This episode is a discussion with Paul Buhle, Abigail Susik, and Penelope Rosemont about the newly released book Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture. This collection brings together legendary Chicago surrealist Franklin Rosemont’s writings on popular culture over a period of more than forty years.
Rosemont, a self-taught scholar, poet, and artist, playfully uncovers the sometimes hidden-in-plain-sight writers and artists who managed to be both popular, vernacular, and in their own ways profoundly revolutionary. Rosemont skillfully weaves together what most would regard as unlikely threads. The labor culture of the nineteenth-century anarchist movement gains new meaning when connected to the famed Chicago musicians of blues and jazz. His interests from childhood extended from his favorite animators and comic art – Mel Blanc and Tex Avery, Scrooge McDuck, Mighty Mouse, Krazy Kat, Smokey Stover, and Powerhouse Pepper – to nineteenth-century drug-taker Benjamin Paul Blood, or the barely remembered best-selling utopian writer Edward Bellamy. Palindromes and other wordplay counted along with radical environmentalism, modern dance alongside the “mad” self-taught writer-artist Henry Darger.
Bios: Paul Buhle has written, edited, or coedited more than four dozen books, including twenty graphic novels, beginning with Wobblies! He founded the SDS journal Radical America and the Oral History of the American Left archive at New York University. He is coeditor of the Encyclopedia of the American Left, a former senior lecturer at Brown University, and the authorized biographer of C.L.R. James. He lives in Providence, RI.
Abigail Susik is the author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work, editor of Resurgence! Jonathan Leake, Radical Surrealism, and the Resurgence Youth Movement, 1964–1967, and coeditor of the volumes Surrealism and Film After 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries and Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance. Susik is a founding board member of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism and joint editor of the Bloomsbury Transnational Surrealism Series. She lives in Portland, OR.
For more information on the book: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1723
Intro music: Krazy Kat Theme Song from “Slow Beau” (1927)
The Minor Compositions podcast is in made in collaboration with Firefly Frequencies: https://fireflyfrequencies.org
