4/18/71 dear Dilly Saxon, you have sent me a thousand letters. And a thousand phone messages. And I am not, in fact, all silence: just mostly, I am not impossible to reach., it is just highly improbable. Too much teaching. Nothing wrong with expansion, but this past year I expanded in the wrong direction for once and now I'm paying dearly for it in intense fatigue, frustration, and for the first time in years incipient depression. When I get my nerve back, I'll beg leave to mark a few shots on Mike's ontacts. I know he wasn't too pleased, but I think some of them are splendid. A dozen arrest my rubbery countenance in every known contortion of lecherous evil. Glorious! Actually I've phoned you back a few times. Your department never answers. I'm pursuing the question of almond trees in the high latitudes. Thus far it's questionable. I have very positive answers on filberts, though. Really the orchard begins next fall, assuming I have time to do a really good job on the ground (with trees it's forever). Perhaps the year after some purebred Corriedale sheep. Your soups are a great miracle. I think on how to match them. Best Brakhage not see ZL, I daresay he would detest the film. But do riot git me wrong about Stan Brakhage : his prose style assuredly gives me a pain in the ass BUT he is a great and wonder-full artist AND, like Aeschylus said of Homer, we are all eating crumbs from his banquet table. (a little exaggerated, I'll grant, but B. has lit the days of my mind as few other men living or dead : after all he is a filmmaker, even as I, and no more a prose stylist than I am.) And, yes, Ezra is important to B. & me, as to few- others I think. (So is Doc tuns, ) There is some new work. A video from February, called TRAVELLING MATTE, made into film (kinescope). Arid a lip-sync piece in lab named CRITICAL MASS. More in various stages. FILM CULTURE is printing the script of nostagia in May. I'm enclosing the preface I wrote for it, since you've undoubtedly pirated the script on yr/ local xerox machine . Also some film clips from the U.S.Steel footage. Dozens of advances in the very slow progress towards Magellan film in past months. 1 think It shall be a serial. hum! Far exemple! I pine for you and balsam. write to me sometime what is on yr/ mind. XAIPE HF
