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FALL 2003
Excerpts from an Elegy
by Ira Jaffe, Retired Chair, Media Arts
I’m honored to speak about Gus Blaisdell, whom I knew for 30 years. Writer, editor, educator, raconteur, friend, husband and father, Gus died in Albuquerque on Sept. 17, still brimming with enthusiasm.
Gus created popular courses in cinema for almost 25 years at UNM, where his work helped establish a Department in Media Arts. He also taught art history and instructed philosophy and math at New Mexico Tech. His publications addressed photography, Him, painting, literature and philosophy; he lectured widely in Europe and the United States. His book with photographer Lewis Baltz, Park City, was followed by his monograph on painter Guy Williams.
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Gus Blaisdell, Department of Media Arts
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A former student of Stanford literary critic Yvor Winters, Gus composed books of poetry and fiction, including Fractionally Awake Monad, Prose Ocean and Dented Fenders. For years as proprietor of the Living Batch Bookstore, where Allen Ginsberg and other poets read, he also ran Living Batch Press.
Gus relished witty conversation, often conducted within the public sphere. He'd meet friends, colleagues and students in popular restaurants on Central to take up topics of the day. He seemed to value the theatrical space of the boulevard as much as he did the classroom. Born in San Diego, he became a vibrant presence in Albuquerque, the city he adopted in 1964.
Life for many people today is distinctly less pleasant without the option of lunching or studying or opining with Gus. He could be gruff, which made his warmth all the more restorative. Plus, he was more than funny. Victims and witnesses will testify that his wit and impersonations could shatter the equilibrium of perfectly fit adults. Audiences eager for Gus’ accounts of, say, the Beat Generation, would fare no better than individuals who joined him for tea. It’s unlikely he would have been so funny, or so sympathetic, were it not for his complex seriousness. In Park City he observes that having the pleasure of company had relieved philosopher David Hume of the despair that attended Hume's reflections about philosophical skepticism, about whether we can be sure of the existence of other minds. Ruminating on Baltz's photos of wastelands, of dead mining ventures, he fastens on what people mean by value: "Waste, trash, litter, rubbish, tailings, scraps: that there is such stuff implies an antecedent process of value, intention and purpose. Waste is an end-product, the consequence of value."
Gus' concern with value accounted for his seriousness. If "at any moment thinking may reel, tip over, and fall into that bottomless pit of nonsense," such thinking partly concerned the question of value. "Anything that is," he wrote, "is a fit subject for philosophizing, and nothing can be excluded as. . . unfit or unseemly; and especially not what the conventional wisdom. . . regards as beneath contempt. . . The freedom of inquiry must lie in the refusal to consent to the ways in which the world has been prepared for us, to the way opinion words the world for us."
Gus insisted here on something like "the universal eligibility to be thought about;" and we might read his words to apply to people as well as things, suggesting his aspiration for equality and community. In these lights, nothing and no one is valueless. Gus' expansive statement helps explain his surprising bouts of patience and love, as well as his abstentions from conventional opinion. Courageous and incorrigible, he was determined in an age of cyber-speed to preserve time for reflection and face-to-face dialogue. Fortunately, lunch or tea with a number of us became such a time. We were all fit, thanks to him.
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