Some years back, Ken Krug painted a series of small diptych portrait/still lives: each with a book (favorites of Ken’s—usually his own beat-up paperback copies) and an object. I loved the intended and (mostly) accidental juxtapositions, which struck me as both literary and quotidian. I’ve had one of these (Spiegelman’s Maus/salt & pepper shakers) and now I’m proud to own two more (Samuel Delany‘s Dahlgren/flip phone; and Borges/Mets cap). Thank you, Ken Krug, for being so smart and so talented and for being the most avid reader of books I know. And thank you, Chip Delany, for creating in all of us a powerful sense of the future of the retro and the retro of the future.
Al Filreis is Kelly Professor, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, Director of the Center
for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Co-Director of PennSound, and Publisher of Jacket2—all at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are Secretaries of the Moon,
Wallace Stevens & the Actual World, Modernism from Left to Right, and Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60. He is currently writing a book on the art & avant-garde of 1960. He has taught a massive open online course, "
Founder/Faculty Director, 