[AGL] the essence of John Clay not unrelated to the essence of Stanley Walker

[Michael Eisenstadt]

http://www.jhfarr.com/audio/road_to_mingus.mp3

as it turns out and as we would expect John Clay has 
an Internet presence. and who does not love John
Clay? sweet John Clay. But is not the musician John
Clay that i think of when i think of John Clay, but
someone who is obsessed by what once was and is
no longer. in fact as far as i remember when talking
to John years and years and years ago he already was
enwrapt in the feeling that it was already no longer 
what it was. In theory this could be pushed back 
chronologically ever further back, before Austin was 
Austin, or back to colonial times or even back to the 
Paleolithic. This is a labyrinth in which many have 
been snared. 

i think of also of Stanley Walker and his famous written 
or unwritten oral history of Austin. again it is a question 
of what was once and is now no longer, a polarity best 
ignored lest one fall into regret. The way to transcend 
this melancholic impulse is the recognition that what 
once was in its particularity was never quite that anyway, 
ungraspable short the talent of a Charles Dickens, merely 
one's fuzzy projection.