“…for amongst the many small things we know about this great saint, soldier, and martyr, is that she cried very easily, whenever she was upset, frightened, cross, or hurt.” - V. Sackville-West on Joan of Arc/Jeanne d’Arc

6.42 a.m. cool air … voices: sunbird, jungle babblers, crows, red-whiskered bulbul, hawk-cuckoo … my neighbor in his backyard washing clothes in a bucket

Whenever I need to check my toner I print a full page picture of a Wade Guyton painting

Found Guyton (sidewalk sculpture).

Legendary composer Èliane Radigue died this past week at the age of 94. She was a pioneer of electronic music and many of her compositions expressed her Buddhist practice in their spacious and slow moving sonic fields. salrandolph.substack.com/p/the-resona...

If you are looking for some feral art criticism, this is the book for you.

Alexander Calder, "Snow Flurry," 1950 calder.org/works/hangin...

Allegory of alchemy in a bas-relief of the central porch of Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris. The head crowned by clouds —much like the Bride's in Marcel Duchamp's "Large Glass."

I am dreaming and writing of horses, but they need time to gather themselves and begin their fiery galloping. Meanwhile, this new year is still emerging from the old. Tell me what you are carrying from the old year, and what you are wishing for in the new. salrandolph.substack.com/p/the-new-days

an A5 postcard for staring at while listening to Derek Jarman's Blue on the BBC on 19 September 1993, for people who didn't get Channel 4 greg.org/archive/2026...

As the news swirls constantly around us, I continue my practice of writing back to posts on social media. It seems I’ve been doing this for a year! It’s a form of play that helps me reclaim my attention and connect to my sense of being. I invite you to do the same!

i went outside for my brain again

My notebooks these days are filled with strange wanderings and shards of tales both short and long. salrandolph.substack.com/p/sea-of-ice...

People are such a cornucopia!

The way he says “cab.”

How do we speak when language fails? salrandolph.substack.com/p/laments

“Artist refers to a person, willfully enmeshed in a dilemma of categories, who performs as if none of them existed.” - Allan Kaprow

I don’t want to hear anything from an elected official unless it’s a plan to defund the DHS and impeach Noem, Bovino, etc. No texts. No emails. No talk about the economy. Step up or step off.

Free Words was a hot pink artists book I described as “a book that belonged to anyone who found it.” I placed it onto the shelves of bookstores and libraries to be discovered, and people who found it had to make a decision about whether they were truly free to carry it away. Here’s the story.

From the great David Wojnarowicz (thread): "I wake up every morning in this killing machine called america & I’m carrying this rage like a blood filled egg & there’s a thin line between inside & the outside a thin line between thought & action & that line is simply made up of blood & muscle & bone"

The Empty Cup (from the School of Radical Attention) invited me to write a guest post on Zen and attention, so here is a brief report on my experiences during this winter’s silent retreat. salrandolph.substack.com/p/where-are-...

The nation is broken, but hills and rivers remain. Du Fu, trans. Arthur Sze

the endless ground of your own deep pulse, Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. David Young

Happy New Year! May this coming year offer you liberation. I’m thrilled to have two excerpts from a manuscript, You Must be an Image to Survive, You Must be a Text to Be Found, in the new issue of Works & Days from out now from Beautiful Days Press.

On the immaterial spirit of giving: salrandolph.substack.com/p/ways-of-se...

A Solstice song to celebrate or get you through. It begins before it begins. It begins before it begins when the light is longest. It begins in triumph and jubilation. It begins in winning. It begins in the fat of the land and the plenty. Such light…. salrandolph.substack.com/p/the-endark...

Really, it would be so easy to be a better nation.

Some words for the longest night. salrandolph.substack.com/p/the-endark...

Will Alexander @ndbooks.bsky.social

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted a Zen talk. Here’s one that I gave last week about becoming a Zen priest and also about the famous koan, “Joshu’s Wash Your Bowls.” salrandolph.substack.com/p/a-bowl-of-...

posting about Edward Curtis's Hollywood era photographs veered into a chance to revisit the frenzied auction of Joan Didion's estate, including the $8960 sale of seashells and pebbles from her mantle, and also what relation pictures have to reality greg.org/archive/2022...

The attacks on trans rights, which are basic human rights, are a terrible injustice and an attack on truth and fact as well. Everyone should be deeply alarmed and it should be disqualifying for a politician to support such discrimination.

This is what happens when you succumb to the drug of someone else’s language (in this case, the unusual methods of László Krasznahorkai). Perhaps a cautionary tale! salrandolph.substack.com/p/this-i-can...

For fellow art-poetry nerds/lovers, Édouard Glissant’s art collection is coming to New York. www.cara-nyc.org/program/exhi...

Syllable- mole, sea- coloured, far out into the unnavigated. -Paul Celan (tr. Michael Hamburger)

Felix Gonzalez-Torres's "Untitled," 1991, originally appeared on a series of billboards throughout NYC. Gonzalez-Torres, a wildly inventive and influential artist, died of AIDS in 1996, age 38. #WorldAIDSDay

Fairfield Porter (1907-1975), “The Cliffs of Isle Au Haut” (1974), oil on canvas, 182.9 x 157.5 cm.

From Robber Barons to Robber Bros.

I’ve fallen in love with the Japanese literary form, zuihitsu. Zuihitsu, meaning “following the brush,” flow as the mind flows. They are fragmentary—mixing moments of observation, opinion, anecdote, asides, and humor. salrandolph.substack.com/p/ways-of-se...

just listen a little. / No one cares if you understand it who understands / why we're alive Alice Notley

wild little Richard Serra drawing, no idea greg.org/archive/2025...

This week I want to hold in mind some work that I love, as inspiration and guide. I’m reposting a love letter to the precarious objects of Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña. salrandolph.substack.com/p/cecilia-vi...

David Smith / Don Quixote, 1952

Some poems from my moment in the sun as Poet of the Week at Only Poems. salrandolph.substack.com/p/poet-of-th...

I want to live in an apartment at the public library.

It's driving me batty that nobody except Heather Cox Richardson, the Washington Monthly, and myself is covering Trump's race to sell off (for likely demolition) "the Sistine Chapel of the New Deal," w/ murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, etc. I've furnish links below to help reporters get started.

Some morning calm. #wellfleetharbor #capecod

Grateful to Mary for adding this black square to my working collection. On that note, this essay by Andrew Spira is wonderful. publicdomainreview.org/essay/black-...

If you’re out of ideas, invent a place where you could find ideas. An orchard of regret where the fruit on the bough are unsent love letters. A grocery store where you can buy a better childhood. You do not have to begin with something; it is often more useful to begin with somewhere.

30 million dead, The Somme, painting created by Mary Bishop 1976 in the art therapy studio at Netherne hospital where she was compelled to live. Aged 4 when her father was killed in WWI, the reverberations of his death & her mother’s vast grief traumatised & distressed Mary for the rest of her life