Julije Knifer: Meandering Coincidences

Nina Pops, Knifer Buch

Yesterday, checking the internet for news about my friend and co-author Zarko Radakovic, I came across a fairly new post by the artist Nina Pops. She lives in Cologne, as does Zarko, and they have frequently worked together. In this series, Zarko's manuscript (of his book Knifer) lends itself to Knifer-inspired drawings—the art and the writing working, at least in my mind's eye, like a pair of jazz musicians listening and simultaneously responding to one another. To see more of the works, click HERE.


Then this morning there was a comment on an earlier blog post that referred to Knifer (click HERE). It was from a woman interested in Zagreb, Croatia and in art history. Her blog, which has numerous posts about art in Zagreg, is HERE. She asked me about my reference to Knifer, to a visit with him in his Paris apartment. 


Zarko and I had spent the previous day with Peter Handke at his house in Chaville, just outside Paris, walking with him through the surrounding woods (in the Niemandsbucht) for hours. Still under his influence, we visited Knifer.


Stimulated by the Nina Pops drawings and by the question about Knifer, I got out my journal from that trip. Here are the pages, 9 December 1995:

Finally, Zarko's book, which I leaf through often, trying to pick out phrases I recognize, gazing through the Serbo-Croatian sentences as if through a glass darkly, hungry for the thoughts and structures of my friend's mind.

Coincidence: Jean Fremon's The Botanical Garden, Part 2

It's a small book—handy.


It rewards even momentary attention.


I carry it into the bathroom, read it on the toilet:


It's true that I have always found suspect the scorn that one claims to hold for that waste which we didn't succeed in nourishing ourselves upon. I like how the chain which joins us to nature doesn't suddenly end at our stomach, that we are not altogether an impasse, an oubliette where all is accumulated and digested, but the site of a transition, a transformation.