From Hobby Horses to Moose

The prodigal son returns. On my trip I read Anne Sanouillet's expanded edition of Michel Sanouillet's Dada in Paris. The chapters on Dada publications were my favorite parts of the book. While in Rangeley State Park in western Maine near the Wilhelm Reich Museum, I read about Paul Dermee's Z, the second issue of which was a four page mimeo. The book really brought home to me that the Dada publications are the forefathers of post-WWII mimeo. Nowhere is this more clear than Claude Pelieu and Mary Beach's Bulletin from Nothing, a direct descendant of Bulletin Dada, the sixth issue of Tzara's Dada that was the first cultivation of the virus from Zurich within French borders.

Coming home from Rangeley Lake my wife and I decided to cross to New Hampshire and straddle the NH/Vermont border down Rte 91 onward home. We took Rte 2 and connected to Rte 91 at St. Johnsbury, which happens to be a stone's throw from the very French sounding, Calais, VT, and I merely gone in circles from my reading in Rangeley since Calais was home base for Kenward Elmslie's Z Press and Z Magazine. John Ashbery and Joe Brainard immortalized the joys of doing Dada here in their The Vermont Notebook, published by Black Sparrow.

While on our vacation, my wife and I desperately looked for moose, including a long seemingly endless drive up Mt. Blue that dead ended into a trail head guarded by particularly vicious black flies. The moose eluded us until I returned home and flew in the door to my bookcase, and there standing right next to a Black Mountain was my moose on the cover of ZZZZZZ, drawn by Alex Katz, with the mark of Dada on his nose. And with that issue, Elmslie closed the book on Z, and I on my vacation.

JB