Joining filmmaker and writer John Waters and art historian Miwon Kwon as blurb writers for the back of the 2008 book Long Life Cool White: Photographs & Essays by Moyra Davey, introduced by Helen Molesworth and which my librarian received as a generous gift from the artist and writer, Moyra Davey herself, choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer begins:
I was blown away by this book. Moyra Davey’s photos I knew but writing I didn’t.
Each of the previous ‘Moyra Mondays’, and no doubt for some Mondays to come, have been knowingly focused on Davey’s writing (and her writing as realized and framed through and by her film-narrations). But today, which also happens to be my librarian’s anniversary of 13 years with his partner, linguist and ombuds Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza (so both accomplished speaker and empathetic receiver!), I have decided to let the photographs speak for themselves.
He doesn’t have a copy of the 2010 book Speaker Receiver – it is now out of print and impossible to find – but thanks to his and Davey’s mutual friend, Bill Horrigan, he was able to read and look at it a few years ago.
Yet across pages 62 and 63 of his copy of Long Life Cool White spreads the two photos that gave the 2010 book its name: Receiver, 2003 and Speaker, 2003 (the latter which gives a tantalizing glimpse of Davey’s Mother Reader in the background).
And as with so many of his posts here, a photo of a book becomes the stage for another photo that moves through and beyond the book, to a life itself (sometime turned around in the process). The book was published in 2008, the year you two met – the photo of you both below, was taken in your early days back in September 2009, when I too was still young and alive.
Allow this fictional library ghost to offer a virtual toast to your 13 years together, and to many more years to come of me receiving your speaking, laughing voices echoing together through the rooms of the house where the shelves I haunt stand.
