Gus Blaisdell Collected

Editor’s Preface

∙ xix ∙ editor’s Preface William PeterSon ■ Who is Gus Blaisdell anyway? In his “Envoi” at the end of this book, Ira Jaffe reports seeing that question scrawled on the men’s room door at an Albuquerque art-house movie theater in 1972. Ira had only just come to the University of New Mexico to start a new teaching post in film, but Gus Blaisdell was already a challenging and mysterious presence on the local cultural scene, a source of wonder and provocation. Gus was a dark star emitting an obscurely powerful influence from the gravitational field of his bookstore, the Living Batch. If you had any creative or critical inclinations, any curiosity about literature, philosophy , politics, or culture in general, or even if you just sought the sort of New Age esoterica that Gus grudgingly shelved under“Gnarled Wisdom,”it was impossible to escape the Batch’s orbital pull. Its eclectic and au courant stock, the authors’ readings and their vital satellite conversation, and the myriad small-press publishing efforts that Gus promoted were irresistible attractions. But it was his intellect and talent, his wild humor and forceful personality that made Gus legendary. These had been evident almost from the moment of his arrival in New Mexico in 1964, when he first began to shake up the literary enclaves that convened in those days at Okie Joe’s Bar on Central Avenue and at the Thunderbird, the preferred watering hole of Robert Creeley and the poets of nearby Placitas. Besides his Stanfordtrained background in philosophy and literature, Gus was also remarkably well connected, spinning a constantly expanding galaxy of friendships and associations among the literary and artistic lights on both coasts and beyond, a cosmopolitanism that locals saw as truly cosmic. xx ∙ editor’s preface Poet, fiction writer, essayist, he was a philosopher and critic with a keen and versatile mind. But he was not easy to categorize. Raconteur and inspiring teacher, book purveyor and publisher, these were only some of the ways he made his way in the world, his few concessions to a standard curriculum vita. Gus was unique. Indeed he was—as even mathematicians and astrophysicists, modern descendants of the ancient night-watching diviners, might term it—a singularity. Ira Jaffe, taking his term from the movies, says that Gus was a star and that, while Gus knew untold numbers of people, he is worthy of greater renown. Who is Gus Blaisdell? He is also “the late” too soon. He died suddenly of heart failure in September 2003, just four days before his sixty-eighth birthday. And so, as the singularity described by calculus and astronomy is elusive and said to hover critically somewhere between existence and nonexistence, known only by a kind of surrounding rumor, it is the purpose of this book to collect the evidence of Gus Blaisdell’s singular nature and perhaps secure for him a firmer place in the firmament of letters. Introductory essays by philosopher Stanley Cavell and literary critic David Morris join Ira Jaffe’s poignant memoir to provide perspectives on the man by friends who knew him well. Glimpses of Gus’s vivid personality can be had from the many photographs gathered here by his daughter, Nicole Blaisdell Ivey, and her diligently researched and lovingly compiled chronology tracks the course of his life. For a capsule portrait, however, it would be hard to improve on one by poet and publisher (and one-time Living Batch employee), J. B. Bryan, in the Festschrift chapbook he prepared for Gus’s memorial celebration in 2005: Gus lived as a man of discerning mind & precise locution, as well as blurted expletive. The oppositional was his blessing & curse. Sharp, jagged, uncannily quick-witted, he sought how to see, how to know, how to lay it down. Outrageous, often enraged, he liked the scat in scatological, he could insult, he could adore, a mimic ribald & hilarious , elegant steel-trap crankiness, photographic memory backed by a deep catalogue of reference wielded with fierce conviction. Within this shone profound appreciation for beauty (film, Monk, Matisse, Utamaro, photography, poetry, prose, mathematics, found objects, etc., etc.) & its precise articulation. His writings have hard-fought style with a content that requires slow, deliberate reading. Language editor’s preface ∙ xxi & lingo, philosophy & logic argued toward revelation inside his own difficult critique. This book collects a broad sampling of Gus Blaisdell’s writings. It consists mainly of critical and philosophical essays from the 1970s and...