Talk:Lettrism

message: Google search: Lettrism
The above link leads to a lot of references to Lettrism... granted these may not have been available in 2004, when many perplexed editors were commenting below.
It's a significant (historically, if not productively) French artistic movement of the mid-20th century... main influence was in inspiring the Situationist International (which in turn influenced Fluxus, and Punk Rock, among other movements.
Comments below seem to be looking for an ideology... I would venture that there probably isn't one to find.  It was a late 1950s anti-establishment, nihilistic movement in the spirit of the Dadaists.  Really a group of precocious teenagers (or young adults, anyway), seeking to piss off the middle-class, bourgeois society they emerged from, without a lot of thought about "what we stand for" but instead a lot of thought about "what we stand against."  Again, think Dadaism.
But they basically revived Dadaism in the post-WWII era... a good English-language reference would be Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces.
But trust me, they are worthy of a Wikipedia entry, even among such notable, historically significant entries as Leeroy Jenkins and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
(Just remember, kids... just because it isn't documented on the internet doesn't mean it didn't happen...)
StrangeAttractor (talk) 05:58, 12 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  um, there's this thing called Google 

message: Letterism seems to be another name for this movement, see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Letterism, Letterism.
Which should redirect to which? On the VfD subpage referred to above, it's suggested that based on Google Letterism may be the more common title among laypeople, and Lettrism among experts.
Assuming both have significant usage, IMO it doesn't matter which is the article title, and which the redirect. Andrewa 19:56, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It's a bit complicated. "Letterism" is the term that the French lettristes themselves prefer. But then, the first time (as far as I know) that the term was translated into English, by Eugène Jolas in 1947/8, he rendered it as "lettrism". So, being the originator of the English term, one could make a case for him as the proprietor of that term. In the (admittedly, pretty scant) material that has been written on the movement, neither spelling seems to dominate. My own feeling, despite having personally first come to them through Jolas and, to this day, still thinking of them as lettrists, is that we should probably give them an official title of "letterists" (with all appropriate redirects). I should, in any case, take this opportunity to give fair warning that I intend to make a major overhaul to this page, and perhaps a few of the other associated pages. I've already been doing big things to the Lettrist International page (which might, itself, need to be renamed -- at least for the sake of consistency). But it's going to be a big project, to edit this page in such a way as might do justice to the movement in question, so it's likely to take a while for me to build up to it. And hence plenty of time for any interested parties to offer their views first. (Though, frankly, I don't suppose many people are watching this at all!) Hce1132 00:41, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Letterism

message: Rather than simply removing this, I figured I might as well highlight it here first. Someone has anonymously added a claim that the New Lettrist International has "some personal connections with the Lettrist International." What, pray, is the basis for this claim? Can we please have a cited source for it; or at the very least some hint as to which person in particular is supposed to be providing such a connection. Most of the members of the Letterist International, and all of the central ones, were dead long before this new group was ever established (to the extent that it has actually been established). On a wider point, I have to say that I'm finding it increasingly bewildering that people consistently seem to be using this discussion page, and the article itself, to discuss everything but the topic of the present article. There are already existing articles on the topics that seem to interest people more, so, unless some connection can actually be demonstrated, there's really no need to bring them here. Hce1132 22:49, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that the claim highlighted here seems highly likely and should be removed unless a sourced reference can be made. Likewise a simple reference to the NLI should suffice and the xtra material should be removed. Thinking about the Jorn reference, it seems he may well have been referring to the producers of illuminated manuscripts and his introduction of this into his text may have been a whimsy. I have tried googling enluminure with various combinations of lett*** with no results. Also the word Letterist is often used a an alternative to Letterer in the comic world. Perhaps a short sentence at the beginning with links to the Hurufi, theological and comic uses of theassociated terms might be useful in enabling people to find the page they are interested in if they have stumbled on this page by mistake.Harrypotter 16:40, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

