Silverness Yellowing

“Diary of a Fruit Farmer.” This article almost sounds like a joke, certainly a niche interest. But that was James Schuyler, where his head was at.

Aug. 7= He was reading James Woodeforde’s Diary, begun 1758 and continued until death, contains the minutia of daily life, with particular attention to food and drink, on Aug. 22 he mentions the above article from The Countryman, Summer 1938. While vacationing on Great Spruce Head Island the crew would take the boat over to Deer Isle and over to the Maine main land to Camden for groceries and for yard sales. I can imagine Schuyler picking up a box of decades old gardening magazine for ten cents. See “Used Handkerchiefs 5¢”

The three poems (written June  30, 1969), “After Joe was at the island,” “‘Used Handkerchiefs 5¢,’” and “The Trash Book,” are either implicitly or explicitly addressed to Schuyler’s friend Joe Brainard, an important artist and collagist. Christopher Schmidt in his thesis “Baby, I am the garbage”: James Schuyler’s Taste for Waste has a whole academic theory about language and trash among the New York School. http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/ijcs/ijcs1011-06.htm Mostly I find it humorous=used handkerchiefs, though I’m not sure why because I’ve bought used handkerchiefs at the thrift store at least once or twice in my life.

Then in searching the World Wide Web I found this:

In the Joe Brainard Archive

Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego Library

Box 1, Folder 2

Some Blue Gay Porn - Construction, 10 x 7 3/4 oval 1975

Four collages and one ink drawing on 4 1/2 x 3 paper stuffed in envelope with blue ink lettering and wash on front and blue-checked contact paper on back; placed in blue-bordered handkerchief; placed in blue-jean pocket mounted on plywood.

--and the juxtaposition makes me weepy. One man’s trash is another man’s art—mediated by the threads of these very special relationships. Finding treasure where others see only trash.

Used Handkerchiefs 5¢

Clean used ones, of course. Also a dresser scarf, woven with a pattern of pansies looking alternately to right and to left; a pillowcase full of carpet scraps; underdrawers of cambric with an edging of tatting; black—shedding jet and bugles—crêpe, as stuffed with dust and as damp, or as dry, as the wrinkled hand of someone too old to die who dies because to wake up this morning just slipped her mind; bent giant postcards; Mount Pelée and a fruitless wonderland of ice prisms, clear water-diluted color chunks: blue, pink, and green; sagging brown metal-threaded tapestry cloth within gothic arch of a table Motorola hiding a speaker from which once sped Flagstad’s more than melodious shriek and, over-enunciated as plumes wrapped in papers printed “Biscayne Farms,” once trotted, like a quick creek, the news that flaming passengers were falling from the Hindenburg, a voice that left itself a small puddle of kerosene on the linoleum; then there is your face, floating up the stairs, big-eyed into the trash-and-treasures loft from which, finally, dressed for tennis as you came, you go down again with a find in hand; a slab of undyed linen its silverness yellowing like a teaspoon from egg yolk, ironed with too coll an iron so the washing crush marks make a pattern over the weave and, above the thick welt of the hem, a cross-stitched border of spruce and juniper unstylized (unless style is simply to choose) in shades of drab that sink in, or merge from: the hand towel od today, embroidered forty some maybe years ago.