Essay: Movimenti fissi e gioie visibili negli oggetti scultorei di Tyrome Tripoli

by Paul D'Agostino

Tyrome Tripoli nel suo studio a Bushwick, Brooklyn, aprile 2013.

Più interazioni che reazioni, più risultati che sculture, più integrazioni che interventi, più evoluzioni antropologico-naturali che creazioni di per sé fondamentali, più montaggi iper-spaziali che riciclaggi essenziali: gli oggetti scultorei di Tyrome Tripoli sono fatti e manufatti tramite manufatturazioni lasciate andate, diffuse o perdute, in un certo senso, per poi venire rimontate come incatenamenti a metà progettati, a metà casuali, eppure quasi sempre, e quasi interamente, visibilmente smontabili. Dalle piccole alle grandi alle grossissime, le opere di quest’artista sono più sculture di altre ‘sculture’ che materiali meramente scolpite—opere invariabilmente ed indubbiamente singolari benché insiemi di prodotti e rifiuti altrui spesso assai meno unici. L’armonia organica degli esiti è straordinaria per definizione: avesse la Natura stessa giocattoli, sarebbero forse molto simili.

Artista americano che si nutre creativamente ed esteticamente più delle strade del proprio quartiere a Brooklyn che della propria città di New York City in generale, Tripoli rimane sempre ispirato sia dal suo passato come studente di biologia, arte e storia dell’arte, sia dal suo presente come fabbricante di mobili squisitamente unici—letti, tavolini, scale a spirale e così via, fatti per la maggior parte di ferro, acciaio o bronzo. L’artista prende spunto da tali insegnamenti e da tali attività nella sua opera di scultore e, al contempo, se ne libera. I metalli pesanti e grigiastri usati nei suoi mobili vengono sostituiti da oggettoni e oggettini di plastica o di legno, per la maggior parte, e di colori e forme svariatissimi, beccati per strada qua o là o forse dimenticati nell’angolino del garage o dello studio di un amico.

Sculture, sculturine e altri oggetti vari nello studio di Tyrome Tripoli.

Tripoli sceglie colori lucidi e brillanti, pezzi robusti e rotondi, per poi ‘dipingere’ e scolpire con essi senza modificarli, tagliarli o riformarli, e quest’ultimo fatto gli è chiave. I componenti si manifestano nelle sculture così come sono stati trovati, ma gli insiemi che producono, che diventano, sono di sicuro ben diversi: strutture, creature ed architetture improbabili o impossibili che spuntano su dal pavimento o giù dal soffitto—o su dal tetto verso il cielo, come l’opera immancabile che indica e personalizza lo studio-garage dell’artista. Forme riconoscibili come animali o strutture, quindi, ma solo come suggerimenti: ciò che si vede è stranamente familiare—soprattutto quando vi si notano giocattoli posseduti da piccoli—ma anche veramente strano, oggetti curiosi e divertenti che non hanno nome e non ne hanno bisogno. Distillazioni scultoree, ecco, di animazioni—stile anni ‘70 o ‘80, diciamo. Montaggi sintentizzati in una forma sola, in un momento solo, da cartoni animati interi con tutta l’energia, tutto il movimento, tutta la giocosità di tali immaginazioni rimasti in qualche modo viventi e visibili. Il programma così riprogrammato, però, è sempre lo stesso, ed è forse una cosa che tutti scrivono, almeno in testa: un programma immaginato o immaginabile da creazioni potenziali, riorientazioni di cose viste o pigliate—come personaggi, diciamo—strada facendo—come sceneggiature possibili—intorno allo studio o verso casa.

È ben più che possibile, quindi, che la Natura stessa abbia dei giocattoli, e che Tripoli sia fra i suoi fabbricanti. Ciò che tutti e due vorrebbero comunicare, però, è che siamo tutti capaci—in qualche modo, a livelli diversi, anche se solo tramite immaginazioni—di fabbricarli.   

