Mina Loy and the Millennium by Richard Collins

ON NOT REMEMBERING CERTAIN DETAILS
OF THE MINA LOY MEMORIAL MILLENNIUM MOVEABLE FEAST, DECEMBER 31, 1999

When the mail was delivered on December 31, 1999, I received a copy of the book I had been working on for ten years. It was published at last, and I was ecstatic—for a moment in time. I loved the cover, its color, and its artwork, as I would the baby-bird-blue cheeks of a gasping newborn son. I was proud but worried about how long it might survive. Soon, the post-publication-partum blues would kick in and last for just over a year, but for now, there was a worldwide party to attend, and we were hosting our own little corner of the global celebration in New Orleans, Louisiana.

We sent out printed invitations for the Mina Loy Memorial Millennium Moveable Feast, which was to begin in the evening at our Creole cottage in the Faubourg Marigny and proceed to Andrei Codrescu’s slave-quarter apartment on Chartres Street in the French Quarter for the coming of this much-touted midnight and the feared digital apocalypse. There would be fireworks on the Mississippi, more than the usual fireworks in the streets, and—unless we had been misled—fireworks in the computer systems of the capitalist economy.

I am remembering all this now because I recently recommended Mina Loy to a poet-friend after I had written the author of The Lost Lunar Baedeker into a new poem—“Mina Loy’s lunatic baedekers map / terrains of futuristic furbelows”—my manifesto of sorts about some of my favorite neglected artists and authors, echoing perhaps Loy’s “Aphorisms on Futurism.”

I pulled my copy of her poetry from the shelf and began reading at random, marveling again at the erotic power of “Songs for Joannes” and the originality of her language and vision. Then something odd happened. I discovered an inscription on the dedication page that read: “for Richard and Leigh, my hosts on the eve of the new millennium, december 31, 1999.” But the signature was unfamiliar and not quite legible until I realized it was that of the volume’s editor, Roger L. Conover.

Racking my brain (and my wife Leigh’s), I tried to recall the details of that long, liquorish night that bridged two millennia. We remembered many details. How our bohemian krewe marched from the Marigny down rue Dauphine (the route of the old streetcar named Desire) to the Quarter armed with bottles of whiskey and wine. How we crammed twenty people into Andrei’s tiny studio that overlooked a courtyard with a fountain, and how some of us decided at some point to get naked and splash in it instead of braving the crowds to view the Baby Bacchus drop at the old Jax Brewery at Jackson Square. How one of our friends, the editor of a literary magazine, welcomed his long-distance girlfriend from Wisconsin to town only to have her ditch him for a stranger she met as they watched Baby Bacchus slide down the pole like some infant fireman or monstrous cherub stripper; having disappeared into the crowd with her romantic reveler she reappeared only when it was time for our jilted friend to return her at dawn to the airport. How a scantily dressed dwarf perched on the arm of a chair like the full-grown infant queen of the new millennium announced that as a sex worker, she was proud to cater to a certain niche taste in the business. She read with joy (from page 84): “I christen you / [that’s me!] minnikin of masquerade sex / Helen of Lilliput?” How we all took turns reading aloud from the complete works of Mina, our sometime futurist muse, until the sun came up.

But I cannot conjure up the presence of Roger L. Conover, which disturbs me because I feel sure I must have enjoyed meeting this extraordinary Loy scholar. Such are the embarrassments of memory. I can usually recall the provenance of every book on my shelf, how it came to me, where and when I bought it, or who gave it, yet I can’t recall a thing about how I acquired this one (first edition, FSG, 1996). I doubt that Roger brought it with him to the party, although considering the invitation, he might well have. Maybe this imminent man of letters, then the editor at MIT Press and no doubt one of Andrei’s vast army of literary friends, sent it afterward in thanks for the party and the homage we all paid to the subject of much of his professional life. But no: here I have just found another clue: a penciled price on the inside cover, which meant that I already had the book (probably purchased at Beckham’s Books in the French Quarter, now that I think of it, in its crystal-clear Durafold dust jacket cover) and Roger was kind enough to write an inscription, whether at my request or covertly, I can’t recall.

Considering the fuel that was consumed that New Year’s Eve, perhaps I should feel lucky that I can recall anything at all from more than twenty years’ distance. I should contact Roger somehow and thank him, belatedly, in case I never did. I can imagine my email reaching him, though, only to send him down his own rabbit hole, saying: Who the hell is this guy with whom I supposedly rang in the new millennium? Don’t know yah, don’t know yah, pon my soul, don’t know yah!

It seemed to us apt to have the Queen of the Futurists as our muse that night when the future promised to flatten us like a runaway train. But despite Mina’s invocation to “DIE in the Past” and “Live in the Future,” we could not quite ditch the present. The future—in spite of its threats and promises—never arrived. It never does. And the past, like one of Gatsby’s passed-out party guests, never really went away, only crawled into a corner and dozed for two decades like Rip van Winkle, to awake one day and ask, What did I miss?