Anodyne
Thursday, November 09, 2006
 

Untitled (Repent), 2006. For John Latta, the Ann Arbor-based poet and critic recently turned digital photographer.

Some years ago, I attended a Don DeLillo reading in Seattle, then waited patiently in line with a well-loved hardcover copy of Mao II for a signature and some simulacrum of "conversation." Conscious of the massive crowd queued behind me (sharpie book dealers bearing mint stacks of Underworld; grad students; Kennedy assassination theorists; the insane) I struggled to reduce what I wanted to convey to DDL to telegram syntax. What finally emerged was, "Thanks for your book. It made me look really closely at Warhol's work, and see it in a new way." And it had; it had made me look past Warhol the showman and media star to the laconic and intensely thoughtful artist who made the Tunafish Disasters, and the Race Riots, and Mao II, too.

DeLillo scrutinized me; he looked suspicious. Had I just fucked up? Apparently not; he just wanted me to know that, in his experience, gratitude and original thinking didn't often go together. "But I'm glad," he said, signing my book on the title page, "that my novel had that effect on you. Warhol certainly did on me."

So: a chain of deferred associations, each thing creating a thing not quite like itself, but something like it. Vancouver lacks Ann Arbor's strong even light and richly decorated walls, but I hope the juxtaposition of words and colors is enough to suggest some correspondences between the two.
- posted by cjb @ 11:30 PM


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