I always get something from the threads that Bhanu starts: thanks to you threadsters and of course to our departing teacher Miss Bhanu.

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–Thom

We are attempting to find new ways to create images through evocation, absence, latency. Latency is a state which haunts all of our work. Traditionally, latency is defined as the state of what exists in a non-apparent manner, but which can manifest itself at a given moment. The latent image is the invisible, yet-to-be developed image on an exposed surface.

To this should be added the idea of “the dormant”, of slumber, of slumbering, of something that can be awakened. To us, latency is beyond evidence. It is the reminiscence of an image, of knowledge but which can be barely grasped. How can one produce images, export them, move them around, while avoiding cut-and-dried definitions? As image producers, we try to avoid being made use of, or taken over by, propaganda within our country or region, or reduced to a simplifying , often “orientalist”, vision. Our work takes into account this possible risk, this breach.

Aware of this situation, we resort to the idea of the anecdotal. Etymologically, the anecdotal appears as something unrevealed, something kept secret, at odds with a certain concept of history.

In our opinion, the anecdotal is not necessarily metaphoric, but rather symptomatic. It is not small history trying to reflect history at large, but a research around sensations, and the re-appropriation of events, like elements of space-time that record a specific, significant moment.

The symptomatic is therefore the possibility of an image, the manifestation of something made visible. A symptomatic image is intimately linked to its context, to a situation and to a history. It is a proposal, an experience. By going back to a personal fact, to a given event, or to “something secret”, we refuse the spectacular aspect and the general sociological subject. The symptomatic image is the product of a situation that cannot be reduced to an allegory or a symbol.

The anecdotal is the possibility of approaching our history. If we consider official history as written by the winners, there is another unofficial and subversive space governed by the anecdotal, “the thing kept secret,” which perforates that official frame. Latency is about affirming a presence. The anecdotal is the story and development of that presence.

~ from Joana Hadjithomas’s and Khalil Joreige’s “Wonder Beirut,” in *Out of Beirut*, Modern Art Oxford, Manchester, 2006.
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Your words on Melissa Buzzeo’s “paragraph” are so beautiful. Yes, these are the words that open the book and what follows is language that is vertical, “triage,” as Melissa calls it — the triage of content, but also the gesture of the lovers picking up these meshed, nodal bits of organic debris and laying them on each other’s bodies. Slapping them on, in a way. Like Elfreide Jelinek’s “meat blanket,” I thought when I read it. She just sent me the manuscript so I haven’t read it all yet: I am waiting, I think, for Sunday, when my son goes skiing with his dad. On that note, thank you for the “Snowman wakes before dawn”!
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Thnx for the list, that is great. I would add to mine The Stolen Party by Liliana Heker (trans. Alberto Manguel) & I’ve been reading Michael Turner’s new novel “8×10″ which I am liking. That’s crazy/amazing that your dad taught himself English by reading Woolf… reminds me of my Yiddish speaking grandmother who insisted on taking her Isaac Bashevis Singer with her to her very last home, even tho her eyesight was too poor to read anything anymore. So really it was a totem.
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“At the bottom of the sea, unidentified lovers have survived The Devastation, the water as it violently emptied, the pronouns as they disappeared into the Marine Biology of the ocean floor. Covered in decayed matter, that of the floor, that of themselves, what was once human skin, reeking of a terrible stench, the lovers repeat this one gesture: Reaching and pulling off from the other the clotted elements of the sea. The once animals, plants—-this matted reach. All that is left of language in an alternate system of life. They reach and they recoil in a gesture of extreme erotcism. Extreme because it is all that is left, because it combines what is left and pushes against limit. Erotic because it is the ultimate reach: through nothing, back to one self: the other body at the limit of self.”

These are some facts. Also: I asked my essay class today read Sina’s newest book, and Asher Gaffar’s wasp book, as examples, in part, excerpted, as prose. As metagenomic efforts. Also, Dodie Bellamy’s ACADEMONIA. Also the Belladonna Elders series. Tisa Bryant/Chris Kraus. Also Monica Ali’s BRICK LANE, for the moment when the trapdoor falls, which leads to: Sarah Water’s FINGERSMITH. If I could, I would show you my grandfather’s notebook, his planning of an orchard’s growth. 19…; and the copies, from the 1960s, of Virginia Woolf’s novels, which my father learned English from, in a bedsit in Golder’s Green. Madness! Tucked in is a prescription, with the price in shillings, for a sedative: Nat.Mur….

A lighthouse, a broken beach….

Kate Zambreno’s insane blog. Les Figues books. This wild animal: Amina Cain. She writes about black wings on the sidewalk. Douglas Martin’s ecstatic triptych, “Your Body Figured.” Rachel Pollack’s talks on the tarot, which are extemporaneous and do not exist in an archive.
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500,500,2500 “by lent finished. flowers fate in and This page to lets at for be that have passive, writes, in, kind own books to That…”

@600,600,2500 “finished. This lent by have and in, flowers language to own I for that expecting/another the be away, who to particular…”

@926,1112,2600 “finished. expecting/another This language that the in, and own have I away, flowers for us for look on who particular…”

@5500,5500,2500 “language expecting/another every the of by the that for finished. that be and witness at them own lent only away, I burn…”

I guess we burn the page to investigate the purpose of being.
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And the previous versions and revisions, the history of deletion and cutting that gets stuck somewhere in the computer. the notebook materializes that but so does the computer which I realize right now, as I’m typing this, is a kind og garbage dump, or a repository of failure, a workhouse or a debtor’s prison, like the Marshalsea in Little Dorit. And the stuff that is supposed to have succeeded is like Little Dorit’s father, the mayor, begging all the time in a mercenary delusion of grandeur.

Passages and arcades to give away! Sometimes I leave books on the airplane. I loved your post!
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But I like the idea of regeneration, of what survives the fire. Which turns me, for some reason, to Ingeborg Bachmann. I think of her scrawled “Death Styles”, just that scrap, in Malina.
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http://www.drunkenboat.com/db8/canadianstrange.html
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