RIP: Franklin Rosemont (1943-2009)
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
[Unfortunately missing from this obituary is Rosement and his
co-conspirators' interest in what he called "Surrealism's popular
accomplices": radio shows like The Shadow, schlocky horror movies like
Night of the Lepus, pulpsters like H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith
(from whom I took the name Smygo), cartoonists like Tex Avery and Mel
Blanc, etc. etc. etc. Readers should check out Autonomedia's big
anthology Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings & Images by the
Surrealist Movement in the United States:
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1570271224/ref=nosim/thedanclorenecro
--DC]
http://slash.autonomedia.org/node/12524
Franklin Rosemont RIP
Tue, 04/14/2009 - 11:13.
Franklin Rosemont RIP April 12th, 2009
by David Roediger, Paul Garon, and Kate Khatib
Franklin Rosemont, celebrated poet, artist, historian, street speaker,
and surrealist activist, died Sunday, April 12 in Chicago. He was 65
years old. With his partner and comrade, Penelope Rosemont, and lifelong
friend Paul Garon, he co-founded the Chicago Surrealist Group, an
enduring and adventuresome collection of characters that would make the
city a center for the reemergence of that movement of artistic and
political revolt. Over the course of the following four decades,
Franklin and his Chicago comrades produced a body of work, of
declarations, manifestos, poetry, collage, hidden histories, and other
interventions that has, without doubt, inspired an entirely new
generation of revolution in the service of the marvelous.
Franklin Rosemont was born in Chicago on October 2, 1943 to two of the
area’s more significant rank-and-file labor activists, the printer Henry
Rosemont and the jazz musician Sally Rosemont. Dropping out of Maywood
schools after his third year of high school (and instead spending
countless hours in the Art Institute of Chicago’s library learning about
surrealism), he managed nonetheless to enter Roosevelt University in
1962. Already radicalized through family tradition, and his own
investigation of political comics, the Freedom Rides, and the Cuban
Revolution, Franklin was immediately drawn into the stormy student
movement at Roosevelt.
Looking back on those days, Franklin would tell anyone who asked that he
had “majored in St. Clair Drake” at Roosevelt. Under the mentorship of
the great African American scholar, he began to explore much wider
worlds of the urban experience, of racial politics, and of historical
scholarship -- all concerns that would remain central for him throughout
the rest of his life. He also continued his investigations into
surrealism, and soon, with Penelope, he traveled to Paris in the winter
of 1965 where he found André Breton and the remaining members of the
Paris Surrealist Group. The Parisians were just as taken with the young
Americans as Franklin and Penelope were with them, as it turned out, and
their encounter that summer was a turning point in the lives of both
Rosemonts. With the support of the Paris group, they returned to the
United States later that year and founded America’s first and most
enduring indigenous surrealist group, characterized by close study and
passionate activity and dedicated equally to artistic production and
political organizing. When Breton died in 1966, Franklin worked with his
wife, Elisa, to put together the first collection of André’s writings in
English.
Active in the 1960s with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the
Rebel Worker group, the Solidarity Bookshop and Students for a
Democratic Society, Franklin helped to lead an IWW strike of blueberry
pickers in Michigan in 1964, and put his considerable talents as a
propagandist and pamphleteer to work producing posters, flyers,
newspapers, and broadsheets on the SDS printing press. A long and
fruitful collaboration with Paul Buhle began in 1970 with a special
surrealist issue of Radical America. Lavish, funny, and barbed issues of
Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion and special issues of Cultural
Correspondence were to follow.
The smashing success of the 1968 World Surrealist Exhibition at Gallery
Bugs Bunny in Chicago announced the ability of the American group to
make a huge cultural impact without ceasing to be critics of the frozen
mainstreams of art and politics. The Rosemonts soon became leading
figures in the reorganization of the nation’s oldest labor press,
Charles H. Kerr Company. Under the mantle of the Kerr Company and its
surrealist imprint Black Swan Editions, Franklin edited and printed the
work of some of the most important figures in the development of the
political left: C.L.R. James, Marty Glaberman, Benjamin Péret and
Jacques Vaché, T-Bone Slim, Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons, and, in a new
book released just days before Franklin’s death, Carl Sandburg. In later
years, he created and edited the Surrealist Histories series at the
University of Texas Press, in addition to continuing his work with Kerr
Co. and Black Swan.
A friend and valued colleague of such figures as Studs Terkel, Mary Low,
the poets Philip Lamantia, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and
Dennis Brutus, the painter Lenora Carrington, and the historians Paul
Buhle, David Roediger, John Bracey, and Robin D.G. Kelley, Rosemont’s
own artistic and creative work was almost impossibly varied in
inspirations and results. Without ever holding a university post, he
wrote or edited more than a score of books while acting as a great
resource for a host of other writers.
