Category: landscape

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How to Eat an Ice-Cream Cone, L. Rust Hills (New Yorker)

“feet from one to two feet apart, body bent forward from the waist at a twenty-five-degree angle, right elbow well up, right forearm horizontal, at a level with your collarbone and about twelve inches from it. But don’t start eating yet!’

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You are the ice cream sandwich connoisseur of your generation.

Blessed are your floral shorteralls, your deeply pink fanny pack with travel-size lint roller just in case.

Level of splendiferous in your outfit: 200.

Types of invisible pain stemming from adolescent disasters in classrooms, locker rooms, & quite often Toyota Camrys: at least 10,000.

You are not a jigglypuff, not yet a wigglytuff.

Reporters & fathers call your generation “the worst.”

Which really means “queer kids who could go online & learn that queer doesn’t have to mean disaster.”

Or dead.

Instead, queer means, splendiferously, you.

& you means someone who knows that common flavors for ice cream sandwiches in Singapore include red bean, yam, & honeydew.

Your powers are great, are growing.

One day you will create an online personality quiz that also freshens the breath.

The next day you will tell your father, You were wrong to say that I had to change.

To make me promise I would. To make me promise.

& promise.

Summer, Chen Chen

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linkhut is a project that aims to revive the bookmarking flow of early Delicious.

“They describe the soul’s encounter with something hard—a thought, an event, a feeling, a pleasure or an undiluted pain—and that process of description is slow, difficult, erratic.” (AN)

My flowers are reflected
In your mind
As you are reflected in your glass.
When you look at them,
There is nothing in your mind
Except the reflections
Of my flowers.
But when I look at them
I see only the reflections
In your mind,
And not my flowers.
It is my desire
To bring roses,
And place them before you
In a white dish.

The Florist Wears Knee-Breeches, Wallace Stevens

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his poetry wants so much to belong to us—to those who know intimately why a relentless self-exposure to the world has to be made, somehow, into a virtue because otherwise it is just abuse. (AN)

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Leave the womb
Leave the fear
Leave the nest

Hit the road
Hightail it
Head the hell out

Live hidden
Without a sound

Not seen
Nor heard

Be not
From this earth
But from nothing.

Ex Nothing (Ex Nada), Cecilia Vicuña, translated from the Spanish by Rosa Alcalá

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• it is obstinate in its commitment to loving without shame or reservation.

• he remained on the hunt for nooks where impassioned and prolonged feelings of all kinds could linger and intensify, private worlds that are not really private and whose borders bleed out.

• communism is (“the land belongs to no one” and “the fruits belong to all”—Sylvain Maréchal, 1796).

Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse, Anahid Nersessian

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Information delayed. Information withheld.
Saturation with info, useless and helpful blended. Plot
not “completed.” Size and significance of events
unemphatic: far too much attention paid to
tiny subjects. Option on funny noises.
Order of info homogeneous. Litotes, a Greek god,
Litotes of Lacedaemonia. Why isn’t this boring?
Do I need this info? It changes all the time,
doesn’t repeat itself, it only almost does.
What is a “conditional honorific”?
Randomness and inductive method, both at once.
“So what?” is a valuable question to ask. Frame story,
like Taming of the Shrew, but W.S. didn’t
finish the frame! A is really a pretext for B. B is what counts.

Title Not Given, Caroline Knox

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Support Structures, Céline Condorelli, 2009, Sternberg Press.

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Ben Eastham on Reba Maybury and Lucy McKenzie’s Pervert or Detective?, edited by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen with an afterword by Susan Finlay, was published by no place press in 2025. It accompanied an exhibition on view at Ca’Buccari, Venice. (e-flux)

When used to camouflage a deeper conservatism, which is so often the function of cliché, the phrasing reassures readers that their engagement with the work of art in question affirms their opposition to the injustice they might recently have observed in the world, might even be feeling guilty about. Aesthetic experience is reconciled with ethical principle, pleasure equated with virtue, the beautiful made consistent with the good.

In the conversation at the heart of this book, [the] artists … dismantle this comforting delusion.

That “perversion” … carries the implication of a desire that cannot be subordinated to any ethical framework.

Art might in turn alert us to the “violence in which we live,” as McKenzie puts it, and lead us to establish creative spaces—subcultures—outside of those strictures.

By decoupling art from received morality, they reclaim it as an arena in which hierarchies and social norms can be brought into question without repercussion.

Only by expressing our unconscious desires and then measuring them against abstract ideals of the good can we approach self-knowledge and establish a workable politics.

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The right to make my dreams come true,
    I ask, nay, I demand of life,
Nor shall fate’s deadly contraband
Impede my steps, nor countermand;
Too long my heart against the ground
Has beat the dusty years around,
And now at length I rise! I wake!
And stride into the morning break!

Calling Dreams, Georgia Douglas Johnson

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I don’t know what to do

????? ????? two states of mind in me

51: I don’t know what to do, translated by Anne Carson

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I have had not one word from her
Frankly I wish I were dead.
When she left, she wept
a great deal; she said to
me, This parting must be
endured, Sappho. I go unwillingly.”
I said, “Go, and be happy
but remember (you know
well) whom you leave shackled by love
If you forget me, think
of our gifts to Aphrodite
and all the loveliness that we shared
all the violet tiaras,
braided rosebuds, dill and
crocus twined around your young neck

Sappho