Sodus memory babe

In Eric Lorberer’s summer 2017 interview with John Ashbery and David Kermani, JA’s prodigious memory at one juncture drives the conversation from:

• The cover art from his Commotion of the Birds (2016), to
  
  
• the name of the artist who produced it, Caen Canier, to
  
  
• the name of the town in Italy, Gubbio, where the view through the window, depicted in the painting, was painted, to
  
  
• JA’s visit to that town, with Kenward Elmslie, at the time of their attendance at a festival in nearby Perugia, (thus probably meaning  summer 1965 in Spoleto – Gubbio is a couple hours away), to
  
  
• a line quoted from memory, “Profound melancholy is the note of Gubbio,” from the introduction to an old book (which TiR believes turns out to be Laura McCracken’s Gubbio, Past and Present – from 1905), to
  
  
• remembrance of Violet Page, a/k/a Vernon Lee, probably because of her Italian travel writing, to  
  
  
• at Kermani’s prompting, recollection of the mythical Wolf of Gubbio, to

• recollection of an engraving from around 1911 which depicts the Wolf,  
  

  
  

• finally leading JA hilariously  to expand:   

 “Oh yes, it ate a lot of boys and girls in the Middle Ages.  There’s an engraving by Carl Weidemeyer showing St. Francis shaking the paw of the Wolf of Gubbio, and the wolf has an expression on his face like, ‘Oh, alright, I won’t eat any more children!’ (laughter).”

An image of the engraving, and the wolf’s facial expression (be your own judge), can be viewed here.

The interview appeared many months back, in Rain Taxi. 

Excavated from the midst of TiR’s objectively bottomless reading backlog pile. 

TiR knew it kept these things around for a reason.