Book Description
During his thirty-four year tenure as a Justice of the Supreme Court, Hugo L. Black demonstrated, in the words of one of his colleagues, "a true passion for the Constitution." At a moment's notice, in front of visiting students or a clutch of legal dignitaries, the Judge would whip his tattered copy of the Constitution from his coat pocket, flip through it to a particular passage and then, in a high voice, read the passage con vivace. And though Black began his political career in Alabama as the candidate of the Ku Klux Klan--with their help in 1926 he became a U.S. Senator--thirty years later, he would argue forcefully for an end to segregation in the South.In Hugo L. Black: Cold Steel Warrior, distinguished writer Howard Ball draws from Black's extensive files in the Library of Congress and on interviews with his colleagues on the Court, his law clerks, and his family to illuminate the enigmatic career of a man who became one of the twentieth century's most vigilant defenders of freedoms and liberty. Ball's examination of Black's life reveals a consummate politician who kept, in a safe beside his desk, the names, addresses, and backgrounds of all those who gave Black support from the time he ran for the county solicitor's job in Jefferson County, Alabama, through his two terms as a U.S. Senator. A fervent New Deal advocate, Black lent his support to F.D.R.'s court packing plan, and was one of the few who stood with the President until the measure's defeat in 1937. Less than one month later, F.D.R. rewarded Black by nominating him to the Supreme Court. Soon after Black's confirmation by the Senate, the story of his Klan membership spread across the nation, prompting Time magazine to write that "Hugo won't have to buy a robe, he can dye his white one black." One of Black's early opinions for the Court, however, changed most of the negative opinion about him. Writing for the majority in Chambers v. Florida, Black and his colleagues overturned charges against four African-American men unjustly accused of murder.In addition to Black's political and judicial career, Ball captures some of the great legal minds at work--Earl Warren, Thurgood Marshall, Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, John M. Harlan II, and William J. Brennan--and their encounters with the tough Justice who was an immovable force when engaged in a constitutional battle. From Brown v. Board of Education and the first tests of the power of the federal courts to implement the Brown decision, to the height of McCarthyism and the national hysteria about Communism, to New York Times v. United States, the famous Pentagon Papers case in 1971 (Black's last opinion for the Court which defended a newspaper's First Amendment rights), Black emerges as a staunch defender of federalism and the primacy of the First Amendment, a strict, literal interpreter of the Constitution, and always proud to be a member of the Supreme Court.Throughout his life, Hugo Black's cockiness, sternness, and stubborn determination won him many critics. On every occasion, as Howard Ball shows, Black proved his critics wrong. He became a major presence in the Senate and one of the great Justices ever to sit on the Supreme Court. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Letras Libres, published by Editorial Vuelta, S.A. de C.V. on March 1, 2001. The length of the article is 1361 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: BAILE DE MASCARAS.(TT: Mask ball.)(Reseña)
Author: Hugo Hiriart
Publication: Letras Libres (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 1, 2001
Publisher: Editorial Vuelta, S.A. de C.V.
Volume: 3Issue: 27Page: 12

Article Type: Reseña

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Book Description
The German contribution to the Dada movement ("DADA MEANS NOTHING!" proclaimed Tristan Tzara) as it unfolded in Zurich during the first World War is not widely known.This collection brings together three texts translated into English for the first time, which were essential for the very creation of the movement, and which influenced all its future developments in France, Germany, the USA and many other countries.

Included is the only Dada novel, Tenderenda the Fantast, written by the movement's founder Hugo Ball. sections of which he performed at the celebrated Cabaret Voltaire. It is partially a roman à clef recounting the birth of Dada and the author's subsequent love-hate relationship with his monstrous creation, and yet is much more besides. Richard Huelsenbeck's Fantastic Prayers was the first Dada poetry collection, and these precocious "Bruitist" poems clearly illustrate how the absurd elements in early Expressionism evolved into the bizarre eloquence of Dada. Finally, Walter Serner's Last Loosening manifesto, the first major German manifesto written in Zurich, which provoked numerous brawls at its various performances and yet is hardly known. In fact it was the source for many of Tzara's future literary provocations and seems to have been deliberately suppressed for this reason.

Three vital texts from one of the most extraordinary manifestations of the avant-garde of this century. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Burn Your Poems and Ride the Hobby-Horse
In a recent review of two books from the Subtext collective (some sort of Seattle based poetry commune), Stephen Thomas, wrote, "Wallace Steven remarked somewhere that every successful poem expresses a theory of poetry... Every serious poet has had to come to terms with the power of language to express its own meanings apart from, or even in opposition, to the poet's own intention. The Language poets seem to start with this experience. It is not too much to say that they cultivate a distrust of language and that their poems often frustrate the `basic' function of language to narrate, to explain, to describe and to import knowledge or wisdom."

I should point out that every serious poet should be burned with a Buick Regal's cigarette lighter and thrown into the Duwamish until they learn that the basic function of the human throat is to howl. The `basic' function of language is to frustrate this impulse.

Eighty years ago, in Zurich among a population of international outcasts and deserters from the Great War, a group of artists exploded what had been German Expressionism. They protested Western Civilization (the whole ball of wax), a society whose devotion to a coldly analytical and rational language had wrought Verdun and the Somme. Remembered largely now as the foundation for Surrealism and trivialized for their jokes, such as Marcel Duchamp's urinal, La Fonatine (1917), The First Texts of Dadarevels in the serious anarchy and the subversive antics that gave birth to Dada.

Hugo Ball -- one of the principal perpetrators of Dada and the author of the only Dada novel, Tenderenda the Fantast, included in this book and which of course bears absolutely no resemblance to what then passed for a novel and often doesn't bare clear resemblence to any known language -- believed that under the "influence of Kant and German idealism, as well as Lutheran sobriety, that language had been made abstract and thus had been debased into a utilitarianism that allowed it to be plundered by jingoism, literary professionalism, journalism, and intellectual vacuity. It had become a tool for upholding the ruling value system." Ball made it his mission to purify the word. He saw Dada, which was initially performed at the Cabaret Voltaire as a fusion of sound, drama, and painting; a cacophony of contradiction, music played on found objects (known as Merz performance, the philosophy that any sound or text can be incorporated as material into a performance), monologues of gibberish, that is an art free from any concrete constraints.

This book charts the inception of Dada and more importantly presents three texts in their confounding entirety. This is not a book about art history; it's a handbook for subversion and a champion of the vitality of art as terrorism. It is not much to say that Dada cultivated a mistrust of language; they burned every scrap of it they could find. ... Read more