by Bob Gerst
So what have we here? There’s a scan (black with white squiggles) I made tonight of an insect of some kind that had fallen in our mail. There’s a slide from about 1970 something that, evidently, fell on the floor beneath the radiator that I discovered today when I was vacuuming the floor. The slide, I guessed, was one my dear parents had brought back from China when they visited there about forty years ago, an image of some of those terra cotta ancient horses discovered and first displayed that decade in China. There’s Greenwich Village folk singer Dave Van Ronk holding forth on a poem by William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet.
I put this stuff together, just messing around, not anything finished, not anything…except something that, when I looked at it and listened, gave me joy. What a criminal I am! A dead moth! A Chinese slide! A folksinger from Astoria, Queens! The spirit of my parents! An Irish poet, god help us. Cultural appropriation crimes…every one!