A detail from Yasmine Seale’s annotation of pages of Edward Lane’s 1838 translation of 1001 Nights – Sleepless 2022, Mirage 2022, Of the Sea 2022 – seen in the British Museum March 2023.
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Book Fetish (unfinished volumes from the crypt)
“If it were half as big, would you read it then?” I ripped my copy in two and it was still scary.
“This is not a bible” – yet major religions have one book at the source, what trouble it is for those who don’t read it.
The presentation copy of Marx’s Capital photographed here – Penguin edition – was used in over 20 years of teaching, in seven cities. I’ve ruined two more since.
Translation issues – appearance as form – erscheinungsform – contains multitudes, but the anger is leached out in bland connotations lost.
Viral commodities – metabolic and contagious.
Tattooing as interpretation, aggravation, language arabesques that might bug most people.
The book as artefact or souvenir. Always souvenir.
Other books are for burning, the pages incandescent in the night by the sea. I did not burn this, but a cheap novel – remembering though J-J telling me of his apartment in Moscow housing the Progress Press printshop and fuelling the furnace with unsold volumes to heat the building in the cold. Of course, undelivered amazon books are also incinerated by the delivery office. Especially Ray Bradbury novels.
JH.
Khalil Rabah – Dictionary Work – 1997 – the visible entry is Palestine (he was born in Jerusalem in 1961). Seen in the BM March 2023.
John Berger’s The Firing Squad (artist unknown)
The Firing Squad
The dog carries the day in her mouth
over the fields of the small hours
towards a hiding place
which before had been safe.
Nobody was woken before dawn.
At non
the dog sprawling in the shade
placed the pup between her four paws
and wailed in vain
for it to such.
A line of prisoners
Hand knotted
fall forward
Into the grave they have dug.
Belly to the earth
The dog carries the day
Which has never stirred
Back to its dark.
Under the stars the bereaved
Imagine they hear
a dog howling too
on the edge of the world.
This piteous day was born Stone-deaf and blind.
Trinketization 