Karla Kelsey, Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy

 

Mina Loy. Not her birth name Mina Gertrude Lowy, or Löwy, depending on the scholar, or the flourish. Not her married name, Mrs. Stephen Haweis, or her nickname, Dusie, but “Loy”—the name she’d chosen to exhibit under since her first public success as an artist in the 1904 Salon d’Automne. The name under which her first published writing, “Aphorisms on Futurism,” will appear in Alfred Stieglitz’s journal, Camera Work, in 1914.

Photographs of Mina Loy are Mina Loy, have become Mina Loy. Glossy black-and-white inserts of Haweis’s photos—a touch of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler, and Edward Burne-Jones—are joined by those taken by Man Ray, Berenice Abbott, and Lee Miller in Carolyn Burke’s Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy, published in hardcover by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1996. And then paperback by the University of California Press in 1997. Stacked at the front of bookstores and years later appointed the best place among the remainders, Loy looks out from the cover as she leans toward the small bronze statue she cradles in her left hand, eyes catching Haweis’s camera sidelong. A pleasant blouse, hair pulled softly back. Also in 1996, The Lost Lunar Baedecker, selected poems edited by Rober L. Conover, is published by FSG, and for the first time Loy’s poetry reaches a wide audience. Here she poses for Man Ray in profile. A thermometer she’s fashioned into an earring dangles from her ear. Eyes closed, she tilts her head toward the light.

I’d been curious about this recently-published self-described fiction/biography by American writer and editor Karla Kelsey [see my review here of one her poetry titles], her Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy (Winter Editions, 2024), a book that offers this further description on the back cover: “Combining experimental biography with fiction and fact, poet Karla Kelsey’s lyric-documentary rendezvous with iconoclastic writer and visual artist Mina Loy (1882-1966) creates a resonating space for the lost and undocumented.” Through her detailed exploration and excavation of the legendary, almost mythical, figure of Mina Loy, Kelsey is clearly aware of how portraits are shaped, prepared, and made, framed and crafted, her own narrative swirling around an impossible centre that suggests itself too evasive to properly capture. Structured across eleven chapters, each of which is titled a different year from 1886 to 1965, Kelsey composes her biography out-of-sequence, focusing on moments in time and their interplay, allowing the story to almost unfold as ripples out from a single moment. The book opens with a chapter titled “1905,” that has Loy in a photography studio: “Twenty-three-year-old Mina Loy poses as Mrs. Stephen Haweis, the artist’s artistic wife. She sits before an easel wearing a print dress, black belt, and straw hat she’d bedecked with enormous rosebuds.” Kelsey begins with an image of Loy that is crafted, curated, by another, with the full participation of Loy herself; one that allows for a shimmering effect, far more performative than documentary in purpose. From this moment of artifice, Kelsey begins. Two paragraphs later:

A third photograph captures Loy from the bust up. She’s pinned her paisley-patterrned robe to make of her bare chest a white diamond while artfully covering her breasts. She looks in sharp profile to the right, hair Athena-coiled atop her head and tied with a floral scarf. Budapest means British Empire. Elegant, bohemian, so “Loy (Mlle Mina), née à Hampstead (Àngle-terre), Anglaise”—as she’s listed in the catalogue for the 1905 Salon d’Automne above the titles of the four portraits she exhibits. Found on a Weebly site, someone’s school project on Loy, with tarot cards and a map of the Arno, this photo is my favorite, but—unattributed and without citation—it might not be of Loy at all.

