BOOKSHELVES Program | “A Plural Singular: How to Live Together*”
A Plural Singular: How to Live Together* was a performative reading for which Ana Iwataki composed a score for three voices consisting solely of quotations from the 3307 library and her titles on-loan to the collection. Personifying solitude, union, and plurality, these collected voices fantasize “a sociability without alienation, a solitude without exile.” In the words of translator Kate Briggs, “…we are not reading cold print, but text warmed by direct transmission.”
*Barthes, Roland. How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces: Notes for a Lecture Course and Seminar at the Collège De France (1976-1977). Edited by Claude Coste. Translated by Kate Briggs. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
The performance and text structure was conceptualized by Amanda Martin Katz and Ana Iwataki. The content of the score was composed by Ana Iwataki from the following books:
Auster, Paul. The Art of Hunger: Essays, Prefaces, Interviews. New York. Penguin Books, 2001. Print.
Barthes, Roland. How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces: Notes for a Lecture Course and Seminar at the Collège De France (1976-1977). Edited by Claude Coste. Translated by Kate Briggs. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Print.
Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010. Print.
Briggs, Kate. This Little Art. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018. Print.
Carson, Anne. Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Print. (3307 Permanent Collection)
Doty, Mark. Still Life with Oysters and Lemon. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Print. (3307 Permanent Collection)
Fisher, M. F. K. The Art of Eating. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004. Print.
Jackson, Shirley. The Bird’s Nest. New York: Penguin Books, 2014. Print.
Tannahill, Reay. Flesh and Blood: a History of the Cannibal Complex. Dorchester: Dorset, 1975. Print.
photos by Ash Thayer
video by Brian Sohn
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