Author Archives: Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

HIS HEAVINESS on THE cover

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THE magazine Best Books of 2012

Photograph by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

Read THE magazine Dec-Jan 2012-13 online!

 

 

It has been said that Gus Blaisdell—writer, philosopher, critic, and educator at the University of New Mexico—was a force of nature. His critical essays addressed photography, film, painting, and philosophy, among many other subjects. Blaisdell delighted in his friendships with celebrated figures in the arts and humanities, which included photographer Lewis Baltz, philosopher Stanley Cavell, writer Evan Connell, poet Robert Creeley, and art critic Max Kozloff. Blaisdell lived a life surrounded by books—he was a passionate reader, as well as being an editor, publisher, and a bookstore owner. Gus Blaisdell Collected (University of New Mexico Press, $40) is a sampling of his writings, selected and edited by William Peterson who writes “Gus’s writing revolved around the quest for knowledge of the self and the search for understanding our human placement in the world.” Of particular interest in this volume are his takes on Joel-Peter Witkin, Frank Stella, Lewis Baltz, and Allan Graham. About Blaisdell, critic Dave Hickey wrote, “Gus was the absolute, undeniable, real thing. One of the few.” This long-overdue book contains introductory essays by philosopher Stanley Cavell, literary critic David Morris, and an editor’s preface by Peterson, all of which gives the reader insight into the workings of the mind of this legendary figure.

Guy Cross editor, publisher THE magazine

*Photograph by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

 

Living Batch, an Illuminating Piece of History of What Was, from Patricia Nelson

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I came to the Batch in the mid eighties. I had been managing the UNM Bookstore’s general book department for a number of years and shared many book conversations with Gus [Blaisdell]. Gus invited me to join the Batch as buyer and manager together with Jeff Bryan. I joined Sigrun, Larry, Geary Hobson, Seth Fiedler, Eileen Jackson. The store deeply felt the loss of Carl Christensen. The recent move around the corner from Central to Cornell had been jarring, and perhaps my arrival was also a jolt.

The storefront at 106 Cornell SE was a narrow space but it reached quite surprisingly far back. Over a few years, we cleared out moribund used book inventory, a new clerestory brought in more daylight, a floor plan evolved in a zig-zag down the center guiding the browser – like a pin-ball machine – all the way to the back.  Some particularly dilapidated couches…

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DISCUSSING GUS Dec. 5th 4pm UNM bookstore

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gus scarf

         Please join editors William Peterson and Nicole Blaisdell Ivey for a discussion and book signing of GUS BLAISDELL COLLECTED Wednesday 12/5  at 4pm

I KNOW A MAN

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In 2002, a year before his death, Gus wrote the bio below to accompany his poems included in  IN COMPANY: an anthology of New Mexico Poets after 1960

                                                                                      photo by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

Gus Blaisdell for twenty-seven years ran an “alternative to an absence,” the Living Batch Bookstore, always close to the Frontier Restaurant. He continues to teach film at the University of New Mexico. He runs a small press, Living Batch Books , that continues to present his alternative to absences. A special line of his books is called Drive, He Said, after Creeley’s poem “I Know A Man.”

Message from Momaday

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                          A note from Pulitzer prize-winning author, N. Scott Momaday, discussing the GUS BLAISDELL COLLECTED book (Gus was UNM Press editor on Momaday’s second book, The Way to Rainy Mountain, published by UNM press).

Dear Nicole,The book is a clear mirror of the man. It is beautiful and moving. Gus and I made a legendary journey to Rainy Mountain in the hard weather that shapes mind and memory. It was a quest, a journey eminently worth making.With deepest thanks.Scott

 

In Gus’s  “Holygraph” book (a blank dummy book for Ivor Winters’s Forms of Discovery run, filled with friends poems, drawings, autographs and insights) 

Scott writes,
 
“Dear Veering,
It has been good to be 
with you on the way to Rainy
Mountain. One day you must
go to the cemetery there, to
see the gravestones of some of
these red people you must at 
times feel that you know.
And I hope that the 
weather is particularly hard
on that occasion.