Dondolando pure dal soffitto: sculture finite e pezzi potenziali nello studio di Tripoli.

.                        .                       .

—  Paul D’Agostino, Ph.D., è artista, scrittore, traduttore e professore che vive e lavora a Brooklyn, New York City.

Schizzo: Au delà du rideau

by Paul D'Agostino

Nocturne 6: Les acteurs et le drapeau / The Actors and the Curtain, acrylic and watercolor on paper, mounted to panel, 24″ x 12″, 2012.

.

Au delà du rideau

Juste avant de se masquer
pour rentrer en scène
(toujours poudrés, visage et cheveux;
toujours habillé, costume
classique, traditionelle)
l’acteur se regarda
un instant dans le miroir
en prenant une petite gorgée d’eau:

“Suis-je, moi-même, convaincu?”
il se demanda.
“Peux-je vraiment, moi-même,
m’oublier?”

Un instant après
il sortit, masqué.
Plus là,
lui-même, son lui-même.

Sa mémoire reste cachée
dans le miroir
quand même.

.

Beyond the Curtain

Just before putting on his mask
to take the stage again
(still powdered, his face and hair;
still dressed in classical,
traditional garb)
the actor looked at himself
in the mirror a moment
while taking a sip of water:

“Am I, myself, convinced?”
he asked himself.
“Might I really, myself,
forget myself?”

An instant later
he exited, masked.
No longer there,
he himself, his himself.

His memory still concealed
in the mirror
nonetheless.

.

 

Artwork & texts, P. D’Agostino

______________________

* A number of other paintings from the series Nocturnes, as well as collages, sculptures and drawings from several other bodies of work—the latter also gathered into a book, Floor Translations—are currently featured in Twilit Ensembles, a solo exhibition of my artwork at Pocket Utopia Gallery, located at 191 Henry Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The exhibition is up through 21 April 2013. More information at pocketutopia.com.

 

Gallery visit: Sharon Butler at Pocket Utopia

by A.L. McMichael

Sharon Butler, “Blue Fences,” 2013, Pigment and silica binder, staples on laundered linen tarp, 16 x 18 inches (photo courtesy of the artist and Pocket Utopia)

Last week I snagged an invitation to a small gathering of art appreciators at Pocket Utopia and had a chance to chat with Sharon Butler, whose solo exhibition, “Precisionist Casual,”  will be open there until February 17, 2013. Several people in our group commented on the colors Butler uses throughout the show—deep terracotta pink, muted tangerine and teal, and shades of grey painted onto linen canvases of pumice and beige. Quietly active and sophisticated, the color palette manifests itself in a series of paintings consisting of shapes that are mostly geometric. They demonstrate that the artist is, in fact “drawn to urban settings, structures, and HVAC architecture,”  as promised on the Pocket Utopia website, yet the linework maintains a handmade line quality.

Just before we dispersed, I commented on the shimmery, grey paint that appears throughout the exhibition. Butler responded that it functions like the mineral sparkle we see in sidewalks on a sunny day. It certainly does have that effect in paintings like Blue Fences and Soaked (Hurricane). But for me it was also a reference to the pipes and steel beams that make architecture a three-dimensional creation. It is as if the reflective paint could be a visual shorthand for ‘metal’ and the negative spaces that sculptural and architectural creations surround. This is further emphasized by the relationship of the canvas that is frayed and stapled to the front of the stretcher, which Paul D’Agostino calls a concatenatory teasing of materials and dimensions. Butler’s display is a gentle step away from the two-dimensional paint on canvas, but one that provides an easy mental leap to built spaces. On Sunday I read Tom Micchelli’s interview with Butler in Hyperallergic Weekend; he also comments on the metallic paint and likens her work to sculpture, noting particularly that the colors in Underpainted HVAC are remniscent of a “dusty, rough-hewn limestone slab.”

