By info@coolgrove.com on October 15, 2024
WHERE I STAND IN ANGEL
Louise Landes Levi [LLL]
We at Coolgrove are happy to announce the completion of Louise Landes Levi’s Where I Stand in Angel. The publication is finished. Additionally, it is now available. It would not have been possible without the invaluable help from David Schonberger. He worked very closely with me over hours of Zoom sessions. Together, we implemented Louise’s precise alchemical typography. LLL published it a while ago as a chapbook. Japanese artist Tadanori Yakoo provided collage art for the front and back covers. This art is now reproduced in this commercial edition. It includes an introduction by beat biographer Gerald Nicosia (Memory Babe and Beat Scrapbook). You might wonder why this book appears in the Mind section of this blog. It’s because of Louise’s long association and devotion to her Tibetan Buddhist Master Namkhai Norbu. He is one of the foremost teachers of the Mind aspects of Buddha’s teachings, also known as Dzogchen. This book can be attributed to her devotion to these two—her teacher and poetry. There is much to discover about this Brooklyn native’s off the beaten path views on Machig Labdrön’s chod practice. She sees it as predating by centuries the ‘cut up’ method. This method involves random arrangement of sentences to generate meaning. Dadaists popularized it. Much later, Burroughs and Gysin also embraced this method. A host of western songwriters, influenced by them, adopted it too. Last year (2023) Coolgrove released LLL’s English translation from the French of René Daumal’s RASA or KNOWLEDGE OF SELF: Essays on Indian Aesthetics and Selected Sanskrit Studies
