Category Archives: Archipelagos

Jack Kerouac: The Rooms, the Dioramas, the Maps
by Sofia Krimizi
Archipelagos 01 / November 22nd 2011 / Brooklyn (USA)

On the road is a novel written by Jack Kerouac, in 1951- published in 1957, on a 120-foot long roll of semi-translucent teletype paper. This scroll allowed Kerouac to continuously feed a typewriter and write without interruption for three consecutive weeks a single-spaced text that he later edited by pencil.

On the road attempts an American version of the French- or at least European-  flânerie, the aimless experiential wondering in the urban phenomenon, here organically operated in the scale of the continent, where each state is a neighborhood to cross, a threshold and a destination simultaneously. Kerouac puts together- on that continuous scroll- a stroll across the United States, for a lack of a better word or a real equivalence in English of the word flânerie-, where one is allowed not to know or even not wanting to know where he is heading. America unrolls in the four parts of the book, plus one in Mexico, as a series of rooms with no transitions, no corridors, no hallways, becoming a distorted palace of Versailles where one changes direction only when there is no more depth to expand upon, no more rooms to visit in that direction.

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FERNANDO PESSOA: HETERONYMS
by Carla Leitão
Archipelagos 01 / November 22nd 2011 / Brooklyn (USA)

FERNANDO PESSOA (1888-1935)

This synthesis is a guideline of particular topics and themes around the portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa and his heteronyms, as they were suggested and discussed by Carla Leitão during the event “Archipelagos 01”. This synthesis is not an essay nor an introduction to the work of this poet writer. This text does not contain all the important aspects of the delivery which can be seen in the video of the same event.

HETERONYMS

Fernando Pessoa had more than 70 heteronyms (including orthonyms). Four of them, and then Fernando Pessoa, the orthonym, are particularly popular and important to understand his work and cultural context. Some heteronyms are related to each other in some fashion and will engage in conversations with each other. Pessoa did astrological charts or created biographical data, including accurate birthdates for several heteronyms. Many heteronyms and orthonyms have an intrinsic, interior contradiction.
One of Pessoa’s main known poems, has more than 20 great translations and is called Autopsicography.
(the one below from Richard Zenith)

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FYODOR DOESTOIEVSKYY: THE TYRANNY OF LOGIC, THE VOICE OF BLOOD, AND INNER DISHARMONY.
By Martin Byrne
Archipelagos 01 / November 22nd 2011 / Brooklyn (USA)

If you’ve ever seen a dog twitch and start in one direction, then leap a step in another only to finally bound away in a third direction, you’ve seen a glimpse into the Dostoevskian man’s mind.  He is no wolf, because he is domesticated, yet neither is he a sheep, because he resists his domestication.  Perhaps a dog is not even an apt metaphor, but man himself, as he is of the few creatures to be aware of the strangeness of his condition while also being acutely aware of his mortality and all that it entails.
In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s pivotal novel (essay, expose, pseudo-biography?) Notes from Underground, we are allowed a deeper insight into the feralized mind that he creates, and acts as a loose framework for a number of his later characters.  One might contend that this model reflects the insights into the recently birthed modern man that Dostoevsky himself holds.  And as a testament of being produced during a state of transition within Russia and society at large, the insights he provides are at once conflicted and cogent.  It is unnerving and liberating, filled with depth and marred by shallowness, brilliant and mad:

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