Sharon Butler, “Soaked (Hurricane),” 2013, Pigment and silica linen tarp, 18 x 24 inches (Photo courtesy of the artist and Pocket Utopia)

The graphite color also conjures up mental images of pencil sketches, of motions creating quick linework, making a gestural statement on flat paper. Some days I can’t stop being a Byzantine scholar, particularly when musing about that link between color and motion. Today, this shimmery paint bridges the gap between contemporary art and medieval mosaics. Art historian Liz James has written about the medieval Byzantines’ use of gold and gems in art—the shimmer activated spaces; reflections of light made the viewer feel as if the space between him and the art was full of energy, drawing him into the image and providing a link to a mystical, heavenly realm.

What’s interesting here is that for both Micchelli and me, Butler’s use of color brought forth connotations of three-dimensionality. That ‘color psychology’ is a nebulous term (and a concept that varies wildly between cultures and individuals) in no way negates the fact that color and emotion are intertwined—we often think of color as an artist’s choice that sets a mood or sends a message. I’d like to emphasize, though, that it’s not just hues but attributes of color—opacity, depth of tone, reflectiveness, (yes, shimmer)—that engage us. Viewing art creates an energy, and the urban quietude of Butler’s canvases harnesses it in a colorful experience that is thought-provoking without resorting to kitschiness or snark.

Essay: Wheatpaste Touchstones

by A.L. McMichael

A wall painting (artist unknown) above Kjosk in Kreuzberg, Berlin.

I spent the summer before last poking around Berlin with Matt, my boyfriend/partner/partner-in-crime. He was researching a novel while I studied for an impending exam in Byzantine art history. Almost everyone around me was bilingual, making me feel half as literate, a humbling and disconcerting notion for a graduate student. I could muddle through street signs and menus but could only converse in English, making my relationship with the people and spaces more visceral—one of hand gestures, written signs, objects.

Images inevitably became my touchstones, the elements of daily life that I remember most vividly. While my budget was too humble for frequenting Museum Island, and the occasional artists’ squat had signs saying, “tourists fuck off,” (thereby inflaming my introverted tendency to feel unwelcome in unfamiliar spaces), there were colors and texts and images sprayed and plastered and painted onto every block, the visual tone of an unfamiliar city. I’ve written elsewhere about the now-defunct Kunsthaus Tacheles and graffiti, so much a part of Berlin, and about the Bode Museum, a haven of medieval art nestled onto Museum Island. But it is the street art that gave me a sense of place in my temporary home. The large murals and wheatpaste images were a sort of bridge between the architecture and people in it. Even from afar, these public images highlight the ways we mediate concepts of both time and space, of public and private, permanent and ephemeral, legal and subversive, beautiful and unsettling.

Kjosk is a bar that serves cans of beer from a parked trailer in an empty lot in Kreuzberg. Soaring above it is (was?) a large mural in progress that served as a favorite landmark. Come to think of it, I have no idea why a dangling, headless beast hanging under, “Love art hate Cops” would have a positive connotation in my memory bank. Perhaps it was the beers sipped on a breezy evening at the plastic table under its towering presence. Maybe studying the monstrous oddities of medieval marginalia have upped my tolerance for the non-beautiful. Either way, there’s an element of mystery in the art. It holds the essence of daring. How’d they get up there? Was it legal? How long will it last? Is it finished?

I suppose we could make some statement about the human connection inherently made by images, or the role of color in mediating a brick-and-mortar architectural environment. While we’re at it, familiarity and recognizability are a form of comfort, of security. Sensibilities aside, the wall is a canvas extending into our three-dimensional reality, integrating itself into the space inside the cafe and projecting the image far beyond the building or the block. The dangling beast is soaring—negotiating visual, psychological, and urban space.

Klone, “Don’t Sleep.” Berlin, 2011.

On my last bike ride in Berlin, I stopped to take a closer look at an image tucked beneath an overpass. Pasted to a pillar was a figure with dark-rimmed eyes, holding a crying paper boat, drifting and dripping in a sea of blue. This was my cue to read up on wheatpaste art and to continue noticing just how much of it papers the urban fabric of my city, of many cities.

