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Overheard at the Circulation Desk
E Back then periodicals represented a tangible common culture
around shared interests, shared standards, shared identities.
G The content I am looking for is, how blood and guts transmute
into books and then into your image and then into our brains
E But looking at them past their expiration dates
has the opposite effect!
G Still I would find it boring to read 'how ' something works as a
pharmakon. Once one can 'say' what it 'is' is it no longer effective
as a spell?
E Publications seem insufficient. The audience for them is a
universe of disparate and disunited lives loosely bound.
G Just imagine coming upon these bindings. How you felt when you found them in the stacks.
E A library was the lifeblood of culture, and the central repository of
intellectual activity.
G Against the cold outside the radiators shutter and pop.
E The written word goes there to die.
G You wander into the general medicine archive circa 1970. To your surprise you spy an unfamiliar sequence.
E Printed matter enters its period of neglect.
G When I was in art school worked as a shelver in a medical library.
E The titles represent a serial aspiration on the part of an
immigrant nation toward a finally resolved sense of identity.
G I worked nights.
E We think now of the library as a cemetery
G A sick sweet smell of farts and dust intermingles with sweat.
(Mickey Smith press release with anonymous remix)
