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Gus and Evan Connell R.I.P.

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DSC_3197

Farewell, Evan Connell

Evan-ConnellFrom Counterpoint Press

January 10, 2013

Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press is sad to announce the death of author Evan S. Connell. Mr. Connell died Wednesday night after several years of declining health. He was 88.

Evan Connell has long been recognized as one of the most important American voices of contemporary letters. A novelist, short story writer, and poet, Connell is the author of seventeen books, including Deus lo Volt!, The Aztec Treasure House,Points for a Compass Rose, Lost in Uttar Pradesh, and the bestselling Son of the Morning Star, which was made into a 1991 miniseries.

His novels Mrs. Bridge (1959) and Mr. Bridge (1969) were adapted into the critically acclaimed 1990 Merchant-Ivory film Mr. and Mrs. Bridge starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Wallace Stegner said of Mrs. Bridge that “[It] is a hell of a portrait…She’s as real and as pathetic and as sad as any character I have read in a long time.”

Connell was awarded the Robert Kirsch Award (a Los Angeles Times Book Prize) for “a living author with a substantial connection to the American West, whose contribution to American letters deserves special recognition.” Counterpoint Press will publishing a new edition of his book of prose poems, Notes From a Bottle Found on the Beach in Carmel, in February 2013.

In 2009 Evan Connell was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, for lifetime achievement. He was born on 17 August, 1924, in Kansas City, Missouri and attended Dartmouth College and the University of Kansas. Connell is also an alumni of Stanford and Columbia universities.

Evan Connell lived and worked in Sante Fe, NM.

Gus wrote an extended essay called “After Ground Zero: The Writings of Evan Connell, Jr.” New Mexico Quarterly (Summer 1966). An excerpt is published in Gus Blaisdell Collected titled VATIC WRITING Evan S. Connell Notes from a Bottle… p.185

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.

IN THE BEGINNING IN THE END

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My father Gus Blaisdell dropped dead from a heart attack in Albuquerque, New Mexico in the alleyway behind the Frontier restaurant and what used to be, until it’s closing in late 1996, his regionally famous Living Batch Bookstore. His heart attacked on a Wednesday night shortly after teaching his Horror film class where he’d screened and lectured (“brilliantly”, according to his longtime graduate assistant Bubbles) on the 1926 Japanese film Pages of Madness. Inside his worn, canvas Living Batch book bag, which he carried with him everywhere, filled with his current readings, notes, and journal writings, was a letter that began; Dear Beth, The untitled collection of my essays I propose falls, natch, into three sections: 1) essays on photography; 2) on painting; and 3) on movies.

When I received this bag from his widow (fifth wife), a year and a half after his death, along with 40 boxes of his papers, I was elated to have some instruction, some guidance, from “His Heaviness” (a title I bestowed and he relished), on how best to proceed in honoring this brilliant, difficult and fascinating man. Hence, the book begins.

His Heaviness in cyber space

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For those of you living in the digital age Gus Blaisdell Collected is out and available on Kindle.
For those of us who need the heft of the good book in hand it will be arriving in early September.
For all who want a preview and to read the wonderful editor’s preface just click on the link below  then click on the handsome book cover and voila’ .
best,
Nicole

Welcome to the FOG

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Friends of Gus,

The countdown has begun. Gus Blaisdell Collected is nearly upon us. Due out in September. The launch party details coalescing. I will keep you posted.

Art • Film • Literature • New Mexico/Southwest • Photography

Gus Blaisdell Collected

 

William Peterson
Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

 

From the moment he arrived in New Mexico in 1964, Gus Blaisdell (1935–2003) was a legendary presence. Famous in Albuquerque as a writer, teacher, publisher, editor, and especially as the proprietor of the Living Batch bookstore, Blaisdell was also a brilliant critic whose essays influenced readers throughout the country and across the Atlantic. This long-awaited collection of Blaisdell’s critical writings includes essays on literature, art, and film, along with moving tributes by some of the distinguished writers who numbered Blaisdell among their friends. Introductory essays by philosopher Stanley Cavell and literary critic David Morris join colleague Ira Jaffe’s poignant memoir to provide perspectives on the man by friends who knew him well. Glimpses of Blaisdell’s vivid personality can be had from the many photographs included, and the diligently researched chronology compiled by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey tracks the course of her father’s complicated life.

 

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Art critic William Peterson lives in Albuquerque, where he is an adjunct instructor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico. Longtime editor of ARTSPACE magazine, he has also been a correspondent for ARTnews and an associate editor at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Nicole Blaisdell Ivey is a photographer and writer. Her work has appeared in The Sun magazine, New Mexico Photographer, and others. She lives in Albuquerque.