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)

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.