Mark Twain was utterly convinced that the works of Shakespeare were not written by the man named William Shakespeare. In his biography of Twain, Albert Bigelow Paine wrote:

Mark Twain had the fullest conviction as to the Bacon authorship of the Shakespeare plays. One evening, with Mr. Edward Loomis we attended a fine performance of “Romeo and Juliet” given by Sothern and Marlowe. At the close of one splendid scene he said quite earnestly, “That is about the best play that Lord Bacon ever wrote.”

Twain’s long essay “Is Shakespeare Dead?” doesn’t so much argue for Bacon’s authorship as it blasts the idea that “the Stratford rustic” wrote the works.

In this 45-minute video, playwright and stage actor Keir Cutler, as Mark Twain, performs, interprets, and expands on the essay in this live performance. It really is devastating.

{Via The Scientific Indian}

In The Posthuman Dada Guide: tzara and lenin play chess, Andrei Codrescu writes:

This is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life. It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life. It is and it was always foolish and self-destructive to lead a Dada life because a Dada life will include by definition pranks, buffoonery, masking, deranged senses, intoxication, sabotage, taboo breaking, playing childish and/or dangerous games, waking up dead gods, and not taking education seriously.

If you have any doubt as to whether you are posthuman or merely human, take a look at the following parts of your body: the city, the house, the car, the iPhone, the laptop, the iPod, the pillbox, the nonflesh surround. If sixty percent of your body is now electronic or bioelectronic, living in space designed for efficiency, you will need Dada as a corrective to what will certainly be the loss of the modicum of liberty you still possess.

Dada intends to open the doors at night to let the wilderness back in. Dada is a tool for removing parentheses and removing the world from between quotes with the forceps of inspiration. Sometimes this will call for disruptive spontaneous action, creating and holding TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zones), actualizing dreams, running with gangs, living with animals, and making peace with weather. Sometimes it will mean going after parts of speech, like “like,” or other rhetorical devices, but we will never discourage direct address, on the off chance that someone is listening.

Meaty excerpts are availble on Princeton Univeristy Press’s website.

The Bandana Republic is the first literary anthology written by gang members (current and former).

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