Hi Andy,

So nice to have your comment on the blog post, and so to engage with figuring out an answering modality. I'll begin with Ann Berthoff, whom I discover is mentioned in

http://oook.info/blog/?p=3345 ("Form Finds Form")

Ann was a protege of my mother, back in the early 1950s when Ann was a brand-new teacher of English and my mother the Dean of Guidance at Bradford Junior College. She went on to become a, perhaps the, doyenne of the Writing Across the Curriculum movement, and was a teacher of Composition and Rhetoric at U Mass Boston. She's mid-90s now. Paige Arrington's 2019 dissertation https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1238&context=english_diss is le dernier cri. Ann's Forming Thinking Writing: The Composing Imagination (1978) has this dedication:

Insofar as this book reflects my teaching experience, it has been nurtured chefly by the late Carolyn A. Blackmer, who was mentor and guide in the first years of my classroom career, nearly 30 years ago. She taught me how to read Whitehead and Peirce and to trust the power of the human mind, despite a young teacher's inclination to believe that there was little evidence for its existence. Our daily trip home on the Boston and Maine (bringing back to North Station a carload each of lobsters and tired teachers) was a three-year seminar in forming, thinking, and writing. I like to think that she would have approved this attempt to encourage students to explore how it is that, as she used to say, Form Finds Form and "to grow", as I.A. Richards has said, "in capacity, practical and intelligential" as a result. This book is dedicated to her memory.

Ann's Mysterious Barricades references Francois Couperin as much as Ludwig Wittgenstein ("Language provides forms which continually reform as we construe and construct them; they are like the figures of Couperin's Les baricades mistérieuses, those resonant suspensions which seem to block the basic harmony, even as they shape the melodic contour" [pg 50]), but I append a pdf of one chapter ("Bottom's Semiology: The Duck-Rabbit and Magritte's Pipe") as an example of the whole. Cassirer and others known to you are scattered throughout...

and http://oook.info/toonz/cartoon23.jpg

Often I find myself trying to parse texts like Ann's as if they dealt with photographic imagery, and sometimes it works and enlarges how I'm able to think about my own and others' images. But as with trying to wrap my mind around Attractors and philosophical ideas like those of CS Peirce, there's a lot of remedial work I have to do just to relate what I read to what I know/understand. The example of that of the moment is alluded to in the blog post before the Attractors one that you commented on: http://oook.info/blog/?p=3794 regarding Becker's book on Oulipo and its offshoots, including OuPhoPo. I'm only about halfway through Becker's book, but the mind reels with every turn of the page, as I read and think and substitute 'photography' for 'literature'. So many photographers whose work I admire are oulipian/pataphysical in their playfulness and surprising vision and paradoxicality and departure from Convention.

The slide deck is a marvel, at the same time utterly familiar (thanks to years of following your blog) and alight with new bits to attend to. Is it possible that there's audio of the Salve Regina talk? Love to hear it, if so.

As for the present, we're happy to be at home, and to have our daughter Kate fortuitously with us for the duration. She was on her way to the Nova Scotia house when the tesseract (or event horizon?) collapsed, and she has been masterminding a vast and magnificent garden project https://www.flickr.com/photos/kateblackmer/ that is beginning to produce tangible results. She's a cartographer http://blackmermaps.com/portfolio.htm , and so is totally portable. Betsy and I have a joint show in the works for July, but it's not clear if the gallery will be operating then or not. Part of my side of the show will be video and is in draft form at https://youtu.be/O7NYOdYPibY and the rest of mine is large prints on satin: http://oook.info/July2020/JulySatins.html Betsy's are 14 glorious 20x30 prints on aluminum.

Who knows what the world will look and be like in 6 months, but in the meantime we have lots to keep us busy. http://oook.info/55th/ is one summary of that, constructed for a 55th college reunion that turns out to be entirely virtual.

All the best,

--Hugh