A curious thing happened recently. My wife encouraged me to submit to a literary journal an artist statement I wrote a couple of years ago as I was trying to think through what I’d been doing in my work with appropriation and its relation to the cultural archive and historical memory. The journal where I sent the text, Azure: A Journal of Literary Thought, was running a writing contest looking for challenging texts. A few months after submitting, I received the pleasant news that my piece had been chosen as the runner-up for the prize. That’s nice to hear of course, even without winning, but the truly inspired part of the whole thing was that the jury wasn’t interested in the main body of the fifteen-paragraph text, which I’d written with care over the course of a year, but rather its endnotes. The decision to nominate the endnotes for the prize (and to discard the main body) embraced with such beautiful irony the key role of erasure, retraction, fragment and void in the main body of my text. Here, I thought, is an example of the editorial act as art! Last month they published my endnotes: Azure: Journal of Literary Thought.
How can one follow up on an act like that? A plan: Write an entirely new text that works with the original endnotes, and for the original text, write a new set of endnotes! (The original text can be found on my site: Allocution.)