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Canadian entrepreneur Michael Henderson thought of an out-of-this-world idea in 2002. He envisioned a 250-acre resort on the Vegas Strip complete with a lunar-themed aquatic center, a mall, a biosphere and even moon buggy rides. Other ideas included a crater pool with water slides, a glass underwater walking area, rock climbing wall, a bar with a two-story waterfall, a winter sports-themed area and a vineyard. To be called Moon World Resort, it would have featured 10,000 rooms and cost $5 billion dollars.

 

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COOP HIMMELB(L)AU’S Sky-Arc / Sci-Arc – 24 hour Living, Culture and Arts District (Los Angeles)

 

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In the mid-imperialist flush of the 1800s, a Londoner named Thomas Wilson decided it was about time the city had its very own Egyptian-style pyramid mausoleum, perched atop Primrose Hill (the highest point in the city). It was to be “sufficiently capacious to receive 5,000,000 of the dead”.

 

_______
In 2004, artist Thomas Hirschhorn was invited to create an “enterable” project in Minneapolis as part of Walker without Walls, the series of programs we presented around town during construction of our new facility. He came up with a Road Side Giant of his own — a 50-foot tall replica of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The massive tome was to be installed along Lake Street in south Minneapolis and would’ve housed a library of philosophy texts, the production center for a daily philosophy newspaper he and philosopher Marcus Steinweg were to create, a meeting and exhibition space, and, outside, a cafe. The project unfortunately outgrew its budget and was never realized.

 

_______
The first Apple Phone was conceived and got as far as the prototype stage in 1983. Before the Macintosh. The Apple Phone had a graphical user interface with a touchscreen. It also had a built-in checkbook program that was intended to allow users to use an early form of online checking. It had an address book as well, which would allow users to scroll through a phone list, click with the stylus, and place a phone call.

 

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The Angel City Development Project was designed as an entertainment complex and landmark attraction for the public and visiting tourists of the downtown Los Angeles area. As Brett’s vision the project would incorporate shopping centers, cinemas, museums, hotels, lush gardens, and various showcases. The tower and its surrounding buildings were designed to stand on a 122 acre site which Brett and his City of Angel’s corporation collected and acquired over the course of 2 years. The unique architecture of Angel City incorporates monumental concrete, granite, and stainless steel flying buttresses inspired by great historic European gothic cathedrals. These elements are merged with an original modern structure making it the first of its kind in the world and a uniquely original creation. Due to an eminent domain lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles School Board, the project’s land is no longer available to construct the grand Angel City development.

 

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In 2016 developer Dacra unsuccessfully proposed a small retail building at 4039 NE 42st Avenue, Miami, designed by Chad Oppenheim. It was called Stardust East.

 

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These are the only known photos of these unproduced prototypes for toys that were never released.

 

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Port Disney (Long Beach, CA)

 

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Steven Holl, an American architect, first proposed the idea of a bike lane between two skyscrapers at the mouth of one of Copenhagen’s harbors in 2008. After much discussion among city planners and architects, the project was finally cancelled in 2015.

 

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It’s 1967. Desmond Plummer and the GLC’s abandoned plan for a monorail on Regent Street. It was just going to go overhead. It looks kind of very stylized to that era, but it says a lot that space was prime real estate. They wanted to hang on to as much pavement space as possible. They didn’t want to extend the roads. They wanted to build there, so they thought let’s just cram in as much as we can. Let’s have a monorail, let’s take things above.

 

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Luckman and Alexander’s star-shaped Hollywood Museum atop Griffith Park (Lo Angeles)

 

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1951 Buick Le Sabre

 

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In 2008, Zaha Hadid won an international competition for the proposed art museum, Vilnius Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, in Lithuania’s capital Vilnius. Hadid’s proposal was a “mystical object, hovering over spindled artificial landscape strip” that contrasted with the verticality of surrounding skyscrapers. The museum was initially scheduled to open in 2011, however was terminated due to allegations of corruption.

 

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Phare du Monde was due to be an observation tower at Paris’s 1937 World Fair (tagline: “Pleasure Tower Half Mile High”). It would have been half a mile high, with a restaurant, sun lounge and beacon at the top, and a bizarre spiral road channelling cars up to a parking garage at the top of the tower.

 

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Western Rivers Expedition, intended for Florida’s Walt Disney World, was going to be Frontierland’s version of Pirates of the Caribbean.

 

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Resembling the nest of an insect, the Dystopian Farming project by Eric Vergne, proposed to built along the Skyline Park in Manhattan would have combined farms, worker housing and market places, mixing politically opposing classes – farmers and urban consumers.

 

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Rome Central Train Station

 

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In 1999, Pepsi and George Lucas decided to get together and release some Star Wars themed items together. Unfortunately, the deal fell through. Years later, a few pieces of concept art were leaked out.

 

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9/11 Memorial designed by Jonathan Cape: “All…victims…are represented by an array of wires…connected to the bedrock of the site and at the other end to a series of steel columns. These wires will also attach to a grass ground plane floating at street level. The wires will express a degree of tension by deforming these columns into a wide variety of forms…and by pulling the ground plane into a variety of folds. Placed between each column are a series of fabric veils which will billow in the winds…and are a metaphoric expression of the souls of the victims. The columns will peel away from a large glass plane upon which are inscribed the place and dates of various atrocities that have occurred in the last century; the wires and veils will be symbolically using the deaths of the victims as a means of exposing other atrocities and will remember the countless unidentified victims of past events in our shared global community.”

 

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The Threatening Shadow. Designed for the New York World’s Fair, 1939.

 

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Victor Gruen, the architect best-known as the inventor of the modern shopping mall, almost built a giant housing development on what is currently called Roosevelt Island. The project would have comprised a 22 ft tall, two-level platform with a series of 8 to 50-story apartment towers. Responding to mass housing shortages, the project would have accommodated up to 70,000 people.

 

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The Dragonfly was an urban farm concept for New York City’s Roosevelt Island, modeled after the wings of a dragonfly and designed to provide fresh, local food within an urban environment. Fruit, vegetables, grains, meat and dairy would have been produced on the Dragonfly’s 132 floors and the entire structure would be powered by a combination of solar and wind power.

