the slash
Art Monsters is a book I picked up on cover alone. An evocative title, but I’ve been burned by that before – mistaking my desire to be captivated by art history with the actual discipline to endure it.
It wasn’t the edition featuring Genieve Figgis’s Blue Eyeliner on a bright yellow background, but the one with the quietest gray, interrupted by bold orange and pink text. It’s my favorite type of book, in terms of its form – paperback, approximately A5, lower page weight. Best of all, the cover has a slight texture to it; it’s hard to describe, it’s a soft, pliable matte, and the picture in the middle is glossy on top of it.
I hold the book even when I’m watching TV, just because it feels so nice in my hands. Considering the book’s interest in form, aesthetics, embodiment, I imagine that author Lauren Elkin might like this fact.
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My favorite punctuation is the em dash – – – its interruption, its demand to keep going, its moreness. I love colons and semicolons and parentheses too, but none of them are quite as commanding as – – – when you feel there is still something to say.
Grammar and punctuation are romantic, calling attention not just to what is being said, but how – the flair, the drama, the music. They are the structure of language, the embodiment of thought.
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Elkin begins her book with an ode to the slash ///
Calling on Woolf’s belief that it is necessary for women to destroy, but also to build – “to fragment, but also to link” – she describes its duality:
I like the way it’s used to break things up. Express division yet relation. Or the way it brings disparate things together. Exclusion and inclusion in one stroke…
The slash provides alternatives, which sit together in an uneasy, impossible simultaneity.
The slash conjuncts, and and or, or or and…
The slash creates a space of simultaneity, a zone of ambiguity.
xi
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Notetaking is a life practice that honors what I know and how I know it, each node a portal into an existing, open, bottomless train of thought / Utilizing principles of atomic notetaking allows me to approach my understanding of the world piecemeal, each page only asking to hold a single concept, idea, question, which I can move between and in between.
Most conversations around notetaking – ‧₊˚✧notemaking✧˚₊‧, – end there, seeing this as a process of cataloguing what parts and perspectives of the world interest you.
What parts and perspectives of you interest you?
Notetaking is equally rewarding as a means of self-research, of approaching your inner world piecemeal.
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The slash introduced a new language to my notetaking. This and, it says.
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I’m just over 100 pages into Art Monsters; it isn’t a dense read, but a stylistic one, and I still get distracted ruminating on her first argument – that of our work being to fracture, to link. There are no two verbs that better distill this period of my life.
It hadn’t occurred to me that this too is a creative practice.
I follow the threads of my curiosity, confusion, grief to their end, where I untangle or trim or both, decide what to keep or discard, in the process fracturing the existing understanding, and, in the fracturing, creating both a shadow of what was and the double of not-is. And with the world, or my own, contained in more manageable shapes, in looser threads – in something more atomic – I can start to link them, construct new narratives, rebuild in a way that makes more sense to me.
This is the process for everything, from a book to a trauma. This and.
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Division yet relation: the slash is a link.