Happy 80th, Jürgen Ploog!

Jürgen Ploog, maybe the best & most adventurous of the German cut-up & collage writers — with Carl Weissner (1940-2012) — turned 80 on Friday. For 33 years a long-distance pilot for Lufthansa (I remember a photo of him with typewriter in cockpit), he has been a cosmonaut of inner & outer space for even longer and his books, from Cola Hinterland (1969) to Unterwegssein ist alles (2011) have been consistent mappings of mental, sexual, cultural & criminal areas where few dare to tread. For the occasion of his 80th, his Nächte in Amnesia, a sequence of  fragmentary fictions including Ploog’s own collages was republished (Moloko Print, Schönebeck 2014). By this time what I have in another context called the seam/seem writing of collage/montage has become so smooth & elegant that most of the sharp edges of cut-up montage have just about disappeared. But beware, reader: it is exactly in those invisible folds that you will be sucked in & under, it is in these hidden syntactic cracks & fault lines that you’ll lose you footing to disappear into this or that parallel noir world, and no “Beam me up, Scotty” will save your ass. For more on Ploog check articles here (in German) & here (in English). At the bottom of this post a video of Ploog reading.

Partial list of Ploog’s writings:

• Cola-Hinterland (Darmstadt: Melzer Verlag 1969)
• Die Fickmaschine. Ein Beitrag zur kybernetischen Erotik (Göttingen: Expanded Media Editions 1970)
• Sternzeit 23 (Göttingen: Shark Editions/Verlag Udo Breger 1975)
• RadarOrient (Berlin: Verlag Jakobsohn 1976)
• Pacific Boulevard (Bonn: Expanded Media Editions 1977)
• Nächte in Amnesien. Stories (Basel: Sphinx Verlag 1980)
• Strassen des Zufalls. Über William S. Burroughs & für eine Literatur der 80er Jahre (Bern: Lichtspuren 1983)
• Facts of Fiction. Essays zur Gegenwartsliteratur (Frankfurt: Paria Verlag 1991)
• Der Raumagent. Erzählungen (Berlin: Druckhaus Galrev 1993)
• Rückkehr ins Coca & Cola-Hinterland (Ostheim: Verlag Peter Engstler 1995)
• Tanker. Texte von & zu Jürgen Ploog. Herausgegeben von Florian Vetsch. (Herdecke: Rohstoff Verlag 2004)
• Undercover. Episodenroman (Wolfenbüttel: GP German Publishing 2005)
• Unterwegssein ist alles – Tagebuch Berlin-New York (Aachen/Zürich: [SIC] – Literaturverlag 2011)
• Word is Virus – Essays. 100 Jahre WSB (Luzern: Der Kollaboratör 2014)

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