A gift:

my tabs

Hello everyone,

It was hard to know where to start this month’s letter. There is a project coming to fruition at the moment, and I am bursting at the seams to tell you, but I have yet to decide how and when. For a Sagittarius like me, patience and discernment when it comes to communication is rare, but this thing is important enough to me that I will put myself out of my comfort zone and keep my mouth shut.

Because this is the summer solstice, I knew I wanted to write about abundance somehow, but time-wise I need to do something quick and cute. And then I realized: tabs. An abundance of open, unread tabs.

There for a calm train ride, or a lazy afternoon I choose to spend catching up on my tabs. I am sure you have open tabs too. Maybe you would like to add some of these to your collection? If you end up reading one or two, could you leave me a voice note with a little summary?

This exercise makes me think of the game when you ask your friend to show you every item in her wallet and explain why it’s there and what it means, or every key and charm on their keyring. It’s intimacy in the mundane.

Idea for an app I would pay money for: a program that takes all your tabs and after three months, say, organizes them into a little digest, and then prints them out in a magazine or booklet format and sends it to you in the mail.

I currently have two browser windows open, each with its own selection of tabs. Sometimes I move the tabs from one browser to another, making one the “theory” browser and the other the “to-do” browser. Right now they are not very clearly distinguished. The first is more recent than the second (some date back to February!). I’ll mark the separation.

Quick announcement: I am performing in Berlin on July 12th and 13th! Info and tickets here. It’s Lester St. Louis’ work called In Residence, this time run by Chris Williams. Nikima Jagudajev is in it too! Among other things, the two of us will dance a lot. I haven’t danced in Berlin in years so catch it while you can! It’s on a boat/art gallery called Hošek Contemporary, and is part of the “Is it cold in the water?” curated by Creamcake. See you there!

Anyways, on with the tabs.

• Barbara Browning’s home page. Barbara Browning is a writer who is also a dancer, and who has written many books of fiction and cultural theory. Can’t remember who turned me onto her. I haven’t read anything yet, but I keep the tab open so that I can remind myself to buy one of her books.

• FEELING DIFFERENCE by Vika Kirschenbauer. I am half way through it. She has a bunch of texts up on her website and I make my way through them a couple paragraphs at a time. I was so into AESTHETICS OF EXPLOITATION: THE ARTIST AS EMPLOYER, in which she asks, among other things, “Why is it that even artists with a leftist and socially conscious agenda fail so terribly at understanding their roles as bosses?” It’s about how the art field is actually the most capitalist field of all, despite how being anti-capitalist is one of the most valuable attributes an artist can have. Interesting incongruity: there are probably more artists who abandon their own work to be employed by other artists than there are artists with direct financial engagements with institutions.

• THE VALUE OF AUTONOMY – A CONVERSATION BETWEEN MARINA VISHMIDT AND KERSTIN STAKEMEIER ABOUT THE REPRODUCTION OF ART. So I haven’t started to read this but Kerstin is my theory teacher. I am a big fan of hers. If you are reading this Kerstin, sorry I have not yet been brave enough to give you this compliment in real life. Marina Vishmidt died a few months ago, and I am now realizing the breadth of her legacy. Ciaran Finlayson spoke to our theory class about his new book Perpetual Slavery, exceptionally, I think, thanks to Marina. I loved Marina’s text called Management and Maintenance, and I will read this tab. Quite a few people seem to have lost a great friend and mentor. Condolences to you all.

• Pdf of Eve Sedewick: Paranoid reading or reparative reading, or, you’re so paranoid you probably think this essay is about you. This text came out of a symposium about the figure of the assistant in art, during a lecture by Miriam Stoney. I have forgotten the context. Cool title. Hope I read it.

• Pdf of The Red Virgin: a poem of Simone Weil. It is possible that I will soon become a Simone Weil fangirl, joining the ranks of Johanna Hedva, Chris Kraus, Tamara Antonjievic, and many others. This link is here as a potential onramp, or “Einfahrt” if you’re German. I hope to write more from within that vantage point soon.

• On Autotheory and Autofiction: Staking Genre by Teresa Carmody in the LARB. This link arrived via a whatsapp message from Melanie Jame Wolf, who is always looking out for me. Must read soon.

• Brenna Bhandar: Colonial Modern Law: property as power. This is a link to a video of a lecture held at HKW. I have watched half and it seems really interesting. It was required for my theory class, but I didn’t have time to get through all of it. We were talking about the proposal of replacing identity with condition. Given how indigenous groups have mostly suffered from being defined by their cultural or racial identities, perhaps it is more interesting, powerful, and relevant to think of how certain conditions create groups. For indigenous people, land rights are defining conditions. For Palestinians, some of whom remain, some of whom have blue cards, and some of whom are diasporic, conditions of dispossession are potentially more relevant than geographical location, bloodlines, or fluency in Arabic, for example.

• Whiteness as Property by CHERYL I. HARRIS in the Harvard Law Review. Definitely want to read this. It’s part of the same line of thought as the preceding tab. Rather than defining whiteness as a racial identity category, it can be more usefully understood through the condition of whiteness’ relationship to property, which is baked in to American law.

