'After finishing Mina Loy’s Insel, one has the impression of clasping a thing of material beauty – a slim volume composed of densely packed prose and rich, earthy imagery – even as before the eyes this solid, textual object shape-shifts, dissolves into one vaporous idea which quickly transforms itself into a contradictory yet no less sublime vision. And suddenly one notices that this “will-o’-the-wisp” world, inhabited just moments ago, has slipped completely through the fingers. Only another read could allow for its retrieval, though it would, more than likely, be an entirely new world that was discovered.
'Such is the enigma of Loy’s work. To call this novel a surrealist satire of surrealism is just one example of the paradox Loy presented readers eager to classify and interpret Insel. As Elizabeth Arnold points out in her extremely elucidative afterword, Loy was a modern artist who rejected adherence to any one modernist movement, absorbing influences from the Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists, while also holding herself at a critical distance and fiercely guarding her own artistic independence. Thus Arnold quite astutely shows how in Insel Loy deftly manipulates elements of the surreal in order to subvert the surrealist manifesto, taking particular aim at its inherent misogyny which dismissed the work of serious female artists like Loy herself.
'Insel recounts the existence of the wraith-like artist Insel from the perspective of his patron, Mrs. Jones, closely mirroring Loy’s own relationship with Surrealist painter Richard Oelze. Despite Insel’s abhorrent appearance and dissolute behavior, his is a sympathetic character who, in Loy’s mystical hands, attains a certain supernatural power – what in the text is referred to as his Strahlen, or, loosely translated, his radiance. The narrative spools into Gordian knots – language so impenetrable yet glittering with the lyricism of Loy the poet – to express Insel’s inexpressible force:
'Either he had a peculiar power of projecting his visualizations or some leak in his psyche enabled you to tap the half-formulated concepts that drifted through his mind: glaucous shades dissolved and deepened into the unreal tides of an ocean without waves. Where in the bottom of slumber an immobile oncome of elementals formed of a submarine snow, and some aflicker, like drowned diamonds blew out their rudimentary bellies – almost protruded foetal arms over all an aimless baton of inaudible orchestra – a colorless water-plant growing the stumpy battlements of a castle in a game of chess waved in and out of perceptibility its vaguely phallic reminder --.
'This power with which Loy invests Insel serves as societal critique by elevating the marginalized, a common thread in Loy’s writings. Insel, the outcast bohemian, transcends the world that has rejected him.
'Nevertheless, it is Mrs. Jones who ultimately prevails, slipping from Insel’s mystical hold through her own act of creation. Insel, then, comes to stand for the “surrealist man,” as suggested by the fragmentary ending of what was Loy’s unfinished manuscript, layering the story of a single artist’s decadence with powerful reflections upon gender, race, modernity and artistic creation. Through the character of Insel, Loy interrogates the surrealist project, and, quite possibly, its role in the unfolding of twentieth-century history, by locating the artist at the intersection of sublime, disembodied truth and the coarse realities of a day-to-day existence.
'But beyond these existential questions, this is a book for those who adore language. Loy’s highly esoteric vocabulary mines linguistic possibility, uncovering words like the rarest of gems and placing them in settings of baroque syntax, where they overwhelm with brilliance. Yet these sentences are handled so deftly, with the poet’s ear for rhythm and sound, that the weighty diction becomes paradoxically weightless, washing over the reader in musical waves. Clearly Insel is the work of a writer at the height of her powers, wielding her art as a tool both to delight and to provoke.
