La parole est à Péret

The marvelous meanwhile is all around us, hidden to vulgar eyes but ready to burst out like a time bomb. The drawer I open exhibits among the cotton reels and compasses an absinthe spoon. Through the holes in the spoon a squad of tulips is goose-stepping towards me. In their flowers stand professors of philosophy discovering the categorical imperative. Each word they say is a worthless penny which breaks on the ground bristling with noses which throw them back into the air to form smoke rings. As they dissolve slowly they generate tiny splinters of mirror which each reflect a blade of wet moss. […]

The marvelous, I say again, is all around, at every time and in every age. It is, or should be, life itself, as long as that life is not made deliberately sordid as this society does so cleverly with its schools, religion, law courts, wars occupations and liberations, concentration camps and horrible material and mental poverty.

Benjamin Péret, 1943

translated by Antony Melville, in Death to the Pigs: Selected Writings of Benjamin Péret, Atlas Press 1988

IN SEARCH OF JARRY'S MANDRAKE: 3rd November

Debbie, Justine, Merl, Nacho and Paul
on the South Bank shore

A little man is he, his clothes are russet hairs



























The bowels of the earth keep tight hold of my feet

My feet are ghouls with necks like snakes to suck on blood





Mine eyes are knots of twine encrusted in the bole of strangest bush new sown

And here's my hand, I seek thy pleading hands that, stiff with effort, reach towards the zenith pale and wan ...





How twisted are his arms, his severed fingers bleed




Magician, thou art blind to all thy magic tomes

Thy claws, thou bird of night, in velvet gloves are dressed to scratch the sacred glyphs upon the dead man's breast.















So moans the little man, the dwarf half-buried, from the shadow of the hanged who swing from posts they bang







O hanged men, kick your heels against the posts for warmth ...

The mandrake rake now makes a mocking gesture, flares as bright as lighthouses

I'm good with my hands

by Paul Cowdell

An Advent Calendar of Decay

by Paul Cowdell

A small incident of objective chance

Yesterday Juan Carlos Otaño (of the Surrealist Group of Río de la Plata) lightheartedly wrote to Merl in an email:

"We await the CD of the Festival as wolves await the arrival of Jonathan Harker."

He did not know at the time that for the past few weeks Paul Cowdell and Merl have been re-reading Dracula together, and that this weekend we had just reached the part of the book where a wolf escapes from London Zoo, and Jonathan Harker is terrified to see the Count walking along Piccadilly.

The re-reading of Dracula was probably one of the reasons why Merl had also dreamt of wolves in arctic snow on Saturday night.