N Scott Momaday 
Christmas Eve 1968"



Gus writes,

"On an Inscription in my Holygraph Book
                                                 for Scott.

We have/ been tog/ether/ now these/ many/ months
each on his way to Rainy Mountain, a journey
taken in fact, in spirit, and imagination.
It is a labor of love without loss, finding
my way, finally, to that dark stone
that bears your grandmother’s name.

You wish me the hardest weather on my visit
Such weather is the weather of my spirit,
A semiarid terrain wild with winds, and,
At evening, reason’s rage and fury flaming,
When the wind blows and wind bells ring
Or the snow falls down and no bell rings."


Rainy Mountain                   from the archive of Gus Blaisdell

 N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer-Winning Native American Novelist, Dies at 89

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/29/books/n-scott-momaday-dead.html 

A chance meeting in a bookstore

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From Vincent Borrelli, Bookseller

I met Gus Blaisdell about thirty years ago – a chance meeting in a bookstore. I was photographing on my first cross-country road trip and I landed in Albuquerque at The Living Batch. Gus showed me Park City by Lewis Baltz. What he didn’t mention is that he wrote the essay for the book – one of the most brilliant essays I’ve ever read about photography and art.

Park City (and a few other influential books) heralded a seismic shift in photography. This astonishing work, which came to be known as the New Topographics, allowed us view the landscape with a new sense of passion, longing, and dread. The style continues to be widely emulated, letting some of us forget the vitality and authority of the original images.

DISCUSSING GUS

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Join editors William Peterson and Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

Wednesday December 5th 4:00pm at the UNM bookstore

to discuss GUS BLAISDELL COLLECTED


Living Batch Bookstore (pieces of history)

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Note: scroll down for a Timeline . . . I just added . . . & a few photographs . . .

“I is now a living Batch”
Ed Dorn, Gunslinger, Book II

I welcome any comments reflections accuracies emendations corrections amplifications of this generously offered material . . . I will put it all together plus more into a tribute to the independent bookstore in America, in this case, as a great example, the Living Batch Bookstore in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I worked, mostly part time from about 1978 to 1991 . . . and I did everything I could to help with poetry readings, book signing events and I’m grateful to everyone who worked there . . . Sally Blaisdell, Joe, Pancho, Mike, Carl Christensen, Sigrun (Siggy) Fox, Geary Hobson, Jeff Bryan (who did fantastic newsletters that vibrated with visuals and word book energy), Kevin Paul, Gus Blaisdell…

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For Jacket Copy / by JB Bryan

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For a jacket-copy intro to the author it would be hard to improve on the capsule snapshot by artist, poet, and publisher (and one-time Living Batch employee), J. B. Bryan, in the little Festschrift chapbook he prepared for the memorial “Celebration of Gus Blaisdell” 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 & lingo, philosophy & logic argued toward revelation inside his own difficult critique.

Doors of Memory and Desire

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 Photographer Arnold Gassan and Gus Blaisdell 1962-63 in Denver, Colorado                  Stockyard Earth                    

                                                                                Photograph by Robert Voy Stark
NOTES ON THE FILM (GASSAN-BLAISDELL)
Tenative title:   DOORS OF MEMORY AND DESIRE.
Chippewa Poem:
You are Walking around
Trying to remember
What you promised.
But you can’t remember.
I am walking around, trying to remember what I promised, but I can’t remember.
 Can the narration run in a kind of counter-point to the images: first as, say, a description of what  will happen next visually; then as a description of what is or has just happened–  but always keeping to the tone of a specious present.
Camera catches M putting on cracked and broken shoes,
lacing them slowly, hastily, angrily. The laces break.
The foot kicks the shoes off. A hand reaches into the frame,
picks between the toes, moves out of frame.
“I have been walking, too long, too swiftly, sometimes much too swiftly
and much too slowly.”
Camera catches man as he moves towards table.
 I have been walking around, trying to remember what I promised, but I can’t remember…can’t  remember what I desired, what I promised…what it was that I desired so much that it made me  promise…whatever it was I did promise.
Perhaps this is because I’m not used to promising,
to desiring, to remembering even.