Last year I had the new experience of being asked to write an endorsement for a colleague’s new book. That was Nicolas Pillai’s Jazz as a Visual Language: Film, Television and the Dissonant Image. It was nice to be asked again not long after to do the same for Scott Navicky’s new novel 3 Essays on Imagereality. Here’s what I contributed for the back cover followed by a précis of the work:
“3Essays on Imagereality is the photographic picaresque: a world of image-multiplicity, failed theory and a 24-hours reflecting on the image, the truth and the knuckleball within the walls of the museum.” – Paul Brobbel, Len Lye Curator at the Govett – Brewster Art Gallery
Haunted by photography and fueled by failure, Carlos Spencer-Bayard is an insomniac anythingarian boozehound, who is known to his friends and family simply as “Ghost.” A keen observer of the strangemotion of his own mind, he spends his days engrossed in the daily demands of parenting (i.e. liontaming), but at night, when the noose of nightmadness tightens and the turtle of thought is flipped onto its back, he wrestles with Imagereality. Understanding Imagereality is no easy task, as images are everywhere; and wherever images go, imagetheory must follow. Thus an imagethinker is a scholar of the cultural kitchen sink: nothing is verboten. Shakespeare’s Sonnets and potential self- slaughter, Gnostic intoxication, Gérard Depardieu’s inexplicable sex appeal, Talkreality (also known as Squawkreality), drag queens, author photos, absinthe, and endlessnessnessness: everything is permissible under Imagereality’s spectacular perspectival sun.
More info from the publisher, Montag Press and you can order from Amazon.
Paul Brobbel 
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