The Genius

The drawing on the cover of el corno emplumado 30, from 1969, is the only illustration of mine that was ever published. I’m sure I was stoned when I did it. I would not otherwise have been so obsessive. I sent it to Margaret Randall and Robert Cohen, who were then the magazine’s co-editors. They surprised me by putting it on el corno’s cover.

In June 1968, after nine months in London, I had flown to Mexico City to visit Meg and Robert. I had known Robert in New York, but I met Meg in person for the first time that summer. We became friends and corresponded prolifically for about a year until she and Robert fled to Cuba in extremely tense circumstances.

The quotation in my drawing is from Dreiser’s The Genius. I probably liked it because of its documentariness. For the same reason, I’m still drawn to old photographs and movies that contain so matter-of-factly the often vanished, and in some sense imaginary, objects or uncanny landscapes of other times.

Daydreams, possibly with redeeming social value.

My actual dreams are often of places with familiar names, like Rome or New York, but that don’t resemble them at all. The other night it was a “Vermont” that had something in common with Burgundy or a less settled and wilder place.

Though my unintentional dream “Vermont” and Dreiser’s intentional “New York” differ in many ways, they seem to occupy adjacent lots in my imagination.