welcome, double agent

While working with visually-impaired photographers in 2000, I remember that one photographer bitterly noted blind peoples’ lack of access to the likes of Genet or Cooper, or, say, Allison or Acker. The photographer’s frustration made it clear that I should attempt to read, record and disseminate something marginal and sexual. I called the NYC public library’s sector for audio recordings for the blind and was informed that a “selection committee in the Midwest handled all acquisition.” This was despite the fact that recordings were made in NYC as well. I volunteered to provide my own audio editions of my selection, Delta of Venus by Anais Nin, but providing one’s own copies was also against the regulations. I never even mentioned my title or intent to the library; my proposal was simply struck down because all books must be selected via committee. Before understanding this, I had chosen Delta of Venus and planned to dedicate the reading to my mother. All this was because I had secretly found and read Nin’s book lying under my parents’ bed at age ten. Next, there was an unnamed Victorian pornographic novel, then Little Birds and Bukowski’s Women, Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and finally, 9 1/2 Weeks, the S/M novella. By then, I was thirteen years old.

Time passed.

Today, I completed the first installment of “Reading Delta of Venus: Mary (Age 10, Age 36)”.
A girl child narrates three excerpts from Delta of Venus ( from Mathilde, Artists and Models, Marcel). 1 hour and thirty minutes.

The child voice breaks both the intent and content of the original work. What started as a philanthropic act has deconstructed itself. What once may have titillated, now confuses. I have restored my first read.

It will be broadcast via the same radio transmitters we built and broadcast from in the past.

“A Politics of Tears: the Museum of Useless Efforts; Marfa , Texas ” was initially published by Afterall.

Mr. Blackwell, namesake of the segregation era school for Mexican-Americans in Marfa, Texas.

When I was in Marfa, I attempted, in vain, to write about the exhumation of Mr. Spanish, a local ceremony intended to begin the exorcism of a history of racial divide; I attempted to write without fear and with honesty. I would sit in my house, adjacent to the parking lot that served Donald Judd’s former studios, trying to determine the parameters of the ‘crypt’ I was writing about. Moreover, I wondered if I researched this region’s history of water, was it the way out of this mess and if this was so, what happens when the crypt floods?

Across the street from where I sat attempting to write, in Judd’s closed studio, which now operates as museum, all of the books were preserved as he left them. Although, I never toured that studio, when I returned to NYC, a friend told me her ex-husband, passing through Marfa, stood amongst Judd’s books, and when the guide’s back was turned, he rearranged them- eschewing the crypt for a living library, where multiple hands touch all of the words. Months passed. I left the town and by leaving the site I came closer to what I needed to say about this shifting ecology of race and water and language. Closer.

New York City, New York

These snapshots are taken by its possessors.
“Night Visitation”, etching printed on discarded school paper (4 x 6 )

greenpoint, brooklyn

woodbridge, virginia

hammond, louisiana

Jackson Heights, New York

Brooklyn, New York