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

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

Brice Martin / Untitled, 1973-79 (for @mrprudence.bsky.social)

Lately, my life has become an ocean of words—nothing but words, words, words to the vast horizon. This has me longing to just look, just see.

Last night I was with 1500 people singing out “People Have the Power” with Patti Smith on stage just as the polls closed and Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor. Peak New York.

Go @teenvogue.com !

Happy Halloween! For your pleasure, a ghost story so short it barely has time to say boo!

Skeletal illustrations supposedly replicating a lost 15th-century manuscript by the wine and women–loving Zen monk Ikkyū. The lively images testify to their maker’s sardonic sense of humor: skeletons dancing, drumming, drinking sake, having sex...

A tale for these days when we enjoy being spooked by what haunts us. salrandolph.substack.com/p/ghost-story

Squirrel of the Day for October 28, 2025, with a freshly unburied acorn #sqrlpix

Modern capitalism is not as different to slavery as we think.

It's not lost on me that the part of the White House we are destroying is the part that has to do with women's history in the White House.

Something you can bring with you the next time you go to a museum.

Tearing down that ballroom is going to feel like toppling statues of Saddam Hussein.

My favorite fall haiku. Yosa Buson trans. Robert Hass: You go, I stay, Two autumns.

As I’m writing, the season is “Crickets chirp around the door.” In New York, where I live, autumn is taking hold. Darkness in the early morning, leaves and branches coming down in high winds, and in the afternoon, low light floods the avenues, catching the tops of trees.

I didn’t realize that I was patriotic before I saw so much of our nation destroyed.

I am surprisingly sad about the destruction of the white house. It’s like a pain in my own body.

I’m not a big blocker but it was satisfying to insta-block the white house troll accounts with this handy list. Digital #NoKings bsky.app/profile/did:...

Let’s start following small presses the way we used to follow record labels.

I’m a huge J.R. Carpenter fan.

Home sick with the flu so I’m beaming in my #NoKings protest telepatically.

Licks over likes.

I write in haste—it was hard to stop reading and start writing. This week I found myself pursuing a writer who makes an art of pursuing others, and I got caught up in the chase. On Sophie Calle’s The Address Book & other miniature novels.

The precise guidelines for Buddhas and bodhisattvas.

Nice to be reminded of David Graeber on the role of giant puppets in protests.

Good morning. This is Part 1 of my Experimental Poetry Criticism— a prelude, a first movement. Read it before Part 2 begins to unwrite it. Ready or not— I am. periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2025/10/laur...

A new (very) short story.

“The traditional model of creation → completion has, in many cases, given way to something more fluid, recursive, and continuous. The endurance of the idea… its refusal to conclude… is the work itself. Social media provides a stage for this endlessness, allowing the performance to loop…loop…loop…”

Agnes Martin, untitled, 1960, ink on paper.

“I NO LONGER KNOW IF I EVER FALL ASLEEP. IF I DO, I remain outside of sleep itself, in that constantly moving ring of icy asteroids that circles the dark and immobile hollow of oblivion. It is as if I never enter that shadowy vacuum. I toss and turn, literally, in the zone around it” César Aira

I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.

Costco now has Novavax shots. There’s a location on East 117th Street—I am *there* as soon as I can make an appointment!

I’m finding it hard to feel buoyant and optimistic about writing this morning when things everywhere are so disastrous.

It seems we are foraging.

Today I looked up at one of those early October brilliant blue skies that grace New York. One might say that I looked up from my phone, from this other kind of Bluesky which feeds me all the madness of the world.

I have too many books. Three more are on the way.

“Expect to see more dictatorships.” Sean Ashton, Massive Massive Oil Slick.

A mysterious package from a friend, a strange book, the river, coffee, the rapture, a moon snail, what to suppose, expect, and avoid: