Dear Sal (2022)
The Uses of Art is a book by Sal Randolph, published by dispersed holdings. The work is a memoir of transformative encounters with art, asking what it would mean to make use of art in the way we make free and personal use of music and literature. Sal invited me to contribute the foreword to the book, which I wrote in the form of a letter to Sal. The book launched in 2022.
“In the familiarity, I continue to miss you, but in your prompt, in the lure, and in the reading, it's getting better, because I'm traveling now and I can't stop. I'm doing a very specific kind of reading with your PDF this morning (in bed), not a close reading, not really an Instagram scan either, but somewhere in-between these demands, within these different kinds of attention. I feel closer to you, in the reading and in the missing, because as I'm moving fowrard from this mid-point in the manuscript, from Lure to Library of Water to Live Feed and then back to the beginning, to Flashlight, I hear you and sense you in the structure of your book. Can a PDF have a kind of non-human personhood?”