Later that summer in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a line art image of a boy emerged from the chipped surface of a stoop.  On that particular day I was terrified by my bike’s malfunctioning gear system and relieved from having just dodged the wrath of Hurricane Irene. At a time of heightened awareness, I was haunted by the wheatpaste figure and his reflection in the nearby glass door. Kneeling yet floating, the boy and his reflection haunted me for weeks until I found his twin pasted near the Gowanus canal.

Swoon, “Emmett.” Fort Greene, Brooklyn, 2011.

I’ve watched the Gowanus wheatpaste boy gradually disintegrate into the fiber of Brooklyn. Snow storms, spray paint, and another hurricane have made it an evolving benchmark. My most recent visit was the day after Hurricane Sandy. Sump pumps were draining basements nearby and the air was heavy and grey. The boy was still kneeling on sidewalk detritus, his torso a ghostly outline palimpsested between layers of paint. The delicacy of something so bold and powerful exposed to the elements is the embodiment of change, of the cycles of time passing in my neighborhood.

Swoon, “Emmett.” Gowanus, Brooklyn. September 2011.

Swoon, “Emmett.” Gowanus, Brooklyn. September 2011.

Swoon, “Emmett.” Gowanus, Brooklyn. September 2011.

Swoon, “Emmett.” Gowanus, Brooklyn. July 2012.

Swoon, “Emmett.” Gowanus, Brooklyn. July 2012.

Swoon, “Emmett.” Gowanus, Brooklyn. November 2012.

The relationship we have with art and our surroundings feels so internal and yet is entirely public. A quick Google image search brought the disconcerting realization that the unobtrusive art I “discovered” on my bike ride in Berlin is by Klone. Naïvely, I was astounded that the street art I loved and considered such a personal discovery is by an internationally known artist with an online store. A stranger’s blog post shows a later incarnation of the Berlin beast, with a head and dangling companions. The Fort Greene and Gowanus wheatpaste boys are by Swoon, who apparently has a studio nearby.*

I was almost embarrassed to find that my quirky visual affinity for street art is commonplace, but its hints of subversiveness pique our collective interest. Street art mediates our sense of place; it documents the changing nature of our surroundings and provides a backdrop for daily life, occasionally asserting itself into the foreground of memories and events.

*n.b. Thanks to Ben Sutton for helping me identify Swoon’s work. If you know who created the Berlin mural, please leave a comment; we’d love to give them credit in the caption.

Schizzo: Diceva sempre che era il suo preferito

by Paul D'Agostino

Diceva sempre che era il suo preferito / She Always Said It Was Her Favorite (detail), oil on panel & secondary panel, 7.75″ x 8.75,” 2012. Private collection.

.                           .                           .

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
(excerpt)

William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)

.                           .

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now forever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.

.

Artwork, P. D’Agostino

.

Diceva sempre che era il suo preferito / She Always Said It Was Her Favorite, oil on panel & secondary panel, 7.75″ x 8.75,” 2012. Private collection.

Schizzo: Futuro anteriore IX

by Paul D'Agostino

Future anteriore IX, mixed media drawing & collage on mylar & paper, 2012.

.                           .                           .

Futuro anteriore IX

Si sarà sì
spesso detto
di quella sera
che certe presenze
vagavano per la chiesa.

.                         .

Future Perfect IX

Of that evening
it will have so often been said
that certain presences
were adrift
in the church.

.

Artwork & text, P. D’Agostino

 

Extra curricular: A Happy Hour Ode to Troubled Unions, Currency Exits, Financial Crises and European Cups

by Paul D'Agostino

*                   *                   *

Transatlantic grousing and gripes are established traditions much like transatlantic admiration and esteem, and cross-border regards for other nations and their variable othernesses within Europe herself can be much the same. At times it’s convenient to embrace one another, in other words, while at times briery priggery rules the day. This is nothing remotely novel, to be sure.

