spencer selby at the beach

i just returned from our annual week long holiday at the beach.  for the last 7 years we've rented a beach house at cayucos, located on the central coast, the little beach town that time forgot.  i immediately dropped into beach time.  life is not only more languid on the sand, but it is also more consequential.  looking/hearing at the surf the mind/spirit hankers for the absolute & the finite.  the waves never ever stop.  shut the windows & doors the surf will sound like a churning washing machine.  but on a moment's pause the mind freezes at the enormity of the energy out there.  those waves have been going for thousands of years.  they will continue for ever more thousands of years.

such scales of time are modest for the universe but for the one human life they are mind-bending.  they are humbling.

& so but, i read as much as my eyeballs could stand.  i found myself pointing my browser to find more & more work by the late poet spencer selby.  selby's cool abstract cinematic textual/visual poems were for me the perfect beach read.  the poet was a long time bay area resident but i failed to reach out to him to say hey your poems make meaning in my life.

spencer selby was also a film historian whose specialty was film noir who had written 2 books on the subject.  here he is interviewed on film noir.

as i said, i didn't have the privilege to personally know spencer selby.  i've been reading his work, off & on, for over 20 years.  something clicked in cayucos.  i couldn't get enough.  there is plenty of his textual/visual stuff to be found on the web.  all you have to do, as lauren bacall said in another film & another context, is google.

here is spencer selby's obituary.

but the real cool thing i found on my travels on the interwebs is this video shot in 1994 of a reading by a.l. nielsen & spencer selby.  this video is a proof that the internet is the repository for all human memory.  only the readers are identified, natch, but i think the bearded fellow in glasses, the chap opening the bottle of wine after the reading, is the late great poet david bromige.  & to make it even better for me, i believe the fellow who does the introduction is my friend steve tills, a fantastic poet in his own right.  i think the reading is in sebastopol, ca, which makes sense if that is indeed david bromige for he taught at sonoma state, located in sebastopol.  tills was a student, & friend, of bromige.