Bordernotes

• Photographs, A Story

  So, imagine finding, just happening upon such a roll or spool of undeveloped film. From before digital. A taut canister of a photo record of someone’s intentions. You could tell it. It could go like this.

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  Belle Lettrists: Nicola Tyson, Maria Lassnig, Amy Sillman

  I have two very particular books of letters on my desk. Particular in that neither is the collected correspondence of one writer in touch with a number of recipients over time, nor gathered together to reflect the breadth of the recipients, nor the myriad points of connections the writer made in a lifetime, nor focused on an event of significance—a crisis lived through and reported on, personal or universal. More particular than that.

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  Through the Eyes of Another: Black and Visible

  How many ways to say—and how many voices to call—systemic racism; to say unyielding white supremacy; to say invisibility that goes unremarked; to say denial of personhood?

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  Subjectivities

  In the span of three years three books have been made available to readers in North America where the simple statement “I am my own subject” could apply.

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  Clarice Lispector: The Thereness of Language

  Everyone who reads Clarice Lispector grapples with the figure who can’t be interrogated now, since she died in 1977, and couldn’t be queried any more readily when she was alive. To read her is to enter a state of involuntariness.

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  Dreaming Robert Frank, Dreaming Walter Benjamin

  Awake too much, the dream and its fragmented, fogged and transitory qualities, I find a seductive state. The lapse and slip and the nuance, already elusive by its very suggestion, is an amplitude to which I am drawn.

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  Nancy Spero: Grit and Grace

  For me it all started in 1991 in Munich at the Glyptothek. First visit there and unsure about the city with its place as a fertile bed for the rise of the National Socialist Party, indeed its foundation was there in 1919. Even though it was May, the weather had turned and we were faced—dressed in light jackets, jeans and sneakers—with angled sheets of rain and snow…

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  Promise, Nathan Englander

  Larry exhibits obsessive-compulsive behaviour. When he was a young man, its manifestations were more prevalent, the urges to follow the inclinations directed by this disorder more compelling. Now he is a mature adult, the expressions of the disorder have receded, are in check. My obsession—of a milder, readerly sort—is with the author of the book kaddish.com, which houses the character Larry. It’s Nathan Englander and it’s this book and the others by the same author.

• Dangerous Persuasions

  I’ve just finished reading Correspondence Course, An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle, edited by the noted art historian Kristine Stiles (Duke University Press, 2010)—a powerful bound sheaf of paper—more than 500 pages filled with letters, mostly written by Carolee Schneemann, with a number written to her. They date from 1956 to 1999 and there are more not included in this volume.

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  The Heart of Absence: Patrick Modiano

  Fleur Jaeggy is the most accomplished scribe of detachment. In her collections of short stories, I Am the Brother of XX and Last Vanities, and in the novels, SS Proleterka and Sweet Days of Discipline, there is a prevailing sense of isolation—readily recognizable as the epidemic condition of our time—an almost truculent inability to connect, and desperation without surfeit. And here is Patrick Modiano as heartbreakingly accomplished in these unfortunate states as she is, describing the daily coming into being of the abandoned child who builds a person from the sad materials of neglect, lack of regard, of never having been held, or insufficiently—and then overlooked and left behind.

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  Spiritualisme: Hilma af Klint, Paul Klee, Kai Althoff

  Before global warming and the publication of Gertrude Stein’s “The Making of Americans”, Paul Klee noted in his diary (“The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918”) that in Switzerland the summer of 1911 was one of extreme heat.

• Uneasy Bridges to Writing a Fine Madness

  The market is a mean destructive place. The motivation each day to lift the flaps, wind the blinds, unlatch the metal screens and draw back the locked gates in the the market’s shops is greed.
  

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