'This provocation is most apparent in the themes Loy chooses to address. Poverty, gender, race, drug use – all were controversial when the book was written, yet her handling of these themes remains shocking to this day, in large part due to the cryptic manner in which the narrative addresses them. One particular scene shows a brawl erupting between Insel and two “negresses”. The prose in this passage, as in almost all the book, leaves the reader disoriented, but here it is particularly unsettling because the portrayal is decidedly offensive, if not downright racist. Nevertheless, it is likely the narrative adopts this tone with the express purpose to appall, to expose the social hierarchy which endowed even Insel, a repulsive bum, with the power of the white male’s privilege. The bold, contrasting black and white imagery which surrounds the characters, Loy’s comparison of the two prostitutes to a kind of dark wood being eaten away by Insel’s “microscopic function of a termite”, and the narrator’s later choice to side with the women when Insel complains to her about them: All point to Loy’s curious rhetorical technique of attacking pre-existing power structures with a feint at the very groups exploited by the status quo. Those who live on the shadowy fringe are therefore thrust into stark relief, forcing her readers to confront the uncomfortable truth of their plight. As Rachel Potter and Suzanne Hobson argue in their introduction to The Salt Companion to Mina Loy, “She has a genius for leading her readers down a particular road only to switch directions at the last moment”.
'Above all, Insel is a self-referential novel by an artist ever aware of the vagaries of artistic creation. It is a book within a book, featuring a narrator frustrated by the limitations of language even as she spins sentences of pure gossamer – all while laboring on her own novel beyond the novel. And hovering over this many-layered world is the poet’s hand, manipulating the countless threads of her masterpiece like a puppet master demanding to be seen and heard. Compelling us take in the work of her dexterous fingers without missing a single detail on her stage. It is a tall order for a reader, but the attempt is infinitely rewarding.'-- Amanda Sarasien
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Further
Mina Loy Online
'The Sacred Prostitute', by Mina Loy
'Mina Loy’s ‘Colossus’ and the Myth of Arthur Cravan'
Mina Loy @ The Academy of American Poets
'Mina Loy's Life'
'Mina Loy: The Forgotten Modernist'
'Feminist Manifesto', by Mina Loy
'The Mina Loy Mysteries: Legend and Language'
Mina Loy @ goodreads
'The Unsung Work of Mina Loy'
Audio: Mina Loy @ PennSound
'Bringing Back Mina Loy'
'Eugenicist Mistress & Ethnic Mother: Mina Loy and Futurism'
'The Early Poetry of Mina Loy'
'MINA LOY: NAVIGATING THE AVANT-GARDE'
'Body Matters: Mina Loy and the Art of Intuition'
'Exceptionalism of Mina Loy and the gender politics of canon formation'
Book: 'Stories and Essays of Mina Loy' (Dalkey Archive)
'LETTER FROM ARTHUR CRAVAN TO MINA LOY'
'Not an Apology: Mina Loy's Geniuses'
'The Best-Kept Secret in Twentieth-Century Poetry'
'Mina Loy and the Electric Body'
'Fashion Victims: Mina Loy's Travesties'
'Mina Loy’s Sentimental Satire'
Buy 'Insel'
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Extras
Digging Mina Loy
Charles Bernstein -- Mina Loy Aphorisms on Futurism
Feminist Manifesto, Mina Loy
Mina Loy Futurist manifesto
"An Old Woman," by Mina Loy
There is no Life or Death, by Mina Loy
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Artworks
'When Mina Loy arrived in New York at the end of October 1916, her name was already well known in Manhattan’s most radical art and literary circles. The writings of this beautiful and brilliant English poet had been praised by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and had appeared in the leading American avant-garde magazines. Shortly after her arrival in America, she was profiled in The New York Evening Sun as the exemplary “modern woman.” Indeed, if you wanted to know the latest trend, the Sun reporter boasted, just ask Mina Loy. “She can tell what futurism is and where it came from.”
'While pursuing her literary activities, Loy worked with equal intensity as a visual artist. From childhood, she drew with confidence and, as a teenager, she escaped the confines of her parent’s Victorian home in London to partake of bohemian life, first at an art school in Munich, and then later, in Paris, as a fixture of Gertrude Stein’s and Mable Dodge’s salons. In Paris she married the English painter Steven Haweis and, at the age of 24, was elected a member of the Salon d’Automne, where her work received its first critical notice. Her Florentine years (1907-1916) were marked by an intense infatuation and falling out with the Futurists, particularly F.T. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini (with whom she had tempestuous affairs). In Florence she also met the American writer Carl Van Vechten, who took an active interest in her work. He purchased at least one of her paintings, sent her drawings to galleries and her poems to magazines, thereby encouraging her to live by writing and art-making—which she struggled to do for the rest of her life.'-- Francis M. Naumann
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Interview
with Mina Loy's biographer
Jacket2: What prompted you to write her biography? Did you want to redress the neglect of her work, or were you more interested in telling the tale of her extremely complicated life?
