Index Cards: Selected Essays

The legacy of cultural imperialism, the consequences of gender, and the marginalization of the conquered are themes that combine and comment, one on the other, in Rosmarie Waldrop's remarkable new work, A Key into the Language of America. As "formally adventurous" (A.L. Nielson, Washington Review) as ever, German-born Waldrop has based her new collection on Rhode Island founder Roger Williams's 1643 guide (of the same name) to Narragansett Indian language and lore.

Rosmarie Waldrop, born in Germany in 1935, is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and essays, and a noted translator of French and German poetry. Her most recent books are The Nick of Time, Gap Gardening: Selected Poems(winner of the Los Angeles Book Prize), and Driven to Abstraction. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts of Letters, and is a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. For fifty-six years, she and her husband Keith Waldrop ran one of the country's most vibrant experimental poetry presses, Burning Deck, in Providence, Rhode Island.

Published here in a stunning edition with images created by Carson, several of the twenty-five startling poetic prose pieces have appeared in magazines and journals like The New Yorker and The Paris Review.

As Carson writes: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them ‘wrong.’”

Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba—the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people—and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand.

Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.

This landmark early book (its original printing by Angel Hair Books was 750 copies, and they are now extremely rare) by the late great Bernadette Mayer is finally available again, both as a tribute and a joy to read. Mayer was a marvelous poet in every stage of her long and prolific writing life, but many fans especially relish her restless, powerful, sexy, and erudite early work. One of her signal elements is a certain deadpan wit, on full display here with classics such as “Lookin’ Like Areas of Kansas” or “What Babies Really Do,” or the marvelous “Essay”:

I guess it’s too late to live on the farm

I guess it’s too late to move to a farm

I guess it’s too late to start farmingI guess farming

is not in the cards now...

I guess farming is really out...

I don’t want to be a farmer but my mother was right

I should never have tried to rise out of the proletariat

Unless I can convince myself as Satan argues with Eve

That we are among a proletariat of poets of all the classes

Each ill-paid and surviving on nothing

Or on as little as one needs to survive

Steadfast as any farmer and fixed as the stars

Tenants of a vision we rent out endlessly

In the fifth published title of the Decadent Editions series, Christine Smallwood explores Chantal Akerman’s adaptation of Marcel Proust’s The Prisoner, the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time, in a text that moves elegantly between Akerman’s films, Proust’s novel, and Smallwood’s own life.

De vijde Nederlandstalige GLEAN editie.

Bijdrages over Chantal Akerman, Biënnale van Venetië, Eline de Clercq, Samah Hijawi, Laure Prouvost, Anastasia Bay, Wim Delvoye, Riar Rizaldi, Haegue Yang, Nil Yalter, Anna Maria Mariolino.

In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

Translated by Daniella Shreir with an introduction by Eileen Myles and afterword by Frances Morgan.

"I spent some time looking for this quote in Moyra Davey’s Index Cards: “To do without people is for photography the most impossible of renunciation.” When I found it, I realized Davey was quoting “George Baker quoting Walter Benjamin.” Later on, I came upon the same quote again in Quinn Latimer’s Woman of Letters, where Latimer also talks about the way “critics adopt Davey’s unique literary style when writing about her work.” For writing to do without repeating the words of others is clearly an impossible renunciation.

Davey, who had internalized the critique of representation in the 1980s, describes the set of circumstances and coincidences that led her to photograph people in the subway after years of self- imposed restraint. For photography to do without people is not impossible, but merely hard and conceivably lonely. Until recently, Kristien Daem’s photographs mostly did without people. It took the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing obligations for her to feel the urge to photograph fellow artists. Daem has most often aimed the lens of her camera towards the quiet architecture of her native Belgium. She spent time researching and unearthing the unrealized works or forgotten projects of artists such as Fred Sandback. And when documenting the work of others, she tries to turn the task into a trade of her own."