 

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In 1987 toy maker LJN they planned on turning vicious killers into kid-friendly squirt toys with these Freddy Krueger and Jason water guns. Freddy made it to the prototype stage, while only concept art for the Jason gun was produced. From the looks of the vendor catalog image above, it appears as if Freddy’s gun was supposed to shoot water from his mouth, while pushing down on Jason’s arms would unleash a torrent of water from the head of his trusty axe.

 

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Florida’s Disney World needed a roller coaster on par with California’s Matterhorn. Mount Fuji was planned to be that coaster, deep in the heart of Epcot’s Japan Pavillion. It was said that it was scrapped to avoid a conflict of interest with Kodak, one of the parks main advertising partners. Allegedly they viewed Mount Fuji as a permanent advertisement for their competitor, Fuji Film.

 

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Architect Joseph Urban’s rejected 1926 proposal for the Metropolitan Opera House (NYC)

 

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Imagine what the NYC waterfront would have been like if Samuel Friede’s gargantuan 1906 Coney Island Globe had made it past the cornerstone laying stage. Measuring 300 feet in diameter and 750 feet tall, the bulbous, truss-supported 11-story tower was to be topped with huge spotlights and would have contained a theater, roller-skating rink, dance hall, circus, palm garden, weather observatory, several restaurants and a roof garden.

 

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Proposed extensions to the White House in Washington DC, 1891-1901

 

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The complicated case of the Museum Tower and the adjacent Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas was at one point to be resolved by installing a 400-foot sun-responsive sculpture-design proposal by architecture firms REX and Front. The large Surya sculpture would have shielded Nasher Sculpture Center from the Museum Tower’s intense reflection by expanding its light-sensitive panels as flowers.

 

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Difficulties plagued the project from Day 1 and costs began to escalate. Fourth Grace was cancelled in 2004. (Liverpool)

 

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“We were supposed to have a new national library built by Jan Kaplicky in Prague. Never happened and the guy died.”

 

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Moving sidewalks probably sounded like a civilized solution to the increasingly congested New York City of the 19th century: to ease crowded streets, “moving sidewalks” or “moving platforms” would be built underground. The idea was first proposed in 1871. Widely debated in newspapers at the time, it went no where: Mayor Seth Low killed the project. But it popped back up again around 1910, this time as a network of moving sidewalks at a top speed of about 10 miles per hour that would replace the new subway system.

 

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The Dubai Towers Dubai was a four-tower complex to be built in the city of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The developer, Sama Dubai, intended it to form the centerpiece of The Lagoons, a megaproject located on Dubai Creek which was to consist of seven islands. The towers would have between 57 to 94 stories, and although the heights of each are not known, it is believed the tallest would top 400 meters (1,310 ft) while two others would rise beyond 300 meters (980 ft). Due to the economic downturn in Dubai, the project was killed.

 

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In 2005 toy manufacturer NECA planned to release an action figure based on the remake of “The Ring”. The set was to feature a figure of Samara along with two different display bases: a TV set and a well, the two things that Samara can most often be found emerging from. The figure was going to come apart at the waist, allowing us to either display her in front of the well or split her in half and have her coming out of the TV. The hair was even going to be flexible, allowing those two different poses to really come to life. But NECA was unable to acquire the proper licensing to actually release the set.

 

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The Geyser Mountain attraction was originally intended to be placed in the Frontierland area of Disneyland. The storyline was that the guests would ride a drilling machine where they encounter a geyser. This would toss the riders up and down, Tower of Terror style.

 

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Vincent G. Raney’s 1945 design for a United Nations complex in San Francisco’s Twin Peaks neighborhood. San Francisco was a candidate for the U.N. Headquarters but lost out to New York.

 

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Frank Gehry’s new Guggenheim Museum (NYC)

 

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Milwaukee’s “Tourist Tower” was to be 875 feet tall, taller than any building in the world outside of New York City. A slender center core would be fitted seven circular “exhibition areas” with an external, iron latticework helping to support the weight of each floor. Inside the core, glass elevators would zip from the ground level to the rooftop observation deck in two minutes. Other exhibition levels would include a revolving beer garden, an artificial stream where guests could go trout fishing, a complete and working dairy farm, and a restaurant where food would be served to guests on trays as they sat in airline seats, facing out at the landscape – “to give those persons who have never flown in a plane an opportunity to sample airline service,” explained Rasche. Backers of the project estimated it would draw as many as 1 million people to Milwaukee every year.

 

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New York architect Eytan Kaufman’s Sky Bridge Hotel in Abu Dhabi was going to be a 264-room hotel suspended in a blimp-like structure over a bridge that connected the main island to Lulu Island. Financial pressures pushed this design into the trash can.

 

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In 1964 the radical architecture group Archigram created Walking City and imagined a future in which borders and boundaries are abandoned in favor of a nomadic lifestyle among groups of people worldwide. Inspired by NASA’s towering, mobile launch pads, hovercraft, and science fiction comics, Archigram envisioned buildings that travel on land and sea to meet up for parties.

 

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In 1758, Charles Ribard designed an elephant to grace to the Champs-Élysées in the spot where the Arc de Triomphe now stands. It consisted of three levels, to be built in the shape of an elephant, with entry via a spiral staircase in the underbelly. The building was to have a form of air conditioning, and furniture that folded into the walls. A fountain — or perhaps the plumbing — was to flow from the elephant’s trunk.

 

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Super Mario’s Wacky Words would have been a direct continuation of Super Mario World. It was slated for a release on Phillips’ CD-I system. Some heavy work was done on this game before development was shut down due to the CD-I not being able to bring in the money. Three prototype discs are said to be in circulation and the game itself managed to at least reach Alpha stage. As it is a pre-alpha, the prototype is rather limited; Super Mario can only walk both ways and jump, and no powerups exist. He cannot slide or swim, but it would appear that these abilities would have been implemented had development continued.

 

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The Fun Palace was one of architect Cedric Price’s most influential projects and inspired Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s early 1970s project, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Using an unenclosed steel structure, fully serviced by travelling gantry cranes the building comprised a ‘kit of parts’: pre-fabricated walls, platforms, floors, stairs, and ceiling modules that could be moved and assembled by the cranes. Virtually every part of the structure was variable. “Its form and structure, resembling a large shipyard in which enclosures such as theatres, cinemas, restaurants, workshops, rally areas, can be assembled, moved, re-arranged and scrapped continuously,” promised Price.

