Monday, I was part of a group museum educators that visited a public school in Hempstead. We were invited to be audience to short performances inspired by books, first through fifth graders had read and studied in the school year that’s drawing to an end. Against sets and backdrops created by the students and their parents, the students, often in costume, presented fragments from works by authors such as Eric Carle and Dr. Seuss, and from books like Charlotte’s Web and The Magic Schoolbus. One fifth grade class had chosen poetry—the poetry of Langston Hughes. I enjoyed being reconnected to his poetry, to hear I, too again. Being an immigrant, I wasn’t introduced to his work or that of other American poets, until my thirties. This morning I was stirring, woke up at 5, got up, went to my desk, and took The Collected poems of Langston Hughes off the shelf. I sat down, opened it, and did so, on page 390 and 391—a spread of children’s rhymes.

By what sends
the white kids
I ain’t sent:
I know I can’t
be President

… was the rhyme my eyes landed on, a rhyme written, at least half a century ago. A rhyme that is being rewritten this year, being transformed by Senator Obama and the America of today, the America of June 4th 2008, the America of the morning after the day Senator Obama clinched the Democratic nomination.

… Tomorrow,
[He]’ll be at the table…

In the middle of night I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I decided to read a short story that would help me fall a sleep again. The short story I decided to read was “Death and the Compass” by Jorges Luis Borges, a wonderfully imaginative Argentinian writer whom I recently discovered. Instead of falling a sleep, I ended up reading the whole story.

The word Bibliomancy immediately came to my mind. The story disguises itself as a detective/mystery story, but it’s much more than that. Where else have you read a detective story where a detective reads religious writings to solve a puzzle? I don’t want to spoil the fun by telling you more. You can read it online here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/267610/Jorge-Luis-Borges-Death-and-the-Compass

Here is a list of the B words I found during a residency at the MacDowell Colony when I was looking for words for Abecedarium:NYC.

By choosing the word bibliomancy, I have forced myself to think long and hard about the investment we as humans have in the written word. Twenty years ago, I made a filmed entitled “Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning”, so I guess I’ve been fascinated with the power of the thing for a long time. With bibliomancy, the thing is the book and the book, in most cases, is holy. But, for those of us secular folks, committed to the magic and the mystery of telecommunications, the holy book has become the telephone book. It offers us access to the identities and locations of millions of other people – people we might marry, people we might meet on a bus, people who are rich, people who are brilliant, people who are almost destitute, people who are no longer people but whose names still remain in the book. Faith in the book implies a belief in its ability to lead us to divine awareness, maybe even to see into the future. The shooting of a film for this word takes us to a basement where Susan Agliata and I photograph the flipping of a Manhattan telephone book while my daughters fan a feint breath across the pages. Later through Flash animation, a hundred names will tumble from the page.