She could see ahead of her, way at the road’s end, the volcano named Fire. – Jane Bowles ‘A Guatemalan Idyll’, reprinted in South as a State of Mind No. 9 [documenta 14 #4] Fall/Winter 2017. Some books are bigger than others, especially in how they loom large in life, and at the intersection of […]
He turned, finally, to the book Moyra Davey published on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition for the 2018 Scotiabank Photography Award in 2018. It is the largest book by Davey he owns, like Index Cards an anthology of texts, but also a rich survey of the artist’s photographic and film work. While flicking through […]
Sometimes a book sits on the shelf, looking at you, wondering when you will take the time to open it, and see what is inside, when you do, it is no surprise that there is something placed within its pages that is completely unexpected. Today it is the book Ibrahim Mahama, Exchange-Exchanger (1957-2057), edited by […]
The woman making this film is writing on the subway… It was a brief encounter; she was meeting some of you for the first time. The day before you left, she turned on the camera without asking. She is fascinated by you, doesn’t want to be a voyeur, knows she is doing just that, eavesdropping […]
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 […]
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 […]
