On the set #84

Joris Ivens, Ernest Hemingway et (à droite) Ludwig Renn sur le tournage de Terre d'Espagne.

[Le film, en entier clic-clic, Papa Hemingway et Dos Passos au commentaire. Joris Ivens est mort comme Couté un 28 juin (1989), clic-clac un jour aussi pour Rimbaud et pour les petits mickeys.].

Des journées entières dans les livres #170

To the young men who spend their days and nights drafting the plans for new rented aggregates of rented cells upended on hard pavements, 

he preaches 

the horizons of his boyhood

[Le preacher in blueprints : Frank Lloyd Wright, † le 9 avril 1959. Pour le reste clic-clic Bébel, Jules et Jim, Frank et Blondin. Et Barbarella.]

Red flags and barricades and suitable posts for machineguns (dans les livres #155)

the garden was crowded and outside Madison Square was full of cops that made everybody move on and the bombsquad all turned out

we couldn't get a seat so we ran up the stairs to the top gallery and looked down through the blue air at the faces thick as gravel and above them on the speakers' stand tiny black figures and a man was speaking and whenever he said war there were hisses and whenever he said Russia there was clapping on account of the revolution I didn't know who was speaking somebody said Max Eastman and somebody said another guy but we clapped and yelled for the revolution and hissed for Morgan and the capitalist war and there was a dick looking into our faces as if he was trying to remember them

then we went to hear Emma Goldman at the Bronx Casino but the meeting was forbidden and the streets around were very crowded and there were moving vans moving through the crowd and they said the moving vans were full of cops with machineguns and there were little policedepartment Fords with searchlights and they charged the crowd with the Fords and the searchlights everybody talked machineguns revolution civil liberty freedom of speech but occasionally somebody got into the way of a cop and was beaten up and shoved into a patrol wagon and the cops were scared and they said they were calling out the fire department to disperse the crowd and everybody said it was an outrage and what about Washington and Jefferson and Patrick Henry ?

afterwards we went to the Brevoort it was much nicer everybody who was anybody was there and there was Emma Goldman eating frankfurters and sauerkraut and everybody looked at Emma Goldman and at everybody else that was anybody and everybody was for peace and the cooperative commonwealth and the Russian revolution and we talked about red flags and barricades and suitable posts for machineguns and we had several drinks and welsh rabbits and paid our bill and went home, and opened the door with a latchkey and put on pajamas and went to bed and it was comfortable in bed

[Emma Goldman, † le 14 mai 1940. Miossec, autrement, et Sinatra clic-clic.]

Des journées entières dans les livres #83

Along the coast in cookshacks flophouses jungles wobblies hoboes bindlestiffs began singing Joe Hill’s songs. They sang ‘em in the county jails of the State of Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Idaho, in the bullpens in Montana and Arizona, sang ‘em in Walla Walla, San Quentin and Leavenworth, forming the structure of the new society within the jails of the old.

At Bingham, Utah, Joe Hill organized the workers of the Utah Construction Company in the One Big Union, won a new wage scale, shorter hours, better grub. (The angel Moroni didn’t like labor organizers any better than the Southern Pacific did.)

The angel Moroni moved the hearts of the Mormons to decide it was Joe Hill shot a grocer named Morrison. The Swedish consul and President Wilson tried to get him a new trial but the angel Moroni moved the hearts of the supreme court of the State of Utah to sustain the verdict of guilty. He was in jail a year, went on making up songs. In November 1915 he was stood up against the wall in the jail yard in Salt Lake City.

“Don’t mourn for me organize,” was the last word he sent out to the working stiffs of the I.W.W. Joe Hill stood up against the wall of the jail yard, looked into the muzzles of the guns and gave the word to fire.

They put him in a black suit, put a stiff collar around his neck and a bow tie, shipped him to Chicago for a bangup funeral, and photographed his handsome stony mask staring into the future.

The first of May they scattered his ashes to the wind.

[Dos Passos, toujours. Joe Hill, exécuté le 19 novembre 1915. L'année dernière, James Ensor clic-clic, Ostende plutôt.]

Oh, il y a des jours d'avarie

I haven't even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.

[John Dos Passos est mort le 29 septembre 1970, Roy Lichtenstein pareil en 1997. On a tout juste un an de plus, trois archanges à fêter, et je me souviens je me rappelle clic-clic.]

We stand defeated America

they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspaper editors the old judges the small men with reputations the college presidents the wardheelers (Listen businessmen college presidents judges America will not forget her betrayers) they hire the men with guns the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons

all right you have won you will kill the brave men our friends tonight

there is nothing left to do we are beaten we the beaten crowd together in these old dingy schoolrooms on Salem Street shuffle up and down the gritty creaking stairs sit hunched with bowed heads on benches and hear the old words of the haters of oppression made new in sweat and agony tonight

our work is over the scribbled phrases the nights typing releases the smell of the printshop the sharp reek of newprinted leaflets the rush for Western Union stringing words into wires the search for stinging words to make you feel who are your oppressors America

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul

their hired men sit on the judge’s bench they sit back with their feet on the tables under the dome of the State House they are ignorant of our beliefs they have the dollars the guns the armed forces the powerplants they have built the electric chair and hired the executioner to throw the switch

all right we are two nations

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch

but do they know that the old words of the immigrants are being renewed in blood and agony tonight do they know that the old American speech of the haters of oppression is new tonight in the mouth of an old woman from Pittsburgh of a husky boilermaker from Frisco who hopped freights clear from the Coast to come here in the mouth of a Back Bay socialworker in the mouth of an Italian printer of a hobo from Arkansas the language of the beaten nation is not forgotten in our ears tonight

the men in the deathhouse made the old words new before they died

If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life talking at streetcorners to scorning men. I might have died unknown, unmarked, a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as now we do by an accident.

now their work is over the immigrants haters of oppression lie quiet in black suits in the little undertaking parlor in the North End the city is quiet the men of the conquering nation are not to be seen on the streets

they have won why are they scared to be seen the streets? on the streets you see only the downcast faces of the beaten

the streets belong to the beaten nation all the way to the cemetery where the bodies of the immigrants are to be buried

we line the curbs in the drizzling rain we crowd the wet sidewalks elbow to elbow silent pale looking with scared eyes at the coffins

we stand defeated America

(John Dos Passos, sur l'exécution de Sacco et Vanzetti, le 23 août 1927, in The Big Money, La grosse galette en VF).

Big Money

Tiens, la Saint-Rudolph. Pour Valentino, c'est chez Dos Passos qu'il faut aller voir, dans la grosse galette - le danseur d'adagios, pages 224 à 229 de mon Folio 1176 : sa vie, sa mort, le cirque à ses funérailles, le spectaculaire en son commencement.

Ce ne fut qu'au bout de deux jours que les flics purent suffisamment déblayer les rues pour laisser passer les couronnes envoyées de Hollywood et pour que les reporters puissent les décrire. [...]
Le train funéraire partit pour Hollywood.
A Chicago, plusieurs personnes furent blessées en essayant de voir le cercueil ; mais cela ne parut plus en première page.
Le train arriva à Hollywood à la page 23 du New York Times.

Lit-on encore Dos Passos ? On devrait.