Ah yes. Squatting here and there with that dinky harmonium and the Wm. Blake songs, excruciatingly sung.

Don't know the film, but had to laugh at "weird european horniness everywhere."

Thanks, Laura. Some years back I used to listen to WWOZ here at work. And then fell out of the habit somewhere along the way.

And: a lovely bit of late afternoon sudden-unstoppable-dance-impetus choreography to (new-to-me) Tennessee Jim’s “Hold Me Tight” (1957).

Thanks, Rachel. Unclogged and back in Ann Arbor. Cancelled flight yesterday. My growling at Delta (along with impersonating a feeble old guy) got us a hotel in said rather decrepit-looking Flush City and we flew out at 6 a.m.

Shame!

We weren’t making limited edition objets d’art for the collectors, but books to read, “for use.” Marty Cain @martycain.bsky.social writes about Ithaca House in a chapter (I haven’t seen) in Making Places: Rural Infrastructure, Media, and D.I.Y Poetic Community, coming out of Clemson UP.

That’s a terrific quote. I know all the finicky woes and teeth-gnashing mistakes (and the delights) of letterpress work from my years at Ithaca House. We did full-length books—typesetting, printing, collating, binding, trimming—all by hand, because it was the only economically feasible way to go.

Thinking how antithetical was The Alternative Press’s letterpress approach: printing poetry objects (postcards, bookmarks, bumper stickers) made largely for use. Doing the work, for a period, out of a former general store in the wonderfully-named Grindstone City, up at the tip of Michigan’s Thumb.

In the wonderful collection of historical essays about various explorers (and visionaries and cranks), A Long Desire (1979), Evan S. Connell writes about Ibn Battuta. Also Prester John.

Thank you, Mary!

Members of the poetry gang I ran with in my salad days used to recite various “Degrees of Gray” lines to one another with a semi-sardonic weariness and angst well beyond our years: “Say your life broke down.”

Proofing high.

Recall finding c. 1980, in the genial semi-chaos of Shakespeare and Company, in Paris, a hardcover copy of The Double Dream of Spring—for a song—and making the mistake of bringing it to proprietor George Whitman himself for purchase. Who barked “Ashbery first edition” and went off with it upstairs.