Archives
Opening a can of worms with this post on the place of libraries within broader archival impulses. I owe my second ‘life’ (no, we have not entered Mark Z’s Metaverse yet!) as a ghost to a few lines of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever about the scholar of the future being willing to listen to ghosts, […]
there is no linear history only strategic remembering – Postcommodity He is all out of joint with himself today, his world has been shaken, so I can’t have him type too much here (he may explode!). Nostalgic, time-travelling tales take their toll on his fragile, settler mind, especially when it comes to the bog of […]
Beware! If you play at ghosts, you become one. – Anon., The Kabbalah quoted as the epitaph to Valeria Luiselli “Face in the Crowd”, Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2014. Here is perhaps the most important observation that I have made since I became a library’s ghost: his so-called ‘living’ library, from which I direct his […]
Footnote added June 7, 2024 If you are reading this after following the link in the article ‘Companion, Peace’, from Experiments in Art Research: How Do We Live Questions Through Art?, edited by Sarah Travis, Azlan Guttenberg Smith, Catalina Hernández-Cabal, Jorge Lucero, a post-Minus Plato dialogue with Angela Baldus, you may be wondering what is […]
Indeed, all of Index Cards could be read as a meditation on reading and its relationship to labor (creative, domestic), illness, gender, history, and selfhood. The essays are rich with allusion (Genet, Walser, Woolf, Baldwin, countless others), though the references are handled without pretension—it amounts to an honest indexing of one reader’s very good library. – David […]
Nesting: A place to rest A site of liberation A place to self encounter Nesting To build a shelter To nurture To protect To grow To escape Nesting: A fragile structure A temple A delicate balance of things A place to replenish the self A corner for memories A room for contradictions Nesting: A utopia […]
1970: Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorn made a tour of American universities – Harvard (from where I am writing these lines [sic.], Yale, and Berkeley, among others. […]. When Godard and Gorin made their tour, American campuses were ready to rise up. They called on students to offer their support to the Black Panther Party […]
The Rojo is a red bookshelf in the living room of the rented house where my librarian lives with his partner and their son. At the start of every day, during the period of this project (which now does by the name The Library of Our Future: A Ghost’s Story – note the shift to […]
For all the poets he now reads since my ‘death’ (and remember I am a library’s ghost dictating these words to him, my librarian, from the shelves of his ‘living’ library, which I currently haunt), he still has lines of that old-type natural fouled-up guy-poet Philip Larkin enmeshed in his memory. Even when he opens […]