Rita took him aside. "Look, Jacques," she said, "you can't go through life living in the past. It's not the 19th century. I mean, it's one thing to write about or think or even care about the past. But you can't live in it. You don't want to end up out of touch, talking to yourself alone." Years of worldly experience fell away. How could he possibly refuse? Her flashing black eyes. Her blue finger tips. Her green lips. She was 25. Another brief episode. Rita and Jacques. Rita and Jacques. Rita and Jacques. Rita and Jacques. By the time we met it was all history. History? This is not subject of mockery! I want to tell you my opinions experiences ideas about history. About art. About everything. But she was only half-listening, reclining among the cushions. "I'm not interested in purely aesthetic people," Fifi sighed. We had just finished lunch; the afternoon was fading in evening; I was still full of impressions from the East. I was riding a train. I was standing on a mesa in the Neveda desert. I wanted her to follow momentum. "All my world experience fell away," I was explaining. -- Constance de Jong, Modern Love

"I confess I've remained very much a classic in the matter of salons. A salon in which one cannot follow or rejoin the suggestive glance one prefers, draw them away from the group, speak with them for a moment in a lowered voice in the shadow, address part of the general conversation to them and find oneself shining and receive a glance of recognition .. such a place is not a salon for me. Oh may the French salon never lose sight of these attentions. The lively wish to please, the animated, unfailing, charming graces of France!" -- Constance de Jong, Modern Love

Andrew Friedman: As Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s October 2011 production of Henrik Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman entered its ninth continuous hour of performance, the theater’s technicians walked off the job. There had been rumors that the technical staff of Berlin’s Volksbühne-im-Prater would not work past their contracted eight-hour shift since they had labored nearly thirteen hours straight two nights prior at the show’s premiere. Vine pleaded with the venue’s staff, who turned on the theater’s houselights and powered down the soundboard. Undeterred, Vinge invited the remaining audience members (about a third of the initial one hundred and fifty) backstage where, somehow, they would continue the show. To do so, we climbed onto the decimated stage littered with the remnants of the performance so far: cake, real and fake feces, urine, shaved pubic hair, wheelbarrows of fresh soil, wet paint, a decapitated mannequin, hundreds of handmade props, and various pork products, all of which were generously coated with fake blood. Before we could get backstage, the theater’s fire marshal, citing safety regulations, blocked the entrance. In appreciation for those who wanted the performance to continue, Vinge, Müller, and their cast delivered the audience cases of champagne, which we drank, tamping out rhythms on the empty bottles as an actor dressed as the play’s typically unstated villain, the lawyer Hinkle, gyrated slowly for an increasingly drunk and appreciative few.

Reading a draft is translating a weaving pattern, or a “draft,” into the passage of time and the set of gestures that get concretized in a textile. Reading a draft considers this as a model for thinking about the sticking points and frictions, human and otherwise, that gather between design and realization.