Mayer's compositional method for this book is to rescue the reams of documentation she acquired throughout her academic life, and to reformulate them as art. I have never seen old school notes put to such fruitful use. The result is a book of facts and reflections which, although they are multivalent, are more straightforward to read than any of her previous works. The convergences that create dynamism in this text come from many different orders of things, and so sometimes sound fanciful, but never arbitrary. We do not merely witness the chance meeting of umbrellas and sewing machines on dingy operating tables.
Hemispheres become loose in the country, there are new forms.
Add up a column of numbers, it comes to William Carlos Williams to me. What are the spiritual heights, she said. Just as Uncle Vanya looks like a dial, Paris comes and goes, prissy, lightfooted and beautiful-looking, but, by and large, the outside forces come to the surface. By the same token, we seem fully uneven, without the bones and stays. There's a picture of a woman dancing with a leaf for a hand, her head on a string, hanging forward.