three Palimpsests I love

1) Persian - last night I finished my first book in Persian, a collection of fables which teach the value of mercy and forgiveness, almost all including farmers and animals. When you're down on hard times, you better still act decently, the peasant on your path might one day turn out to work for the Shah. The best part is seeing the Arabic which was indo-europeanized to form verbs all throughout the book, and the many adjectives and nouns which seamlessly carried over into Turkish, words like: heyecan, pişman, durust, and biçare. I could easily make my way through the book knowing the semantic palimpsest of words underneath the easy edifice of indo european grammar. It is the closest I'll ever get to being possessed.

2) New York City - the more I learn about the history of New York the more I marvel at how there are layers and layers of barely perceptible geographical history. How the names of streets are mispronunciations of Dutch words that mean innocently simple things, how the arrangement of streets reflects a hundreds year old mercantilist logic, how the coffee shop Walt Whitman used to chill in is now a Swatch store. I have always lived in historical areas, as every place is historical, but for the first time I live somewhere that has been so faithfully documented that I can read about the flop houses on the Bowery I ride up every morning, the merchants who brought tea from China who got a street in lower manhattan named after them, the veiny swamp in south Brooklyn inhabited by Indians which was partially drained and industrialized and turned into the Gowanus canal. There is layer upon layer of history that just has to be deciphered, sedimented below the largely bullshit neo-liberal coral reef of a city that exists now.

3) Screen Printing - This weekend Nora showed me how to screen print and as she pulled out her screen, you could see the different layers of other projects she had worked on lingering on the mesh. Some of the images I recognized and some I didn't. It felt like getting a voyeuristic peek at the shadows of the labor of someone who makes me wildly curious.