Prophet, curse me the blabbing lip,And curse me the British vermin, the rat;I know not whether he came in the Hanover ship,But I know that he lies and listens muteIn an ancient mansion’s crannies and holes:Arsenic, arsenic, sure, would do it,Except that now we poison our babes, poor souls!It is all used up for that. […]
With these dispatches steadily accumulating, as the books move from shelf to shelf or from shelf to bag to car to office to floor, I think it is time to reveal something that I have been holding back until now. My haunting of Lucius Fletcher’s living library – yes, that is now the name I […]
Maybe one of the most recited mantras of the last few years – at least in my perception – has been “we need to take care of each other.” This has been so, at least since Brexit, the election of the 45th president of the United States, the march of the alt-right with chants like […]
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 […]