• Formless: A user’s guide by Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss. Also from theory. Kerstin said it was an important exhibition catalogue but also a very bad one. I’m guessing it means influential but stupid. Will probably scroll through and delete.

• Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept by Rabea Eghbariah* in the Columbia Law Review. This talks about how Zionism and Nakba are mutually constitutive, how the Nakba is something that has evolved over time. Here are some quotes from the abstract: “this ongoing Nakba includes episodes of genocide and variants of apartheid but remains rooted in a historically and analytically distinct foundation, structure, and purpose.” And also, “It positions displacement as the Nakba’s foundational violence, fragmentation as its structure, and the denial of self-determination as its purpose.”  

• A link to a book called “Parapolitics: Cultural freedom and the Cold War.” It’s about how the US uses modernist art as propaganda during the Cold War. Sounds really interesting but I probably will end up deleting. Do you sometimes go through your tabs and delete them?

• Palestine’s Martyrdom Upends the World of Law by Anonymous. This came up in theory class after I kept asking about Simone Weil having a martyr complex. At some point Kerstin said no because this is how we are understanding martyrdom in this class. Can’t wait to read!

• Pdf of “Quit Smoking in One Day” by Jan Geurtz. Oohlala!

• Ariana Reines’ home page. Tamara Antonijevic who co-hosts my master’s program said I should read Reines because she is as close as one comes to an actual prophet in this day and age.

• DEFINING MY OWN OPPRESSION: NEOLIBERALISM AND THE DEMANDS OF VICTIMHOOD by Chi Chi Shi. Apparently, Shi does something very impressive and amusing in this text, but I can’t remember exactly what. I think it’s probably that she makes a very convincing argument against identity politics. Also from theory class.

• A derisory French newsletter my mother sent me about Macron’s idiotic strategies in 4 points. It includes the savior complex, radical individualism, and blind faith in the ‘silent’ french. I have since read it and deleted the tab so I don’t know if it counts, but it seemed relevant.

How we doing? Ready for the second browser window? This one is the older one.

• Like a Real Veil, Like a Bad Analogy: Dissociative Style and Trans Aesthetics by Maxi Wallenhorst. I need to read this!! Maxi is a friend and Kerstin keeps talking about this e-flux essay. Maxi writes interesting things about dissociation in it.

• A Dance to the Music of Fucked-Up Time by Anahid Nersessian. Gah this was so long ago I fear I do not even remember why I had this tab open. We read Nersessian’s writing about Keats (or maybe we just talked about it?) in theory class, and Kerstin curated this essay during her stint at Mousse Magazine. This essay is about criticism, asking why and how our attention goes where it goes, I think.

• Xleepyfay & Aemmonia: The Xenofeminist Hauntology, by Xleepyfay. Sometime in February I got really into the blog that published this essay, Do Not Research. They publish stuff about internet subcultures. Sometimes I dive deep into that topic, and I am never really sure what happens when I come out.

• A BRIEF GLOSSARY OF SOCIAL SADISM BY ANA TEIXEIRA PINTO AND KERSTIN STAKEMEIER. This is about artists and curators who flirt with the alt right, or who are alt right. Artists who justify transgression with free speech. Anyone who is confused about Dime Square or Red Scare or LD50 or Dana Schutz’s portrait of Emmet Till at the Whitney Biennial 2017 should read.

• Pdf of Roger Caillois’ The Writing of Stones. Not sure what this is about but I remember when typed it in I was like “ah!” and that it sounded very relevant to me.

• Hauntology and Lost Futures: Trauma Narratives in the Contemporary Gothic by Emma Dee. I want to learn more about the gothic, both in the sense of the cathedral, the aesthetic, and the lifestyle. Not sure which one this 6-page essay addresses or where I found it. Probably from Do Not Research.

• Cottage Cheese Muffins on 101cookbooks. I’ve been reading this vegetarian cooking blog since 2011, and I swear it is really good. These muffins are protein rich, savory breakfast delights I want to make asap. You know what? I’m going to add the ingredients to my shopping list right now!

• Can Literature Save the World? On Translating Attar’s “The Conference of the Birds” By Sholeh Wolpé. No idea where this is from. A newsletter I subscribed to I think. Attar is a sufi poet from the 12 century, pre-Rumi. This is an essay about the process of translation, but I pulled out a beautiful excerpt from the translated epic poem itself. The nightingale says:

So deeply intoxicated am I with the rose
that my own existence is nothing to me.
It’s demanding to be filled with such love;
my desire for the slender rose is sufficient.

• Berlins Kultursenator Joe Chialo im Porträt: Katholischer Afropäer. This is a portrait in German of the cultural senator in Berlin. Apparently, in the article he compares himself to Jesus. I wanted to read about it for myself, but the German is daunting. Would love a voice note summary!!

• Adidas by Stella McCartney Hika Outdoor Sandals. Are these my new summer shoes? They are so beautiful!

Thank you for reading! Happy solstice and enjoy the tabs!

Love,

Louise