"Carolina Low Country Fossils"

A postcard from beloved poet Celestine Frost.

I am very proud of having published her magiserial I gathered my ear from the green field.

Now if I can just get my brother to move the furniture he moved into my Mom's basement when he got divorced many years ago, so I could actually get to these books, I could list them online for sale and do right by the poet!

My mom promises that he will do this one day.

But for now that room looks like the residence of the Collier Brothers in New York back in the day. Have you ever seen photographs of that place? You probably think I'm joking about my brother's packing of his furniture but it is almost a work of art---some form of twisted conceptualism--that someone would attempt to compress an entire house into a single room. And he fucking did it. It's like a fucking Rubik's cube of furniture.

Which leads to the question, "When they broke up, my brother appears to have gotten every piece of furniture in their large house. So what did his wife get?" Short answer: sanity.

Anyway...

I must have a hundred letters from Celestine in many of which she would often vacillate between language and imagery (the plasticity of her poetic imagination is very much like Apollinaire's) but for postcards she usually stayed with words.

Usually she would select really great art that was making the rounds in New York that year so I could get glimpses of what people were seeing at least.

And her husband is designer Carl Lehmann-Haupt (brother of the New York Times reviewer, yes) so between the two of them you can imagine the feast of visual culture they enjoy in New York. They would probably starve visually if they lived anywhere else.

So this postcard is the exception for Celestine.

But she picked well. I love this stuff. I have a tube of shark's teeth about three feet from where I'm sitting.

I love to just spill them out in the palm of my hand and marvel. A lot of these sharks must have died as babies. Or else they were tiny sharks.

I also like to spill them across my scanner glass when I do scanner art. They're so damn photogenic.

Right now I'm hearing Matthew Barney singing (yes, you heard right). Bjork actually had him sing on her soundtrack for Drawing Restraint 9 and he's so cute. He acquits himself admirably.

I love the "Ambergris March" song. What is she using on there? It sounds like cembalo and a bird's thrum alternating. A bird's thrum being used as a rhythmic element. I bet it's an ancient cembalo. It's probably something that imitates a bird's thrum, but it really does sound like the wings of a bird thrumming.

So not only does he get to be the Abercrombie & Fitch boy (or was it J. Crew--yes J. Crew, sorry) when he's young and cute (and I think a football star at his high school). But he gets to be a god in the art world. And marry Viking Queen Bjork and make her babies . And now he gets to sing.

Now that's a charmed life.

Celestine's a Southerner and she's showing you what her local geography looked like way back when with this postcard.

"These fossils are from 16 to 25 million years old."

Celestine is telling me that she liked a book I sent (poet Sujata Bhatt) so much that she is acquiring another copy to give as a gift to another writer.

The postal service manhandled this postcard.

Postcards often get mangled.

They are considered the ugly stepchildren of mail by postal carriers.

Although they will deny that.