Mildly to moderately obsessed with Black Mountain College. To the point of reading "I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century" the 1942 autobiography of BMC co-founder John Andrew Rice. Alas, it is not an interesting book. https://archive.org/details/icameoutofeighte00rice
Ha, yes. Me too. (Though my case might be moderate to severe, as the drug commercials say.) I just picked up Fielding Dawson's The Black Mountain Book, which is a memoir on which the jury is still out. Such an unexpected way station for the American avant-garde. And the fact that it was founded as a kind of a spin-off of Rollins strikes me as funny, since my impression of Rollins is almost entirely informed by its appearance in The Preppy Handbook as the last house on the WASP block.
There must have been some "dark side" to the whole BMC experience, but as far a I can tell it was a temporary autonomous zone-type utopian experience for artists...
Mildly to moderately obsessed with Black Mountain College. To the point of reading "I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century" the 1942 autobiography of BMC co-founder John Andrew Rice. Alas, it is not an interesting book. https://archive.org/details/icameoutofeighte00rice
Ha, yes. Me too. (Though my case might be moderate to severe, as the drug commercials say.) I just picked up Fielding Dawson's The Black Mountain Book, which is a memoir on which the jury is still out. Such an unexpected way station for the American avant-garde. And the fact that it was founded as a kind of a spin-off of Rollins strikes me as funny, since my impression of Rollins is almost entirely informed by its appearance in The Preppy Handbook as the last house on the WASP block.
There must have been some "dark side" to the whole BMC experience, but as far a I can tell it was a temporary autonomous zone-type utopian experience for artists...
Yes, the Dawson book definitely paints it that way.
Excellent piece.