Blast 1 Paperback – August 15, 2009

I read one of the originals in the Reading Room at the British Museum. It's a historical document, and can be be best read as a work of its time. Hugh Kenner describes the journal and its context best (w/modernist allusions):"A new copy of Blast, puce, the size of a telephone directory lettered from corner to corner, lay on an aristocratic garden table. The summer day darkened. The rains commenced to fall. No one rescued it. Through a spattered pane wide aristocratic eyes saw in a blazing lightning-flash the shocking pink cover start forth, the five fierce black letters, B L A S T. Darkness recomposed. The dull rain fell and fell."Six weeks after Blast was published Europe was at war."Get a copy. This is how BLAST was designed to be read.

I can't provide a fair and balanced review of Blast. My first exposure to it was at a coffee shop open mic night in a nearby college town, when someone did a modern spoken word adaptation of the introduction to the volume. I didn't gain any interest in it until I saw it years later in college, when it was required reading for a class on modernist literature.Blast will look great on your bookshelf, especially if it's surrounded in conservative looking collections of essays on lit theory. It's big and pink and in-your-face, with a manifesto that could easily have been written by an angsty teenager. It's surprising and impressive, then, that so many of its contributions remain readable and relevant today. The introduction and manifesto segments aren't the valuable parts. The Pound and Ford Maddox Ford work though are excellent. The Rebecca West story is also worthy of note, especially considering the context of Vorticism, which many view as patriarchal at best and misogynistic at worst. There's also a great deal of writing by Lewis himself. There's a tendency among many modernist readers to see Lewis's Blast work as facile and childish, but there's no denying that it at least is passionate and uses some great alliterative language. As a fan of Wyndham Lewis's other work, I enjoy his sections in Blast was well.Blast isn't a good representation of early 20th century modernism, but it's a great representation of the schism that was forming around the pre and post World War I era between "respectable" modernists like Woolf or Forster and the more avant-garde the less moderate fringe. And it's just a fun book to have.

Seems to be faithful to original, however if photos were in colour it would lift it up a notch in my opinion.