In memoriam: Jack Collom (1931–2017)

the ogre said to his daughter:
sixteen miles from this place
is a tree
round the tree are tigers
and bears, and scorpions
and snakes
on the top of three
is a very great fat snake
on his head
is a little cage
in the cage is a bird
and my soul is in that bird
——Jack Collom, from Exchanges of Earth and Sky (2006)

Solstice. This taxing, time-dilated Common Era Year 2017 is finally ticking down to its end, and I doubt many of us will be looking back fondly on it.

This year I lost two people who were important to me. The first was Hannah, who I've already talked about. Three months later, she's still completely unaccounted for. I'm not ready to say anything else about her yet.

The second was Jack Collom—teacher, poet, naturalist—who passed on this last July the second. I've mentioned him before. Until this month I had no idea he died. It didn't come as a shock: he was already an old man wearing a nasal cannula and wheeling a tank of oxygen around with him when I met him in Boulder, Colorado, in the summer of 2008. Occasionally while leafing through his work in the years since, I'd think to google him and make sure he was still among the living. This time the answer was finally 'no.'

Fernand Léger: some words and pictures

August 19 [1955]——This journal records too many deaths. Now it is Léger's. He was the greatest artist of our time. He will not only live, he will father an art.

—John Berger, A Painter of Our Time (1958)

For several months now I've been in the employ of an art museum, though my job is really only enviable for its setting (if anything). Not long ago the gift shop was cleaning out its storage space and came across a trove of Fernand Léger postcards left over from a 2013 special exhibition. Many of the cards feature artworks that were on loan from other museums and private collectors, and even if there were willing buyers for 1000+ of these things, the expiration of the temporary reproduction rights makes selling them somewhat dicey from a legal standpoint. So the only thing to do was toss them out. I intervened to rescue a batch from the dumpster, so I'm pretty much set for my epistolary life. Some of them I'm going to tape to my walls. When you're wealthy, you acquire original artworks to display in your home and impress your guests. When you're poor, you grab postcards of artworks to stick up in your bedroom to suit yourself.

Léger has become one of my favorite painters. I was introduced to him pretty much accidentally three years ago, when I was reproducing William Carlos Williams' The Descent of Winter and searching for visual art I understood as 'modernist' to align with Williams' diary entries/poems/miniature essays. That was how I first came to know Léger and his 1919 opus La Ville (The City). A lake of curatorial ink could be spilled (and has been spilled) in the exegesis of this painting, but the work needs nobody to speak for it. The composition, its title, and its date tell the whole story, and all the rest is critical salary work. La Ville is a dream or hallucination of the modern metropolis, looming and labyrinthine, blazing with electric lights, thrumming with motor traffic, and checkered with vivid pictoral adverts. The city as a dense human settlement has existed since at least 4500 BC, but it was only in the first decades of the twentieth century that the city as we recognize it emerged onto the world. This new composite organism of humanity and machinery so captivated Léger that he made it the singular focus of his oeuvre during the years between World War I and the Great Depression, the moment of his artistic prime.

Amy, Her City

No news from St Thomas. Still in a freeze here. But:

I recently had a new short story appear in the virtual pages of The Matador Review. It's called "Amy, Her City" and is about cities and stalkers and dreams. I have to thank Ms. Grassi (whom I first met indirectly when my story "How You Sleep at Night" appeared in issue #20 of The Puritan alongside her "Air Show"), who not only helped me revise the piece, but actually catalyzed it by humoring me when I texted her some months ago to ask her to toss a writing prompt my way. As it happens, the finished story doesn't much resemble the two-sentence zygote from which it mitosed—but as the analogy implies, that's just natural.

Anyway, you can read the story here. I think you'll like it.

Not so much a hiatus. More of a suspension.

It's not what you think. Not entirely.

Here. Read this.

So. Anyone (not sure if there's anyone, but you know) who's been following for the last few years might remember me occasionally mentioning someone named Hannah, moving to the Virgin Islands, breaking up in the Virgin Islands, reconciling a bit later on, and so forth.

There are only two dots to connect here. Get it?

I'm not going to pretend that everything is just business as usual.

