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In Memoriam

“There is a life here”

“There is a life here”

On Bernadette Mayer (1945–2022)

I had arrived at the all too probably named Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute past its ostensible heyday. Founded in 1974 by Waldman and her “spiritual husband” Allen Ginsberg, the school had the reputation of a mountain retreat for the Beat Poets, and their friends in the New York School, and their friends in the Black Mountain school, and their friends in the New Narrative school.

Our Godard

Our Godard

On Jean-Luc Godard (1930 – 2022)

Godard always seemed to be asking What is a movie? What can it do? knowing that he would never find a satisfying answer, forever in pursuit of what was still beyond the grasp of his own prodigious powers.

On Hans Magnus Enzensberger

On Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Why should one not have readers? Was there any merit in being difficult or obscure?

He designed a fridge-magnet poem-kit (which, I believe, has now had a software program based on it). He wrote a skeptical book about Europe in 1987, before Europe was really a subject (Ach Europa! was the wonderful title of the original; Europe Europe in English). He wrote a children’s book, an opera libretto about a runaway Cuban slave, a world-best-selling math book (The Number Devil), a partial memoir (Tumult).

Mike Davis’s Specificities

Mike Davis’s Specificities

Repetitious and reductive appeals to the universal never satisfied him

The US working class was forged, for Davis, through its compounded historical defeat, which gave it a distinctive contradictory, battered, and lumpy form that could not be evened out through appeals to abstraction. Most importantly, the cycle of defeat and accommodation had separated the official labor movement from the Black working class, which he saw as the only possible “cutting edge” for socialist politics.

Miyake’s Layers

Miyake’s Layers

Contemporary fashion often seems to be in mourning for itself

Yesterday’s Pleats are in tomorrow’s seafood (microplastics, it seems, tend to proliferate in mollusks like scallops, mussels and oysters, fancy girl food and treif alike). Of all the myriad toxicities of microplastics, I was most tickled to learn that they are estrogenic and lower sperm count; the red-pilled among us might argue that the Pleats themselves made me trans.