Process note: Received AMPS approved abstract Tue June 23. The approved abstract is the original submission, which two reviewers agreed needed revision, specifically for concept of totality. Either the May 25 revision was disapproved, or never received through the software. Impossible to gauge cultural difference and distance, so the only path is to expect the need to speak more conservatively, more carefully, than you write. These paragraphs are building a prospectus for a displacement of Projective Verse and/or 19 Ways of Looking at Chris Marker. Medvedkin is not referenced in the second text, possibly because this late work contradicted the earlier, more assimilable work. Le Tombeau d’Alexandre? Unapologetic second-generation Stalinism. Medvedkin functioned within the bureaucracy; he knew more than the film says; Claude Lanzmann’s interrogative pressure is missing. Marker must have been disillusioned at the end of his life, like Godard. No one has dealt yet with American adumbrations of Popular Front Stalinism: Oppen and Rukeyser. Reopen Robert Lowell for the simple fact that he went to prison the same as Cannon et al. rather than countenance an imperialist war: workers killing workers. Lowell’s Collected Poems photograph the entire Western tradition; they are bad photographs, but the worst in art is always the most productive. HOWBEIT’s unabashed willingness to put it all out there, ‘flat stupid reality’ from which stunning edges, colors, and volumes emerge in the blink of an eye. In comparison, Empire is a stunt. Situate HOWBEIT in the context of MoMA’s Duchamp without omitting Malevich. The published proposal is the same as October’s 20-minute faculty event. Nobody called you out on your ‘Fanon sublation of Adorno-Benjamin.’ Chandrashekhar asked a good question about Adorno-Benjamin historical disjunction (critical theory and poststructuralism); spoke briefly with her about all the Deleuze in Hardt and Negri afterwards. For the Q&A, you called the film from India her paper introduced “ethno-national” (citing Groys’ e-flux appeal to recuperating universalism); Ranciere made some of the same points as Groys the Volksbuhne i.e., right and wrong has replaced right and left. You also said something that you didn’t understand at the time about art’s ability to theorize itself. Art does not need interpreters other than curatorial frameworks. The same should be said for poetics. The identity politics Amnasan was so concerned about in 95 morphed into the populism of the present conjuncture. Both parties will seek to exploit it. Stop beating yourself up for 20 years’ silence. If you believe in what you write, then your contemporaries had nothing to do with your decision, which happened by default. Despite multiple efforts after 2007, nobody would publish you. Nobody contacted you. Everybody misread the “fake book.” The outcome, whether intended who can say, is indisputable and a matter of public record: you served the most vulnerable layer of your class for 20 years with an impeccable teaching record which will matter to future historians compared to the original betrayal and denigration of your name. The supreme challenge is not to play the part of Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel (where Donna me prega started to go). Everything now becomes immense. The Cavalcanti will become a palimpsest. World-historical leadership, ‘for the centuries’ you are so fond of reminding anyone who will listen, must identify petit-stalinisms (yes, lower case) such as the thesis that your name had to take the fall for the New Coast controversy – archive fax). You talked about it too much at the time with too many people. Whether it was fair is less important than the betrayal of a confidence buried in a love letter is explicable from a class perspective. Fairness is always a question of perspective. Shift the perspective, and the one who betrayed you can be viewed seeing the other as Lear’s Edmund and protecting the community. One of the authorizers for the “fake book” wrote: “I do not forget. I do not forgive” and the other, at the door to the house on your birthday said, “Forgive the past.” And now the tape please. But the samizdat reference in the background note for the Apex of the M letter is displaced to 2000; no mention of the 1995 El Cerrito open houses that were followed with such interest by Etel Adnan and Beverly Dahlen, among others. Conjecture: The omission signals the severity of the punishment for publishing Arctic Summer. Accusations of betrayal are biblical and help no one. Befriended by none and none befriending in the Donna me prega is coding your split at the time between the poetry community and the streets where you met the lady from Ankara and later, in Cleveland, the lady from the telephone company. The one was highly politicized and the other Black and proletarian. Both befriended you. Arctic Summer simply shocked you into recognizing the magnitude of the historical threat the “fake book” represented. Ruckenfigur’s “some crude change wave.” The missing piece that transforms triptych to quadrant, call the signature Attila or Athalie or Attila-Athalie, was not supposed to come back. We are living in serious times. Did nobody listen to Robin at Vancouver? Americans! He was an old man barely distinguishable from George Stanley. When Blaser showed up in 1986 nobody knew who he was. You returned to the countryside and wrote Shades of Hades.