Care(less). A Supplement To On Care

The straplines of a number of advertisements drawn from magazines of the 1950s are turned into drawings, as though a particularly vain and narcissistic woman speaks (as of course she does), She is ‘en pleine forme’ of her beauty. (2016).

Take my hand. Trace the lines on my palm with your fingers. What size and shape are they? Take note of their form: are they forked, tasselled, wavy, chained, broken? Now examine my fingers. Tell me my disposition; tell me what beholds me.

Mapping the hand as cosmos as clinic as history as biography, hand reading is a technique suspended between medical and mystical judgement, empirical diagnosis and speculative divination. This book weaves the lives and work of the ‘reader’ and the ‘read’ together in an intricate fabric. The central ‘reader’ is Charlotte Wolff (1897–1986), a friend of Walter Benjamin, Helen Grund, and Ernst Schoen, who after fleeing from Germany’s new regime in 1933, took up hand reading in Paris to make ends meet. The ‘read’ are anonymous acrobats, dancers, and department-store managers, and members of the avant-gardes of Paris and London, from Antonin Artaud to Romola Nijinsky, Marcel Duchamp to Virginia Woolf. Arranged as an index, this book is both a guide to the techniques of hand reading and a critical theory of its history and practice, mixed with Wolff’s later work as a theorist of gender and sexuality.

"Hand That Touch This Fortune Will is a study devoted to friendship, refracted through the portal of the upturned palm. Charlotte Wolff met the world by examining what was written on the hands of the times.  What did she read in the landscapes of this intimate organ of touch, and what, through reading, was she fatally unable to see?  Through a gentle fragmentation reminiscent of The Arcades Project, Dolbear acts as a thoughtful guide through fascinating and nearly forgotten passages in the European history of palmistry under late capitalism—along with all the political uncertainties and faggy gestures that formed its nimbus.  With extraordinary attention to the peculiar experiments in living that have scarcely left a trace in the archive, Hand That Touch gathers the reader around those bars, clinics, and drawn curtains, where, under the shadow of fascist diagnosis, the occult comes palm to palm with the queer past." — M. Ty

Each book holds a very lovely insert of a hand reading chart, designed by Ana Cecilia Breña and Sam Dolbear. Printed on tracing paper, it allows the reader to read their hand as they read the book.

Sam Dolbear was a Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin from 2020 to 2024. His research addresses the life and work of Walter Benjamin and those around him. He has taught and published widely, including, with Esther Leslie, Dissonant Waves: Ernst Schoen and Experimental Sound in the 20th Century (2023). He is a co-founder of the sound and radio collective MayDay Radio.

For nearly two years the author collected phrases from the exhibition press releases she received through email, posting certain of them on Facebook in a rather unsystematic way (that is to say, when she felt like it), with only one change, that of the personal pronoun, so each statement appeared vainglorious, absurd, even tragic. She supposes the measure was if they made her laugh or gasp or used words she deplores when thinking or writing about art. The posts gathered quite a following. Some people still mention them to her, and others have asked her to look at their own press releases before circulation.

These extracts have provoked laughter, disbelief (especially when performed as public readings, when she has  been obliged to swear to their veracity), self-recognition, and yes, shame.

She had only three rules: 1) She would not quote the press release of anyone she knows (certainly she could have done—she must admit that both a friend and someone she dislikes intensely have slipped in, and she fervently hopes neither ever reads this book); 2) She would not alter anything except the pronoun (this is largely true; however, for this book, she corrected some errors of punctuation and spelling, changed spellings to their English form, and employed her beloved Oxford comma); and 3) She would not use anything the artist had written (this, too, is true, save for one exception that was too wonderful not to include).

Finally, she  gathered a collection of endorsements, some along the way, others when she indicated this work was done. She is still alive and she continues to labour in obscurity. 

Books in dreams were once made of scrolls and parchments. Once, books in dreams could only manifest themselves as clay. Scratches became meaningful. Books still tumble down. Most rooms are flooded; the waters are generally at ankle height.

Shapes Found for Living offers short tales—rumours and fables coalescing  from the uneven experience of living in this century and vivifying the reader’s imagined memory theatre. The collection moves from rude immediacy via questioning forms of language depicting unstable mental states, the near madness of trying to live or love,  to the absurd remnants of an (envisioned) ancestral recall. 

A synthesis of dreamwork and bookwork, combining collaboration with dream-vision report, creative writing, and AI—a “Media Archaeology of Dreams.” Its central character is the author’s voice in this process through ekphrasis. What/where is the separation between the ekphrastic object, the dream, and its description?

Somewhere between fact and fiction, 
memoir and novelisation ... 
a tidal thread of correspondences. 

A novel-in-correspondence, a neither/nor publication defying easy category—a book that rests somewhere between fiction and memoir—Envois is a collection of letters sent to Sharon Kivland by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan during the course of their long and stormy love affair from 1953 until his death in 1981.