Carolyn Burke: Some of each. It didn't occur to me to write a biography at first. I was going to look at her poetry as a painter's poetry, because I've always been interested in exchanges between artists and writers. When I returned to the U.S. in 1978 it dawned on me that I knew more about her than almost anyone, because the sheer digging around had unearthed quite a lot.
Where did you dig?
I began by looking up all the remaining expatriates and Surrealists in Paris. It was fortunate that I was on the spot and knew some of them. After that I had to find her two daughters and start digging in the U.S., England, Munich, and Italy.
She was at first a painter. From what I can gather, it seems she began to write poetry when inspired by the wild energy of the Futurists in Italy. Could you talk about her context in the decade leading up to and including the First World War -- her association with the avant-garde, the Salon d'Automne and the Futurists?
It was a crucial period in her life and one that took years to unearth. Although the Salon d'Automne was held in Paris, there were only the slightest references to her showing there and to the art school she attended in the 1900s. I tried to find the records for both places but they didn't exist any more -- so I had to go about it in a devious fashion. I was able to get the titles of all the paintings that she'd shown, because the catalogues still exist, but I had to research the rest through the memoirs of people who lived in Montparnasse at the time.
Mina was not a daring painter in those days. She was an accomplished Post-Impressionist who did quite well for an English woman of 23 in that she was elected to the Salon d'Automne. This meant that you were a life member and could show your work without going through the selection process. But she was not as bold a painter as she would become a poet. Which is not surprising; she always said that she went into a sort of backwater, a genteel backwater, when she and her husband left Paris and moved to Florence in 1907. That cut short her career as a Post-Impressionist.
She had a child die.
Yes. Which was probably the reason for the marriage -- she was pregnant. After the death of their daughter, she may have had a nervous breakdown. There's not much information about that but she did enter treatment with a young doctor at the time -- whose widow I was able to find in Paris.
People didn't move so much there, so you could track them down -- those who were still alive. I also met two wonderful women in their nineties: Gabrielle Picabia and Juliette Roche-Gleizes, who was a painter. They had known her in New York. They had wonderful things to tell me -- both about the New York Dada days and about the earlier days in Paris. That was invaluable.
So the Haweises moved to Italy in 1907 for economic reasons?
Also because of the disarray between them -- yes. They went to try to salvage things between them as well as live on her little income.
And this is where she encountered the extraordinary Futurists and had affairs with Papini and Marinetti. She found some intellectual excitement with the Futurists that had been lacking for her previously . . .
When she moved to Florence she had a period of doldrums, because she lived for about the next five years among these very genteel English and American expatriates, the most eminent of whom would be Bernard Berenson, and people like Gordon Craig and Mabel Dodge Luhan -- a wealthy American who became her best friend. These people were leading a fin-de-siècle life, as if the nineteenth century had not yet come to a close. They were given to costume parties and renaissance festivities -- unlike Mina, they were able to play out their fantasies in a grand way. Nonetheless, it was an aesthetic backwater as far as she was concerned.
In the meantime, she had two more children, a girl and a boy, and she was leading a life that did not stimulate her much -- a round of social events, tea-drinking, gossip about people's affairs. It was meeting Gertrude Stein, whose friend she became and whose manuscripts she read, and then Marinetti and his gang, that woke her from this period of lassitude.
Also Mabel Dodge played a role in that she was very much given to intellectual pursuits. She and Mina read Freud, Bergson, some of the Eastern philosophers -- they were immersed in what was called the New Thought -- so you put all that together and it was a climate ripe for something new to happen. But I think the direct influence of Stein and Marinetti was what impelled her into poetry.
Marinetti was aware of her first as a person rather than as an artist and much later Ezra Pound knew her work -- both those men had terrible beliefs about women's lack of ability to make art. Do you think that her encounter with Marinetti (whose philosophy she later rejected completely) was a reason for her early feminism?
