Product Description
In this unconventional book, Jonathan Hammer offers a new translation of Hugo Ball's visionary novella Tenderenda the Fantast, along with his own unique Tenderenda-inspired images. The resulting "dialogue" between Ball, the founder of Zurich Dada, and Hammer, a contemporary artist, casts new light on Dadaism and its postmodern legacies.

In Tenderenda, composed between 1914 and 1920, Ball recounts a hallucinatory tale of his own Dada enchantment and disenchantments. Jeffrey T. Schnapp introduces the book, elaborating the cultural and historical context of Ball's work and situating Hammer's work in relation to Dada. In a concluding essay, Hammer probes various aspects of Ball's asceticism, spirituality, and sexuality to arrive at a revisionist interpretation of Zurich Dada and the origins of modernism as well as postmodern art-making. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Brilliantly Odd
Ball and Hammer is a like a six-hand piano piece.Seated at the bench are the long deceased founder of Zurich Dada, Hugo Ball; the contemporary artist, Jonathan Hammer; and the well-regarded critic-scholar, Jeffrey Shnapp.The piece they play is built around Ball's visionary novella-memoir, Tenderenda the Fantast, which is a bit like trying to build a temple around a hallucination.

Hammer and Schnapp brilliantly riff in and around Ball's memoir: the former with his zany illustrations, a provocative essay and his translation of Ball; the latter with a razor sharp-edged introduction and an array of learned notes. The mix works.It's hard to tell where one takes over and the other leaves off.

This is no conventional university press book from the standpoint of production values.It's graphically dazzling, has twenty-plus splendid color illustrations, and is at least as much fun as a ride on one of those Twister roller coasters.

I recommend it highly for yourself or for that distinctive gift to an eccentric friend or loved one who loves Dada.

It makes nice in your brain and looks just as nice on your coffee table. ... Read more

Product Description
Hugo Ballpoet, philosopher, novelist, cabaret performer, journalist, mysticwas a man extremely sensitive to the currents of his time and carried in their wake. In February 1916 he founded the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The sound poems and performance art by Ball and the other artists who gathered there were the beginnings of Dada. Ball's extraordinary diaries, one of the most significant products of the Dada movement, are here available in English in paperback for the first time, along with the original Dada manifesto and John Elderfield's critical introduction, revised and updated for the paperback edition, and a supplementary bibliography of Dada texts that have appeared since the 1974 hardcover edition of this book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A great book...
A great book that no one has heard of. I like his writing style and the idea of the dada movement in general. His anti-establishment stance is great as he plays devil's advocate throughout the book questioning whether the state/system can really be abolished. Great mind around at a great period in history.

Difficult. beautiful, underappreciated genius
Long before the beat movement or the hippies comes such a beautiful work from one of the most honest and daring individuals to ever live and then be forgotten in this world. The title says it best. Hugo Ball is probably themost important guide (in my life). You should read this and see if any ofit rubs off on you. ... Read more

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During his thirty-four year tenure as a Justice of the Supreme Court, Hugo L. Black demonstrated, in the words of one of his colleagues, "a true passion for the Constitution." At a moment's notice, in front of visiting students or a clutch of legal dignitaries, the Judge would whip his tattered copy of the Constitution from his coat pocket, flip through it to a particular passage and then, in a high voice, read the passage con vivace. And though Black began his political career in Alabama as the candidate of the Ku Klux Klan--with their help in 1926 he became a U.S. Senator--thirty years later, he would argue forcefully for an end to segregation in the South.

In Hugo L. Black: Cold Steel Warrior, distinguished writer Howard Ball draws from Black's extensive files in the Library of Congress and on interviews with his colleagues on the Court, his law clerks, and his family to illuminate the enigmatic career of a man who became one of the twentieth century's most vigilant defenders of freedoms and liberty. Ball's examination of Black's life reveals a consummate politician who kept, in a safe beside his desk, the names, addresses, and backgrounds of all those who gave Black support from the time he ran for the county solicitor's job in Jefferson County, Alabama, through his two terms as a U.S. Senator. A fervent New Deal advocate, Black lent his support to F.D.R.'s court packing plan, and was one of the few who stood with the President until the measure's defeat in 1937. Less than one month later, F.D.R. rewarded Black by nominating him to the Supreme Court. Soon after Black's confirmation by the Senate, the story of his Klan membership spread across the nation, prompting Time magazine to write that "Hugo won't have to buy a robe, he can dye his white one black." One of Black's early opinions for the Court, however, changed most of the negative opinion about him. Writing for the majority in Chambers v. Florida, Black and his colleagues overturned charges against four African-American men unjustly accused of murder.

In addition to Black's political and judicial career, Ball captures some of the great legal minds at work--Earl Warren, Thurgood Marshall, Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, John M. Harlan II, and William J. Brennan--and their encounters with the tough Justice who was an immovable force when engaged in a constitutional battle. From Brown v. Board of Education and the first tests of the power of the federal courts to implement the Brown decision, to the height of McCarthyism and the national hysteria about Communism, to New York Times v. United States, the famous Pentagon Papers case in 1971 (Black's last opinion for the Court which defended a newspaper's First Amendment rights), Black emerges as a staunch defender of federalism and the primacy of the First Amendment, a strict, literal interpreter of the Constitution, and always proud to be a member of the Supreme Court.