 

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Stanley Tigerman’s Instant City, 1965, proposed a city where prism-shaped offices sheltered grand expressways, leaving wide swatches of green space open to the public.

 

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Like a lot of people at the end of 2001 and beginning of 2002, artist/architect Vito Acconci made a hypothetical proposal for a building to replace the World Trade Center. His reasoning was that if buildings get exploded we could make them already exploded.

 

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In 2008, post-structuralist French architecture firm R&Sie(n) hoped to create a new research station and museum called Waterflux whose strange shape would have suggested ice caves – or the guts of a living thing.

 

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After Alcatraz was a prison and before it was a tourist attraction—Native Americans occupied the island in an effort to claim it as their own, in response to their own land being forcibly taken away by the government. Architect Donald MacDonald proposed this plan for the Alcatraz Center for Indian Life, which included a cultural center, school, museum, council chambers, and shops.

 

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Four Dutch designers—Chris Collaris, Ruben Esser, Sander Bakker and Patrick van der Gronde— envisioned a sustainable design of re-use for a discarded oil tanker as a city in the Southern Gulf Region, which they entitled The Black Gold.

 

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The Santa Monica Causeway

 

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In 1995, Peter Neville, an architect working for Japan’s Taisei Corporation, dreamed up the X-Seed 4000, a 2.5-mile high steel skyscraper in the shape of Mount Fuji that would have been situated in Tokyo. In fact, the X-Seed 4000 was designed to be slightly taller than Japan’s largest mountain. Neville’s futuristic environment could accommodate 500,000 to 1,000,000 inhabitants, who would zip around the 800-floor structure on MagLev trains. The X-Seed 4000 would have cost over $1 trillion to build.

 

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In the Mojave Desert you’ll find California City, a city famous for dreaming big. A huge chunk of it is gridded roads—complete with names, speed limits, and GPS driving directions—with nothing built on the vast majority of those plots. Incorporated in 1965, California City is a living contradiction. Today it’s a working community with roughly 15,000 residents. But it’s simultaneously enormous, having been planned at a scale to rival Los Angeles. The city has over 200 square miles of land.

 

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Though never released, The Car Game got close enough to production that print ads were in circulation. Based upon the relatively obscure 1977 movie The Car, in which a car) goes on a murderous rampage, the game looked as if it would actually be rather a lot of fun. Basically: position The Car at the top of the ramp, and – if it rolls down on your turn – you lose or win dependent on how much debris is knocked out of its path. That’s all well and good, but in the movie that debris was usually made out of living, breathing, people.

 

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Due to Robert Young’s untimely death, this re-imagination of Grand Central was never realized. The newly elected chairman of the New York Central Railroad chose architect I.M. Pei to design the new station, which was released in 1954. Pei’s “Hyperboloid” was a 1,497-foot-tall office tower and transit hub that would cost approximately $100 million and span 108 stories. The proposed nine-acre site would have been the the world’s tallest and most expensive structure. Young died in 1958 and the project was scrapped.

 

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In this never-built Disneyland attraction guests would have walked right into the mouth of an oversized version of the Crocodile from “Peter Pan.” Then — by walking down a set of steps (Which supposedly put Disneyland visitors down inside the croc’s belly!) — they could then peer out plate glass windows at a colorful collection of tropical fish.

 

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Atlantropa was the brainchild of the German architect Herman Sörgel, who tirelessly promoted his project from 1928 until his death in 1952. His experience of World War I, the economic and political turmoil of the 1920s and the rise of Nazism in Germany convinced Sörgel that a new world war could only be avoided if a radical solution was found to European problems of unemployment, overpopulation and, with Saudi oil still a decade away, an impending energy crisis. With little faith in politics, Sörgel turned to technology. Dams across the Strait of Gibraltar, the Dardanelles, and eventually between Sicily and Tunisia, each containing gigantic hydroelectric power plants, would form the basis for the new supercontinent. In its final state the Mediterranean would be converted into two basins, with the western part lowered by 100 meters and the eastern part by 200 meters and a total of 660,200 km2 of new land reclaimed from the sea – an area larger than France.

 