And to be sure all the more, a great many particularly prickly situations and events might bring such vicissitudes to the fore. Political and economic matters, per force, matter quite deeply to one and all, and they can stir things up for the better or the worse.

Those are hardly the lone tumbler stirrers, of course. Football tournaments are wont to rupture or renew ever-shifting sorts of alliances as well.

And so, in the throes of great and potentially grave, so it goes, economic woes, and with the fervor of the European Cup now upon us, why don’t we just drink to all of the above?

We’ve done so before, we’ll do so again.

For at the end of the day, we’re really all great friends.

Right?

Okay, that could be debated.

Forever.

Thus for the now and the meantime at once, I offer the following freshly minted verses to give voice to a toast. They’re accompanied by drawings by Adam Thompson to further embellish the post.

Enjoy, grazie.

*                   *                   *

*                   *                   *

A Happy Hour Ode to Troubled Unions, Currency Exits,
Financial Crises and European Cups

(So That We Might Enjoy Summer
From the Start, Together or Apart)

Loads of trenching, border-rimmed
loves and loathings long
clothed under folds and
draperies and moldings
of thin lies tether-tied:
Our so-called West.

Long we’ve thunk,
long we’ve all well known it.

So at times we’ve fared,
at times we’ve drunk to it.

And to our books and
our paintings,
our cuisines,
our histories.

And so on the so forth,
our so-called Goods.

Whether now’s woes we get over
in times distant or near,
tonight they’re just news
and numbers:

Cheers!

*                   *                   *

Editorial note: Sometimes presumably simple questions are the most elusive to address. A deeply storied and likely eternal example of such a question is the following: What is art?

Writings on After Vasari bearing the ‘Extra curricular’ heading are attempts to explore this query in various ways, to probe the ever-nebulous boundaries of ‘art’ in hopes of grasping, however fleetingly, why it is that some endeavors and objects merit such a name.

Schizzo: L’Isola di Fortuna / Fortune’s Island

by Paul D'Agostino

L’Isola di Fortuna / Fortuna’s Island, 1-4.
Serialized set of polytype monoprints with cross-diminishing palette.
Oil on card stock, 2012. Click on one for slideshow of all.

.                           .                           .

.                         .

.

According to a tradition going back to
the Romance of the Rose (Jean de Meung, 1280),
Fortune lives in a half-crumbling palace set on a rocky island,
which is now assaulted by waves, now left high and dry,
and it is constantly changing shape.

.                         .

.

Extracted from The Mill and the Cross,
Michael Francis Gibson

.

Artwork, P. D’Agostino

Extra curricular: science

by A.L. McMichael

Editors’ note: Sometimes presumably simple questions are the most elusive to address. A deeply storied and likely eternal example of such a question is the following:
What is art?

Writings on After Vasari bearing the new heading, “extra curricular” are attempts to explore this query in various ways, to probe the ever-nebulous boundaries of ‘art’ in hopes of grasping, however fleetingly, why it is that some endeavors and objects merit such a name.

**************

In The Brodmann Areas ballet from Norte Maar, dancers interact with video projection and sound by After Vasari’s own Paul D’Agostino.
PHOTO: Norte Maar.

Science and art are, at times, uneasy bedfellows—one explores the concrete and measurable while the other incorporates our entire realm of possibility and fantasy. This was not always the case, of course. In Renaissance Florence painters were incorporated into the guild of physicians and pharmacists, emphasizing their skills in mixing and measuring pigments. Leonardo da Vinci became the essence of a ‘Renaissance man’ with his plans for a helicopter and anatomical sketches created alongside his painted masterpieces. His anatomical drawings, on exhibition at Buckingham Palace, were produced with near-photographic accuracy, capturing the nuances of how a spine supports the body and how the heart pumps blood.

