Milk – Through a Glass Darkly – Peter Blegvad
Milk: Through a Glass Darkly by Peter Blegvad / ISBN 9781910010365 / 94-page paperback with flaps, 5.6 x 9 inches, published in 2023 by Uniformbooks (UK)
A new book from a long-time fave… (the index of quotation sources makes a nice reading list as well)
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For over fifty years, since he was in his early twenties, Peter Blegvad has been collecting quotations about milk, the primary substance of nutrition and of wonder. All the while his belief in the numinousness of milk has been compounded, that in its opacity and fluid density it is a thing full of both meaning and mystery.
Milk: Through a Glass Darkly gathers these quotations into a mosaic, or literary collage, consisting of almost three hundred and fifty separate passages that consider “light, smell, writing, mothers, fathers, colour, nothingness, regression, gender, race, food, cattle, ectoplasm, anti-matter, the moon, sex and insanity amongst other things”.
“…on one level the book is merely a compendium but on another it amounts to a kind of autobiography, a portrait of the self, mediated through milk. Glowing, elemental, otherworldly and full of natural goodness…” — Ian Sansom, ‘A 50-year obsession with the white stuff’, The Spectator
Peter Blegvad is a musician, songwriter, artist, writer, teacher and broadcaster. Born in New York, he lives in London with his wife, the painter Chloë Fremantle. He has been making music since the mid-1970s with Slapp Happy, Faust, Henry Cow, John Greaves, the Golden Palominos, John Zorn, Andy Partridge and others. As a broadcaster, he created many dozens of ‘eartoons’ (audio cartoons) and several radio plays for BBC Radio 3. His comic strip, The Book of Leviathan, is published in the UK by Sort Of Books and is also available in Mandarin, Cantonese and French. In 2000 he was awarded the Ordre de la Grande Gidouille by the Collège de ’Pataphysique, Paris, and in 2011 was elected president of the London Institute of ’Pataphysics. A book about his life-long epistemological project, Imagine, Observe, Remember, was published by Uniformbooks in 2020.
