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Books new to me, late 2024
January 15, 2025My book acquiring in San Diego has increased over the past few years, and especially this past year: I was unemployed for four months and had the time to attend my library’s monthly book sales in the basement garage; I started writing a newsletter that requires a monthly visit to the big library downtown and perusing their used bookstore; the library at my new job held their yearly book sale; I spend a lot of time at a zine archive with a beautiful shop attached. (The books shared here have been obtained from June - November 2024.)
I bought two editions from Corrientes at the American Library Association’s annual conference, which was held in San Diego this year: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, translated by Diego Cossío, and On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. I love these little bilingual essay editions. I bought Elotera from Dianna Elizardo at ALA, and brought home an armful of small zines from the Zine Pavilion. I took a lot of things from the BAB & friends gift shop: Supplemento al dizionario italiano by Bruno Munari, A Generous Grift: Museums, Finance Capital, and the Clash of Cultural Workers and Collector-Trustees by Sam Lefebvre and June LS, Interference Archive: Building a Counter Institution in the United States by Jen Hoyer and Josh MacPhee. When I visited Interference Archive in August, Josh gave me a huge stack of things for the SCANNNERS Archive. I took an extra copy of the Cop City is Everywhere pamphlet for myself. On the same trip, I picked up the zine my friend Maria Arenas designed for Little Manila Queens: Mabuhay! at PS1. I love an exhibition takeaway, and I love Maria.
The Last Safe Abortion, Carmen Winant, SPBH Editions, 2024.
Little Manila Queens: Mabuhay!, organized by Elena Ketelsen González and Janggo Mahmud, in collaboration with Jaclyn Reyes and Xenia Diente, designed by Maria Arenas, MoMA PS1, 2024.
Interference Archive: Building a Counter Institution in the United States, Jen Hoyer and Josh MacPhee, co-published by Interference Archive and Pound the Pavement, 2018 (?).
A Generous Grift: Museums, Finance Capital, and the Clash of Cultural Workers and Collector-Trustees, Sam Lefebvre and June LS, the Lab, San Francisco, 2022.
Cop City is Everywhere, Weelaunee Defense NYC, undated.
Elotera, Dianna Cristina Elizardo, self-published, 2023.
I bought Carmen Winant’s The Last Safe Abortion after Printed Matter didn’t have the book I originally wanted. I like Winant’s work a lot — I remember feeling overwhelmed by the installation of “My Birth” at MoMA in 2018, that it suddenly seemed shocking to me that there were no images of my birth, that I did not know what had transpired: what my mother experienced when I arrived. (Earlier in the year, my father sent me four untitled videos, each about two hours long, digitally copied from DVDs that had been ripped from home video footage. Buried in the last one was a short clip taken in the hospital room a few hours after my birth. They still have not chosen my name, and at one point my father whispers my name to me and waits to see if I respond. I do not.) Abortion, like birth, is something I did not have a visual vernacular for, other than billboard images of fetuses, glowing red in utero, the scene from Juno, right-wing propaganda. The Last Safe Abortion aggregates images of abortion clinics, procedures, and protests: it presents an image of community, of care, of instruction. As Winant writes in the book’s concluding essay, “What is the visuality of abortion care work? If anti-choice photographic propaganda strategically disregards everything except what’s in the amniotic sac (the mother or birthing person, the labor, the care, the science), then what does that tell us about our values, and theirs?” Thus far I have not been an abortion patient, but I have been a frequent gynecological patient since late 2021 for something confusing and painful. It is gratifying to see images of healthcare that encourage and prioritize autonomy over one’s body, and the right to knowledge about it.
Taking Part: A Workshop Approach to Collective Creativity, Lawrence Halprin and Jim Burns with contributions by Anna Halprin and Paul Baum, the MIT Press, 1974.
jump into bed with me, Paul Knight, Perimeter Editions, 2019.
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin, trans. Diego Cossío, Corrientes, undated.
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber, Corrientes, undated.
Pissing in the Garden, David Horvitz, Gato Negro, 2024 (second edition).
Paul McKnight’s jump into bed with me is the book I had originally wanted from Printed Matter. When I worked at Dashwood, we received copies of this book and I didn’t buy it, but I’ve thought about it frequently since then. (I gave up and purchased a copy directly from Paul, who was kind enough to mail it to me from Berlin.) It’s a tender little book that folds out into spreads of four, often organized loosely by color, grounded by two long pink sheets filled with text messages between the two lovers depicted. I love books that can change based on how you open them; it’s folded in such a way that you can view images in pairs or strips of four, and organized neatly, so that the groupings feel intentional any way the pages fall. Together, the images are quiet, romantic, erotic.
