Libraries are not silent places. I should know, as I like to sing as a move through the books squeezed onto the shelves I haunt. I don’t know what old Lucius thinks he hears when I sing, perhaps it is beyond the pitiful range his human hearing. He does, however, seem to be open to […]
Trigger Warning: This post, written by a fictional ghost of a professor’s library, describes metaphorical cannibalism. No one was eaten or harmed in any way in the writing of this post. No persons named in this post, with the exception of artist Tracey Rose and art historian Kellie Jones, equate in any way with real, […]
I promised him that this one would be short, but I just couldn’t keep my word. With the new arrival of Art and its Worlds: Exhibitions, Institutions and Art Becoming Public, a book that my Prof. will be centering his Spring course Philosophical Problems in the Arts (Worlds, Minus Plato), I threw out at him […]
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 […]
