M Kitchell

The continuing adventures of engagement with small books. As in the first installment, I mentioned I carry just as much interest in “zines” as something determinedly named a “chapbook” and…

I’m a fan of small books. Whether this means a short book, a chapbook, a novella, a “novel” that is only 20 pages (consider Bataille’s Madame Edwarda or Marguerite Duras’s…

I’ve been interested in François Laruelle since he hit my radar, probably around the time Urbanomic, with Sequence Press published The Concept of Non-Photography. I ordered a copy and slowly…

In the June afternoon I walked through—at least three times—“DESTROY THE PICTURE: PAINTING THE VOID, 1949-1962,” an exhibition at Los Angeles’s MOCA. The show was great. Afterward, I tentatively wandered…

I spent the last few weeks working my way through Michel Surya’s brilliant 1984 biography of Georges Bataille. In French, the subtitle of the book is “la mort à l’oeuvre,”…

TEN THINGS I KNOW ABOUT JAMES LEE BYARS 1) “The Death of James Lee Byars,” a performance piece by James Lee Byars, carries very simple instructions: ‘Quietly lie down and…

OR: CULMINATION IN THE ZERO DEGREE OF OBLIVION I left off, in part one of this essay, on a thought that the book, in considering certain conceptual moves, is alive.…

There is an idea that the book is an immovable object, as if the book were a heavy stone. An idea that, aside from mistakes, a books as it is…

          I awoke this morning, far too early, in sweat, my stomach churning, my body sending my brain signals that something was wrong. I sat upright, moaned to darkness, and went…