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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. […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Tina was still convinced that she would soon be leaving Mexico and was fairly sure about where she would be going. Germany seemed an attractive choice and the February 1930 issue of Deutsches Magazin von Mexiko published several of her photographs along with an interview given some time previously, which mentioned that ‘Tina Modotti desperately […]
After about ten minutes it began to rain, and though Dalie [Giroux] didn’t mind, the umbrella was not enough to protect the camera, so we moved inside to a couch in the living room where we sat and talked, off camera, for hours, about her work, her writing and about ourselves, our early lives separated […]