Blast was as much a MANIFESTO as a short lived magazine, with only two publications in 1914 and 1915, to sustain the creative and political energies of the Vorticist movement based in Britain.
The first edition was published with a bright pink cover, and referred to by Ezra Pound as the; "great MAGENTA cover'd opusculus"; and the second a year later on 15 July 1915. Both editions were written primarily by Wyndham Lewis.
BLESS the vast planetary abstraction of the OCEAN
BLESS ALL PORTS . . .
. . . and lighthouses blazing through the frosty starlight cutting the storm like a cake . . .
BLESS the great PORTS
Including HULL and LIVERPOOL
. . . and the celebration of SHIPS, SEAFARERS, THE ARABS OF THE ATLANTIC, clear liquid space, overlaps with experience of modernity and of globalisation before the term was used.
The Douglas DC-3 is a fixed-wing propeller-driven airliner that revolutionized air transport in the 1930s and 1940s. Its lasting effect on the airline industry and World War II makes it one of the most significant transport aircraft ever produced.
McLuhan then says:
"But the English language is already the base of all technology."
BLESS COUNTER BLAST
Published in 1969, COUNTERBLAST by Marshall McLuhan is introduced by the author in an acknowledgement of the inspiration provided by Wyndham Lewis' BLAST. Incidentally, McLuhan was responsible for some of Wyndham Lewis' various academic employments in Canada during WWII.
In 1914, a few weeks before the war, there appeared from the Rebel Art Center in London, BLAST. Wyndham Lewis, the painter, was the perpetrator of this blast. The word is a jest derived from blastoderm, a term from embryology. Lewis also had reference to the GERM, the Art magazine put out by the Rossetti Circle. BLAST, typographically, is unique in the history of English literature. Lewis told me that he had found it impossible to get it set up by any London printer whatever. He finally found an alcoholic ex-printer who agreed to set it up exactly as Lewis required in return for large supplies of liquor. Nearly the entire magazine is set up in heavy headline type. Headlines are icons, not literature.McLuhan comments on the continuing difficulty in the late 1960's to set up prose or verse in headline type. He ends his introduction with an explanation of the title of this work.
The term COUNTERBLAST does not imply any attempt to erode or explode BLAST. Rather indicates the need for a counter-environment as a means of perceiving the dominant one. Today we live invested with an electric information environment that is quite imperceptible to us as water is to a fish. At the beginning of his work, Pavlov found that the conditioning of his dogs depended on a previous conditioning. He placed one environment within another one. Such is COUNTERBLAST.
Back in 1914 BLAST took a swipe at French SENTIMENTAL GALLIC GUSH and PARISIAN PAROCHIALISM on this double page spread.
While McLuhan in COUNTERBLAST reflected upon the European intellectual's vast capacity for taking themselves too seriously and sentimentally, Wyndham Lewis poked fun at French APERITIFS.
