Domenica Martinello @domenicahope - Tumblr Blog

Diana and Actaeon (Diana Surprised in Her Bath), 1836 by Camille Corot (French, 1796--1875)

The flowers were recording instruments of exquisite sensitivity; their glass anthers captured someone pouring a glass of water, the turning of a page.

We entered a large room full of dark wooden display cases containing thousands of anatomically perfect flowers in perpetual bloom, but also models of fruit in intricate, perpetual decay: strawberries turning ghostly with mold, peaches collapsing inward on a branch, leaves curling at their edges…I was astonished by what I saw. I couldn’t quite believe that this moth orchid was glass, that this pear blossom was lampwork, that these objects had been blown and shaped and painted, that these impossibly delicate things were the result of a thousand rapid choices and adjustments, movements of the hand…I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck-rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed…There were a few other visitors that afternoon — I sensed that the tiny stems and styles and petals surrounding us were vibrating imperceptibly, or maybe perceptibly, from our footsteps and voices, that the little wires in the models could register even our breath, but also that the specimens were trembling from the exhalations and voices and footsteps of all that people who had ever been in their presence, still vibrating, too, from the journey by boat from Europe…vibrating with the street life of Dresden outside the workshop where the father and son sat softening tiny tubes and rods in a jet of flame. The flowers were recording instruments of exquisite sensitivity; their glass anthers captured someone pouring a glass of water, the turning of a page.

— Ben Lerner, Transcription: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 7, 2026)

dk-thrive

I was glitching, craving my cellular phone on a cellular level, shamefully unresponsive to the old media that surrounded me: books, paintings…

Beside me on the end table were several recent poetry titles from a small press called The Song Cave. I picked up one of those. But I couldn’t attend to the poems. I wanted—I needed—to check my texts, my email, to swipe and scroll and photograph, to frame and filter and archive, to share my location, etc., so as not only, not fully, to be where I was; since at least 2008, to be where I was was too much for me, or too little. I put down the book and removed my phone from my pocket and pressed the side buttons and put it back in my pocket. I stood up to take a closer look at an area of wall where there were several studies of hands in red chalk, but I was faking it; my eyes were saccadic; my fingers were involved in some weird Saint Vitus’ dance at my sides; I kept shifting my weight back and forth. I wasn’t merely distracted, I was offline, a state of exception… My body was able to convert the strangeness of being screenless into a kind of super sensitivity, but now that I had arrived…I was glitching, craving my cellular phone on a cellular level, shamefully unresponsive to the old media that surrounded me: books, paintings, analog photographs, a vinyl record spinning somewhere in my mentor’s house.

— Ben Lerner, Transcription: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 7, 2026)

I was experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyChart alert or a work email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting; I was having an unusual experience of presence—more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk—but I was also walking into my past, because this was a landscape so dense with formative memories and events, and because only in the past would I be deviceless.

Transcription, by Ben Lerner

#ben lerner

choysum

Ben Lerner, Transcription

neonelven

Sunset over the Fjord by Eilert Adelsteen Normann

domenicahope

“It all begins with fucking around and intuition and without any idea of what you’re doing, I think.”

— Allen Ginsberg (Paris Review, 1966)

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“What is it like to feel female? Explicitly? A body that feeds. Is food. Is gnawed on. One that kneels. A facilitator. Organized joy. A corporeal caving in, arranging the joist. Cooling.”

— Dawn Lundy Martin, “After Drowning” (via blackskintrillmask)

jareckiworld

Roberta Booth (1947-2014) — Split Infinity [oil on canvas, 1982]

“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.” ― James Joyce, Ulysses

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Arcadia (1993). Tom Stoppard

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The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks…. The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew was wrong.

Arcadia, Tom Stoppard