1) From Sergei Tretyakov's essay "The New Leo Tolstoy" (orig. in Novyi LEF# 1, 1927):
We have no reason to wait for Tolstoys. We have our epic literature. Our epic literature is the newspaper. . . .
The L'vov-Rogachevskiis and Kogans try to find nuggets of edification in today's belles lettres. But this is akin to the way a cat still automatically circles in the corner even after the litter box has been taken away. . . .
The entire anonymous newspaper mass, from the worker-correspondent to the writer of the lead article, is the collective Tolstoy of our time. . . .
Our primary task is not to wait for red epicists, but rather to train the entire Soviet public to read the newspaper, this bible of the present day.
2) From J.L. Moreno's "Sociodrama" (1943, orig. from the journal Sociometry, vol. VI):
Among the forms of writing, the newspaper comes nearest to being a spontaneous expression and to fulfilling -- in a trivial and limited way -- what we mean by the concept of the moment. It is tied up with the present. . . .
But the livingnewspaper technique, after a few years of nation-wide popularity, in the form of the March of Time and as a W.P.A. project, came to a dead end in 1940. . . .
The press reaction was reserved and sarcastic as is usual with a novelty. However, one factor was appreciated in the reports -- the spontaneity of the players. There was no playwright and no script.
Admittedly, spontaneity playing is a difficult task. But it is the crux of the matter. . . . As soon as the living newspaper is used as a frame for writing a nice and polished play all the conventional trappings of the theater automatically come back into operation. . .
Preparation and planning are required, but by methods of a different kind than those of the theater. . . . [T]he purpose of their enactments would not have been for the sake of exploring individual situations and producing individual catharsis, but for the sake of exploring collective situations and producing a collective catharsis. . . .
[T]he spontaneity of the subjects, of the informants as well as of the spectators, should be maintained by all means. Any rehearsal with informants ahead of the session will turn them into actors and often into bad ones.
reprinted in Psychodrama, First Volume, (1994) McLean VA, 1994: Amer. Soc. for Group Psychotherapy & Psychodrama.
[Thanks to this comment for causing me to try again to dig into Moreno's mysterious, intriguing, weird and frustrating book, which we found 2 years ago, used at a thrift shop, having never before heard of the guy.]
3) Régis Debray:
[M]ediological periodization allows us to situate the life-cycle of socialism, that great fallen oak of political endeavor, within the last 150 years of the graphosphere; and to explore its ecosystem, so to speak . . .
The inventor of the word 'socialism' was the genial typographer, encyclopaedist and 1848-er, Pierre Leroux. . . . The workers' press and the socialist library were crucibles for anarchists, Proudhonists, Leninists and reformists alike. Saint-Simon was a copyist, proof-corrector and bookseller; Proudhon, a typographer. . . . The sons of Marx and of Bakunin shared the same gospel: to read and to get others reading. Everywhere they went, they left a library. . . .
Indeed, it was L'Atelier, Buchez's paper, that in 1840 coined the expression 'working class' . . . [N]o workers' parties existed before the appearance of popular broadsheets around 1860. . . .
Whereas the finger that presses a button, fast-forwarding a tape or disc, will never pose a danger to the establishment.
Some people are forever tempted to spend their lives placing down pieces of information in juxtaposition and staring at them as if they were inverted jigsaw puzzle pieces.
What if the pieces don't neatly fit together? Or fit plausibly but in too numerous ways?
Then look for and collect more pieces! What a fate!