Yes, in part.
She was so much ahead of her time in that regard.
She wrote her Feminist Manifesto in a kind of intellectual dialogue with Marinetti -- in response to some of the debates within Futurism on the issue of the Futurist woman. And in response to his disdain for "ordinary" women. He told her that she was an exception, but she refused the role of the exceptional woman, for which I've always admired her. She wrote in response to this situation. Indeed, she showed her paintings in the first international Futurist art exhibition in 1914, but also told Marinetti that she felt too much solidarity with her own sex to agree with his ideas. She was very thoughtful on that subject -- at the same time, she always credited Marinetti with waking her up. He had a beneficial effect on her. He was one of those people who had an invigorating effect on others. So, like his Futurist movement, he was kind of a mixed bag. But since Mina was a person who reacted to what others did, it was actually good for her to have to respond to Marinetti's misogyny -- in her wonderful poems on the "sex war" as she called it and her satires of Italian males like Marinetti.
In 1914 she told Carl Van Vechten: "I have a fundamental masculine conceit that ascribes lack of appreciation of my work to lack of perspicacity in the observer." Do you think she was being ironic or do you think she was actually that confident -- or is that perhaps something that women do?
Ah, that's a difficult one. She could be very ironic. Her correspondence with Van Vechten has this teasing account of her mixed nature described in the terms of the time as partly masculine and partly feminine. Sometimes she was quite serious about that, because she had such a good brain, and she tended to identify logic with something more masculine. So she was probably being both. When one's in doubt about the tone of a poem, she's usually doing several things -- so I would say in answer to that question, she's probably doing some of each.
There was also the period of her friendship with Natalie Barney, Djuna Barnes and the other expatriate writers in Paris -- but during this time she published or perhaps even wrote very little . . . is this the case?
Well, as she said, she was so busy running the lampshade business that it took all her time. But I also feel that after her first book of poems was published in 1923, and then segments of her long autobiographical poem Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose came out in the next two years, that she had temporarily run out of material; she had come to a standstill. She began writing about Cravan during that time, as far as I can tell. When she started writing again it was prose rather than poetry, but she didn't get the necessary leisure or the peace of mind until she sold the shop. By the early thirties she was immersed in what she called her novel -- which was really many versions of a highly autobiographical account of her upbringing.
However, she was present at those salons. They must have been extraordinary . . .
Yes. I was fortunate in that I was able to interview Berthe Cleyrergue, Natalie Barney's "gouvernante" -- the woman who looked after everything, in Barney's house. I also talked a bit with Djuna Barnes about those days and drew on her Ladies Almanack -- an extraordinary roman à clef about that salon. I've reconstructed Barney's Académie des Femmes as Mina participated in it, and hope that I've gotten a bit of the teasing tone that went on there, as well as the sexual high jinks. It was quite an atmosphere. Mina Loy read there -- a few of her poems. And she was probably the only heterosexual member -- an interesting position, which she was teased about.
Mina returned to New York in the late thirties. Did she begin to frequent the Bowery then?
No, she didn't really get to the Bowery until the late forties. She had lived in New York in the middle of World War I, and always said that it was the only city where she had been happy. So she returned to the U.S. just before the outbreak of World War II because her daughters had settled in New York and were terribly worried about their mother in Paris as Hitler was taking over. She had a very low period for about the next ten years -- from '37 to '47. She no longer felt at home -- so much time had passed -- she had in her head memories of the 1910s, the Dada group, and the Arensberg circle, and these people had scattered. She no longer felt adequate to the social and artistic scene. She did write a bit, but it wasn't until she moved close to the Bowery, after her daughters both went to Aspen, Colorado, that she came out of this ten-year slump.
She met the artist Joseph Cornell, and although she had literary supporters in Kenneth Rexroth and, later, Jonathan Williams, she seemed to be ignored by her American contemporaries -- which is astounding after her European experience.
