Barry Schwabsky

Playing Cards and Cigarettes

 
I would like to ask Basil King whether, when an artist paints the cards of the deck, one of them is a wild card. And if so which one? Furthermore I would ask what currency is being wagered in the game in which these cards are played.
 
I would like to ask Basil King about what happens when a cohen, a priest, becomes a melech, a king. Is that necessarily a promotion?
 
I would like to ask Basil King to recall for me the color of Franz Kline’s bathrobe. I don’t assume it was black and white.
 
I would like to ask Basil King if he knows the way from Alpha Road to Omega Boulevard.
 
I would like to ask Basil King if Klee and Ingres diverted themselves with the same fiddle.
 
I would like to ask Basil King where the hook goes when a question mark turns into a full stop. Does it then become the profile of an abstract portrait head?
 
I would like to ask Basil King whether, when reading his books, my feeling that I have read a given passage before means that I have really read it before or that I am only now, thanks to the grace of a second chance, able to read it for the first time.
 
I would like to ask Basil King if John Wieners looked any prettier in a dress than I think he did.
 
I would like to ask Basil King if an artist has subjects in the same sense that a monarch has subjects.
 
I would like to ask Basil King if learning to draw comes before drawing to learn.
 
I would like to as Basil King what rough magic turns painters into beasts and what spell it is that brings them back again.
 
I would like to ask Basil King if he ever thrashed it out with Joe Brainard about when and how illustration becomes a fine art. And how a book of memory becomes a text of the perpetual present.
 
I would like to ask Basil King how, when a man has lived many lives, read many books, and seen many pictures—how that man knows which of his memories are of what he’s lived, of what he’s read, of what he’s seen.
 
I would like to ask Basil King whether Emily Carr and Virginia Woolf would have become lovers if they had met.
 
I would like to ask Basil King what playing cards and cigarettes have in common besides being sold in packs.
 
I would like to ask Basil King to explain the nature of prose incantation. Also, I am then led to wonder, would it ever make sense to speak of a painted incantation?
 
I would like to ask Basil King if he knows how it is that desire can outlive childhood.
 
I would like to ask Basil King how often a woman looks back at him when he looks in the mirror.
 
I would like to ask Basil King whether HD would have crossed the street to avoid WCW. Did she ever feel that he was stalking her? Would she ever have changed her routine, as WS (and I don’t mean William Shakespeare) began to avoid walking through the village for fear that he might run into Baroness EF von L?
 
I would like to ask Basil King how to know when repetition is not compulsive but free.
 
I would like to ask Basil King how many times he has witnessed the death of a color. I would also like to know if he has ever seen one resurrected. Like certain flowers that faint away at a man’s touch, then revive just as he starts to turn away.
 
I would like to ask Basil King whether he and Ronald Kitaj ever had a chance to wave to each other while crossing the Atlantic in opposite directions.
 
I would like to ask Basil King if he ever saw the movie in which Suzanne Valadon was played by Gloria Graham, opposite Humphrey Bogart in the role of Edgar Degas. I don’t remember what it was called but it might have been directed by Nicholas Ray.
 
I would like to ask Basil King if what he found at the movies is what Pauline Kael lost.
 
I would like to ask Basil King this: “Sigmund Freud sees Egon Schiele / crossing the street” is the opening line of a joke, that’s obvious, but is it what they mean by “Jewish humor”? And what’s the punch line?
 
I would like to ask Basil King if he really remembers what yesterday smelled like.
 
I would like to ask Basil King to explain to me the difference between East London and Minsk, and whether that is the same question as, what is the distance between East London and Minsk.
 
I would like to ask Basil King if he knows, when the 1845 Sunrise with Sea Monster turned into the 1872 Impression: Sunrise, in the meantime, what had become of the sea monster?