I would argue slightly with the description of the book, as Kelsey’s approach to the whole project is reminiscent of other titles also blending non-fiction research with a kind of lyric memoir, specifically Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay’s Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 1993) and Montreal writer Gail Scott’s Furniture Music: A Northern in Manhattan: Poets/Politics [2008-2012] (Seattle/New York: Wave Books, 2023) [see my piece on such here]. While someone, whether publisher or author, might suggest Kelsey’s work sits under “Fiction/Biography,” Transcendental Factory reads firmly set within the genre of creative non-fiction, a genre in which the author is not a distant narrator, separate from the action, but one deeply engaged within the narrative of the story. Early in the fifth chapter, “1925,” Kelsey writes:

I don my faux Turkish fox over an unseasonably thin dress to create a Mina Loy—or Myrna Loy—type woman. Psychically I’m all Hannah Höch collage, machine arms stuck to a Siren’s body. While the interior remains private, for the outfit to work does it matter whether I style myself as Mina Loy, born December 27, 1882, with the name Mina Gertrude Lowy in a North London suburb or as Myrna Loy, born August 2, 1905, as Myrna Adele Williams in Helena, Montana? In her early twenties Williams changed her last name to Loy at the suggestion of a wild Russian writer who’d found his way to Hollywood. This man, let us call him Sasha, let us give him a shock of white hair and sand-colored eyes, could have been Mina Loy’s lover when, after a summer in Vienna, 1922—sketching Freud’s portrait as he read some of her prose—she moves to Berlin and stays there until relocating to Paris in spring of 1923.

I’m charmed by the music, the lyric, of Kelsey’s prose, all highly deliberate through such luscious sweep and gesture; the prose is reminiscent of how Isaac Jarnot originally worked chapters of their biography of Robert Duncan, well before the multiple-year peer-reviewed process appeared to smooth over the remarkable music to land as Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2012). “Loy’s Jemima,” Kelsey writes, “thought to be a self-portrait and shown in London at the New English Art Club’s 1910 summer exhibition, will be lost. Also from circa 1910, Ladies at Tea is lost, Ladies Watching a Ballet is lost, Ladies Fishing is lost, Heart Shop is lost, The Little Carnival is lost, Voyageurs is lost. Lost, lost— [.]” Kelsey offers a biography of depictions and smoke, often articulating a particular lack of archival information by detailing all that surrounds it, offering details and surrounding context so fine that the contours of Loy’s story can’t help but find definition. She digs deep into all that there is to uncover and decipher, but there is still, as Kelsey suggests, so much of Loy’s narrative that is missing; too much of Loy’s image defined by the works and depictions of those that surrounded her, certain of which remains incomplete, contradictory and even incorrect (including the portrait on the book’s cover, long attributed to be of Loy but actually, as Kelsey learns through her research, of American actress Evelyn Brent, circa 1920). Kelsey works through such wonderful prose across research, informed speculation, conjecture and intricate wanderings across and around her subject, providing paragraphs of context around what else was happening during those same years as Loy, as important to her story as those bare facts of her life, of which there are too few. Early in chapter “1965,” for example, she offers one of a number of passages that provide a broader context from which Loy can’t help but exist in the world alongside and within, whether directly or indirectly. As the passage begins:

In 1965 the US increases military forces in South Vietnam and begins Operation Rolling Thunder, an aerial bombardment campaign over North Vietnam which will last until 1968, killing more than fifty-two thousand people. In 1965 most of Congress and much of the US support the war, although tens of thousands attend the antiwar teach-in at the University of California at Berkeley. Half the population of the US is under twenty-five. Eva Hesse is awarded a year-long fellowship in an abandoned textile factory in Germany and begins to move into the three-dimensional space of found objects and papier-mâché. By the end of her residency, she will consider herself a sculptor. Carolee Schneemann teaches herself how to make films.

The publication of Transcendental Factory follows close on the heels of Lost Writings: Two Novels by Mina Loy, edited by Karla Kelsey (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2024), a pairing that offers an echo to Ianthe Brautigan’s memoir of her late father, Richard Brautigan, You Can’t Catch Death: A Daughter’s Memoir (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001) alongside the posthumous appearance of Richard Brautigan’s final novel, An Unfortunate Woman (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001), two years after a third title, Brautigan’s long-lost volume, The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings (Mariner Books, 1999). For best effect, one might suppose, these titles appear in clusters, to catch the attention. Are you paying attention?