Several things had happened. One was that her work had gone out of fashion by the thirties -- the emphasis was on poetry with social content. High Modernism had begun to seem old-fashioned by then -- it was a time when her kind of writing was not what people were interested in. And then she was out of print -- the usual fate or thing that keeps people from reading you. And, in any case, when New Criticism came in after World War II, people in the U.S. turned to T. S. Eliot as the model Modernist. He favored Marianne Moore to such an extent that Mina Loy was somehow eclipsed. There had been since the 1910s a peculiar kind of comparison between the two women poets -- not anything of their making but rather the creation of Eliot, Pound, and William Carlos Williams -- as if to say, "These are the two best women poets -- which is better?" Eliot chose Moore -- so it's an unfortunate yet familiar and harmful structuring within the poetry world of Loy's reputation as minor in relation to Moore's.
That seems to happen all the time. Do you think that operated on a social level rather than a level of poetics -- a sort of social vying?
Well, some of each. Marianne Moore continued to publish whereas Mina Loy did not -- that makes a big difference. And Moore was in her own modest way rather good at creating her public persona -- by the late forties and early fifties she was seen as a sort of American eccentric.
Yes -- the hat.
Yes, and she liked baseball. She loved the Dodgers. So she did certain things that kept her being read and having a certain name-recognition, whereas Mina Loy didn't do any of that and was riddled by such self-doubt that she could barely manage to get dressed to go to social events, or would turn around and go home because she felt she was no longer the great beauty that she had been in earlier days. There was a certain amount of self-subversion as well as these changes in literary fashion, and the fact that if there was going to be one Modernist woman poet from that generation it was to be Moore, not Loy. Had she kept on writing and publishing it might have been quite different.
So it was about ten years later that Jonathan Williams published Lunar Baedeker & Time-Tables (1958).
Yes, partly because of Kenneth Rexroth's encouragement and recommendation. Rexroth had a great deal to do with the rediscovery of Mina Loy. He helped me a lot, especially at the early stages.
And when Lunar Baedeker & Time-Tables came out it was almost totally ignored -- met with a grand silence. What do you think about that?
It may have been a bit soon, it may not have been well-distributed -- it certainly wasn't well-reviewed; there was exactly one review. She had not yet been rediscovered by the readers who would find so much in her ten to twenty years later. She was read by a small coterie of poets including people like Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Paul Blackburn -- people associated with the Black Mountain school read her. But these people were themselves on the fringes of the poetry world in the U.S. at that time, so having enthusiastic comments by them didn't necessarily get you a large readership. Then being published by a small press -- Jargon Press -- probably meant that there were distribution difficulties. Mina Loy remained a poet's poet until the seventies, when she was rediscovered within the context of feminist readings.
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Book
Melville House
'Insel, the only novel by the surrealist master Mina Loy, is a book like no other—about an impossible friendship amid the glamorous artistic bohemia of 1930s Paris.
'German painter Insel is a perpetual sponger and outsider—prone to writing elegant notes with messages like “Am starving to death except for a miracle—three o’clock Tuesday afternoon will be the end”—but somehow writer and art dealer Mrs. Jones likes him.
'Together, they sit in cafés, hatch grand plans, and share their artistic aspirations and disappointments. And they become friends. But as they grow ever closer, Mrs. Jones begins to realize just how powerful Insel’s hold over her is.
'Unpublished during Loy’s lifetime, Insel—which is loosely based on her friendship with the painter Richard Oelze—is a supremely surrealist, deliberately excessive creation: baroque in style, yet full of deft comedy and sympathy. Now, with an alternate ending only recently unearthed in the Loy archives, Insel is finally back in print, and Loy’s extraordinary achievement can be appreciated by a new generation of readers.'-- Melville House
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Excerpt
“Fleisch ohne knocken,” Insel especially hollow-voiced begged me when I took him to dine. This insistence on boneless pieces of meat was habitual with him.
“Do I look any fatter?” he inquired after he had eaten, as if consulting his doctor.
I thought it best to reply in the affirmative. As a matter of fact the disquieting thing about Insel was that however much food you sunk in him it no more seemed to amalgamate with him than would a concrete mass with a gaseous compound.