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Arakawa and Madeline Gins’ HOTEL REVERSIBLE DESTINY provides you with a meditative architectural context within which to demonstrate and explore your full range of capabilities, not only those generally accepted as part of the human repertoire but also still nascent ones. Through practicing architectural meditation within HOTEL REVERSIBLE DESTINY, visitors will come to know what makes a person tick, the ins and outs of human – and transhuman! – behavior. This architectural meditation site will before you know it have you “talking” for your great benefit with your own genes. HOTEL REVERSIBLE DESTINY makes you as adept at perspicuous bodily thinking as are birds in the sky and fish in the sea, but considerably more so.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Charalampos Tzanakis, Hope you enjoy it. I think my favorite LCTG sequence is the third one, if I had to choose. The deleted scene was originally an extension of that scene that we ended up thinking was unnecessary. I can imagine Zurn having that influence. How cool. ** Tosh Berman, Loy was a Dodger fan? They already existed back then? If I were a real fan, I would know the answer to that question. It’s a really unique and weirdly stylish or stylishly weird novel. I think you’d really like it. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Ha ha, thanks. I topped the slaves! No, buying things for myself in any circumstance is one of my least favorite things to do in the world. I suppose I might treat myself to an unusually interesting meal or something. And I guess my portion of the Buche cost will be kind of a self-gift. Do or will you buy yourself a nice Xmas gift? You most certainly deserve one. ‘Hangry’, ha ha. That is a seriously horrible word. Wow. If someone used it around me, I don’t even know what I would do. Something not dignified. Love making every store of every kind everywhere in the world sell every variety of Pocky, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I hope you like it. It’s very chewy in in the good way. ** Bill, Hi, B. It’s pretty fucking good, man, I think. Ah, I spaced. I’m glad it (the gig) went so well, and I’m sad if the video isn’t up to speed, but I know that can be. It’s good I have wild imagination. And fingers crossed re: the off chance you think it’s salvageable. I don’t think I know the work of Christine Choy. I’ll go correct that. ** CAUTIVOS, Thank you about the post. ‘Shy’ really holds up, I think. I read it again not so long ago, and it still seems really amazing. It took me a while to be okay with that cucumber cover. Not my pick, needless to say. But I get the charm. Thank you for everything, and a salute from France and me to you and yours. ** Steve Erickson, I don’t think I know Sault unless I’m blanking. I’ll find and try the Little Simz album. We’re supposed to get a very initial budget this evening. It’ll need to be heavily refined once we have a shooting schedule and shot list and stuff, but it’ll be an important indicator. Best guess at the moment is the next trip to LA will happen somewhere between Jan 5 and 10. I’ll find Johnny Truant’s channel. I looked at ok.ru initially, and I couldn’t mistake heads or tails of it. Thank you! ** tomk, Hi, Tom. Well, the novel is strangely under-discussed considering. I think you’ll get into it. I hope the Peru trip wipes away the worn out quality. It seems intense there at the moment, no? Commiserations galore on any possible jet lag that ends up hitting you on the other side. Hugs from me! ** Jeff J, Hi. It’s really terrific novel. Her prose is so constantly on its tippy-toes. Curious sounds there on the upcoming EP. Nice. I’ll let you know re: ‘Aftersun’. Any film that has Tilda Swinton in it needs to have a big other allure for me to want to see it. And two roles sounds like a total dealbreaker. I think the only Joanna Hogg film I’ve seen is ‘Archipelago’, and I don’t remember it blowing me away whatsoever. Why, do you like her stuff? I’m totally crushed about Bookforum. That is really, really sad news. I think it was far and away the best lit magazine in the US. One of the very few things I craved and read cover to cover. I assume it’s been killed because it’s a money loser by Artforum’s new owner. I do want to check in with my Editorials friends at AF and get the accurate scoop. But, yeah, that’s very bad news for lit and for all of us writers who try to write towards the sun and moon. ** Misanthrope, That’s quite a little problem. My keyboard is fucked up and won’t type an ‘x’ unless I push down really hard on the key. Very annoying. ‘X’ happens to come up quite a lot. Who’d have thunk. Awesome about the return of the remote. Yeah, I’ll skip ‘Bones and All’. I don’t have a boner for Chalamet, and that director’s earlier films are ugh to me, so that’s that. I should get that/those new McCarthys. Mental note. Well, you showed her! Or your body did! But you’re in charge of your body, obviously, so, no, you showed her! I’m good, but I’m not warm. ** Robert, I don’t consciously try to max out the blog readers’ bank accounts, but I suppose that is the collateral damage. I don’t know ‘Aliss at the Fire’, no. I’ll investigate. Joshua Tree is sweet. The park, that is. Especially on mushrooms. I guess the town itself is sweet too. A bit odd. So not on mushrooms. I can imagine putting something in order could seduce sleep. Something non-stressful to put in order. Hm. When I was in high school there was a point when it became super trendy to become Born Again, and all my friends were getting baptised and stuff. Lasted about a month and a half as I recall. ** Okay. I haven’t made one of these posts in quite a while, so I did. Because they’re kind of fun, no? See you tomorrow.

* (restored)

 

‘After finishing Mina Loy’s Insel, one has the impression of clasping a thing of material beauty – a slim volume composed of densely packed prose and rich, earthy imagery – even as before the eyes this solid, textual object shape-shifts, dissolves into one vaporous idea which quickly transforms itself into a contradictory yet no less sublime vision. And suddenly one notices that this “will-o’-the-wisp” world, inhabited just moments ago, has slipped completely through the fingers. Only another read could allow for its retrieval, though it would, more than likely, be an entirely new world that was discovered.

‘Such is the enigma of Loy’s work. To call this novel a surrealist satire of surrealism is just one example of the paradox Loy presented readers eager to classify and interpret Insel. As Elizabeth Arnold points out in her extremely elucidative afterword, Loy was a modern artist who rejected adherence to any one modernist movement, absorbing influences from the Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists, while also holding herself at a critical distance and fiercely guarding her own artistic independence. Thus Arnold quite astutely shows how in Insel Loy deftly manipulates elements of the surreal in order to subvert the surrealist manifesto, taking particular aim at its inherent misogyny which dismissed the work of serious female artists like Loy herself.

‘Insel recounts the existence of the wraith-like artist Insel from the perspective of his patron, Mrs. Jones, closely mirroring Loy’s own relationship with Surrealist painter Richard Oelze. Despite Insel’s abhorrent appearance and dissolute behavior, his is a sympathetic character who, in Loy’s mystical hands, attains a certain supernatural power – what in the text is referred to as his Strahlen, or, loosely translated, his radiance. The narrative spools into Gordian knots – language so impenetrable yet glittering with the lyricism of Loy the poet – to express Insel’s inexpressible force:

‘Either he had a peculiar power of projecting his visualizations or some leak in his psyche enabled you to tap the half-formulated concepts that drifted through his mind: glaucous shades dissolved and deepened into the unreal tides of an ocean without waves. Where in the bottom of slumber an immobile oncome of elementals formed of a submarine snow, and some aflicker, like drowned diamonds blew out their rudimentary bellies – almost protruded foetal arms over all an aimless baton of inaudible orchestra – a colorless water-plant growing the stumpy battlements of a castle in a game of chess waved in and out of perceptibility its vaguely phallic reminder –.

‘This power with which Loy invests Insel serves as societal critique by elevating the marginalized, a common thread in Loy’s writings. Insel, the outcast bohemian, transcends the world that has rejected him.

‘Nevertheless, it is Mrs. Jones who ultimately prevails, slipping from Insel’s mystical hold through her own act of creation. Insel, then, comes to stand for the “surrealist man,” as suggested by the fragmentary ending of what was Loy’s unfinished manuscript, layering the story of a single artist’s decadence with powerful reflections upon gender, race, modernity and artistic creation. Through the character of Insel, Loy interrogates the surrealist project, and, quite possibly, its role in the unfolding of twentieth-century history, by locating the artist at the intersection of sublime, disembodied truth and the coarse realities of a day-to-day existence.

‘But beyond these existential questions, this is a book for those who adore language. Loy’s highly esoteric vocabulary mines linguistic possibility, uncovering words like the rarest of gems and placing them in settings of baroque syntax, where they overwhelm with brilliance. Yet these sentences are handled so deftly, with the poet’s ear for rhythm and sound, that the weighty diction becomes paradoxically weightless, washing over the reader in musical waves. Clearly Insel is the work of a writer at the height of her powers, wielding her art as a tool both to delight and to provoke.

