red

Archy was a wise old roach, who from 1916 until 1926 directed missives to the public through the newspaper columns of journalist Don Marquis, employed first by The Evening Sun and later the New York Tribune. When Marquis left newspaper work for the magazine biz, archy went with him.

As a diminutive cockroach, archy was forced to communicate by diving head-first onto the keys of Marquis’ manual typewriter, one key at a time. Thus, he wrote all in lower-case, and not by choice, like ee cummings, but because he had to: there was no way for archy to both pound a letter key and simultaneously press the shift key. While the illustration reproduced here, the first public showing of archy, presents an archy comfortably looming over a typewriter, no such miniature device was ever prepared for the insect in his lifetime.

Archy’s musings in some ways rival Montaigne’s; beyond the furthur is his insight into the importance of beauty in life.

furthur=>

“Noah was an asshole.”

“Why Noah?” Arkady asked. This was a new indictment.

“He didn’t argue.”

“Noah should have argued?”

Yakov explained, “Abraham argues with God not to kill everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah. Moses pleads with God not to kill worshippers of the golden calf. But God tells Noah to build a boat because He’s going to flood the entire world, and what does Noah say? Not a word.”

“Not a word,” said Bobby, “and saves the minimum. What a bastard.”

—Wolves Eat Dogs, Martin Cruz Smith

What people forget is that there actually was idealism at the beginning of the Revolution. Starvation and civil war aside, Moscow was the most exciting place in the world to be. When Mayakovsky said, “Let us make the squares our palettes, the streets our brushes,” he meant it. Every wall was a painting. There were painted trains, boats, airplanes, balloons. Wallpaper and dinner plates and gum wrappers were all created by artists who genuinely thought they were making a new world. At the same time women were marching for free love. They all believed anything was possible.

Lenin’s tomb is a Constructivist design inspired by Malevich. It’s a red square on Red Square. There’s more to it than just Lenin laid out like a smoked herring. Art was everywhere in those days. Tatlin designed a revolving skyscraper taller than the Empire State Building. Popova drew high fashions for peasants. The artists of Moscow were going to paint the trees of the Kremlin red. Lenin did object to that, but people thought that anything was possible. Those were days of hope, days of fantasy.

Malevich said in 1918 that “footballs of entangled centuries would burn out in the sparks of bubbling light waves.”

We live in the archeological ruins of that new world that never was. If we knew where to dig, who knows what we would find?

—Martin Cruz Smith, Red Square

They invented the printing press out on the plain this morning; Constantinople fell in the afternoon. I suppose they’ll discover America tomorrow. What a lot of running around they do. I saw Charles VIII of France (invasion of Italy led by: 1494) picking his nose with one hand and adjusting his wig with the other. Jetter pointed out that this particular period ended with the diet of Worms.

I found my little buffalo with his throat slit open. All right, God, that’s the way you want to play it.

—Kenneth Patchen, The Journal of Albion Moonlight