Ongoing notes: late April, 2016

Given our new baby distractions, I thought it might be worth going back through the past few months and acknowledging the books over the past two years-plus that I started to review, but, for whatever child-related reason, I wasn’t able to complete as a longer, full-sized review. Here are some notes, if not even regrets, on a couple of books that I wish I’d more time and attention to properly discuss (as they each, obviously, deserve).

Kiki Petrosino, Hymn for the Black Terrific: American poet Kiki Petrosino’s second trade poetry collection, Hymn for the Black Terrific (Louisville KY: Sarabande Books, 2013) is part of a vibrant, aural tradition of poetry that can’t help but lift itself from the page. Her poems run the range of questioning, arguing and speaking clearly, and are best experienced out loud, in a collection where her voice is clearly there, inside your head. This is truly a remarkable collection by a remarkable poet.

Ariana Reines, Mercury: There aren’t that many 240 page-plus contemporary poetry collections, but American poet Ariana Reines manages such for her third trade collection, Mercury (New York NY: Fence Books, 2011). The author of The Cow (Alberta Prize/Fence Books, 2006) [see my review of such here] and Coeur De Lion (Fence Books, 2007), Reines’ Mercury, with its silver reflective cover, is an expansive, sexual, highly charged and even perverse collection, collecting five incredible sections: “LEAVES,” “SAVE THE WORLD,” “WHEN I LOOKED AT YOUR COCK MY IMAGINATION DIED,” “MERCURY” and “O.” There is something about Reines’ new collection I haven’t seen in serious poetry before, that level of personal, physical and sexual openness, and the text rocks with a physical urgency that propels the poem forward. Her second section, “SAVE THE WORLD,” is composed as an essay/rant against the film The Watchmen (2009), and its conflation of sex and violence, as she writes:

This movie is about evil

What its woman wants

Is love and respect

She does not care that the world is ending

And that the superhuman man is trying to save the evil world

For humanitarian reasons. He is not paying attention to her.

She wants love

And respect.

She wants his thoughts.

Jubilee Hitchhiker: the life and times of Richard Brautigan, William Hjortsberg: After years of rumours, William Hjortsberg’s incredibly detailed biography of the late American writer Richard Brautigan was released a few years back, the 852 page Jubilee Hitchhiker: the life and times of Richard Brautigan (Berkeley CA: Counterpoint, 2012). And, after three long months, I have finally finished reading it. In Hjortsberg’s biography, the detail is absolutely incredible. In working up to talking about Brautigan’s association with the hippie period of Haight-Ashbury, a whole chapter is dedicated to providing a backdrop, with the same treatment given to the earlier period of the Berkeley Renaissance. Brautigan managed to become a leading figure in American writing [see a recent piece I wrote on his work here], called “the last of the Beat poets,” connecting the beat writers to further literary and cultural movements, including the Diggers and Hippies (he was part of the former, but less the latter). One of the most striking, and thoroughly-researched, biographies I’ve read, this is a fantastic biography of an American writer often dismissed by serious readers unable to read past the surface elements of his ‘hippie-surrealism,’ misunderstanding the depth of his work, and the place he should hold as one of the most original American writers of the second half of the twentieth century.

Erika Staiti, The Undying Present

I haven’t consulted the map. I didn’t know there was a map until after they returned to the car at the beginning and spread it over their laps. I know I am trying to get to the magnified view as indicated. I will have to go through many rooms. In some cases I might have to stay overnight. It all depends.

