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Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Yes No
03.23.2010
06:34 pm
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Via Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, here’s a review of “YES NO” by Dadaist painter Francis Picabia:

Hanuman Books are sweet strawberries covered in the most delicious creamy chocolate in this feast of literature. I adore them. They are petite and firm, exotic and very, very sexy little items, guaranteed to add secret glamour and sophisticated depth to even the most shallow of pockets.

“YESNO”, by “dadaist” and painter Francis Picabia, is 47 discerning midget pages of evanescent aphorisms. Gems of cynicism, melancholy observation and caustic comment, worthy of any aspiring, or asp-like, queen’s tiara of wit. The brief messages, warnings and considerations are drawn from his journals and notebooks over the period 1939-1957.

“Beauty is relative to the amount of interest it arouses.” quoth she.

This is an anthology from the revered lineage that includes the dandyish sublimity of an Oscar Wild; the fastidious camp of a Quentin Crisp; or even the more obscure English Edwardians like James Bertram and F. Russell whose Victorian misogyny and skepticism were illustrated more exquisitely than the “corpse” itself by Austin Osman Spare in “The Starlit Mire”. Yes, aphorisms are a justly grand tradition of which one can only approve, given that one is a reasonable person.  And, in this age of advertising slogans and soundbites; bumper stickers, and designer corporate logos as street fashion, a reminder of the priceless art of word games. The contradiction, collision and collusion in fresh revelation that twisting and pummeling the material of words can supply, in order for us “to see what they really say” as Brion Gysin so prophetically indicated in his “cut-ups”.

(Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: YES NO)

Yes No (Hanuman Book No. 39)

(I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation)

Posted by Jason Louv
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03.23.2010
06:34 pm
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