Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944)

Not for nothing was Marinetti known as the “Caffeine of Europe”. His aim was to snap the intelligenstsia, the politicians, the populace, anyone who would listen to him, out of the past, out of sentimentality, into the future, into electrification, and to do it as fast and as stylishly, as unreflectingly and mercilessly as he inhumanly could do. He acted the role of the prophet, intoxicated with possibility, a vision of society moving at the speed of an electron, splintering the show more clunkiness of wood and tradition in a wake of soundwaves by wheels and engines and wings. He wanted man to become machine, and to wage and glory in war on his fellow machine, and to exalt in art, poetry, and dance at the same time.

It is a dizzy mixture that makes up his selection of his writings here, from art manifestos, allegorical fiction, memoir, invective, to poetry, politics, and proselytizing. We hear a lot about his “invention” of “Words in Freedom”. Here the form fits the content - a sort of high speed multi-sensory thinking out loud on the page that lacks punctuation and blurs ideas together in communicative association (a bit like Finnegan’s Wake, but with a purpose, and ten years earlier). Even when he is not deliberately writing like this, there are hints of it in the fluidity of thought and association of ideas. But this is a book of real contrasts. Sometimes his inspired use of metaphor unwillingly carries the reader along with his death driven dreaming, other times it jars like Nietzsche’s painfully vain autobiography, and he unmasks himself. The tightrope act between the dreaming poet, and the self-important impresario of the future is not one that he quite has the delicacy of balance to maintain in all his writings here, and yet he does it in some of his better ones.


I have read nothing like this collection here before. Marinetti has left a huge cultural impact over the years, in the spheres of art and literature high and low (especially anything modernist), film, technology, and in society at large. And this volume is worth reading for that reason, and because it can still provoke thought, while giving us a view onto the intellectual climate of cultural, technological, and societal change in the early 20th Century. However, it is not without its caveats, and there is a lot of questionable value here too in some of what he says (let’s not forget he was a bit of a Fascist). show less

The Futurists were literally on the wrong side of every great public argument of the 20th century. Pro-engine, anti-nature, full of lust for war and scorn for women. I guess artists can afford to mess around with Fascism and rampaging egos and talk big about killing you until their successors come along to kill them, assuming that society will never be as avant-garde as them, and will therefore never destroy itself with ideas like these, and so they can continue living like diesel gods among show more the herd. I love that Marinetti's story (in the "Founding") of how dangerous he is involves him driving into a ditch and some local people pulling him out, and then he has to squirm about being grateful because he thinks you can embrace and promote violence and hate and then not have to like, be violent and hateful. Hypocrite! The prose is magnificent, the ideas are evil. The only thing that redeems it is that it was written before, not after, two world wars. show less

Orientalist chauvinism and schmalz wrapped up in one tiresome whole. Seemed as if Marinetti (here, at least) fancied himself the 20th-century incarnation of Nietzsche, but missed the mark entirely.

wtf I hate pasta now

Marinetti's futurist cookbook is fearless and radical. The challenges that Futurists faced with art/music/dance were mere hurdles compared to the struggle of changing a country's palate. While he would mock the the phrase "don't fix what isn't broken" his vacuous destruction of taste and focus on aesthetics of food was a ripple in Italy and the world's menus. Even if you never try and of the recipes in this you must appreciate his passion.. or jetfuel for dynamic, show more unsurmountable, boundary breaking ideas that could only be fenced in by the universal love for what actually tastes good. show less