Dancers are often at the forefront of exploring the human body and its movements as a nexus of art and science. The Brodmann Areas, a recent collaborative ballet at Norte Maar, was named for a map exploring the cerebral cortex. Choreographer Julia Gleich introduced the final performance by sharing with the audience, “the dances are experiments.” And in that phrase, she summed up aspects of scientific experimentation that are driven by human creativity.

Each piece danced was a meditation on kinesis and memory. In a section called “Motivi esteriori e cosi via,” a film of collaged images was projected behind the dance floor. Each figure on the stage danced a response, emphasizing the temporal nature of fleeting images and the physical presence of the studio wall. As the images disappeared or changed, the movement continued, incorporating our memories of the images as an additional medium in the work.

In a segment titled “Folium: a wrinkles on the surface of the cerebellum,” Jace Coronado danced a solo with a small ladder strapped to his back. His jubilant leaps were a manifestation of pure human achievement. The accompanying clack of castanets in Antonio Martin y Coll’s music referenced the flapping ladder. Stepping away from clinical references to the brain, the piece offered instead metaphors for subtlety, subconscious connections, repeated thoughts. The ballet was an ever-changing incorporation of dance, visual stimulation, music, and vocals that speak to the myriad connections and collaborations in the activity of the human brain.

Harnessing neuroscience is also a way to decipher creative impulses. An Xiao of Hyperallergic has recently pondered the scientific impetus for art, exploring “what’s going on in artists’ brains” while they create. Jeremy Dean has pointed out that embodied metaphors such as “jog one’s memory,” can be put to literal use: movement, gesture, and even posture are connected to problem solving.

But what about the inherent element of science that is creativity? Experiments, even when tightly controlled are the result of intellectual curiosity, of innovative problem solving. My response is to contemplate and challenge my own notions of medium and materials in the construction of art. Leonardo’s painstaking draughtsmanship was a vehicle for both scientific observation and visual expression; perhaps it offers the most tangible example of the human body as a loca sancta of both science and of art.

Schizzo: See Idem, Ibidem, et alii

by Paul D'Agostino

Futuro anteriore VII: Colpevoli saranno stati tutti e nessuno affatto / Future Perfect VII: Guilty Will Have Been Everyone and No One At All. Mixed-media collage with ink and acrylic mediums on gessoed paper, 2012. Private collection.

.

See Idem, Ibidem, et alii

Herewith I observe
Paul Virilio observing
Franz Kafka’s version
of matters related
to what Jean Rostand called
‘foolishness’ made ‘noisier,’¹
and Ray Bradbury,
‘the bombardment of images.’²

Thus the thusly prefaced
observation:

“‘The masses are rushing, running,
charging through the age. They think
they are advancing, but they are simply
running on the spot and falling into the
void, that is all,’ observed Kafka.”³

Analogously circular, the pits of
citation.*

______________________

1. Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner, London, Verso, 2005. Cit. p. 38.
2. Ibidem.
3. Idem.
*  See notes 3, 2, 1.

.

Artwork & text, P. D’Agostino

______________________

Nota bene: Feeling that the above verses were already lexico-textually indulgent enough for one post, I had opted not to include an additional note about the intriguing—at least in my mind—coincidence that led me to write them. But then a message I received from my cohort here, A.L. McMichael, led me to reconsider that decision.

Thusly did the coincidence play out:

The first lines of Chapter 5 of Virilio’s above-cited The Information Bomb are as follows: “‘The war years do not seem like real years…. They were a nightmare in which reality stopped,’ wrote Agatha Christie not so very long ago.”

Indeed, Virilio opens the chapter with a quote, an at least mildly chilling one at that. What’s more, he does so with a quote from an author whose works I do not often find cited, then proceeds in subsequent pages to cite authors whose works I know much better and find cited with at least relative frequency. That in itself is neither coincidental nor noteworthy, to be sure; that is, that Virilio’s citational opening and further paraphrasing and quoting might have been the impetus for me to compose a few inherently disposable verses—ouroborically self-consuming in their tautologized knot, those verses exist ever-stuck in the act of self-disposing—about, essentially, quotes, follows a logic that is linear enough.

