Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea. —Henry Fielding

26 May 2011

Revisiting Tzara

This week in the class I'm teaching, we are visiting with the Dadas. So, of course, I came across this passage from The First Celestial Adventure of M. Antipyrine:

DADA is neither folly, nor
wisdom, nor irony, look at me
friendly bourgeoisie.
Art was a nut-shell game, the
children assembled words with a
ring at the end, then they cried,
and shrieked the verse, and
decked it out in doll shoes, and
the verse became queen to die a
little and the queen became a
whale and the children all ran till
their breaths did fail.
Then came the great ambassadors
of sentiment who exclaimed
historically in chorus
Psychology Psychology heehee
Science Science Science
Vive la France
We are not naive
We are successive
We are exclusive
We are not simple
and we are all well-versed in
intelligence.
But we, DADA, do not agree with
them, because art is
not serious, I assure you, and if
we show the crime to
say learnedly ventilator, it's to
please you, good
listeners, I love you so much, I
assure you and I adore you.

*
Obviously.

1 comment:

  1. I really like this quote! I don't know much about the DADA's but it is inspiring me to do a bit of research. Cool quote

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