A publication assembled chronologically—following the yearly seminars of Lacan and structured per their delivery—and in which love emerges as a form of appropriation; a litmus for authenticity; a look book for learning; an atlas for forms of yearning; a map for multimodal thinking; a log book for passing hours; a calendar to keep track of the quickening of time; an itinerary of preoccupations; a discipline; a vocation; a dressing up and dressing down of language; a lens; an aperture; a tool shed; a window; a corridor; and/or an arena of investigation. Kivland was not listening for psychoanalytic theory and she is faithful to the words of her beloved, attuned to his speech towards her and her alone... And yet, well, and yet, all that remains as her master breaks the silence.

This eighth instalment of BFTK is on letters and letters. It takes the double meaning of this word as its point of dispatch, inviting recipients to think through and respond to — directly and indirectly — ideas around correspondence, addressing and alphabets. What it means to be in correspondence with somebody, the initiation and continuation of this communicative exchange and what happens when it is severed or lost. How to write directly towards a you, to you; to a particular reader, object, locale. The volume is littered with letters. There are letters about letters, letters to letters, letters that crease, fold, tear and rip, letters that are sent and lost, found and read. There are letters that pile up, their combinations arranged and rearranged to form comprehensive linguistic logics, and there are letters that are simply letters. Contributions sit in eight-page signatures, of which there are twenty-six in total. Of the eight hundred bound copies, twenty-six are left unbound, returned to discrete correspondence, loose abécédaire units for exchange — letters to be leafed through and addressed once more.

PLEASE TAKE A LOOK AT YOUR
SHADOW IN THAT MIRROR
Chang Yuchen
(pp.1–8, A)

BESTIARY FOR A NON-GENETIC DESCENDANT
Bhanu Kapil
(pp.9–16, B)

THROW STUFF AWAY
Hannah Regel
(pp.17–24, C)

THE MOON HATH XXX DAYS:
LETTERS FOR LETTERS
Helen Marten
(pp.25–32, D)

WHAT DOES THE LOSS FEEL LIKE?
Meg Miller
(pp.33–48, E, F)

LIGHT UP THE A
Kate Briggs
(pp.49–56, G)

THE POSTCODE CONNECTION
Rebecca Ross
(pp.57–72, H, I)

(LETTER) TO S… LABYRINTH-CORTEX
Michèle Métail, trans. Thea Petrou
(pp.73–80, J)

RACKETY CORRESPONDENCES /
A CORRESPONDING RACKET
Nisha Ramayya
(pp.81–96, K, L)

THE COIN OF THE REALM
Lucie Elven
(pp.97–104, M)

UNFOLDING FOLDED FANTASIES:
A CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE SEATED SCRIBE
Fatema Abdoolcarim
(pp.105–112, N)

DEAR DEAREST DEAR MOTHER
Alice Butler
(pp.113–120, O)

/ DON’T BOTHER THE CREASE
Tice Cin
(pp.121–128, P)

FEELING LETTERS, SEEING BLUE
Gemma Blackshaw
(pp.129–144, Q, R)

LINES OF GRACE AND DISGRACE
Francis Haselden
(pp.145–152, S)

AN ABC OF MIMICRY
Jeffrey Stuker & Jan Tumlir
(pp.153–176, T, U, V)

ADDRESS
Céline Mathieu
(pp.177–184, W)

MY VOICE FOLDS YOU
Thea Petrou
(pp.185–192, X)

A LONG DISTANCE LULLABY
Vibeke Mascini
(pp.193–200, Y)

DEBT OF GOLD CAN BE PAID OFF,
DEBT OF KINDNESS IS CARRIED OVER DEATH
Chang Yuchen
(pp.201–208, Z)

LETTERS ON LETTERS
FROM LETTERS ON LETTERS
Matthew Stuart
(covers)

A meditative reflection on language and its loss.

How does one language inherit another? Defeat, erase or live through another? How to speak dead is Walid Sadek's meditative reflection on language, dead or victorious. At heart, beyond defeat and victory, it is a reflection on how one can approach a speaking that is of neither a living language nor a dead one. A speaking that knows loss and knows it is woven into every uttered word, every spoken sentence. A loss that becomes syntax.

"There, where the battle is lost and won and where, after the hurly-burly is done, we may approach a speaking that is of neither a living language nor a dead one. A speaking that knows loss and knows it is woven into every uttered word, every spoken sentence. A loss that becomes syntax."
Walid Sadek

Walid Sadek (born 1966 in Beirut) is a Lebanese artist and writer. He is a professor at the Department of Fine Arts and Art History of the American University of Beirut.

Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, Dao Strom’s Yellow Songs vibrates with the ramifications and ripples of Empire. Each of the four Yellow Songs books reckons with the intimate consequences of the colonial project, reconfiguring them into complex and lucid, literal and figurative songs of selfhood. Embodied, critical, wholehearted, collective, personal, genre-defying—Yellow Songs renders the brute force of history with tender precision. Art book quality printing in full color with felt paper inserts.

