from Sound * Image * Text
Anselm Berrigan’s Pregrets (2021) saved my late winter, nuclear pandemic mind from Twitter rut (rot). It’s the realist abstraction ground heart feeling of this weird time I’ve seen. It’s hard to find the right words. It’s a perfect book for a time of grets.
Resist the program. Thinking this morning of David Levi Strauss’s reading of Vilém Flusser in the compact and beautifully written Photography and Belief (2020). I took this photo in a forlorn corner of a bbq joint in my East-side neighborhood in Toronto. In the background there is ongoing war noise. But that noise I don’t think has been absent in my lifetime. The noise increases and decreases according to a manufacturing of consent.
With my dad, Dorsey, New Year’s Eve, near midnight. We watched the okayish Rooster Cogburn (1975) with John Wayne and Katherine Hepburn. He said he wished he could understand my book, Flying Red Horse (Talon 2021). Maybe it’s a wish not to understand, or feel, its meaning. Nevertheless there’s a lot of (complicated) feeling in this man.
“The nucleus of one’s own self is the incorporated other” (Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body [1966]). There’s so much in Brown’s book that cuts to the chase. My late winter source for restoration. Amidst all kinds of disappointments and menacing environments, I’m reminded that boundaries are largely self-imposed. There’s a messy, unavoidable porousness. “The super-ego is your father in you; your father interjected; your father swallowed.” Okay.
Lost Dance. “Last chance.” I’ve been editing a book of essays on the work of Norma Cole since spring 2020. I was grateful to find her new Bird & Beckett chaplet in the mail the other day. “Words people energy / somewhere in there / that that punctuation.” Form, time, word, passion. This work breaks into element, a syntax music that is thinking and feeling our condition here, this now. Love and gratitude for this new work.
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