The mosquito knows full well, small as he is
he’s a beast of prey.
But after all
he only takes his bellyful,
he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.
The Mosquito Knows, D. H. Lawrence
Norway – Brazil 2 -1.
small as he is
walk garlanded in wisteria
The Thicket. 2024. Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, Ray Suen.
Jack & Lula, 4:42
Franz Schubert, Fantasie in F Minor, D. 940, 5:40 (Ray Suen · Thomas Nickell, Piano)
I will get me to the wood
Where the gods walk garlanded in wisteria,
By the silver-blue flood move others with ivory cars.
There come forth many maidens
to gather grapes for the leopards, my friend.
For there are leopards drawing the cars.
I will walk in the glade,
I will come out of the new thicket
and accost the procession of maidens.
After Ch’u Yuan, Ezra Pound
AG2026_1830372a sways to the tune
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway. . . .
He did a lazy sway. . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.”
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more—
“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisfied—
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.”
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.
The Weary Blues, Langston Hughes
AG2026_MG_7479a or lush and bare
Jacob Lawrence
Could paint
The beauty
Of ?bareness
Blacks
Moved North
Leaving
Empty
Rooms
Behind
Them
Lawrence’s genius
Was to paint
Those rooms
Left behind
Brown bare
Wooden rooms
Light brown plank walls
Dark brown plank floors
A single dark green
Shade
Covering
The window
Erasing the lush landscape
Creating a
Stark beauty
A simple beauty
A bare beauty
The Beauty of Bareness, William J. Harris
AG2026_MG_8350a as wish fulfillment
exhibition has been put together by the team behind the DRAW Project. Based on a proposal by Rafael Domenech, Sonia Rosa Kahn, Loïc Le Gall, Alejandro Valencia. This exhibition is supported by 193 Gallery, Paris. July 3 — October 17 2026.
Pleasure is paramount for literary theorist Northrop Frye’s definition of romance, as wish fulfillment: “[T]he quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality.”
the pleasures of genre and romance are the smooth operators of recurrence and relief, certainty. So unlike life, this smoothness swoons on the weft for expectations and the warp of their fulfillment, pleasure with insurance.
We repeat aesthetic pleasure, we repeat as aesthetic pleasure, because repetition is a—the—truth of psychic life.
Love’s Work, Anna Kornbluh (Parapraxis)
AG2026_MG_7403a or the weight of my life
He was as a god,
stepped out of eternal dream
along the boardwalk.
He looked at my girl,
a dream to herself and
that was the end of them.
They disappeared beside the sea
at Revere Beach as
I aint seen them since.
If you find anyone
answering their description
please let me know. I need them
to carry the weight of my life
The old gods are gone. What lives on
in my heart
is their flesh
like a wound,
a tomb, a bomb.
Billie, John Wieners
AG2021_2050443a or a creative vision of a world
Monk meets Lautréamont on the night train to freedom. It is
one of many chance encounters that reveal a deep affinity be-
tween black life and culture and surrealism. Neither man would
have identified himself as a surrealist, although Lautréamont,
along with another nineteenth-century French poet named
Arthur Rimbaud, are considered the spiritual fathers of surrealism
before the movement was declared after World War I. And yet
they embody the basic principles of surrealism, a living, mutable,
creative vision of a world where love, play, human dignity, an end
to poverty and want, and imagination are the pillars of freedom.
Freedom Dreams, Robin Kelley
Our relationship to this domain–beauty
Merve Emre with László Krasznahorkai (New Yorker)
Everything that is beautiful—whether natural or created by human beings, whether created by God or by life itself—exists in an inviolable domain, which never changes. Only we change, only our relationship to this domain changes, our chances of connecting to it change. In the Renaissance, our chances improved, and now in our modern age they have been ruined, our chances of making this perfect beauty appear, of stepping into relation to it, for it to hold our souls.
[…]
The first movement of despair, when a person is uncertain, when they feel frail, is to start looking for a form that will free them from this uncertainty, and then these political ideologies start coming very easily, without any kind of serious philosophical background, or even without any philosophical background whatsoever.
I don’t need anything from here.
László Krasznahorkai, translated, from the Hungarian, by Ottilie Mulzet.
Red International and Black Caribbean, Communists in New York City, Mexico and the West Indies, 1919-1939, Margaret Stevens
Good habits for eye care. (CNET) The American Optometric Association recommends using the 20-20-20 rule to prevent computer vision syndrome. Every 20 minutes, look at something at least 20 feet away for 20 seconds.
