MDDM Ch. 56 Vortex

[Otto]

556.1-3:
"A Vorticist. Lord help us, his Mercy how infrequent!" Emerson, believing
Vorticists to be the very Legion of Mischief, had so instructed ev'ry
defenseless young Mind he might reach.


from the first M&D-reading, Fri, 13 Mar 1998:
"I hope we are not talking Wyndham-Lewis here, although who knows, but the
primary reference is Descartes."
more at:
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9803&msg=24800

vorticism , short-lived 20th-century art movement related to futurism. Its
members sought to simplify forms into machinelike angularity. Its principal
exponent was a French sculptor, Gaudier-Brzeska. The movement, however, had
its largest following in England, where Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, James
Joyce, and T. S. Eliot wrote about it.
See W. C. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde, 1910-1915 (1972)."
http://users.senet.com.au/~dsmith/vorticism.htm

"Vorticism was a literary as well as an artistic idea. Vorticist prose, of
which Lewis's Nietzschean novel Tarr was the apotheosis, certainly followed
Imagism in its verbal economy. It was terse and was characterised by clear
visual images. Lewis did not enter, empathetically, into the emotions of his
characters, but viewed them externally, as a painter or sculptor.
(...)
Vorticism, like Futurism, captured the zeitgeist of the pre-war age and was
destroyed by the war in which Hulme and Gaudier-Brzeska were both killed."
http://www.fluxeuropa.com/wyndhamlewis-art_and_ideas.htm

Otto