Yellow Songs 1: Voiced-Voiceless unearths, unwinds, un-bodies the violence of stigma, reclaiming the ventriloquized voice of David Bowie's "China Girl” through a lyric-critical essaying (assaying) of cultural tropes, racialized and gendered power plays, and memory.

In I presumed possession, my language, my loss, I begin in third person to write about what it means to lose a mother tongue, and about how that loss is never natural but engineered: by state assessments, border conditions, and a free market of articulation. I write about language as transaction—what you gain in the language of power at the cost of becoming inarticulate in the language of origin. I write about the monolingual paradigm as a political demand rather than a natural inheritance, about standardization as a form of border-drawing, and about the grief of hearing the people you love measured as insufficient. The text moves between the personal and the structural, between a grandmother forgetting and a language policy forbidding. It is about what we lose, and about what we have learned to accept as acceptable to lose.

Cecilie Fang is an anti-disciplinary artist and writer from China and Denmark, based in Amsterdam. Generated through writing, her process-oriented work unfolds across performance, publication, material micro-performativity, and installation.

Is it the computerization of the planet
Or a loosening of my fidelity to suffering
I don’t understand the intensity
I’ve hidden here but I know I despaired
Of finding a physical place to keep
My tears. Now what. Seas that go turquoise
When you stop looking at them . . .
 
Wrestling with the mind of war, at times shocking in its self-analysis, Wave of Blood is a furious and sincere essay, an eclipse notebook, a family chronicle, all told in the poetry of witness.

Praise for Ariana Reines:

Ariana Reines is a go-for-broke artist who honors her traditions by being like no one else. Some of us have made a fetish of our stupidity, pretending to forget history, and some of us have made a fetish of despair, congratulating ourselves on melancholia, but Ariana is too brilliant and too alive for either of those sad luxuries... I am convinced of the authenticity of the summonses she receives and the summonses she issues and when I read her I am reminded that all of this is a calling before it's an identity or career. Her voice-which is always more than hers alone is a dialectic between the very ancient and the bleeding edge. - Ben Lerner

Reines's books are works of intellectual commitment and structural sophistication; at the same time, they allow the raw stuff of being, in all its messiness, to enter the page. -The White Review

Mind-blowing. - Kim Gordon

Her writing is queer and raunchy, raw and occult, seemingly never pulling away from her deepest vulnerabilities. Yet Reines simultaneously maintains a feeling of epic poetry, of ancient intention. She moves between worlds in search of the divine and the self. - The New York Times

These are the kinds of poems that reorient you in the world, make you understand how little you know, but how much is inside you. - NYLON

Who is the Oriental Cyborg? asks Aditi Kini in this collection of notes, jokes, and queries into the provenance of a creature designed for labor, 3-D printed in the technoscientific post-colonies, modeled on old automata. Race is a technology, that we know, and technology can be raced — so why inquire into this at all? Perhaps this, the Oriental Cyborg, is a fantasy more than a memory, or an echo more than a form — or just an essayist’s extraction of personal anguish and humor from globalist decay.

Taking on the form of historical analysis / lyrical essay / documentary poem / experimental buzzword / positionality statement, this chapbook and its titular character might still be an elusive mystery even after reading.

“’What is a ghost but a person removed from corporeality?’ This is one among layers of questions Aditi Kini poses in Oriental Cyborg, a lyrical excavation into survival in the era of techno racial capitalism, and its “deleting touch” that so easily voids—reduces to faceless services—the exploited individuals performing various acts of techno-labor. A grieved searching drives this hybrid essay, which feels urgent and necessary as threats from AI grab headlines. This work compels us to see our culture’s love affair with technological progress as a means for continued colonization and domination. It also reminds us, and celebrates, that those erased don’t stay silent forever. We privileged may not be able to hear them yet, but those who are listening know. They roar.” — Allison Cobb

“In the mirror of Aditi Kini’s Oriental Cyborg, I become the monster—a hopeless automaton, an intelligence stripped of roar. With titanium-threaded theory, Kini radiantly stitches together the ideal Asian working machine. Get your own Oriental cyborg today: super dazzling and sexy, historically embroidered, an oracular truth who never tires, never complains, forever mute, what perfection!” — Lily Hoàng

Aditi Kini is an undisciplined writer. They’ve done both NYC and the MFA (at UC San Diego). They were a finalist/alternate for the 2020-22 Jerome Award for Literature. They edit Lumpenpockets, “a nonquarterly sick rag.” Read their words in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Rumpus, Denver Quarterly, The New York Times, and elsewhere. They’re at work on multiple projects, all at once. They are blessed with two dogs, Lucy the Happy and Charly Kong, who make life worth living.