The founder of Futurism, F.T. Marinetti, had an awful lot to say about internal combustion engines, speed, technology--in short, he wrote a lot about the same sort of stuff that many of us like to read and write about, i.e., fast cars; the feel of blasting along an empty road in a convertiable; fishtailing around a corner just to feel that awful/lovely fear and adrenaline in one's belly.

Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux recently published a new edition of Marinetti's writings, and more than a few entries seemed ripe for inclusion in a blog devoted to motoring. Here's a sampling--fasten your seat belts.

From THE FUTURIST MANIFESTO (1909):

"We believe that this wonderful world has been further enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed. A racing car, its bonnet decked out with exhaust pipes like serpents with galvanic breath...a roaring motorcar, which seems to race on like machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace."

His extraordinary vision of man and motor car as one being:

"We have therefore to prepare for the imminent, inevitable identification of man with his motorcar, so as to facilitate and perfect an unending exchange of intuitions, rhythms, instincts, and metallic discipline, absolutely unknown to the majority and only guessed at by the brightest spirits."

His prescription for making Venice (of all places) more attractive, according to Futurist precepts--as well as a few weirdly personal, comical swipes at the marvelous, decaying old city itself:

"Your Grand Canal, when widened and deepend, must inevitably become a great commercial port. Once your canals have finally been filled in, trains and trams will be hurtling along the great streets built over them, bringing stacks of merchandise to a discerning public, which is rich, and busily employed by industrialists and businessmen! There's no use howling against the presumed ugliness of the locomotives, trams, motorcars, and bicycles, which for us represent the opening lines of our great Futurist aesthetic. They're always good for flattening a few filthy, grotesque, Nordic professors, sporting their little Tyrolean hats. But you love to fawn on foreigners, and your servility is despicable!"

Finally, the clear, poetic enunciation of his view that speed, in the end, is what it's all about:

"Let us imitate the train and the motorcar, which compel everything that exists along the way to move at the same speed in the opposite direction, and arouse in everything that exists along the way s spirit of contradiction, that is, of life. The speed of the train decrees that the landscape it crosses be divided into two landscapes that rotate in the opposite direction from its own. Every train carries away with it the nostalgic spirit of anyone who watches it passing by. Things that are some distance away--trees, woods, hills, mountains--look fearfully at this rushing forward of things that are flung in the opposite direction to the train. Then they decide to tag along with them, but despondently, and more slowly. Every body moving at speed rocks from side to side and tends to become a pendulum.

"Race along race along race along fly fly. Danger danger danger danger to right and to left below and above inside and out scent breathe drink in death... To enjoy more coolness and more life than in rivers and seas, you have to fly in the ice-cold slipstream at full speed."