VORTEXT Poetry Mail Subscription Magazine
VORTEXT is a mail subscription magazine for poetry, poetics, and other short forms of writing. It’s founded in the spirit of practices of self-publishing, circulation, and distribution of new writing, tracing the footsteps and tracks of subscription magazine traditions, such as for example Diane Di Prima’s and Amiri Baraka’s The Floating Bear – A newsletter.
As most of the correspondences that reach us through the letterbox are usually bills, advertisement, invoices, and other unpleasant communication, VORTEXT aims to contribute a more enjoyable form of mail correspondence.
VORTEXT is founded and co-edited by Erin Honeycutt and Katharina Ludwig, and printed by CUTT PRESS in Berlin.
La Lunga Strada di Sabbia Revisited
Border/ July
A warm and humid afternoon. Grey skies and heavy air, the sun struggles against a thick blanket of clouds. The slightest bit of a breeze. I arrive at the border between France and Italy. The same location where Pier-Paolo Pasolini began his journey of La Lunga Strada di Sabbia, 66 years ago. Behind the border, where Avenue Aristide Briand merges into Corso Mentone, I park the car and take a look around…
In the summer of 1959 Pier-Paolo Pasolini embarked with his Fiat 1100 on a tour from Ventimiglia at the Italian-French border to Trieste, along the entire coast-line of Italy. During this time he was still writing for different magazines and journals. His travelogue of this journey was published as a photo reportage, with images taken by his travel companion, documentary photographer Paolo Di Paolo, in Successo magazine under the title La lunga strada di sabbia – The Long Road of Sand.
Apparently Pasolini and Di Paolo’s idea of the assignment and its execution were rather divergent however: Pasolini’s texts document the post-fascist times after WWII and the socio-historical aspects of the different coastal towns and cities visited. They try to make tangible an ungraspable and perhaps already vanished atmosphere as well as chronicling traces of a place, its inhabitants, its architectures, and haphazard encounters on site. His gaze reaching underneath and beyond what appears on the surface, looking for and sensing the undercurrents. In somewhat of a countermovement Di Paolo’s beautiful photos depict contemporary post-war leisurely life at Italian seaside resorts and beaches – extending a hand toward modernity and a prospective future of tourism.
A summer holiday to Italy in 2024, cancelled due to chronic illness, lead to my partner/collaborator Florian Kräutli and I reading the English translation of La lunga strada di sabbia to each other; alternating, each place one voice, each day a site. A way of travelling, physically static, but through words, times, and the eyes of someone else. While reading and listening, the idea to follow Pasolini’s route around Italy and re-writing his entries was born. Photos of the journey have been reproduced by a number of artists and photographers, however, so far we haven’t encountered a contemporary re-writing of Pasolini’s travel journal.
La lunga strada di sabbia appears one of the lesser known Pasolini texts and we are almost certain it never was one of the maestro’s favourites – while not without depths, and as such in line with his other articles, it was a classic bread-and-butter assignment: travel and living costs covered, an occupation and distraction for three months over a summer, its outcome published in a glossy magazine. Despite, or maybe rather exactly because of, the minor significance given to this text in Pasolini’s oeuvre overall, we see some relevance in re-staging the trip, to catch a glimpse through Pasolini’s eyes, and explore and record what has changed and shifted, what has been lost and found since 1959.
Last year, 2025, marked the 50th anniversary of Pier-Paolo Pasolini’s murder. In his memory we began the same journey around Italy, starting with the Ligurian leg of the trip from Ventimiglia to La Spezia. One month too late (he started in June), in small sections (it will be a longer-term project), and on a very low budget as we lack a commission. Also with a less attractive car, but with Pasolini’s text as a guidebook.
Should you be interested in a reading sample feel free to contact me.
Ventimiglia, July 2025
Sabotage Poets' Theatre
I accidentally started to write a play, reading about Sabotage.
Apparently the Simple Sabotage Field Manual is one of the most downloaded texts of Project Gutenberg in the States (one can wonder why). It was written by William J. Donovan, Director of the Office of Strategic Services (now CIA) in 1944. It was declassified in 2008.
The play will begin with shoes, of which I have too many as my companion kindly pointed out. Also, there will be other things we might need in the times to come…