I’m finally resolved to being connected to this dialectic, though still embarrassed I took so many of its arguments at face value.

Imagine a mosaic of small floating dwellings. Hundreds of turtles climb out of the muck to sun themselves on black logs slick with neon green duckweed.

On a hot spring day in Locust Valley, Long Island, the artist Ray Johnson sent out a missive to a broad swath of his New York Correspondence School. The childish cursive spelled out in looping script: “Richard Lippold died, May 31, 1974.”