Maudlin though it may be, one of the reasons I've kept this blog going is because she never stopped reading. Not the only reason. But if there's an audience for whom I've been writing in the last four, five years, it's her. You—you, who checks this thing from time to time—I know you're out there, and this one I'm writing for you. But: these last few days, whenever I've sat down to complete a fragmentary and long unfinished post about the misapplication of Moore's Law in casual talks about technology, and how specious it is to invoke "increases" in tech as factors of social change without specifying what is increasing, I feel as though I'm just talking to the wall in an empty room. 

This is not business as usual.

I'm stepping back until she's found, with a prayer that she's found alive.

EDIT: Finally actually read the Newsweek piece from start to finish.

When Upp was missing in 2008, police reports said she spent a lot of time in places like Riverside Drive, which overlooks the Hudson River, according to The New York Times. After she was found, she said her attraction to the area made sense——an answer that may also shed light on why she found her way to Sapphire Beach almost 10 years later.

My advice to Newsweek staffer Josh Saul is to refrain from speculating about people he doesn't know, especially when he's reporting a story without actually visiting the site. Also to fuck off.

Progress report

Not that I have any illusions about how many people are actually reading this blog and clamoring for updates, but this is my excuse for the last few weeks' inactivity. Been workin' on something. Hoping I'll arrive at point where I can logically pause, step back for a little while, and work on some other stuff a bit before diving back in.

stray thoughts: the rhyming spiral of history (pt 2)

Ary Scheffer & Charpentier, Portrait of John Calvin Meditating

Elsewhere in The Western Intellectual Tradition from Leonardo to Hegel (1962), authors Bronowksi and Mazlish relate the brutal methods of theocratic dictator John Calvin in settling a dispute with Michael Servetus:

Calvin enforced his regimen with great vigor and, frequently, with outright ferocity. One of his "citizens" was beheaded for writing a set of what Calvin called obscene verses. A card player was pilloried, and an adulterer whipped through the streets and then banished.

Among these, the persecution of Servetus was the gravest incident of Calvin's rule in Geneva. Servetus, who was a doctor and scientist living in France, wrote a book attacking the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. Thereupon, he and Calvin became engaged, by letter, in a violent theological polemic. Calvin's anger mounted to the point where, himself a heretic from the Catholic Church, he secretly accused Servetus of heresy to the Catholic Inquisition in France. Servetus was forced to flee; and, as bad luck would have it, his escape route took him through Geneva. Although his book had been neither written nor printed at Geneva, Calvin had Servetus seized and burned at the stake.

I'm not saying that John Calvin invented or even prefigured the au courant practice of "swatting," but you've got to admit that going through back channels to anonymously rat out a despised ideological adversary to the Inquisition is similar in spirit, if not substance, to sending a SWAT team to someone's door on a bogus report of a hostage situation because they offended your sacrosanct beliefs regarding ethics in gaming journalism (or whatever).

stray thoughts: the rhyming spiral of history (pt 1)

Walter Raleigh (artist unknown) and Donald Trump (via Vasco Gargalo).
Note the politicians' shared affinity for ruffs.

 
Given all the signs and wonders promulgated daily in the sci&tech news, it can be tempting to believe the hype, to conclude that our present epoch isn't merely brighter, more diffuse, and faster than earlier ages, but that it signals a social mutation no less explosive than the genesis of agriculture. Maybe so. But as long as one can turn to the literature of earlier ages and still relate to it, and find consonance between accounts of historical moments and today's current events narratives, one must admit that all our extracutaneous prosthetics haven't entirely reinvented humanity and its social institutions (not yet?), but rejiggered them, accelerated them. This isn't to say that our age isn't unexceptional, but it's often difficult to tell where the quantitative changes end and the qualitative transformations begin.

Case in point: I've been reading Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish's The Western Intellectual Tradition from Leonardo to Hegel (1962)—I grabbed a used copy ten years ago from a "take these or we're throwing them out" table at my alma mater and finally dug it up and cracked it open—and am routinely writing "cf. virilio" or "we use twitter for that now" in the margins. For example, the chapter on the Elizabethan Age contains a few paragraphs about Walter Raleigh:

[Raleigh's] progress at court was made simpler by the fact that he was a handsome man. He was also helped by his intellectual accomplishments. For example, he read not only the learned tongues but French and Spanish fluently; and none of this was lost on Elizabeth, who was also proficient in languages (it is said that she knew five or six fluently, and read Machiavelli in the original).