Friday, April 17, 2009

Las Cuarenta y Ocho Estaciones de ´Extasis


At the risk of appearing to be a hair-splitting contrarian, a feisty old effigy desperate to animate the embers of a lost eminence, I take issue with Dahlia Danton’s recent revelation concerning Micah Carpentier’s 48 Stations of Ecstasy.

With briny assurance she claims to have happened upon the original copy of Carpentier’s famous chapbook. What she saw in Havana was most certainly a specious facsimile.

The original, handmade copy of Las Cuarenta y Ocho Estaciones de ´Extasis is nesting in a flatfile in David Schoffman’s incorrigibly lambent Los Angeles studio. It was given to him as a gift shortly before Carpentier’s death and has been available to scholars for years.

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