Gus Blaisdell Collected

Introduction: On “Slipping Across”: Reading, Friendship, Otherness

∙ 1 ∙ introduction on “Slipping Across”: Reading, Friendship, otherness DaviD B. morriS ■ Camerado! This is no book; Who touches this, touches a man; (Is it night? Are we here alone?) It is I you hold, and who holds you; I spring from the pages into your arms—decease calls me forth. —walt whitman,“So Long!”1 There are worse fates for a writer than finding your book, ink still fresh from yesterday’s megastore signing event, in the remainder bin. That’s where Gus found me. As owner of an independent bookstore where he selected and very often read the books he sold, he knew that megastores order by corporate logarithm and sell in bulk, so their remainder bins are a treasure trove for books destined to fail the test of mass sales. I like to think my good fortune lay in having built a final chapter around ideas of everydayness , borrowed from philosopher Stanley Cavell. Over our lunches, I learned that Gus talked weekly or daily by phone with the eminent Harvard thinker, who shared his passions for film, music, and complex mental explorations , minus the bombast. Luckily, I hadn’t built my chapter around the obscure academic theorists whom Gus hated for their amped-up profundities and treated to colorful obscene denunciation. An unknown caller asks if I’m the guy who wrote the book in the remainder bin. Swallowing my pride, I offer a noncommittal yes, and the caller says we should meet for lunch. So begins a deep friendship of contraries. When 2 ∙ introduction I last saw him, Gus was teaching a film course he called “Teen Rebels.” Was it veiled indelicate autobiography? On his fingers, between the knuckle and first joint, I could just make out the faded tattoo letters l-o-v-e and h-a-t-e, one letter per finger, one word per hand. Unlike the commercial barbwire designs on biceps at my local gym, these ancient high school tattoos —self-inscribed with a sharp instrument and ballpoint pen—stood out both as verbal artifacts and as silent provocation: fists as texts, which hand do you want? With Gus you pretty much knew where you stood.Also, bodies mattered. I never got to tell him that the poet’s one-long/two-short dactylic rhythm takes its name from the Greek word for finger (dactyl), as fingers contain three bones—one long and two short. Gus liked a poetry of bodies. He was a connoisseur of bodies. He savored their local properties and earthy flavors like a devotee of fine wine. In paintings, on the big screen, in the classroom, bodies with their erotic charge fascinated him, and he could fall in love instantly with a crooked smile or well-filled denims. William Blake belonged in Gus’s personal pantheon, and it seems fitting that certain bedrock Blaisdell values would find expression in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell through the voice of the devil: “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul—for that called Body is a portion of the Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.” Zen Buddhism offers another corrective to what Blake’s devil describes as the errors caused by all bibles and sacred codes. In this spirit, I suppose , Gus put me onto the fifteenth-century Japanese Zen master Ikkyūwho wrote raunchy haikus about his sexual affair at age seventy-seven with a young blind temple attendant: don’t hesitate to get laid that’s wisdom sitting around chanting what crap2 We both loved the eros-inflected, anti-Cubist nudes of Amedeo Modigliani that Gus, in a poem, accurately described as women with “apricot thighs” and“offset twats.”The two dense, primal inscriptions on his hands—nouns? verbs? imperatives?—weren’t exactly pre-concrete, one-word, living poems carved into the flesh, fading as the flesh aged; but they sure weren’t decorations , and their position “in” the body (not on top of it) is serious stuff. introduction ∙ 3 I also regret that I never got to ask him about Marlon Brando’s starmaking turn in The Wild One (1953). Brando, as leader of the pack, is perhaps too post-adolescent to make the teen rebel course, although teens idolized him. I saw Gus, however, less as Brando than as Brando’s whackedout rival gang leader, played by Lee Marvin. In contrast to Brando’s leathered...