Working Progress, Working Title : Automystifstical Plaice

by Matthias, John

• ISBN13: 9781876857417
• ISBN10: 1876857412
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-07-01
• Publisher: Lightning Source Inc

Summary

Working Progress, Working Title combines two of John Matthias's most experimental poems. Critics have for some time written of Matthias as a poet of place, but what will be made of his "Automystifstical Plaice"? The poem in fact derives from the strange fact that film siren Hedy Lamarr and avant-garde composer George Antheil collaborated on a patent for a radio-directed torpedo in the early days of World War II when both had gone to Hollywood. But the piece is also about the Paris avant-garde, early experimental films like Ballet mecanique and L'Inhumaine, Antheil's early scores, Hollywood in the 1940s, spread-spectrum technology, artificial intelligence, and many related matters. The narrator seems to be Claire Lescot, who steps out of L'Inhumaine and follows Antheil and Lamarr to Hollywood. The second and longer poem, Pages: From a Book of Years, is a kind of manic attempt at remembering in the context of the poet's mother's loss of memory to Alzheimer's disease. The years happen to be 1959, 1941, 1953, 1961 and 1966, all years of great personal significance to the poet, but also years in which the public world intersected the private world in unusual ways. Matthias's father collected yearbooks on a wide variety of subjects. Materials from these yearbooks, along with the poet's high school yearbook which he hadn't seen for forty years, propel themselves into the world of these poems as the poet cleans out the family home and writes his pages, abruptly ending each one at the bottom of his computer screen.

Table of Contents

Automystifstical Plaice

Pages

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Excerpts

from Automystifstical Plaice In the beginning without any mother the girl was born a machine. In the year of erotic parades. The Novia poured out the oil the gears were engaged the eacute;tudes composed and the light bulb was Amegrave;ricaine. Voilagrave; Picabia sweetheart of first occupation voilagrave; ballet meacute;canique. We'll not eat our bread by the sweat of our brows in the end: Je viens pour toujours it is error and grief you'll be known by the strength of our steel the number of rivets and not by the river where fishermen cast or the last of your towers to build on the strength of our dowry. Antheil Olga Boski Hedy and Ez, she says: Or probably better Olga and Ez, Antheil and Boski [Hedy Keisler Mandl Lamarr. That's Mandl, Fritz, from Vienna, the armaments man, the war profiteer. Hedy Keisler, the naked broad in the film. It won't be a dance, it won't be ballet meacute;canique. Ecstasy, rather, a run through the woods and a swim. The actress saying: sex in this movie is real, Mandl's lieutenants will buy up & burn any print they can find so Hedy and Fritz can entertain Hitler and Mus. Aribert Mog is displaced; the telescope on the lens enlarges another face from about a decade before.]