Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture

Rediscover the most insightful and incendiary cultural commentaries from a leading figure in the revival of Surrealism.

Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues is a collection of Franklin Rosemont’s writings on popular culture over a period of more than forty years. Rosemont, a self-taught scholar, poet, and artist, playfully uncovers the sometimes hidden-in-plain-sight writers and artists who managed to be both popular, vernacular, and in their own ways profoundly revolutionary.

Rosemont skillfully weaves together what most would regard as unlikely threads. The labor culture of the nineteenth-century anarchist movement gains new meaning when connected to the famed Chicago musicians of blues and jazz. His interests from childhood extended from his favorite animators and comic art—Mel Blanc and Tex Avery, Scrooge McDuck, Mighty Mouse, Krazy Kat, Smokey Stover, and Powerhouse Pepper—to nineteenth-century drug-taker Benjamin Paul Blood, or the barely remembered best-selling utopian writer Edward Bellamy. Palindromes and other wordplay counted along with radical environmentalism, modern dance alongside the “mad” self-taught writer-artist Henry Darger.

Find all these and much more, exploring the inventory of Franklin Rosemont’s discoveries and his luminous, unpredictable exploration of himself. An introductory essay by Abigail Susik and an afterword by Paul Buhle frame his work and life.

Praise

“There isn’t much Franklin Rosemont did not know, and what he knew he knew from the inside out. I noticed this in the first few months of our decade-long friendship and collaboration. Whether it was the politics of working-class culture, jazz, rock, blues, hoboes, comics, cinema, ecology, psychoanalysis, poetry and poets, art and artists, Chicago and Paris, or Surrealism and Surrealists, he saw things from inside the belly. He read, listened, and felt from a warm, churning, vulnerable place and turned the experience into prose with such elegance and clarity, it hit you in the pit of your stomach. Gut punch or tickle attack, either way you’re left breathless. Don’t take my word. Open this book and start on page 1.”
—Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

“However much the ruling ideas of a society come from its ruling class, such dominance does not extend to our dreams. In this marvelous book the great surrealist writer, artist, and rebel Franklin Rosemont captures across an incredible terrain the ways in which the wild, the funny, the insurgent, and the uncanny animate what is loved in popular culture. He shows how the imagination, collective and individual, challenges miseries, conformities, and oppressions and finds its audience.”
—David Roediger, Foundation Professor of American Studies, University of Kansas, and author of many books including Working Toward Whiteness

“Ahead of the game, yet unapologetically behind the curve, Franklin Rosemont’s writings on popular culture have always been needed. But they seem required reading, now, more than ever. Without recourse to humor, irreverence, and play, how else is the current moment to be outlived? The editors have done a stellar job of drawing together gems from his prodigious output, originally spread across countless volumes, tracts, pamphlets, and posters. They don’t need any polishing, but this volume makes them shine somehow brighter.”
—Joanna Pawlik, senior lecturer in Art History, University of Sussex, and author of Remade in America: Surrealist Art, Activism, and Politics, 1940–1978

About the Contributors

Franklin Rosemont (1943–2009) was the founder of the Chicago Surrealist circle of the 1960s–70s and later, the central figure in the rebirth of the Charles H. Kerr Company during the 1980s, and a prolific author on labor history and culture.

Abigail Susik is the author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work, editor of Resurgence! Jonathan Leake, Radical Surrealism, and the Resurgence Youth Movement, 1964–1967, and coeditor of the volumes Surrealism and Film After 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries and Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance. Susik is a founding board member of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism and joint editor of the Bloomsbury Transnational Surrealism Series. She lives in Portland, OR.

Paul Buhle has written, edited, or coedited more than four dozen books, including twenty graphic novels, beginning with Wobblies! He founded the SDS journal Radical America and the Oral History of the American Left archive at New York University. He is coeditor of the Encyclopedia of the American Left, a former senior lecturer at Brown University, and the authorized biographer of C.L.R. James. He lives in Providence, RI.

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