Ban’s Bibliomancy

Trying to make myself write some sort of commentary on the latest “emergency” reportage, I tear up my notes as soon as I write them.

Roland Barthes

Some books whisper to me as I pass through the shelves I haunt. The final pages of Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books 2015) , amid the various mutations and deletions of her Ban project, I hear her speak of Bibliomancy, described as “a form of divination that happens in a library space.”

Notebook 27 [1/2/08] [Rogue Notebook]: “on the plane above Kabul. Thelonius brought a red balloon. Above Afghanistan. He’s sleeping now. En route to India, I’m out of touch. In this sky with my son. Post-genre. Hybridity is a genre still forming. Hybridity is building something to attract not the insects: but the light. So, in a way, it’s a void, a kind of fertility. Why don’t I write?”

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