From now on Insel turned up regularly as soon as my fitting by the dressmaker was over.
Whenever I let him in he would halt on the threshold drawing the whole of his luminous life up into his smile. It radiated round his face and formed a halo hovering above the rod of his rigid body. He looked like a lamppost alight. Perhaps in that moment before the door opened he recreated himself out of a nothingness into which he must relapse when being alone his magnetism had no one to contact.
“I’ve brought ‘it,’ ” his illusive grin seemed to be announcing, as if his visible person were a mannequin he operated on occasion. “Make what you can of it — you may wonder if I am sure of its nature myself—let us not be too precise as to what I am.”
I led him down the corridor, feeling that he, so recently non-existent, was all-surprised at finding himself to be anything at all.
He shut the door, an act I have heard an authoress describe as so banal it is unfit for publication. But shutting the door, like all automatism we take for granted, is stupendous in its implications.
As the ancients built temples as isolators for the power of the Almighty, which their ritual focused on the altar, a force so dynamic that officiating priests, having evoked it, were constrained to descend the altar steps backwards without ceasing to face it; for the limitless capacity of the eyes could absorb such power, whereas if the blind back were turned upon it they would receive a shock that flung them to the ground.
So the shutting of doors is a concentration of our radiations in rectangular containers, to economize the essences of our being we dispense to those with whom we communicate.
Thus, when Insel shut the door infinitesimal currents ran out of him into the atmosphere as if he were growing a soft invisible fur that, when reciprocal conditions were sufficiently suave, grew longer and longer as the hair of the dead, it is maintained, will leisurely fill a coffin until it seemed with its measured infiltration even to interfere with Time. The mesmeric rhythm of a film slowed down conducted the tempo of thought and sentience in response to his half-petrified tepidity, for he moved within an outer circle of partial decease—a ring of death surrounding him — that reminded one of those magically animated corpses described by William Seabrook. Even before he came into one’s presence, one received a draughty intimation of his frosty approach. He chilled the air, flattened the hour, faded color.
But if one could crash through this necrophilous aura, its consistency dissolved, one came to an inner circle where serial things floated in a semi-existent aquarium. Or, at times he, himself, would overflood it, as now when his coming close to me affected acclimatization, turning an irreal ice into a tenuous warmth.
“I was so terribly afraid I should miss you. I got to bed at seven this morning— (quite exceptional,” he added hurriedly as if wishing to efface a bad impression, “I shall not do it again), and when I woke up my watch said twenty past six. I was convinced you would be gone, but—is it not astounding — a moment later it said half past four.”
To these teeny nothings that marked out his life (as momentous events are the milestones of others) he imparted an interest peculiarly visual. You saw the watch in hallucinatory transformation, its dial advancing the gray diamonds of his eyes out of a murk more mysterious than darkness instead of correcting the eyes’ mistake. He possessed some mental conjury enabling him to infuse an actual detail with the magical contrariness surrealism merely portrays. Perhaps it was the operation of this weird power that necessitated his speaking with such drilling intensity.
He had brought me a present — As he bowed his head over what he held in his hands, all the sweet-stuffs of the earth exuded from his nerves, in an exquisite music of a silence that is alive. He seemed to be sodden with some ineffable satisfaction, as if emerged drenched from some luxuriance requiring little tangible for its consummation. I had to hold myself in check. My charmed curiosity wanted to cry, “From what enchanted bed of love have you so lately arisen? What astral Venus has just receded from your embrace?”
It was a queer impulse, the idea of making such delicious inquiry of this bald and toothless man whose clothes were stiff with years of wear, yet deodorized by continuous exposure to the all-night air.
His voice, gone dim with a crushed emotion as he held out to me a black passe-partout, was saying, “I want to give you my own drawing; the only one I refuse to sell.” The drawing in the passe-partout, like his atmosphere that clung to him as ours clings to the earth, seemed almost astir with that somnolent arrested motion revealing his nature.
It was so white, the flocking skies of a strangely disturbing purity drifted above vortices of snow-like mist in travail of taking shape, coiling the mind into following the spiral, eventual materialization of blindly virginal elementals.
