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Cyberspace is full of spirits. It is a disembodied realm, the domain of ghosts & uncanny obsessions. On New Year's Eve 1998, the two contentious & enduring voices of Dada & Surrealism, André Breton and Tristan Tzara, collided once again, spewing pontifical debris in all directions. Much of what is exchanged between these two irascible spirits is pure braggadocio, the excema of a constantly abraded obiter dictum, pustules of prose on a page of swaggering ectoplasm vomiting nudity & art. But braggadocio, it must be realized, is the purest humility. The rumble of the washer varies. Nipples are sermons. We must listen to the sun as it crackles in the odor of the throat. One can, after all, do no less than dilate one's eyes when one is faced with a rampaging elephant of spectral viburnum. One might also fold oneself up into a holiday & extrude flatware & diving equipment at a summer of ineffable beige. Why ask for a taxi when you can have an obsession? It will help if the gentle reader remembers what devoted, selfless blowhards André & Tristan were, & are, & will remain, so long as there is hot air & bombast. For one of the joys of being dead is that of speaking ex cathedra among the stars, & the black void of space, where no one but the angels & asteroids can hear you. And the comets & the goldfish of heaven, which are actual goldfish, with actual scales & actual fins, & mustachios & Vichy water.
--John Olson, May 10, 1999.
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