What a drawer is for

A blog is a stack, newest on top. It is a good structure for a stream and a poor one for a body of work, because it answers the question “what is recent” and no other question at all.

A card catalog answers a different question. Each card carries, at its foot, a list of every other card in the drawer that this work connects to — the tracings. A librarian writes them by hand. They are not derived, they are not inferred from shared vocabulary, and there is no algorithm that produces them. Somebody decided these two things belong together and recorded the decision.

That is the whole idea here. I write in four registers that look unrelated on a category page, and the only honest way to show they are one practice is to put the connections themselves in front of you. Not a tag they happen to share. A line I drew, sometimes with the reason attached.

Where the reason is missing, the tracing is thinner. That is deliberate. An empty apparatus is honest and a fabricated one is not.