Painting, reading, looking at things.

Happy Holidays.

Friends, My best books of 2025 for the New Museum in New York are now up and available. To read the reviews: www.newmuseumstore.org/collections/... My best of at DAP: www.artbook.com/blog-ex-libr... A few of my favorites at Point Reyes Books: ptreyesbooks.com/herberts-fav...

k + h ∞ h + k

Llewelyn Powys on the Lark and his dusky darling, from the ever astonishing Earth Memories, published by @LittleToller

Go out to the roses and the bees and the dove-cots. But especially to the songbirds, that you may learn from them how to sing! Singing is for the convalescent; the healthy can speak. Nietzsche : Zarathustra

Accessible but veiled.

Letter to a friend.

Be glad: the house is mined, it will fall. - Robinson Jeffers The Broken Balance

My painting "No Omen but Awe" is on view at the permanent collection gallery at the Bolinas Museum. Come west & stop by.

Very few get the biographer they deserve—R. Crumb got lucky. Dan Nadel's wonderfully candid chronicle does not recoil, moralize, or whitewash. It's my book of the month at the New Museum. @newmuseum.bsky.social. Full review here: www.newmuseum.org/articles/boo...

Edward Gorey, who painted his toenails black on the day Gertrude Stein died.

"...a handful of dust." || Postcard to a friend.

And I the apparition, I the spectre. - Whitman

This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. [...] Man was not to be associated with it. – Thoreau, The Maine Woods

If you find yourself in New York City, please stop by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in Tribeca to see Louise Despont's beautiful solo exhibition—Afterlifes. I'm working on a book with Louise & wrote the exhibition's accompanying text, which can be found here: nicellebeauchene.com/exhibitions/...

For k.

Speech is but broken light upon the depth of the unspoken. - George Eliot

Yuri Knorozov, who studied Mayan hieroglyphic writing. Why is there no book about him?

Got myself some birthday presents @pointreyesbooks.bsky.social

I want to represent things as they are, or rather as they would be, supposing I did not exist. - Charles Baudelaire, Salon of 1859 To see a landscape as it is when I am not there... - Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

Das Fett der Werke wird verfaulen. Übrig bleiben ein paar Sätze. - Canetti

No counsel is more trustworthy than that which is given upon ships that are in peril. - Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks

These lies mean that the country wants to die. (Robert Bly, The Teeth Mother Naked At Last, 1970)

László F. Földényi's "The Long Shadow of the Guillotine" arrives in the mail on the same day as Julia Kristeva's "The Severed Head." Coincidence? Elective affinity? An omen?

the things of this world: snake.

"The lesson of these days is the vulgarity of wealth. We know that wealth will vote for the same thing which the worst and meanest of the people vote for," noted Emerson's Journal in 1854.

A boy told me the little jumping spider was “a friend”.

"Schoenberg archives destroyed in LA fires." †

Departed there and landed here. Carried all my twitters with me––from 2016 until now. May this port prove solid.

Cristina Campo wrote about the "accumulation of time and secrets" in "The Unforgivable," one of my favorite books @pointreyesbooks.bsky.social in 2024. Good books are sanctuaries that can be shared. ptreyesbooks.com/list/best-bo... ptreyesbooks.com/herberts-fav... Here's to a wondrous new year.

​Osip Mandelstam - Two Poems. Translated by Andrew Davis. Hand set and printed letterpress by The Brother In Elysium. Edition of 175 copies. thebrotherinelysium.com/shop/osip-ma...

My music is best understood by children and animals––said Stravinsky.

It is a mistake to believe in my presence. - Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time

Is it true the question mark derives from the shape of the tail of a cat when surprised. Sorry unfair question. - Anne Carson, Wrong Norma

...alles Sieghafte ist völlig unerträglich. - Gottfried Benn, Brief an Oelze

...and they held out as long as they could. For Kirston @epidotepress, these days & all days.

Schigaljow sah so aus , als erwarte er den Untergang der Welt, und dies nicht etwa in unbestimmter Ferne, sondern ganz bestimmt, etwa übermorgen früh, genau 25 Minuten nach 10. - Dostojewski, Die Dämonen

Like Whitman, Chesterton thought that the mere fact of existing is so prodigious that no misfortune should exempt us from a kind of cosmic gratitude. - Jorge Luis Borges / Robert Bresson, Mouchette

America, at times, seems to be the only country to have gone directly from adolescence to senility, without intervention. Noted Paul Metcalf, some time ago.

Looking forward to this one from The Brother In Elysium. thebrotherinelysium.com/shop/osip-mand…

Schreiben, malen, formen, erbauen und erfinden –– der Hölle zu entrinnen ist das wahre Ziel. - Antonin Artaud

Friends, I have a few last copies of the broadside edition of my text on the immoderately experimental, radiantly rare & radically strange conjuror of future sounds Charles Ives. Letterpress printing & collage work by Jon Beacham of The Brother In Elysium. DM me if interested.

Fragment on Ives. More information here: herbertpfostl.com/publications#/…

What do answers answer anyway. They fit onto questions like a stocking onto a leg but the blood stains still refuse to evaporate. - Anne Carson, Wrong Norma

Artaud (as "Knife Grinder") in Fritz Lang's 1934 "Liliom.

The last issue of IM LABYRINTH has been published. It includes my painting "no omen but awe" (below) and a text piece as bow to some pictorial wonders of the dead. Relics of light for me––and (maybe) you. Special thanks to Harald Wolf for his curiosity & candor across the years.

Ewiger Traum, daß man etwas nicht macht, sondern daß es entsteht. - Gottfried Benn

Gena Rowlands, RIP