He became perhaps the most productive scholar of labor and the left in
the United States. His spectacular study, Joe Hill: The I.W.W. and the
Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture, began as a slim
projected volume of that revolutionary martyr’s rediscovered cartoons
and grew to giant volume providing our best guide to what the early
twentieth century radical movement was like and what radical history
might do. His coedited volume Haymarket Scrapbook stands as the most
beautifully illustrated labor history publication of the recent past.
Indispensable compendiums like The Big Red Songbook, What is
Surrealism?, Menagerie in Revolt, and the forthcoming Black Surrealism
are there to ensure that the legacy of the movements that inspired him
continue to inspire young radicals for generations to come. In none of
this did Rosemont separate scholarship from art, or art from revolt. His
books of poetry include Morning of the Machine Gun, Lamps Hurled at the
Stunning Algebra of Ants, The Apple of the Automatic Zebra’s Eye and
Penelope. His marvelous fierce, whimsical and funny artwork -- to which
he contributed a new piece every day—graced countless surrealist
publications and exhibitions.
Indeed, between the history he himself helped create and the history he
helped uncover, Franklin was never without a story to tell or a book to
write—about the IWW, SDS, Hobohemia in Chicago, the Rebel Worker, about
the past 100 years or so of radical publishing in the US, or about the
international network of Surrealists who seemed to always be passing
through the Rosemonts’ Rogers Park home. As engaged with and excited by
new surrealist and radical endeavors as he was with historical ones,
Franklin was always at work responding to queries from a new generation
of radicals and surrealists, and was a generous and rigorous
interlocutor. In every new project, every revolt against misery, with
which he came into contact, Franklin recognized the glimmers of the free
and unfettered imagination, and lent his own boundless creativity to
each and every struggle around him, inspiring, sustaining, and teaching
the next generation of surrealists worldwide.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
(Wait for the new edition: http://hplmythos.com/ )
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
"Tho-ag in Zhi-gyu slept seven Khorlo. Zodmanas
zhiba. All Nyug bosom. Konch-hog not; Thyan-Kam
not; Lha-Chohan not; Tenbrel Chugnyi not;
Dharmakaya ceased; Tgenchang not become; Barnang
and Ssa in Ngovonyidj; alone Tho-og Yinsin in
night of Sun-chan and Yong-grub (Parinishpanna),
&c., &c.,"
-- The Book of Dzyan.
Dorothy J Heydt
Dan Clore <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
>News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
>http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
>
>[Unfortunately missing from this obituary is Rosement and his
>co-conspirators' interest in what he called "Surrealism's popular
>accomplices": radio shows like The Shadow, schlocky horror movies like
Well, Night of the Lepus was pretty silly. But they did get
one thing right. They made the rabbits, modulo their
Harley-Davidson size, behave like rabbits. Hal and I were
raising rabbits at the time, which enabled us to appreciate
little things like ... there's a moment, I forget when
exactly, where the humans are out in the dark, listening for
strange sounds ... and they heard this soft, snuffling sound.
We recognized it as the sound a litter of baby rabbits make
in their burrow. Sure enough, in the next five minutes or
so, the whole warrenful attacked.
It was definitely a silly movie, and the silliest part was
that the humans, faced with rabbits that grew to the size of
small cattle in *a few weeks,* couldn't think of anything
better to do with them than exterminate them. Ye gods.
Think of what a cheap, tasty, low-fat protein source they
would make!
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at hotmail dot com
Should you wish to email me, you'd better use the hotmail edress.
Kithrup is getting too damn much spam, even with the sysop's filters.
Dan Clore
> In article <49F139C8...@columbia-center.org>, Dan Clore
> <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
>> News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
>> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
>>
>> [Unfortunately missing from this obituary is Rosement and his
>> co-conspirators' interest in what he called "Surrealism's popular
>> accomplices": radio shows like The Shadow, schlocky horror movies
>> like Night of the Lepus,.....
>
> Well, Night of the Lepus was pretty silly. But they did get one thing
> right. They made the rabbits, modulo their Harley-Davidson size,
> behave like rabbits. Hal and I were raising rabbits at the time,
> which enabled us to appreciate little things like ... there's a
> moment, I forget when exactly, where the humans are out in the dark,
> listening for strange sounds ... and they heard this soft, snuffling
> sound. We recognized it as the sound a litter of baby rabbits make in
> their burrow. Sure enough, in the next five minutes or so, the whole
> warrenful attacked.
>
> It was definitely a silly movie, and the silliest part was that the
> humans, faced with rabbits that grew to the size of small cattle in
> *a few weeks,* couldn't think of anything better to do with them than
> exterminate them. Ye gods. Think of what a cheap, tasty, low-fat
> protein source they would make!
It has a great quotient of has-been actors, and the way the rabbits keep
changing size between shots is positively mind-boggling.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
(Wait for the new edition: http://hplmythos.com/ )
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"