The band Short Fictions recently (November 2019) issued an album, Fates Worse Than Death, that includes the song “Property of Pigeons.” Check out the track at this link, along with the liner notes that acknowledge the use of Loy’s poem and transcribe the poem’s lines appearing in the song:

Pigeons doze, or rouse, stripped crescendos of grey rainbow
a living frieze, on the shallow sill of a factory window
pigeons arise alight, on vertical bases of civic brick
whitened with avalanches, as if an angel had been sick

Sam Treber, leader of the band, is a Duquesne University graduate. Thanks to one of his past professors, the fabulous Matt Ussia, for sending along this link to us, and gratitude to the (unknown) professor or student or friend who turned him on to Mina Loy. And thanks to Sam!

Artist Mary Montgomery-Lee spent the past year constructing a multi-media dada-style book about the early twentieth-century Dada movement. Using found materials and collaging text pieces, she submitted the completed project to the Brooklyn Art Library Sketchbook Project . Having discovered Mina Loy in her research for the project, Montgomery-Lee constructed a portrait page in her book inspired by Loy’s late assemblage “House Hunting.”

About the sketchbook project, entitled Dada, Stitch, and Story, she writes:

I have always loved the DADA period and Avant-Garde art in general, so I began by constructing a story from words cut from a book (like some dada poetry), then alternating pages with art I am making on teabags, featuring artists from the period. I am representing female and male DADA artists 2:1, respectively. I am creating these works infused with the artist’s style and then posting tidbits of their history on my Instagram page, along with the image of my art. This art is then sewn into my sketchbook.

I’m also intrigued by the juxtaposition of the cut up text and the portraits and the meaning that can be derived from them. I am posting on Instagram as @mary_art_girl and on Facebook as Mary Lee.

Mary contributed her Loy portrait as a postcard to our “En Dehors Garde Flash Mob” project. Dada, Stitch, and Story is now part of the Brooklyn Art Library’s sketchbook collection.

[F]irst, the photographs are the only truly contemporary images of Loy’s assemblages that show them the way Loy herself chose to display them, revealing Loy’s particular orientation of her artwork. . . . Second, while some of the content of the photographs may be recognizable  . . . none of the previously circulated images of the assemblages were produced by Abbott. And third, of the seven assemblages in these newly discovered photographs, three have never been published or seen by the public, to my knowledge, making them a tremendous new contribution to our study of Loy’s multimedia practice. (1095)

Traveling north to Bridgeton, Maine in early October, we (Suzanne Churchill, Linda Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum) were treated to a good dose of autumnal color as backdrop for our fall work retreat. Tucked on the edge of a lake, we spent several days focused on the project while trying not to be distracted by nature’s spectacle.

The gathering gave us a chance to reflect upon the recent “Post(cards from the En Dehors Garde” project, a flash mob event event that resulted in about 65 Post(cards) from all kinds of folks addressing possible ways to theorize, define, or characterize alternative ideas about the avant-garde. Moved by the creativity and diversity of the Post(cards), we plan to post an account of the experiment soon.

Susan and Linda spent a good deal of time revising and beginning to post various chapters of the newly titled “Mina Loy Baedeker: Scholarly Handbook for Digital Travelers,” which develops extended and immersive discussions. Drawing about UX design feedback from her students, Suzanne redesigned the page displays and menus to facilitate the site and enhance its “Baedeker” concept. We also worked together to post close readings of “Costa Magic” (one of Loy’s three “Italian Pictures) and “Ceiling at Dawn” to the newly functional platform for split screen analysis, allowing us to display the poem and analysis side by side. More to come!

We also had the pleasure of a visit from Roger Conover, Loy’s literary executor, Executive Editor at MIT Press, and project advisor. Over coffee, we updated him on our work while discussing ways to incorporate Loy’s work and history as an artist. Suzanne and Linda hope to return in March to further these discussions with him. Before leaving town, we lunched at a perfect Maine diner and headed back to our respective lives south of Maine and its autumnal glory.

Suzanne and Susan also conducted a workshop for faculty and graduate students, “Designing Suitable Projects for You and Your Students,” exploring collaborative models of involving students in digital humanities research. During our meeting in Pittsburgh, we devoted significant time to refining plans for the grant period and met with Duquesne Gumberg Library’s digital librarian, Gesina Philips, who has joined our cross-institutional crew.

The panel and workshop contributed to a series of three public events and workshops devoted to digital humanities research held over the spring semester at Duquesne, joined by SUNY-Buffalo’s Cristanne Miller and Nicholas Wasmoen speaking about the Marianne Moore Notebooks project, and the University of Pittsburgh’s Matt Lavine discussing his digital research on Willa Cather.