“This,” he continued, “is the first drawing of a new series— all my future work will be based on it. I intend my technique to become more and more minute, until, the grain becoming entirely invisible, it will look like a photograph. Then, when my monsters do evolve, they will create the illusion that they really exist; that they have been photographed.”
The while the drift of his words swept me together with the frozen drawing along a current of quiet reverence, expressing gratitude. As under his conjurative power of projecting images, I felt myself grow to the ruby proportions of a colossal beef steak.
I argued for some time over the idiocy of presents in the very jaws of economic death; proposed sending it to New York to be sold for him; but at length when he inquired sadly, “It doesn’t please you? I will give you another,” I promised to keep it.
*
p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. And that's only maybe half or even less of them. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Yeah, incomprehensible. It's strange: the impulse of people on the outside trying to say something that will make it okay, but I guess that's natural. I'm really glad you had the kind of time you needed with your writer friend. I guess it's all about just wanting someone to be there. Really be there, not trying to turn the moment into something else. The epitome of collaboration without art's distraction, I guess. A long time ago, when I was a teenager, my great, late friend and muse George Miles would get severely depressed sometimes, so depressed that he couldn't get out of bed and could barely talk. When he got like that, his mother would call me and ask if I would come over and be with him. So I would go over and just sit on a chair in his room for hours and hours. Sometimes we would exchange a few words, but mostly he just lay there staring at the ceiling. I thought it would be wrong to read or do anything, so I would just look around his room or watch him or daydream. Then, at a certain point, he would say, 'It's okay, you can go now', and I would leave. It never felt like my being there made any difference at all, but his mother told me it helped a lot, and when George was feeling okay, he said it really helped. So I guess there's an extreme example? My day was okay, pretty quiet and work-related. The meeting with our producer got delayed until next Monday. A bit frustrating just because we're anxious to make progress on the project, but it's okay. I hope your day gives you some solace and even rewards! Did it? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I don't know that Tacita Dean piece. Cool, thanks a bunch. I'm going to investigate it. Your Farage piece looks really good. I like how, in the pieces you can see in the photo, the artists all seem to be walking a fine, intermediate, and interestingly complicatedly slanted line. ** Steevee, Hi. No, I haven't eaten at a one of those. I think I've eaten at two revolving restaurants, both now defunct. One on the top of a hotel just north of Hollywood Blvd. near Highland Avenue, and once at the old Encounter restaurant at LAX. Ha ha, nice way to put it re: your friend's thing. Interesting that he feels he has to make a big, public point about his stick-in-the-mud tastes. That makes it more ugh but more intriguing too. Me, it's not like I make an effort to stay interested in new music. I just never stopped being like that, and I don't really understand why people draw a line at a certain point, and I wonder why that line is drawn where it is. I guess a lot of people mostly use music as emotional food or something and aren't actually interested in the form? I don't know. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff! Thanks a lot! Yeah, cool, I thought that post had really good combination of being really strict and formal while being a container of a particular kind of dreaminess that was dumb but instructive or something. I thought it was like this interesting, charismatic toy. Anyway, I'm really happy you tried it out and got something in return. Thank you very much about 'I Quit'! There is something different happening in it, yes. I think, or I hope at least, that what that newness is will more present and available in the novel that 'IQ' is a piece of, but we'll see. Yay, about finishing your Kiddiepunk project! That's very exciting! Michael's away in Italy for the month, as you probably know, but I'm definitely going to pump him about it as soon as he gets back. And it's really nice that we share a publisher now too! No, I didn't know Jenny Erpenbeck. I just did a quick google search on her, and her work sounds sounds very interesting. I'm going to investigate her and her work further today. Thanks a lot for that, Jeff. Have you read her? ** Okay. Do you know Mina Loy? She's mostly known as either a poet or as the writer of a couple of fantastic manifestos on futurism and feminism. Anyway, she wrote one novel that was only published after her death, and it's an exciting novel. I'm spotlighting it today. See if it's of interest. See you tomorrow.