‘This provocation is most apparent in the themes Loy chooses to address. Poverty, gender, race, drug use – all were controversial when the book was written, yet her handling of these themes remains shocking to this day, in large part due to the cryptic manner in which the narrative addresses them. One particular scene shows a brawl erupting between Insel and two “negresses”. The prose in this passage, as in almost all the book, leaves the reader disoriented, but here it is particularly unsettling because the portrayal is decidedly offensive, if not downright racist. Nevertheless, it is likely the narrative adopts this tone with the express purpose to appall, to expose the social hierarchy which endowed even Insel, a repulsive bum, with the power of the white male’s privilege. The bold, contrasting black and white imagery which surrounds the characters, Loy’s comparison of the two prostitutes to a kind of dark wood being eaten away by Insel’s “microscopic function of a termite”, and the narrator’s later choice to side with the women when Insel complains to her about them: All point to Loy’s curious rhetorical technique of attacking pre-existing power structures with a feint at the very groups exploited by the status quo. Those who live on the shadowy fringe are therefore thrust into stark relief, forcing her readers to confront the uncomfortable truth of their plight. As Rachel Potter and Suzanne Hobson argue in their introduction to The Salt Companion to Mina Loy, “She has a genius for leading her readers down a particular road only to switch directions at the last moment”.

‘Above all, Insel is a self-referential novel by an artist ever aware of the vagaries of artistic creation. It is a book within a book, featuring a narrator frustrated by the limitations of language even as she spins sentences of pure gossamer – all while laboring on her own novel beyond the novel. And hovering over this many-layered world is the poet’s hand, manipulating the countless threads of her masterpiece like a puppet master demanding to be seen and heard. Compelling us take in the work of her dexterous fingers without missing a single detail on her stage. It is a tall order for a reader, but the attempt is infinitely rewarding.’ — Amanda Sarasien

 

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Gallery

Mina Loy circa 1912

Mina Loy photographed by Man Ray

Mina Loy and Peggy Guggenheim

Brancusi, Tristan Tzara, Mina Loy, Jane Heap & Margaret Anderson

Mina Loy (center) with Jane Heap, Ezra Pound

Mina Loy photographed by Lee Miller, 1930

Mina Loy circa 1952

Mina Loy photographed by Jonathan Williams, 1964

 

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Further

Mina Loy Online
‘The Sacred Prostitute’, by Mina Loy
‘Mina Loy’s ‘Colossus’ and the Myth of Arthur Cravan’
Mina Loy @ The Academy of American Poets
‘Mina Loy’s Life’
‘Mina Loy: The Forgotten Modernist’
‘Feminist Manifesto’, by Mina Loy
‘The Mina Loy Mysteries: Legend and Language’
Mina Loy @ goodreads
‘The Unsung Work of Mina Loy’
Audio: Mina Loy @ PennSound
‘Bringing Back Mina Loy’
‘Eugenicist Mistress & Ethnic Mother: Mina Loy and Futurism’
‘The Early Poetry of Mina Loy’
‘MINA LOY: NAVIGATING THE AVANT-GARDE’
‘Body Matters: Mina Loy and the Art of Intuition’
‘Exceptionalism of Mina Loy and the gender politics of canon formation’
Book: ‘Stories and Essays of Mina Loy’ (Dalkey Archive)
‘LETTER FROM ARTHUR CRAVAN TO MINA LOY’
‘Not an Apology: Mina Loy’s Geniuses’
‘The Best-Kept Secret in Twentieth-Century Poetry’
‘Mina Loy and the Electric Body’
‘Fashion Victims: Mina Loy’s Travesties’
‘Mina Loy’s Sentimental Satire’
Buy ‘Insel’

 

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Extras

Mina Loy, Artist: From Rogue to Rags

Charles Bernstein — Mina Loy Aphorisms on Futurism

Lecture: Mina Loy/Feminist Manifesto

Mina Loy Lecture

“An Old Woman,” by Mina Loy

There is no Life or Death, by Mina Loy

 

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Artworks

‘When Mina Loy arrived in New York at the end of October 1916, her name was already well known in Manhattan’s most radical art and literary circles. The writings of this beautiful and brilliant English poet had been praised by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and had appeared in the leading American avant-garde magazines. Shortly after her arrival in America, she was profiled in The New York Evening Sun as the exemplary “modern woman.” Indeed, if you wanted to know the latest trend, the Sun reporter boasted, just ask Mina Loy. “She can tell what futurism is and where it came from.”

‘While pursuing her literary activities, Loy worked with equal intensity as a visual artist. From childhood, she drew with confidence and, as a teenager, she escaped the confines of her parent’s Victorian home in London to partake of bohemian life, first at an art school in Munich, and then later, in Paris, as a fixture of Gertrude Stein’s and Mable Dodge’s salons. In Paris she married the English painter Steven Haweis and, at the age of 24, was elected a member of the Salon d’Automne, where her work received its first critical notice. Her Florentine years (1907-1916) were marked by an intense infatuation and falling out with the Futurists, particularly F.T. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini (with whom she had tempestuous affairs). In Florence she also met the American writer Carl Van Vechten, who took an active interest in her work. He purchased at least one of her paintings, sent her drawings to galleries and her poems to magazines, thereby encouraging her to live by writing and art-making—which she struggled to do for the rest of her life.’ — Francis M. Naumann

 

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Interview
with Mina Loy’s biographer

 

Jacket2: What prompted you to write her biography? Did you want to redress the neglect of her work, or were you more interested in telling the tale of her extremely complicated life?

Carolyn Burke: Some of each. It didn’t occur to me to write a biography at first. I was going to look at her poetry as a painter’s poetry, because I’ve always been interested in exchanges between artists and writers. When I returned to the U.S. in 1978 it dawned on me that I knew more about her than almost anyone, because the sheer digging around had unearthed quite a lot.

Where did you dig?

I began by looking up all the remaining expatriates and Surrealists in Paris. It was fortunate that I was on the spot and knew some of them. After that I had to find her two daughters and start digging in the U.S., England, Munich, and Italy.

She was at first a painter. From what I can gather, it seems she began to write poetry when inspired by the wild energy of the Futurists in Italy. Could you talk about her context in the decade leading up to and including the First World War — her association with the avant-garde, the Salon d’Automne and the Futurists?

