ARCHIVE

Lists of destroyed buildings posted by the L.A. Conservancy and USModernist offer a ghost map of a past that extends far beyond living memory.

The term poetic infrastructure has stuck with me. I consider myself someone who thinks almost exclusively in reference. Lines from movies, song lyrics, pages of books, that thing someone said, a picture I took. One thing is always another—a mental web flickering into both well-worn and bright new constellations—so much noise perhaps coalescing itse... See more

Yes, a lost house itself is a tragedy, but there is an entire universe in the items inside, an entire universe in the single page of a book that drifts away while you’re running to catch a flight. There is an entire universe in a quote, an entire universe in interpretations of a book that begs for humanity to find a way to survive when our environm... See more

I grieve for many things; the engine of my grief changes, sometimes hourly. I grieve for our increasingly hostile and uninhabitable world, and I grieve for the cruelties that make it so, both structural ones and ones that individuals inflict on one another. But today I am grieving because I struggle to fathom all of the material loss of meaningful ... See more

I understand this element of loss, the exercise of cataloguing all that cannot come back, at least not in its original form.

Some great-grandchild will find this book at the back of the closet. And I will, at least as a pale apparition, come briefly to life.