Hi everyone. This week I read "ICE vs. Everyone" and the pieces from the "pictures/que" section of echolalia echolalia, and I wanted to write out some reflections to get start thinking about our chat in about an hour.

reflections

I've been thinking about libraries a lot this past week, and "Catalogue of Tearing" was a surprising way to (almost-)conclude this week's readings for me. I found myself free associating and remembering endless hours spent in university library stacks, surrounded by endless books and getting dizzy as I spiraled trying to make sense of this system that felt like a neatly self-contained system of madness.

But the longer you spend in the stacks, the more this madness makes some kind of sense; the increasingly precise numbering and the sub-sub-sub-topics depicted in those numbers. And then, at the end of the day, you stumble outside, see sunlight, and immediately start to forget that system.

I think I have some more thoughts about imposed categorization and systems of organization, and why libraries feel different in some way. I think I'll think more about it and come to the video chat with it.

I'm keen to hear if you had a strong association with something you read this week; if you want to join today, let me know what you read and how it stuck with you.

video chat details

In about an hour (at 12pm ET) let's get together¹ and chat about whatever we've read this week. The link to join is here (if that doesn't work, the url is below)

https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom

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supporting The Sameer Project

If you can't buy from the bookstore, please consider making a donation directly to one of the Sameer Project's campaigns, or consider sharing a fundraiser with friends. If you can't do any of that, consider sharing the reading group with some friends; if some of them can buy the book from Open Books, or even make direct donations to The Sameer Project, then that would help enormously.