text: "[The New Lettrist International] is aparently mostly based on some personal connections with the later Situationist International, notably between Ralph Rumney and Stewart Home (eg Festival of Plagiarism ). The greatest area of common interest is superficially that of psychogeography, again an area that associates both Rumney and Home as well as many of the NLI, whose participants include London Psychogeographical Association, Neoist Alliance and the Association of Autonomous Astronauts."
Given that (a) there are already wikipedia articles on the New Lettrist International, the Situationists, Ralph Rumney, Stewart Home (incorporating material on the Neoist Alliance), psychogeography, the London Psychogeographical Association, and the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, and (b) a single link to the New Lettrist International page will enable the reader to find the relevant places, it seems unnecessary to duplicate that material here. Unless it is directly relevant to the present article, its inclusion here will not merely add unnecessarily to its length, but, more seriously, will serve to give the non-expert reader a seriously distorted impression of the concerns and connections of the original Letterist group. But the fact is that it simply is not relevant. Ralph Rumney was never part of the Letterist group. He was not part of the Letterist International either. And, as far as I know, he was not even part of the New Lettrist International. His interactions with one of its members, Stewart Home, are not sufficient to demonstrate that he was involved with this particular aspect of Home's work (and "apparently mostly based" is not a useful phrase: it is, I believe, an example of what wikipedia calls "weasel words"). He was, it is true, once involved with Guy Debord, who had briefly been a member of Isou's group: but he was only involved with him for a period of about nine months in 1957–58, long after Debord had broken off all ties with that group (ties which he'd only held for about a year or so anyway). He was also involved more intimately and enduringly with Michèle Bernstein: but she, notwithstanding her participation with the Letterist International, had never been part of Isou's group at all -- the latter being the topic of the present article. All in all, the situation seems to be that one of the members of the New Lettrist International had some vague association with one of the members of the Situationist International, who was thereby associated in turn with some people who had formerly been members of the Letterist International, a group which had ultimately originated as a splinter-group from the Letterists. Four degrees of separation is not my idea of relevance. Besides which, why are we talking about psychogeography here? Yes, of course it was an interest that linked Rumney and Home: but it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the original Letterist group. In my opinion, it's entirely right and proper that we should be mentioning things like the Letterist International, and other groups that sprang directly from the Letterists -- though a full discussion of their respective projects belongs in their own proper articles -- and that even the Situationist International deserves some mention in connection with the fact that they and the Letterists had a member in common but were bitterly opposed to one another. But this New Lettrist International stuff is just at too many removes to warrant any more than the briefest of mentions, and even there the sort of mention it should be getting is one that is deliberately designed to downplay their connection: because, again, the non-expert reader (and experts, after all, have no need to come here) will otherwise get a seriously distorted impression of what was actually going on. Hce1132 11:06, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  all that maybe true if this article was about the Lettrist Movement or about the Lettrist Dictatorship or about Isouism. It is not. It is about Lettrism. Was the attack on the Charlie Chaplin press-conference orchestrated by Lettrists practicing Lettrism? yes. Was the attack on the Notre Dame Cathedral orchestrated by Lettrists practicing Lettrism? yes. Was the Lettrist International a Lettrist organisation? yes. Is Psychogeography an innovation of those very Lettrists? yes. all this is a matter of record, whatever your "idea of relevance" is or isn't. Were these techniques the application of those techniques perfected by the Lettrists in their cinema and then applied into other fields of activity, in precicely those forms that would later become reffered to as Situations as opposed to art-house 'Happenings'? that maybe a question for "experts" - wot u may call "original research" . however, the writing of encyclopeadea entries is also a matter for experts, albeit the co-ellaborated expertise of the wiki web world.
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 202.139.42.5 (talk) 03:18, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

text: The first debate I attended was on anarchism. Shinsetsu O-Tearai from Japan, opened this with scorching attack on Johnnie Moore's Anarchy and Ecstasy. She quoted chapter and verse from Ei-sai's The Protection of the State by the Propagation of Zen and mocked anarchism as an intellectually unstimulating doctrine secreted by the European enlightenment. She then propounded Do-gen's theory of The Sutra Equal in Size to the Whole World concerning a 'text' which was written with characters drawn from heaven, from man and the beasts, and from the vegetable world. This she compared to John Toland's theory of seeds within matter, and William Blake's injunction "to see the world in a grain of sand". She concluded that only Lettrism can reconcile the finest fruits of East and West. Report of the First Congress of the New Lettrist International. See also the comments about the War of the Insane.Harrypotter 15:21, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  New Lettrist International 

message: One cannot, I suppose, please everyone: but one can at least try to make a start. To that end, I've created a self-contained 'Offshoots and Influences' section, where material can go which deals with the various offshoots of the Letterist group or with the individuals and groups that have drawn inspiration from it. Having found one (single, solitary) page which does provide at least some vague support for that Irma Vep link I was querying, I've even restored that. Hce1132 21:59, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  A compromise 

message: If this is an article about an art movement, there should be pictures accompanying it. This isn't really my area of specialty, but this sounds kind of like Surrealist automatism. Or at least it has the same degree of ridiculous technical terms. Lithoderm (talk) 21:15, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Pictures?

message: very close in fact, My grandmother is his sister..  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.151.62.54 (talk) 18:51, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
replies: text:  Of Guy Debord or Isidore Isou or any of the other Lettrists?  If that's true, please, have your grandmother give her story to a historian of this era... there are many in France, but in the US the one I am most familiar with is Greil Marcus. But any art historian of the 20th century would be interested, and easily found through university websites. These guys were actually really important, and your grandmother's memories should be part of history, if she's willing to share it... StrangeAttractor (talk) 04:59, 10 April 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  I am a relative of his 

message: Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. The material was copied from: http://primo.getty.edu/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.do?vid=GRI&afterPDS=true&institution=GETTY&docId=GETTY_ALMA21136977590001551. Copied or closely paraphrased material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.) For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences or phrases. Accordingly, the material may be rewritten, but only if it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you.  Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 19:05, 15 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Copyright problem removed 

message: Discuss. 107.203.108.56 (talk) 19:38, 1 December 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  Yes, welcome to 20th century art, my young friend. Your comment reminds me of an old politically incorrect joke, as follows.  A guy from the hinterlands finds himself in Manhattan for a business convention and makes his way to a nearby bar in Chelsea, and proceeds to get drunk and talkative.  "Hey," he says to a random stranger sitting next to him at the bar.  "What's with all these homos?  You know what I think?  They should take them all and put them on an island." "Yeah, so guess what?" says the Chelsea stranger.  "You're on it."  StrangeAttractor (talk) 04:55, 10 April 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Propose rename to "Pretentious assholes".