It was a crucial period in her life and one that took years to unearth. Although the Salon d’Automne was held in Paris, there were only the slightest references to her showing there and to the art school she attended in the 1900s. I tried to find the records for both places but they didn’t exist any more — so I had to go about it in a devious fashion. I was able to get the titles of all the paintings that she’d shown, because the catalogues still exist, but I had to research the rest through the memoirs of people who lived in Montparnasse at the time.

Mina was not a daring painter in those days. She was an accomplished Post-Impressionist who did quite well for an English woman of 23 in that she was elected to the Salon d’Automne. This meant that you were a life member and could show your work without going through the selection process. But she was not as bold a painter as she would become a poet. Which is not surprising; she always said that she went into a sort of backwater, a genteel backwater, when she and her husband left Paris and moved to Florence in 1907. That cut short her career as a Post-Impressionist.

She had a child die.

Yes. Which was probably the reason for the marriage — she was pregnant. After the death of their daughter, she may have had a nervous breakdown. There’s not much information about that but she did enter treatment with a young doctor at the time — whose widow I was able to find in Paris.

People didn’t move so much there, so you could track them down — those who were still alive. I also met two wonderful women in their nineties: Gabrielle Picabia and Juliette Roche-Gleizes, who was a painter. They had known her in New York. They had wonderful things to tell me — both about the New York Dada days and about the earlier days in Paris. That was invaluable.

So the Haweises moved to Italy in 1907 for economic reasons?

Also because of the disarray between them — yes. They went to try to salvage things between them as well as live on her little income.

And this is where she encountered the extraordinary Futurists and had affairs with Papini and Marinetti. She found some intellectual excitement with the Futurists that had been lacking for her previously . . .

When she moved to Florence she had a period of doldrums, because she lived for about the next five years among these very genteel English and American expatriates, the most eminent of whom would be Bernard Berenson, and people like Gordon Craig and Mabel Dodge Luhan — a wealthy American who became her best friend. These people were leading a fin-de-siècle life, as if the nineteenth century had not yet come to a close. They were given to costume parties and renaissance festivities — unlike Mina, they were able to play out their fantasies in a grand way. Nonetheless, it was an aesthetic backwater as far as she was concerned.

In the meantime, she had two more children, a girl and a boy, and she was leading a life that did not stimulate her much — a round of social events, tea-drinking, gossip about people’s affairs. It was meeting Gertrude Stein, whose friend she became and whose manuscripts she read, and then Marinetti and his gang, that woke her from this period of lassitude.

Also Mabel Dodge played a role in that she was very much given to intellectual pursuits. She and Mina read Freud, Bergson, some of the Eastern philosophers — they were immersed in what was called the New Thought — so you put all that together and it was a climate ripe for something new to happen. But I think the direct influence of Stein and Marinetti was what impelled her into poetry.

Marinetti was aware of her first as a person rather than as an artist and much later Ezra Pound knew her work — both those men had terrible beliefs about women’s lack of ability to make art. Do you think that her encounter with Marinetti (whose philosophy she later rejected completely) was a reason for her early feminism?

Yes, in part.

She was so much ahead of her time in that regard.

She wrote her Feminist Manifesto in a kind of intellectual dialogue with Marinetti — in response to some of the debates within Futurism on the issue of the Futurist woman. And in response to his disdain for “ordinary” women. He told her that she was an exception, but she refused the role of the exceptional woman, for which I’ve always admired her. She wrote in response to this situation. Indeed, she showed her paintings in the first international Futurist art exhibition in 1914, but also told Marinetti that she felt too much solidarity with her own sex to agree with his ideas. She was very thoughtful on that subject — at the same time, she always credited Marinetti with waking her up. He had a beneficial effect on her. He was one of those people who had an invigorating effect on others. So, like his Futurist movement, he was kind of a mixed bag. But since Mina was a person who reacted to what others did, it was actually good for her to have to respond to Marinetti’s misogyny — in her wonderful poems on the “sex war” as she called it and her satires of Italian males like Marinetti.

In 1914 she told Carl Van Vechten: “I have a fundamental masculine conceit that ascribes lack of appreciation of my work to lack of perspicacity in the observer.” Do you think she was being ironic or do you think she was actually that confident — or is that perhaps something that women do?

Ah, that’s a difficult one. She could be very ironic. Her correspondence with Van Vechten has this teasing account of her mixed nature described in the terms of the time as partly masculine and partly feminine. Sometimes she was quite serious about that, because she had such a good brain, and she tended to identify logic with something more masculine. So she was probably being both. When one’s in doubt about the tone of a poem, she’s usually doing several things — so I would say in answer to that question, she’s probably doing some of each.

There was also the period of her friendship with Natalie Barney, Djuna Barnes and the other expatriate writers in Paris — but during this time she published or perhaps even wrote very little . . . is this the case?

Well, as she said, she was so busy running the lampshade business that it took all her time. But I also feel that after her first book of poems was published in 1923, and then segments of her long autobiographical poem Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose came out in the next two years, that she had temporarily run out of material; she had come to a standstill. She began writing about Cravan during that time, as far as I can tell. When she started writing again it was prose rather than poetry, but she didn’t get the necessary leisure or the peace of mind until she sold the shop. By the early thirties she was immersed in what she called her novel — which was really many versions of a highly autobiographical account of her upbringing.

However, she was present at those salons. They must have been extraordinary . . .

Yes. I was fortunate in that I was able to interview Berthe Cleyrergue, Natalie Barney’s “gouvernante” — the woman who looked after everything, in Barney’s house. I also talked a bit with Djuna Barnes about those days and drew on her Ladies Almanack — an extraordinary roman à clef about that salon. I’ve reconstructed Barney’s Académie des Femmes as Mina participated in it, and hope that I’ve gotten a bit of the teasing tone that went on there, as well as the sexual high jinks. It was quite an atmosphere. Mina Loy read there — a few of her poems. And she was probably the only heterosexual member — an interesting position, which she was teased about.

Mina returned to New York in the late thirties. Did she begin to frequent the Bowery then?

