A German knitting handbook from 1939, with a dedication written inside dating Oktober 1942. The best thing is that the illustration is from elsewhere- from a magazine or poster, perhaps, hand-wrapped and pasted onto the cover.

Look at the two lovers. It’s like I’ve found a trove of some woman’s longing. Last week, Michael Moon said of the artist Henry Darger: “He wrote not to produce books but to produce a more and more expansive environment for himself.” This is what I imagine her doing when she adhered her new cover. Centuries of [certain] lives confined to private space producing “the secret lives of women.” Sex play in the archives.

✳ archiving the dumpster ✳ chivalry ✳ archives ✳ 1930s butch-femme 

“The structure of the chocolate laxative can be discerned throughout today’s ideological landscape.” I never knew what the fuck Žižek was talking about. Yeah: he was analogizing chocolate laxative to capitalists who champion philanthropy. Chocolate causes constipation, yet they package the laxative in the exact thing that necessitates it; George Soros and Bill Gates execute slews of injustices and then erect humanitarian organizations to counter the havoc that they themselves have wreaked. So they’re the chocolate laxatives. But I was always like, “What chocolate laxative?” Voila in a South African Women’s Magazine from 1975.

Photograph from BONA, June 1975.

✳ archives 

Better Homes and Gardens, 1979

✳ capitalism works but just this thing happened in 2008 and-- ✳ o4real ✳ archives 

France 1968.

A photo of ‘68 I had never seen, found in a Paris travel magazine I dumpstered last weekend. There were hundreds of magazines unimportant enough to exclude from archives so I’m archiving them here. They seem to have been discarded when someone died; all of them are yellow and frail - I feel like I’m breathing in ashes going through them. But it was one of those fated finds. There are loads of Woman’s Day and Southern Living from the 60s and 70s. The housewifery is so imposing to me, now, and the depictions make palpable the results not just of centuries of struggle, but even of the past 40 years:

our foremothers and forefathers
came singing through slaughter
came through hell and high water
so that we could stand here
and behold breathlessly the sight
how a raging river of tears
is cutting a grand canyon of light

They should be in archives just for shock value (which is much of the archive’s effect anyway). As reminders that no, they’re not parodies. And as gifts: the present, in its usual way, feels so naturalized and eternal.

The person who died and bequeathed their collection to the dumpster amassed stacks of southern recipes. I flip through them and wonder about the role of dessert for the housewife, what baked goods meant for the southern US, what sugar meant to so many else.

A comical setback to these fated finds being, of course, that many of them are in German and I can’t actually read them. I’m archiving but writing captions for the present.

I showed the ‘68 picture to a friend who speaks German and asked her to decipher the caption on the accompanying page. It was small and read something like: Because of the students’ graffiti, the statue is no longer in a state of peaceful contemplation.

Yes, absolutely. Disturbing the dead.

✳ slash disturbing the petrified ✳ upgrades for the now ✳ archives 

Peloponnesian Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, living in secret. Jean Genet said a couple years before he died that Greece was the country where he felt most free. In 2012 the whole world is watching Greece. It’s the guinea pig for the post-collapse.

Look at the mischief of the one behind, like muahahaha everybody thinks we’re just friends. And the great feet and legs of the one in the front. Bitches don’t know what Wie Gott in Frankreich, they just don’t. (c) caricapapaya

Photograph from Merian 12: XVII, Dezember 1964

✳ stories ✳ archives 

✳ archives ✳ poetry ✳ class privilege