Heya Nora, thanks for thinking of me. I’m old enough to be your dirty uncle. I just purchased my ticket home on the 19th of Dec. until Jan 2. Listen, short-stack, we should hang out soon. I’m not teaching this semester (enforced sabbatical) which means I’m ready for you to show me the seedier side of things sometime. And I don’t mean late night photos of some other guy sucking on your foot. What passes for painting these days. Though it’s no small consolation to note your unease over referring to it as a self-portrait (which one, christ), keeping me up late at night while I’m trying to grade papers is unkind. As I write this, I have a very serious face. Last night I watched Twilight Part Deux and read the Duino Elegies at the same time. Is it possible that both could make me feel the same thing? I must be irreparably broken, but then angels and vampires do have some things in common. Exile, right?...

We’ve seen this happen before. Can you imagine a time when introductions and parting gifts were a necessity. There’s a look at who’s at the door, who’s leaving when it’s time to go. Who came and who went. Something that says “Thinking of You –“ In May 2010, Itza Vilaboy twisted on the technological screw via a blog on the web-based artspace, Light & Wire Gallery. It was the perfect portal to take seriously an inclination based on the thrill of motion, a sailing through space just to get out of bed. This was something to do for fun when enthralled with disappointment. NORA, a novel, is reformatted into a series of letters or “blog posts,” channelling a trans-arts sensibility into the remote actuality of internet address. Forms are challenged to take on the shape of letter, poem, postcard, post. They are alarming and seem to recreate, as in a sudden memory, the moments when you first received each of these letters (and e-mails and post-cards), messages of such flaunting, guileless presentation, of such unapologetically encroaching intimacy that they present themselves as a demand. You cannot read them without a surprised, possibly guilty flush, as though you had accidentally stumbled upon your own, forgotten cache of letters, and the past, somehow completely, maybe by turns lost or obscured, as if surfeit was stylish, has just pounced upon you and asserted its rights. Here, a tug. There, a caress. A “here I am, what are you going to do about it”, and induce, in equal or varying portions, panic and delight. Simultaneously, while these writings attack with an odd sense of renewed immediacy, this immediacy is tempered by a structure of elision or amnesia. A notion of the contemporary along the lines of the virtual haunted...