No, she didn’t really get to the Bowery until the late forties. She had lived in New York in the middle of World War I, and always said that it was the only city where she had been happy. So she returned to the U.S. just before the outbreak of World War II because her daughters had settled in New York and were terribly worried about their mother in Paris as Hitler was taking over. She had a very low period for about the next ten years — from ’37 to ’47. She no longer felt at home — so much time had passed — she had in her head memories of the 1910s, the Dada group, and the Arensberg circle, and these people had scattered. She no longer felt adequate to the social and artistic scene. She did write a bit, but it wasn’t until she moved close to the Bowery, after her daughters both went to Aspen, Colorado, that she came out of this ten-year slump.

She met the artist Joseph Cornell, and although she had literary supporters in Kenneth Rexroth and, later, Jonathan Williams, she seemed to be ignored by her American contemporaries — which is astounding after her European experience.

Several things had happened. One was that her work had gone out of fashion by the thirties — the emphasis was on poetry with social content. High Modernism had begun to seem old-fashioned by then — it was a time when her kind of writing was not what people were interested in. And then she was out of print — the usual fate or thing that keeps people from reading you. And, in any case, when New Criticism came in after World War II, people in the U.S. turned to T. S. Eliot as the model Modernist. He favored Marianne Moore to such an extent that Mina Loy was somehow eclipsed. There had been since the 1910s a peculiar kind of comparison between the two women poets — not anything of their making but rather the creation of Eliot, Pound, and William Carlos Williams — as if to say, “These are the two best women poets — which is better?” Eliot chose Moore — so it’s an unfortunate yet familiar and harmful structuring within the poetry world of Loy’s reputation as minor in relation to Moore’s.

That seems to happen all the time. Do you think that operated on a social level rather than a level of poetics — a sort of social vying?

Well, some of each. Marianne Moore continued to publish whereas Mina Loy did not — that makes a big difference. And Moore was in her own modest way rather good at creating her public persona — by the late forties and early fifties she was seen as a sort of American eccentric.

Yes — the hat.

Yes, and she liked baseball. She loved the Dodgers. So she did certain things that kept her being read and having a certain name-recognition, whereas Mina Loy didn’t do any of that and was riddled by such self-doubt that she could barely manage to get dressed to go to social events, or would turn around and go home because she felt she was no longer the great beauty that she had been in earlier days. There was a certain amount of self-subversion as well as these changes in literary fashion, and the fact that if there was going to be one Modernist woman poet from that generation it was to be Moore, not Loy. Had she kept on writing and publishing it might have been quite different.

So it was about ten years later that Jonathan Williams published Lunar Baedeker & Time-Tables (1958).

Yes, partly because of Kenneth Rexroth’s encouragement and recommendation. Rexroth had a great deal to do with the rediscovery of Mina Loy. He helped me a lot, especially at the early stages.

And when Lunar Baedeker & Time-Tables came out it was almost totally ignored — met with a grand silence. What do you think about that?

It may have been a bit soon, it may not have been well-distributed — it certainly wasn’t well-reviewed; there was exactly one review. She had not yet been rediscovered by the readers who would find so much in her ten to twenty years later. She was read by a small coterie of poets including people like Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Paul Blackburn — people associated with the Black Mountain school read her. But these people were themselves on the fringes of the poetry world in the U.S. at that time, so having enthusiastic comments by them didn’t necessarily get you a large readership. Then being published by a small press — Jargon Press — probably meant that there were distribution difficulties. Mina Loy remained a poet’s poet until the seventies, when she was rediscovered within the context of feminist readings.

 

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Book

Mina Loy Insel
Melville House

‘Insel, the only novel by the surrealist master Mina Loy, is a book like no other—about an impossible friendship amid the glamorous artistic bohemia of 1930s Paris.

‘German painter Insel is a perpetual sponger and outsider—prone to writing elegant notes with messages like “Am starving to death except for a miracle—three o’clock Tuesday afternoon will be the end”—but somehow writer and art dealer Mrs. Jones likes him.

‘Together, they sit in cafés, hatch grand plans, and share their artistic aspirations and disappointments. And they become friends. But as they grow ever closer, Mrs. Jones begins to realize just how powerful Insel’s hold over her is.

‘Unpublished during Loy’s lifetime, Insel—which is loosely based on her friendship with the painter Richard Oelze—is a supremely surrealist, deliberately excessive creation: baroque in style, yet full of deft comedy and sympathy. Now, with an alternate ending only recently unearthed in the Loy archives, Insel is finally back in print, and Loy’s extraordinary achievement can be appreciated by a new generation of readers.’ — Melville House

 

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Excerpt

“Fleisch ohne knocken,” Insel especially hollow-voiced begged me when I took him to dine. This insistence on boneless pieces of meat was habitual with him.

“Do I look any fatter?” he inquired after he had eaten, as if consulting his doctor.

I thought it best to reply in the affirmative. As a matter of fact the disquieting thing about Insel was that however much food you sunk in him it no more seemed to amalgamate with him than would a concrete mass with a gaseous compound.

From now on Insel turned up regularly as soon as my fitting by the dressmaker was over.

Whenever I let him in he would halt on the threshold drawing the whole of his luminous life up into his smile. It radiated round his face and formed a halo hovering above the rod of his rigid body. He looked like a lamppost alight. Perhaps in that moment before the door opened he recreated himself out of a nothingness into which he must relapse when being alone his magnetism had no one to contact.

“I’ve brought ‘it,’ ” his illusive grin seemed to be announcing, as if his visible person were a mannequin he operated on occasion. “Make what you can of it — you may wonder if I am sure of its nature myself—let us not be too precise as to what I am.”

I led him down the corridor, feeling that he, so recently non-existent, was all-surprised at finding himself to be anything at all.

He shut the door, an act I have heard an authoress describe as so banal it is unfit for publication. But shutting the door, like all automatism we take for granted, is stupendous in its implications.

As the ancients built temples as isolators for the power of the Almighty, which their ritual focused on the altar, a force so dynamic that officiating priests, having evoked it, were constrained to descend the altar steps backwards without ceasing to face it; for the limitless capacity of the eyes could absorb such power, whereas if the blind back were turned upon it they would receive a shock that flung them to the ground.

So the shutting of doors is a concentration of our radiations in rectangular containers, to economize the essences of our being we dispense to those with whom we communicate.

