Going through Freddie’s books
When Quilter and I left Mary’s house I ended up with several large plastic bins of Freddie’s collages as well as some boxes of slightly mildewy books. Quilter pulled the stuff that looked like older, more rare or interesting anarchist and other political books along with first editions and old copies of feminist science fiction. There’s another box of zines and letters, mostly zines and books that have Freddie’s art on the cover or inside as illustrations. Mary has her enormous collection of vintage Tura glasses, mostly cat-eye style with amazing rhinestones, filigree, or other baroque ornamentation.
As I catalogued and tagged the political books I got a very interesting picture of Freddie’s intellectual history and context – her milieu – that has given me a deeper appreciation of her art. I wish I had known her better as a friend rather than a long time acquaintance. She is a bit older than I am and I developed a sense of her in the 70s as a young person, agitating for the rights of herself and her fellow high school students, being around the “Red and Black” crowd(s) in the midwest, then dropping into the Situationist ferment of Santa Cruz and Berkeley and the general Bay Area. I came across letters from people like John Zerzan, sending her zines, reprints of Freddy Perlman or Camatte booklets, all kinds of stuff that it will take me a while to untangle (and likely scan). Debord, Goldman, Marx, De Cleyre, Jo Freeman, Audre Lorde. Mass production, technology, sociological arguments about industrialization, ecology, sexuality & gender; revolutions, schisms within revolutionary organizations, all made their way into her work. Anarchist women, surrealists, bomb throwers, angry women of all kinds. Her typesetting and graphic design alongside her art underpinned several different intertwined scenes & zines.
I was reminded a little of the feeling I have whenever I visit Timmi Duchamp’s house and when I first saw her amazing library (heavy philosophy! Holy shit!) Like getting to see the cathedral of books as a ghostly structure around her work. These few boxes of Freddie’s books hand picked by Quilter felt like a dark and beautiful sea, with my tiny boat (my own understanding) tossed around by the waves.
Like poetry the point of art (like freddie’s) is sometimes to say what can’t be said a different way , or say it in a way that can’t be “read” in words by people who will never trace your particular pathway through the world of books and ideas. Freddie’s delicate flywheels and iron, tendrils of vines, weave around women who are tigers, who are fairies, framed by the way they are classical statues, like Galatea bursting with things she wants to say, laid carefully across pages of anthropological texts, the chalice and the blade. Dozens of complex textures mixed with doll heads, with flowers, in a kaleidosope or a mandala, like stained glass window frames or reflections in a fly’s eye.
I am pecking away at these scans with my nice CZUR high speed camera scanner and putting them in two places, one on my Flickr in an album which also contains stuff that isn’t scans of her original art, and then more permanently and I hope usefully on Wikimedia Commons, under the category Collages by Freddie Baer. They are CC-4.0-BY licensed as Freddie wished. So far, there are 54 high quality/ high resolution scans up on Wikimedia Commons — take a look! Or, you can page through this little Flickr embed to have a glimpse of all the Freddie related stuff in my Flickr set.
For many of these works we have not correlated the titles with the work, so my file names for them are intended to be temporary placeholders.
I was at a party at Lisa‘s house this week & got to hang out with so many lovely bookish people, most of them knew Freddie, often through SFF communities like Potlatch which went all up and down the West Coast for many years. A bunch of us who used to do the “Tom Purdue” Proust dinner parties are going to reconvene and read Middlemarch (with me and Patrick advocating a bit for Dream of Red Mansions… maybe next.) Karen & Mike, Debbie, and others (I was briefly in their apazine but couldn’t keep up). I love those folks and especially am always keen to hear anything that comes out of Janet Lafler’s mouth, love her keen critical eye & wit & perspective. From some of those connections we will gather up more of Freddie’s work to scan (even if from prints not originals) and probably can figure out more of the titles. The T-shirt of the month club work is going to be tough to identify & catalogue!
Quilter and I are going back together to make one more pass through Freddie’s books and papers, next week.
I wish I had known Freddie better before this, and I wish we’d known to help do all this kind of organizing, scanning, curation, etc. for her (if she would have even allowed it). She was not looking to make a profit off her art. Obviously! Deliberately! As a political and artistic choice and I respect that a lot and understand it. Freddie gave her art away, she let it be used for fundraisers or swag for things like alt.polycon, the Tiptree, Potlatch and other really vibrant amazing communities. She made her money not just by her day job as a print materials designer, but by thrifting and re-selling (another interesting and deliberate political choice!)
I feel very determined that those choices to be non-commercial in her approach should not mean her work is disrespected or forgotten. Like, yes I am doing this because I will basically do any kind of collaboration with Quilter (we are also going to unfuck the feministsf.org site, wiki, blog, etc. on this visit and go through her books among other things.) But i am doing it because I love Freddie’s work and the bits of her politics and thought that I do know.
Thinking suddenly of Lorine Neidecker pulled out of semi isolation by Corman, and of course who even reads Cid Corman these days (other than me).
It is sobering work. Like, it’s one feeling to be sad I didn’t know her better, but how much more everyone feels who had been close to her! It is painful.
All of this made me think about the mess my own work is in. Every holiday season I look at my poetry and my writing and try to pull some more of it together, make a new zine, or re-publish something from my back catalog for Kindle. But it is in wild disarray. I don’t k now where entire years or books of poems are, or I might have one or two copies of a book/booklet or some printouts in a binder from 30 years ago, but no longer can find the files of entire manuscripts. It always is upsetting to face the mess. This isn’t even considering the things in journals & notebooks that never made it to a more final typed form. As I worked on this over the last week, on and off, I kept finding ENTIRE MANUSCRIPTS that I’d forgotten about, scattered poems, translations, or essays that were published that I also forgot about.
I resolved to set aside a little more time for that work and am putting all the poems and translations that are a bit more “finished” (lol) into a database locally on my laptop, and also to send out poems (old or new) more regularly for publication. A little archival work on myself, I guess.
Some local poets (or some correspondents even) would be so nice. I should call up Artsen and figure out a time to hang and write or go meet up with him at Hotel Utah. The DCC open mic was also super promising and I should be going to the Queer Open Mic at Strut more often to meet people! Feels like I lost my “scene” so many times and it is time to rebuild & make connections.