Throughout his life, Hugo Black's cockiness, sternness, and stubborn determination won him many critics. On every occasion, as Howard Ball shows, Black proved his critics wrong. He became a major presence in the Senate and one of the great Justices ever to sit on the Supreme Court. ... Read more

Product Description
Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, two of the towering Supreme Court justices of this century, formed a fascinating personal and professional relationship that lasted for more than 30 years, from the 1930s to the 1970s.Together, they were embroiled in some of the most momentous social, political, and economic conflicts in American history. While many observers of the Supreme Court have regarded them as having a uniquely close alliance at the core of the Warren Court, they were quite different jurists, marching to very distinct drummers.Of Power and Right tells the story of this curious relationship and the turbulent era in which it took place.

Hugo Black was a much admired, congenial man.A gracious Southerner, he could be as hard and immovable as granite once he'd made up his mind.An ardent advocate of free speech and press, he was a Puritan who had difficulty accepting behavior outside his own personal standard of morality.For him, the fundamental issue was the power of the people to govern, first through the Constitution, and then, where the Constitution was not clear, through their elected officials. William O. Douglas was a very different man. Tough and even petulant, he could also be extremely shy and sensitive. A staunch defender of the Court and its role, he was often willing to plunge it into the middle of society's most divisive debates.He believed first and foremost in individual rights, and believed that the Court's most important job was keeping government off the backs of the people.Though close on and off the job, the two men frequently clashed over this fundamental difference between power and right.

The Black-Douglas years saw unprecedented social and political upheavals, from the New Deal and the civil rights movement to the Vietnam War, and the Supreme Court was called upon time and again to reexamine and often fundamentally alter definitions of equality and liberty in every area of American life.Howard Ball and Phillip Cooper chronicle each man's confrontation with the issues before the court and the often heated debates that resulted.They develop the central tension in American political life between democratically exercised power and individual freedom that so often occupied Black and Douglas and about which they so often differed. In so doing, the authorspaint a full and compelling portrait not just of Black and Douglas, but of the institution of the Supreme Court during these years, showing us a Court that is more human, more politically aware, and more diverse than we have traditionally seen.The friendship of Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, and the differences that divided them, provide a unique window on the Supreme Court and the society it serves. ... Read more

Product Description
The German contribution to the Dada movement ("DADA MEANS NOTHING!" proclaimed Tristan Tzara) as it unfolded in Zurich during the first World War is not widely known.This collection brings together three texts translated into English for the first time, which were essential for the very creation of the movement, and which influenced all its future developments in France, Germany, the USA and many other countries.

Included is the only Dada novel, Tenderenda the Fantast, written by the movement’s founder Hugo Ball. sections of which he performed at the celebrated Cabaret Voltaire. It is partially a roman à clef recounting the birth of Dada and the author’s subsequent love-hate relationship with his monstrous creation, and yet is much more besides. Richard Huelsenbeck’s Fantastic Prayers was the first Dada poetry collection, and these precocious "Bruitist" poems clearly illustrate how the absurd elements in early Expressionism evolved into the bizarre eloquence of Dada. Finally, Walter Serner’s Last Loosening manifesto, the first major German manifesto written in Zurich, which provoked numerous brawls at its various performances and yet is hardly known. In fact it was the source for many of Tzara’s future literary provocations and seems to have been deliberately suppressed for this reason.

Three vital texts from one of the most extraordinary manifestations of the avant-garde of this century. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Burn Your Poems and Ride the Hobby-Horse
In a recent review of two books from the Subtext collective (some sort of Seattle based poetry commune), Stephen Thomas, wrote, "Wallace Steven remarked somewhere that every successful poem expresses a theory of poetry... Every serious poet has had to come to terms with the power of language to express its own meanings apart from, or even in opposition, to the poet's own intention. The Language poets seem to start with this experience. It is not too much to say that they cultivate a distrust of language and that their poems often frustrate the `basic' function of language to narrate, to explain, to describe and to import knowledge or wisdom."

I should point out that every serious poet should be burned with a Buick Regal's cigarette lighter and thrown into the Duwamish until they learn that the basic function of the human throat is to howl. The `basic' function of language is to frustrate this impulse.

Eighty years ago, in Zurich among a population of international outcasts and deserters from the Great War, a group of artists exploded what had been German Expressionism. They protested Western Civilization (the whole ball of wax), a society whose devotion to a coldly analytical and rational language had wrought Verdun and the Somme. Remembered largely now as the foundation for Surrealism and trivialized for their jokes, such as Marcel Duchamp's urinal, La Fonatine (1917), The First Texts of Dadarevels in the serious anarchy and the subversive antics that gave birth to Dada.

Hugo Ball -- one of the principal perpetrators of Dada and the author of the only Dada novel, Tenderenda the Fantast, included in this book and which of course bears absolutely no resemblance to what then passed for a novel and often doesn't bare clear resemblence to any known language -- believed that under the "influence of Kant and German idealism, as well as Lutheran sobriety, that language had been made abstract and thus had been debased into a utilitarianism that allowed it to be plundered by jingoism, literary professionalism, journalism, and intellectual vacuity. It had become a tool for upholding the ruling value system." Ball made it his mission to purify the word. He saw Dada, which was initially performed at the Cabaret Voltaire as a fusion of sound, drama, and painting; a cacophony of contradiction, music played on found objects (known as Merz performance, the philosophy that any sound or text can be incorporated as material into a performance), monologues of gibberish, that is an art free from any concrete constraints.

This book charts the inception of Dada and more importantly presents three texts in their confounding entirety. This is not a book about art history; it's a handbook for subversion and a champion of the vitality of art as terrorism. It is not much to say that Dada cultivated a mistrust of language; they burned every scrap of it they could find. ... Read more

Product Description
An English translation of a sharp polemic originally published in 1919 by a leader of dada and the avant garde, who blames the disaster of World War I on Germany's intellectual heritage. Ball argues that German religion and philosophy conspired with militarism to betray the country in 1914. ... Read more