THE DREAMING MACHINE N.2 IS OUT! – writings and visual arts from around the world

On May Day 2018

The Dreaming Machine N. 2 has made its way out in the world; intense

labor pains yielded an exciting second issue and a number of new features

and collaborations. Way at the top of the home page in the desktop version (for

smartphones they will be sub-items) you’ll see the results of the labor of love of

our webmaster Micaela Contoli who has found a way of providing Tables of

Contents that should facilitate navigating the 43 pieces present in this issue of

the journal. There is also a TOC for the first issue. In the header, the category

THE DREAMING MACHINE also takes you to all the articles of each issue.

We are also learning to make more effective use of photo galleries and you’ll see

Giorgio Di Maio beautiful shots of Oppido Lucano revealing their Hidden

Harmony and Micaela Contoli’s study of the Adriatic Sea, as well as galleries of

paintings and art work accompanying the poetry of some of the poets. Many of

the featured images in this issue are courtesy of painters Giacomo Cuttone and

Barbara Gabriella Renzi (Lule), and many of the shots are from the Kolkata area,

courtesy of Aritra Sanyal.

We are merely six months old today, but we are starting to make very inspiring

links with other writers, artists and initiatives including The Creative Process

Project, the AfroWomen Poetry website, Ximena Soza’s Underneath the Soles

traveling exhibit on dislocation, Wuyi Jacobs and the AfroBeat radio interviews

project on racism and xenophobia in Italy. We are starting collaborations with a

number of writers and journals in Kolkata, thanks to Aritra Sanyal. We are

receiving translation exercises from readers, like Joel Gerst’s new translation of

Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Siren. Helen Wickes and Don Stang are continuing

their tireless endeavors to introduce the English speaking world to the work of

Julio Monteiro Martins and Pasqualino Bongiovanni.

It would take volumes to talk about all and each of the valuable and stimulating

articles we have received, so we’ll use this newsletter, the Facebook page and our

Twitter account to share groupings of them, our Archipelagos of Dreams, over

the next period of time until the next issue. To subscribe to the newsletter, please use form available on the Homepage

The Dreaming Machine, Pina Piccolo and Micaela Contoli

To view the Table of Contents of issue n. 2

To view the Table of Contents of issue n. 1

Kind of a “mission statement” from issue N. 1

Pina Piccolo in collaboration with lamacchinasognante.com and Micaela Contoli (web designer at Openmultimedia) announce the launch of www.thedreamingmachine.com, a writing and visual arts project, taking a transnational, multi genre, intersectional approach.

To disambiguate the title “The Dreaming Machine”, we can say it is inspired by “La Macchina Sognante” the name of a posthumous book by the late Brazilian and Italian author Julio Monteiro Martins, whose work we introduce in this issue. In expanding upon Cocteau’s notion that a great literary masterpiece is only a dictionary in disorder, Julio Monteiro Martins remarked that in the “explosive” internal economy of great works of literature there is a shift and a poetic enhancement of each word, which is illuminated in a different way than usual inside the dreaming machine which is a great work of literature.

As the very survival of humanity, at this time requires a great deal of illumination and dreams at any longitude and latitude of the planet, as writers and visual artists we feel the need for such a machine. Instead of delegating this task to a single literary masterpiece, we hope to make a dent by creating an online space which, by placing side by side a mosaic of innovative, border crossing writings from all over the world, may contribute to the shifts and poetic illuminations required.

The images that accompany each post are meant to help activate the dreamy location of the senses by dissonance, harmony, irony, the sublime, the grotesque, all meant to push along that shift in paradigm we so much need.

We have experienced some of the potential of this approach in our two year experiment with lamacchinasognante,com, the Italian language online container of writings from the world, which is, so to say, ‘the mothership’ of this new adventure. We hope that this new project can expand the pool of contributors and audiences.

At the risk of being accused of crass pragmatism, for the moment, let us say that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so click on www.thedreamingmachine.com and buon appetito!