form is the mask of space

poetry will find you, learn with every bit

[queensboro]

“It is as though the shifting, changing sands of visual polysemy, of multiple meanings and regroupings, have made us intolerably nervous, so that we wish to find the bedrock of sense. We wish to achieve a type of signification beyond which there can be no further reading or interpretation. Interpretation, we insist, must be made to stop somewhere. And where more absolutely and appropriately than in an act of what the police call “positive identification”? For the individual who can be shown to be the “key” to the image, and thus the “meaning” of the image, has the kind of singularity one is looking for. Like his name, his meaning stops within the boundaries of identity.”

— Rosalind Krauss, In the Name of Picasso

[proustiansleep]

"It's like a hole in my life, an eight-year hole. That's what I find interesting in people's lives, the holes, the gaps, sometimes dramatic, but sometimes not dramatic at all. There are catalepsies, or a kind of sleepwalking through a number of years, in most lives. Maybe it's in these holes that movement takes place."

—Gilles Deleuze, On Philosophy

[philosophybits]

“As soon as one considers a system abstractly and theoretically, one puts himself, in effect, on the plane of the universal, thus, of the infinite. That is why reading the Hegelian system is so comforting. I remember having experienced a great feeling of calm on reading Hegel in the impersonal framework of the Bibliotheque Nationale in August 1940. But once I got into the street again, into my life, out of the system, beneath a real sky, the system was no longer of any use to me: what it had offered me, under a show of the infinite, was the consolations of death; and I again wanted to live in the midst of living men. I think that, inversely, existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.”

— Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

[formisthemaskofspace]

The Ostriches: Part I

“This is the plague after the plague”

October 15, 2025

Val Vinokur

THE OSTRICHES: PART I

Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, for our vineyards are in blossom. —Song of Songs, 2:15 I have become a brother to the jackals, and go about in the company of ostriches. —Job, 30:29

Our vineyard is titanium and glass and the little foxes flicker in the tiny rectangle amidst weird tricks chair calisthenics and large language models

The jackals know the shards and bones were never ash but embers blown by bile by mistakes so obvious that they could never be repeated and that’s exactly why they were repeated not even remade but repeated louder faster a boot to the face a girya to the groin because this time they really meant it a killer joke that was no joke at all so take a fucking joke snowflake

This is the plague after the plague the blight meant for us the we who are the ones we have been waiting for masked men have come for us with sickles run! run where? there is nowhere to run excepting fog drenched with the dew of heaven or with the bitter foam on sweet grass blown by the nymphs of spittlebugs from meadow sap to hide us low and quiet in the fields until the smirk of danger passes

“The Ostriches” is a poetry cycle written and read by Val Vinokur and published by Public Seminar. The cycle is a continuation of “The Big Cats,” a 12-part series Vinokur began writing in June 2020 in response to COVID-19, George Floyd’s murder, and other world-shifting events as they unfolded.

[weltenwellen]

Hanif Abdurraqib, "Glamor on the West Streets / Silver Over Everything"

[intactics-deactivated20250505]

tactics to remain intact ❔

keep a part of yourself reserved for yourself alone and build a relationship with the silence at the heart of your solitude. who you are before that silence is the closest thing you can get to an unobstructed view of yourself. the noisier it is in your head, the further away you are from the middle. take medication if it helps keep the volume down. remain in your body and listen to it. whatever the day disintegrates within you, make some attempt to reintegrate it each night. whatever emotion is shaking you like a rabbit in the jaws of a dog, go limp and wait for the dog to finish before you take action or speak rashly. keep all promises to yourself. eat and sleep and drink as well as you can. figure out what makes the integity of your self worse and quit doing it. show up every day to the job of taking care of yourself. forge close personal bonds with your peers, if you can locate some peers. dance.

[apesoformythoughts]

"Similarly people are losing the power to enjoy Christmas through identifying it with enjoyment. When once they lose sight of the old suggestion that it is all about something, they naturally fall into blank pauses of wondering what it is all about. To be told to rejoice on Christmas Day is reasonable and intelligible, if you understand the name, or even look at the word. To be told to rejoice on the twenty-fifth of December is like being told to rejoice at a quarter-past eleven on Thursday week."

