris, 1913 • http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b6923250x

7. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction ZONES • Borderless frontier worlds

8. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction ZONES • Borderless frontier worlds • Juxtapose places not connected on real-world maps

9. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction ZONES • Borderless frontier worlds • Juxtapose places not connected on real-world maps • Superimpose different times and localities

10. The Valleys as Zone “The iron districts had no urban traditions. Although a mass society developed there, it happened in a frontier world, a world lacking the graces of civic life. The people who created the communities which grew up under the shadow of the ironworks brought with them the traditions and the values of the countryside from whence they came.” John Davies, A History of Wales, p. 33

11. Petrol Voices

12. Tristan Tzara, from ‘Manifesto of Feeble Love and Bitter Love’ Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem. Cut out the article. Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag. Shake gently. Next take out each cutting one after the other. Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.

13. Charcophagus

14. Cut right through the pages of any book or newsprint… lengthwise, for example, and shuffle the columns of text. Put them together at hazard and read the newly constituted message. William Burroughs & BrionGysin, The Third Mind, p. 34 Take a page… Now cut down the middle and across the middle. You have four sections… Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. Burroughs & Gysin, The Third Mind, p. 31

16. Interzone

17. Interzone Burroughs’s zone, or interzone, is a vast, ramshackle structure in which all the world’s architectural styles are fused and all its races and cultures mingle, the apotheosis of the Third World shanty-town. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction

18. Interzone Burroughs’s zone, or interzone, is a vast, ramshackle structure in which all the world’s architectural styles are fused and all its races and cultures mingle, the apotheosis of the Third World shanty-town. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting. William Burroughs, Naked Lunch, p. 24

19. Bitch Dust

20. Bibliography Apollinaire, Guillaume, Selected Poems Burroughs, William, Naked Lunch Burroughs, William, & BrionGysin, The Third Mind Davies, John, A History of Wales McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction Nicholls, Peter, Modernisms