“Dear God, if he were to get out of this alive he would be attentive to his plants.”
He forgot about the future and past.”
(AS)
Be attentive to plants
Author: dig
From the shores of oval oceans
Constance Debré was in conversation about her work with writer and critic Alice Blackhurst. (LRB, 2024)
Also, her website.
A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis
From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient
Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete
And “Immortality”
mildews …
in the museums of the moon
Lunar Baedeker, Mina Loy
AG2023_1023157a feels true
Tatiana Trouvé, 6 juillet – 12 octobre 2008. Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou. Text by Eva Prouteau.
“Les Modules « sont des lieux de travail et de concentration dont on ne sait précisément si la fonction consiste à recenser ou à produire les pensées ou les traces de l’activité de l’artiste – comme si la genèse en constituait également l’horizon.»
[…]
Eléments enfouis de la mémoire qui font surface, à l’image des polders des Pays-Bas, zones côtières endiguées pour dérober les terres à la mer, « ces espaces en réduction restent énigmatiques parce que composés d’éléments faisant référence à des univers hétéroclites : de plus, leur changement d’échelle, optique, s’accompagne systématiquement de la redéfinition d’une logique d’espace. »
Belief in a novel is, for me, a by-product of a certain kind of sentence.
[…]
The sort of sentence that makes me feel – against all empirical evidence to the contrary – that what I am reading is, fictionally speaking, true. (ZS)
AG2023_1880720a2 or wonder if It weighs like Mine
I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, eyes –
I wonder if It weighs like Mine –
Or has an Easier size.
I measure every Grief I meet, Emily Dickinson
AG2026_1078312b
I am only the place where
Proton guides us through Google Photos. (2024)
“this city’s brute capacity for gathering” Nick Laird (New York Elasticity) via Under the Banner of New York, Zadie Smith.
Inside us live innumerable others;
If I think or feel, I do not know
Who is thinking or feeling.
I am only the place
Where feeling and thinking happen.
I have more than one soul.
There are more I’s than just I myself.
And yet I remain completely
Indifferent to them all.
I silence them: I speak.
The crisscrossing impulses
Of what I feel and don’t feel
Argue inside the person I am.
I ignore them. They dictate nothing
To the me I know I am: I write.
219, Ricardo Reis, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari
Lived out unmeasured
I do not want to remember or to know myself.
We just get in the way if we look into who we are.
Not knowing we are alive
Is quite enough of life.
The hour in which we live is just as alive
As we are, and also equally dead
When it passes along with us
As we pass along with it.
If knowing this is of no help in knowing this
(Because otherwise, what’s the point of knowing ourselves?),
The best life is the life
Lived out unmeasured.
112, Ricardo Reis, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari.
AG2024_1088828a or puts his hand to this or that
The Original, Anahid Nersessian on “Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver,” Peter E. Gordon (newyorker)
“he would come to exemplify a new kind of criticism, aimed at an audience of literate laypeople and marked by the application of left-wing political thought to the analysis of both high and popular culture, from Marx to Mickey Mouse.
Before the late eighteenth century, few would think to write an essay unpacking the hidden meaning of a novel or painting, let alone suggest that works of art might have ideological agendas or biases. Art was good if it was well executed and managed to entertain without being coarse, immoral, or sacrilegious. As Benjamin argued in his dissertation, it was writers such as Friedrich Schlegel who, around 1800, first began to consider aesthetic objects as capacious and mercurial entities, whose true contents could be revealed only through sustained scrutiny. For them, an art work became a “medium of reflection,” no longer simply a mirror of the world but a tool for understanding things about history, society, and politics, as well as about more familiar matters of the human heart. As for criticism, it was both a means to discover what the art object had to say and an extension of the object itself.”
“In 1928, he published “One-Way Street,” a collection of aphoristic meditations on objects such as gloves (“All disgust is originally disgust at touching”) and numbered lists of epigrams (“I. Books and harlots can be taken to bed. II. Books and harlots interweave time”). Elliptical and fragmentary, “One-Way Street” is, Benjamin said, an homage to the “inconspicuous forms” of urban life taken in by the flâneur, the man who strolls aimlessly about a city covered with “leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards,” whose pithy, highly evocative, and sometimes surreal style Benjamin borrowed as his own.”
John Duff, Reena Spaulings. January 18 – February 28, 2026; TEXT+LIST OF WORKS.
John Duff
Untitled, 1968
clamshells, wire, paint
dimensions variable, 106.68 x 63.5 x 38.1 cm; 42 x 25 x 15 in
JD/S 48
“He thinks, dreams, puts his hand to this or that, and we are welcome to eavesdrop if we care to do so.” via New York Art Critics Association