I bought Pissing in the Garden by David Horvitz to add to my small section of publications about piss. I also have Facility magazine, issue 2, Pissing Figures 1280–2014 by Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, and an old bathroom reader book about pee. (After attempting to print a risograph zine of very dark photographs, I have newfound respect for Gato Negro’s printing, or any well-printed riso photo zine.) Taking Part: A Workshop Approach to Collective Creativity by Lawrence Halprin and Jim Burns was a few dollars at the library book sale. The design is beautiful, and I want to sit down and read it and maybe model something after it. I wanted to buy a second copy to give to the SCANNNERS archive, but the copies I’ve found online are too expensive. Working as part of a group, and making something that serves as a piece of the collective whole, changed my life last year.
Raw Material, Betty Tompkins, Montpellier Contemporain and JBE Books, 2021.
Holy Bible, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, text by Adi Ophir, MACK and Archive of Modern Conflict, 2013 (first edition, second printing).
The Use of Photography, Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, trans. Alison L. Strayer, Seven Stories Press, 2024.
segments & leaves laying about, Zackery Hobler, self-published, 2024.
My spouse and I received Holy Bible as an unmarked wedding gift; at first, we thought that someone had given us a real copy of the Bible, which would be surprising, but then I opened to a spread with images and understood. I texted at least ten friends before discovering 24 hours later that it was from Nick and Manda. I’ve spent a lot of time with this book since October, going from violent image to violent image. (I wrote a little bit about it for the December 2024 issue of Picture Files in Mail Mag.) segments & leaves laying about was also a wedding gift, from Zack; it’s printed on beautifully mottled paper and features one repeated photograph, which flits around the page from spread to spread, and small hand-drawn marks that echo the twigs within the photograph, a perfectly self-contained book.
I don’t have coherent thoughts worth writing here about The Use of Photography at this point, but it is an Annie Ernaux book about three things I am regularly fixated upon: sex, illness, and photography. I love the way she describes the images by addressing what it is in them. I read it so fast that it demands a re-read, and proper thoughts.
An Image of My Name Enters America, Lucy Ives, Graywolf Press, 2024.
The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property, Eunsong Kim, Duke University Press, 2024.
Supplemento al dizionario italiano, Bruno Munari, Corraini Editore, February 2024.
The Politics of Collecting is an incredibly important book about the creation of museums, the labor disputes that philanthropy in the United States was founded upon, and whiteness as property. (I found the fifth chapter, about the digitization of artworks, particularly regarding the Agassiz daguerrotypes, illuminating, by which I mean that all people involved or concerned with photography, images, or museums should read it.) This is the most clarifying book I read this year, a book that filled a hole, that answers questions, that aims to make a new world. From Kim’s introduction, available here: “...the United States is entrusted with the role of global leader because of its commitment to the continuum of colonial rule. It is by design that this continuum is duly extended through the composition of contemporary museum boards and prize committees.” And, on the last page of the introduction: “The ambition of this book is to aid in the deracination of the present world order by examining the colonial roots of art, poetry, museums, and archives. … In line with with the long and ongoing call to abolish the police and prisons, recent arguments have been put forth by activists that, just as the police do not keep people safe, museums do not keep culture safe and therefore must be abolished.” A Generous Grift and Interference Archive, mentioned in the second paragraph of this post, are also about institutions; the former, about the forms of finance capital that rule museums in the US participate in, and the latter about creating a counter institution and an archive of movements.
I have been anticipating An Image of My Name Enters America for a long, long time. Lucy Ives was my professor briefly in grad school, and she mentioned this book during a brief session in the summer of 2022, which was sticky and full of moths. Life is Everywhere, published by Graywolf that year, was also formally weird and brought together so many things I did not think could go together coherently, or confidently. (Lucy’s work makes me want to be smarter. Her teaching also makes me want to be smarter, or it makes me want to know more things, so that they may all kiss in the tank together.) “The End,” the fourth essay in the book, is about language and the end of the world. The books I have loved this year have been concerned with a new world. I am concerned with a new world. (Yesterday my nephew was born. Last week, when he was supposed to have been born, but was delayed a bit on the way out, Los Angeles burned. And burns. And then the ash came to San Diego and laid itself down on the cars.) Lucy writes (emphases hers), “The world is less a planet or country than society. … It is a conversation, a public, a crowd. This would suggest that the end of the world, if we hew closely to language itself, is the end of a collective form of time, the end of collaboration. It might also be the end of understanding. … an end of expectations, certainties, security, comprehensibility, artworks, inheritance, banter.” I finished this book four days after the election here in the United States. The presidential election’s results did not surprise me. California’s failed propositions, ones that called for statewide rent control and an end to involuntary servitude for incarcerated people in state prisons, did surprise me. “The End” is also about mental illness, and the notion of survival via language. I found much of this writing to be beautiful, I have held these words closely: “I sometimes think, if I was able to do this for myself, what else is possible?” Next to this, I wrote an exclamation point and the word oh.