Andrei Codrescu wrote the following in the introduction of his "The posthuman Dada Guide : Tzara and Lenin Play Chess" :
We will record only what can't be googled. In other words, only what hasn't yet been captured. Dada is the Western Now, a Zen that employs fullness instead of emptiness, so much fullness, in fact, that there isn't enough matter to fill its fullness, so it resorts to imagination in order to create ever more paradisiacal objets, better ipods made from shredded dreams.
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The claim to the nongooglable is pretty huge and I'm making it lightly. The good available information googled either from Google or out of books written by Dada chiefs will be used here to its utmost, that is to say, used in order to extract or prolong the vital fluids, which are as yet ungooglified. (At least until this is e-published).
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... but in the grand collage that is Dada, past and future are equally usable. Look at the fragment from a newspaper inserted by Kurt Schwitters in his 1920 collage : the actual newspaper, with its oh-so-urgent events of the day, is long forgotten, but the section preserved in Schwitters's collage is immortal.
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If the 20th century has taught us anything, it is that we will forget everything except the box it came in. The substance of what it was, what it felt like, what could be usefully gleaned from it, was buried with the persons who felt and gleaned. Memoirs and history further dismember the past by articulating it : every articulated experience is as good as forgotten.
Forgetting is a human specialty that was greatly refined by the recently deposed century. We've kept the wrappings, though : the styles, the anecdotes, the narratives (the sexy ones, not the cadademic), and we are using them to deposit new contents inside.
Andrei Codrecu talks about his book.