Oakland, California writer Erika Staiti’s striking first full-length book, The Undying Present (San Francisco, CA: Krupskaya, 2015), exists in the nebulous space between prose poetry and novel. Constructed as a collage-work, The Undying Present is a pastiche of scene-sections, including scenes presented from multiple perspectives, a set of semi-travel narratives, multiple examples of overlap, deliberate obfuscation and occasional contradition. Writing out a series of movements without specific details, the narrative allows itself to not be limited by a single trajectory or reading. As Ariel Goldberg and Rachel Levitsky wrote in their “Conversation about Erika Staiti’s ‘The Undying Present,’” as part of their “Social reading” series in Jacket2: “Under erasure, constant revision: questions left by Staiti’s outlines and silhouettes must only be answered in multiples, of bodies, desires, expirations hiding from each other, revealed in the reading, by the readers: for how long can a hand be held?” They continue:

In a narrative that is about an underground replete with unspoken dynamics that are probably sado-masochistic, the open field of the mystery is significant. The narrative is not master of its own mystery. The narrator is not in control.

“False harmony warms the network. Secrets eat through the spaces between bodies.”

There is something going on in The Undying Present but it’s a secret. There is a necessity of uncovering the mystery, the structural body of the scene that can’t be addressed singularly by the author who is included in it. How are we going to be asked to question the surface? To get to the matter, when intimacy lapses. The reader is being asked to help.

Narrative, one might argue, is as arbitrary as any other idea upon which to hang a story. Staiti’s narrator is not in control, they write, and yet, it takes a remarkable amount of control to allow such a space for the narrator to drift so artfully, highlighting a comparison and difference between this and, say, Richard Brautigan’s novel Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel (1976), in which narrator, narrative and, supposedly, author erode simultaneously. Staiti’s montage of prose-sections accumulate in such a way that are reminiscent of the novels of Toronto writer Ken Sparling, yet writing out longer scenes than his novels often include. Both writers, somehow, manage to create full-length prose-works that suggest that the order of the sections aren’t fixed, but simply one way of reading; might The Undying Present be equally readable if the sections were re-ordered? Would it make for an entirely different, yet equally satisfying, experience?

Staiti is also the author of the chapbooks Verse/Switch & Stop-Motion (2008), In the Stitches (Trafficker Press, 2010) and Between the Seas (Aggregate Space & Featherboard Writing Series, 2014), and in an interview conduced by Ariel Goldberg, Staiti discusses In the Stitches in a way that seems to connect to this current work: “There is some kind of world in which this language is existing but I don’t really know what it is. It’s partly an imagined/fantasized world but it steals objects and ideas from our world. I don’t feel so literate in this world at all. I feel pretty removed from it. In the earliest version, I was trying to write lines that would negate themselves. I wanted to see what something looked like if it could be itself and also its own negation. I was writing longhand, which I almost never do. As the piece over time transformed into this thing, I realized that something kind of ambient but real came out in the attempt to negate. I thought a lot about ambience. I wanted to see a world in which ambience dominated. It’s interesting about the different voices you mentioned because I’ve been hearing it as un-voiced, as a humming or something.” In remarkably precise prose, Staiti appears very much to be creating a world through halved information, presenting just enough to create an incomplete portrait, and make the reader aware of what might be missing. One might say that this new work is just as much ambient than setting or narrative, suggesting what another writer would have fleshed out more fully, yet most likely lessening the effect.

I walk through the City of Margins. Tall angular buildings shimmer in the sun. Dozens of people move past me walking in straight lines with conviction. I am moving in this way too. The streets push us to our destinations efficiently. We push ourselves there.

A narrow alleyway appears. I turn and walk down the torn street. I reach an empty parking lot. I feel the Second City beneath me. The shell of a burned out car sits at the edge of the frame. An abandoned and deteriorating building sags into the ground. This is where we enter.

I open the doors of the building and walk around peering in each room. The rooms hold remnants of the past, forgotten objects slathered in dust and rodent feces. I climb the stairs dragging knobby fingers over a dusty banister. A young woman is crumpled in the corner at the end of the hallway. Her body is a mouth, a dark open hole telling a story. Speaking not speaking.