Saint Ghetto of the Loans: Grimoire [Paperback]

Gabriel Pomerand (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2006

Poetry. Art. Translated from the French by Michael Kasper and Bhamati Viswanathan. SAINT GHETTO OF THE LOANS reissues a legendary but little seen masterpiece of French book art from 1950, by the Lettrist Gabriel Pomerand. The prose poem text appears in segments on left-hand pages (bilingually, in this edition), and its French words and syllables are represented visually by dazzling pictographs--rebuses--on pages facing. "Every 20th century art movement has its mythic works, fetishized objects of cult workshop. Gabriel Pomerand's Saint Ghetto des Prets sits alongside Isidore Isou's Les Journaux des Dieux as one of the few sustained works of metagraphics produced by the Lettrists. A remarkable novel-in-pictographs-and-verse"--Johanna Drucker.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This gorgeous book of politically charged urban rebuses was written in Paris in 1950 by Pomerand, the associate of Isidore Isou, who lead the artistic Lettrist movement into the French headlines with its postwar provocations. Known to readers in the U.S., if at all, only through Greil Marcus's descriptions of the French edition in Lipstick Traces, the book appears here for the first time in this lovingly produced bilingual edition. It consists of toughly enigmatic texts—"This bullet-holed beauty's spoiling in the sun, godless, with a church full of atheists, alongside police headquarters in the sixth district"—matched by graphic pen-and-ink interpretations of them on facing pages, drawing on everything from mathematical symbols and Hebrew script to dice, guitars and mice. The texts can't really stand on their own, but they weren't meant to: buoyed by the obsessive yet whimsical energy of the drawings, they bring a paranoid, over-inscribed Paris to life, one what would soon explode, as Marcus has noted, into Situationism, Godard and May 1968. Reading this book rekindles the radical mid-century: exciting, unintelligible and essential. (July)
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Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse; Bilingual edition (January 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933254181
• ISBN-13: 978-1933254180
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 6.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,047,119 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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