The deeper layer in all this that made my encounter with Virilio’s citation of Agatha Christie so momentous—again, at least in my mind—was that it occurred almost precisely 24 hours after a previous, and quite similarly unexpected, encounter with the works of the same author. For two mornings ago (on the morning of 23 March 2012, that is), while reading the current issue of The Atlantic (April 2012) and arriving at a series of five rather brief book reviews (pp. 94-95), I found it notable that two of the brief reviews were of recently reissued editions of books first published decades ago, and both by the same writer, Agatha Christie. That doubled-up reminder of the author might have been enough to keep her name fresh in my mind, but what made me take more mental note was that I’d thought, after reading both reviews, how much I’d like to read both of the books mentioned therein. Admittedly, and perhaps inexcusably, I’ve never felt eager, or at least not irresistibly compelled, to delve into Christie’s oeuvre proper. These volumes, however, fall outside of it to some extent and seem promisingly full of different sorts of mysteries and surprises. For instance, one review notes that in Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, one finds a wealth of details related to how she derived plots and characters—yet absolutely no mention of what is considered her “famous 11-day disappearance in 1926″; the other review appraises very favorably Come, Tell Me How You Live: An Archaeological Memoir, in which Christie recounts experiences from her yearly trips to Syria in the 1930s with her husband, Sir Max Mallowan, who traveled there regularly for archaeological digs, all of which conjures a romantically placid, genteel aura of a nation that is currently in the tumult of self-destructive—though perhaps eventually self-renewing, unlikely though it still seems—violence.

I clearly dug into those reviews enough to plan to perhaps eventually dig into those books as well, so my brain was prepared to react synaptically when I encountered her name again 24 hours later in quite a different source—and sitting in precisely the same chair at the kitchen counter, no less, and with that issue of The Atlantic still right there as well. Also of note, of course, is the precise source of Virilio’s quote: the first edition of Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, which was initially published in 1977.

That happens to be the same year a certain yours truly was also issued (to the variable detriment of others).

All the same, as stated above, I had considered including something about all this in the post, only to then decide not to bother. It’s not all that coincidental, I figured, and it would perhaps be of little interest to anyone else. Furthermore, I note these types of lexical coincidences far too often to describe them every time, though each instance compels me to somehow do so.

But then I sent A.L. a brief note last night telling her I’d prepared a new Schizzo for the blog, and asking her to have a look at it before I posted it today. I mentioned nothing regarding the Agatha Christie encounters detailed above.

She replied at some late hour last night, but I only saw it early this afternoon. Therein she said the following: “That’s the second Ray Bradbury reference I’ve seen in two days. Is this a sign that I should be reading Fahrenheit 451 or not writing on lined paper or something?”

‘Perhaps,’ I thought, but I replied differently. “Funny you should bring up multiple encounters with an unlikely author. That’s exactly how I ended up writing that piece, though Bradbury wasn’t the unlikely one. It was, instead, someone quite different. I thought about adding an indulgent note at the end describing it, but then I thought it wasn’t necessary. Now I know it’s in fact necessary, so I’ll add that before posting.”

Necessary, at any rate, to round things off. To be thorough. To bring things, in a manner quite different from that implied in the verses above—or maybe not so different at all, depending on how any of this is eventually read—full circle. Additionally, A.L’s reference to that particular work by Bradbury also conjures imagery related to my collage featured above.

If nothing else, and if only to conclude, this ancillary recounting of coincidences and the like dovetails nicely with something Christie writes in her Mesopotamian memoirs regarding why she made such an effort to compose them. She did so (as quoted, of course in The Atlantic) “to remember that there were such days and such places.”

And such delight to be had in reading and writing.

In recounting and recalling.

In citing, repeating.

Ibidem, ‘as above.’

Idem, ‘the same.’

Nota bene.

— P.D.