Thus, when Insel shut the door infinitesimal currents ran out of him into the atmosphere as if he were growing a soft invisible fur that, when reciprocal conditions were sufficiently suave, grew longer and longer as the hair of the dead, it is maintained, will leisurely fill a coffin until it seemed with its measured infiltration even to interfere with Time. The mesmeric rhythm of a film slowed down conducted the tempo of thought and sentience in response to his half-petrified tepidity, for he moved within an outer circle of partial decease—a ring of death surrounding him — that reminded one of those magically animated corpses described by William Seabrook. Even before he came into one’s presence, one received a draughty intimation of his frosty approach. He chilled the air, flattened the hour, faded color.

But if one could crash through this necrophilous aura, its consistency dissolved, one came to an inner circle where serial things floated in a semi-existent aquarium. Or, at times he, himself, would overflood it, as now when his coming close to me affected acclimatization, turning an irreal ice into a tenuous warmth.

“I was so terribly afraid I should miss you. I got to bed at seven this morning— (quite exceptional,” he added hurriedly as if wishing to efface a bad impression, “I shall not do it again), and when I woke up my watch said twenty past six. I was convinced you would be gone, but—is it not astounding — a moment later it said half past four.”

To these teeny nothings that marked out his life (as momentous events are the milestones of others) he imparted an interest peculiarly visual. You saw the watch in hallucinatory transformation, its dial advancing the gray diamonds of his eyes out of a murk more mysterious than darkness instead of correcting the eyes’ mistake. He possessed some mental conjury enabling him to infuse an actual detail with the magical contrariness surrealism merely portrays. Perhaps it was the operation of this weird power that necessitated his speaking with such drilling intensity.

He had brought me a present — As he bowed his head over what he held in his hands, all the sweet-stuffs of the earth exuded from his nerves, in an exquisite music of a silence that is alive. He seemed to be sodden with some ineffable satisfaction, as if emerged drenched from some luxuriance requiring little tangible for its consummation. I had to hold myself in check. My charmed curiosity wanted to cry, “From what enchanted bed of love have you so lately arisen? What astral Venus has just receded from your embrace?”

It was a queer impulse, the idea of making such delicious inquiry of this bald and toothless man whose clothes were stiff with years of wear, yet deodorized by continuous exposure to the all-night air.

His voice, gone dim with a crushed emotion as he held out to me a black passe-partout, was saying, “I want to give you my own drawing; the only one I refuse to sell.” The drawing in the passe-partout, like his atmosphere that clung to him as ours clings to the earth, seemed almost astir with that somnolent arrested motion revealing his nature.

It was so white, the flocking skies of a strangely disturbing purity drifted above vortices of snow-like mist in travail of taking shape, coiling the mind into following the spiral, eventual materialization of blindly virginal elementals.

“This,” he continued, “is the first drawing of a new series— all my future work will be based on it. I intend my technique to become more and more minute, until, the grain becoming entirely invisible, it will look like a photograph. Then, when my monsters do evolve, they will create the illusion that they really exist; that they have been photographed.”

The while the drift of his words swept me together with the frozen drawing along a current of quiet reverence, expressing gratitude. As under his conjurative power of projecting images, I felt myself grow to the ruby proportions of a colossal beef steak.

I argued for some time over the idiocy of presents in the very jaws of economic death; proposed sending it to New York to be sold for him; but at length when he inquired sadly, “It doesn’t please you? I will give you another,” I promised to keep it.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! That was my hope. It worked for me. I stole that little 2 emoji sentence from an upcoming slave. Except he wasn’t Orban’s fuckmate  or pretending to be, of course. Ha ha, it’s been a year? Aw, how nice that things for those lucky two worked out. Now it really does feel like Xmas. Love making Santa fill your apartment with so many gifts you need a chainsaw to find the front door, G. ** CAUTIVOS, Hi, C. Oh, thank you so much for querying on behalf of my work. They can just write to me directly if they want — [email protected]. I would direct them to my agent, but she very lazy. I’ve read individual essays by Paul B. Preciado that I thought were very interesting. I haven’t read a collection. My understanding is that Preciado was coupled with Despentes at one time but they split quite a long time now. Thank you very much for the info! ** Bill, Me too, Bill, me too. Yeah, I heard California is getting drenched. I don’t know about SF, but it’s a windfall for LA assuming nothing cool washes away. Wait, wasn’t your gig this past weekend? Maybe I misremember. ** _Black_Acrylic, A lot of those are free to play online if you get sufficiently in the spirit. I actually watched most of the game on Saturday. Les Bleus did seem more dominant, but there was some serious bad luck too. That one dude’s shitty free kick, ouch. I have a feeling Morocco is going to trounce France, but maybe I’m wrong. ** Robert, Oh, ‘Violent Night’? I’m seriously surprised that no one has ever used that title before. I cant remember ever believing in Santa, but I suppose I must have. Never believed in God. Always thought that was a total whopper. Most of the locations we’re seriously considering are in the high desert, Joshua Tree/29 Palms. About 90% of the film takes place in one house, but we need build a haunted house attraction inside it and dig a swamp in the backyard, so that’s the rub. Right now we’re also looking at some houses in Barstow because that might be cheaper, and we need cheap. We start shooting in mid-March. My collaborator Zac Farley and I co-direct. We’re still quite cold here, brr-ish. I hope you got the needed sleep by now. When I have trouble sleeping I start making up a story, a narrative, usually based on something that actually happened to me, and, almost always. telling myself that story in my head eventually becomes so uninteresting that it makes me fall asleep. ** Jeff J, Thanks! Yes, I saw she’s in the New Yorker! That’s pretty wild! I haven’t read it yet because I have New Yorker paywall issues, but Zac usually buys the New Yorker on the newsstand, so I’ll borrow his copy. Next, i.e. the following week should be good for Zoom, yeah. I should get a DVD player, and, yeah, you’re right. Hm. No, I haven’t been to the movies in ages. I’m planning to see ‘EO’ and the new Serra in the next days. I’ve mostly just been watching films related to film posts I’m making. I just restored Paul Sharits Day for upcoming, and I rewatched a few of his, so great! I’m curious about ‘Aftersun’. I don’t think I’m curious enough about ‘Bones and All’ to actually watch it. ** Right. I decided to restore the spotlight that had once fallen on this crazy, fantastic Mina Loy novel. You know it? You might dig it. See you tomorrow.