Mina Loy Critical Lives

Today, August 4, is the day before my son Matthew's birthday, and I remember my surprise at his birth, because, having had my daughter Hilary only two years before, I was certain that this time again the baby would be a girl. But it was Matthew, who could have been called Jonathan, but since -- unbeknownst to either of us -- she was to marry a Jonathan, it would have been awkward as to which one one was addressing. So it came out correctly, as he did, and now I can't remember why it and he were not the way young persons of baby age are generally welcomed into the world. 

And I believe that , thanks to my daughter, I can fit my endnotes to the Mina Loy Critical Lives volume I have finished for the third time. It was FUTURISM that was almost the downfall of the project, not because of Marinetti and Papini, with both of whom Mina Loy had torrid affairs, but because how hard it is to fit a poem suddenly into a chapter where yo will have to add a note between two others. On top of that, two comic things: first, that since it says "footnote" to get to the place you add in the endnote and THEN you choose not foot but end, and every time it sends you first to foot. 

So that is funny sort of , but this other is not. Mina Loy's poems are found in two different volumes, one marked "The Last Lunar Baedeker" and it is not at all the last but the lost -- very much out of print. -- and the last one, very much found and lately, like 1996 whereas the "last" is from 1982 and is definitely not the  last but the lost, whose name is given to the other. Try keeping that straight on the endnote fabric, that has no perceptible sense of humor. Many such things, like her aphorisms of Futurism whose name she wanted to change to aphorisms of Modernism, and did that in the left behind papers (of which there are Many Many at the Beineke Library at Yale, all deliciously available on the internet). 

So then there is the Next Thing, which is either putting together my articles on surrealism, for the same publishers, Reaktion Books, or launching out into something like women of modernism, broken down into whatever category.... Laziness will surely win out, and I can drift back into surrealism, which, I suppose, I never really left.