— G.K. Chesterton: "The New War of Christmas", G. K.'s Weekly (26-12-1925)

[havingapoemwithyou]

above everything by David Ignatow

[boykeats]

[ID: poem text reading,

"I wished for death often but now that I am at its door I have changed my mind about the world. It should go on; it is beautiful, even as a dream, filled with water and seed, plants and animals, others like myself, ships and buildings and messages filling the air - a beauty, if ever I have seen one. In the next world, should I remember this one, I will praise it above everything."

/end ID]

[yr-bed]

That the National were going to spend six hours repeatedly performing the same song in an art gallery was one thing. A collaboration with Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, A Lot of Sorrow wasn’t intended as a physical endurance test, but a study in the evolving emotional tenor of a work stretched to its limits: National frontman Matt Berninger described its aim as “reaching a different sort of euphoric, mantra-like state.” Releasing the entire performance in a box set composed of nine clear LPs, however, strips away the sad communion of the original Sunday afternoon show, leaving just the listener and approximately 105 iterations of “Sorrow”, spanning six hours, five minutes.

[…]

But much as it’s exhausting and unrealistic to absorb in one go, as much a millstone as a symbolic objet d’art, A Lot of Sorrow rewards patience in the most literal fashion. (Another inadvertent joke at the perception that everything the National make is “a grower”…) “I don’t wanna get over you”, Berninger sings in a faint plea every time, an Old Testament pop trope that works as an act of self-preservation and insurance against the responsibility of being the one who has to change. It’s a voluntary slow-death sentence, which he bears stoically throughout the six hours: joking, singing with a mouth full of sandwich halfway through Side O (Kjartansson brought them food and drinks throughout), and saying they’ll have to start over after he coughs during a chorus.

It’s only at the end of Side Q, around the 95th take, that Berninger breaks down. He gasps halfway through “sorrow’s a girl inside my cake” before missing a line and crying, having lost his nerve because he couldn’t see his wife and daughter in the crowd. His live performances are frequently marked by a frightening volatility, and he often openly declares that he needs someone in song, but he’s rarely vulnerable like this. Guitarists Aaron and Bryce Dessner and the band’s backing musicians take the lead on vocals (and the crowd joins in), and Bryan Devendorf intuits that he should sit this one out.

Throughout, the unspoken conversation between the band is mesmeric: early on they play more muted versions, like steady long-distance runners. They never break between songs—there’s always that hissing drumbeat or a steady guitar line to guide the transition—and the Dessners constantly experiment with different textures. Sometimes the guitar parts swing like slack machinery; later they tremble with the seismic presence of a Richard Serra sculpture, shriek like birds, and swell drunkenly. I didn’t see the original performance, and had wondered if it might mirror William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, fading as energy and morale grew dim, but the ceaseless invention here keeps the song alive.

The National: A Lot of Sorrow album review

[days-of-reading]

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

[magicalgirldropout]

[jakarimalotara]

i miss my mom

[toiich]

Audrey Hepburn in her kitchen, 1955

[disease-deactivated20210414]

JENNY HOLZER

[sivavakkiyar]

oh that’s actually kinda cute

[sealinne]

Also at that conference was the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. During the next two days the three of us made two discoveries about one another.

The first was that each of us had attacked at least one of the others in print. I had dissed Eco’s book. Umberto had criticized Mario for being too right-wing. Mario had criticized me for being too left-wing.

The second discovery was that we all got on like a house on fire.

It was Umberto who suggested we should now call ourselves The Three Musketeers. (This, remember, was the time of the Three Tenors, Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras.) I remember asking, “Why Musketeers? Why not, for example, The Three Stooges?”

“No,” Umberto insisted. “It has to be Musketeers, because first we were enemies and now we are friends.”

- Selman Rushdie

[wovi]

[hoursofreading]

“I feel I have wasted my life … and know far too little for a woman of twenty-seven years … I feel a dizzying pressure under my skin … I want to make a hole in everything and penetrate it deep. I want to reach the heart of the earth. My love lies in there, a place where seedlings turn green and roots meet one another and creation continues even in disintegration. I think it has always been this way—in birth and then in death. I think my body is a temporary form. I want to reach its essence. I want to hang my heart like a ripe fruit on every branch of every tree.”

— Forugh Farrokhzad, in a letter to to Ebrahim Golestān, Behnam Bavandpour, ed., Majmooeh āssāreh Forugh Farrokhzad (Nima Press, 2002). (via vfollia)