1966-01-21

Something Else Newscard #9

Now that Spoerri’s Anecdoted Topography of Chance is finally bound, we asked Emmett Williams, who translated it, how he felt, and received the anecdoted footnote below.* Incidentally, Emmett will be coming to the states this January. He hasn’t spent much time here since 1947, since when he’s been active in concrete poetry, Fluxus and everything else that counts in Europe. We’ll be doing a book of his own in 1966.

We should like at this time to announce the formation of the All-American Fan Club, which will lend its moral support to all members of all teams, and whose members are spiritually entitled to belong to all of them. Persons interested in obtaining free membership should send in their sweat shirts (plus return postage) to be imprinted “TEAM”.

• Reading The galley proofs, I found myself enjoying the chore of re-exploring the lay of the land on Spoerri’s blue table. One might imagine the translator would be sick and tired of the “human garbage can” by this time. But who can get sick and tired of a blue table cluttered with eighty heterogeneous everyday objects yoked together and brought violently to life in terms of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Priapus, Marcel Duchamp, Mr. Peanut, Adolf Hitler, G.F. Gillette, the mad Anton Müller and hundreds of others living and dead? As Joe Miller said about the telephone directory, there’s not much plot, but what a cast! In Spoerri’s case, the author is plugged into a universal switchboard. What a literary predicament!

[s. 2]

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