huge thanks to all the humans who read and shared my heresies this year. it means the world; words are the only world I feel known in. thank you — I will say it until blue in the face— writing is always an effort to speak to you, to imagine a world where the things that destroy us are speakable.

I love frottage because it’s like this haptic residue, evidence of the touch. But also distinct from action painting, which shows evidence of a difference sort of touch — the artist to the canvas. Frottage kind of anticipates our desire for that “secret third thing.”

Brian Blanchfield published this a few years ago but i still love it. Just as I love watching deer run their nubs on bark — and all the rubbings of being, some based in becoming, other based in overcoming, etc etc :) harpers.org/archive/2015...

Thinking while hanging from a limb, an ode to Adriana Cavarero’s Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude.

All frottage— www.alinastefanescuwriter.com/blog/2025/12...

Feeling seen by Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Minotaur” — 🖤

Loved your piece. Just want to toss out a Guston paragraph on Piero who he thought had a way & style

Advice to myself — Do not make laws. Do not form habits. You do not possess a way. You do not possess a style. - Philip Guston, 1978 www.alinastefanescuwriter.com/blog/2025/12...

Inclination is not a steady state; it is a slope, as the word says, a disposition toward affect, which comes from certain likable qualities in the object: but it may become affect or impetuous love. — Niccolò Tommaseo, Nuovo dizionario dei sinonimi della lingua italiana

Why am I sad because he's hot and wears very nice geometric sweaters and doesn't love me - Dorothea Lasky, MEMORY

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a given property of the mind that certain bounds hold against chaos, that is a place of first permission, everlasting omen of what is - Robert Duncan, "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow"

"If it's a matter of words, if it's a function of language, if it's concerned with what it's like or not like to be human, it will prove to be some sort of fiction." - Wright Morris, Time Pieces

“Only fiction will accommodate the facts of life...Our choice, insofar as we have one, is not between fiction and fact, but between good and bad fiction..." - Wright Morris, Time Pieces

Overwintering queens make wonderful pets, just don’t expect them to understand your writing, how you’ve rearranged the stresses to sponsor feelings in advance of the collective subject who might feel them - Ben Lerner, "The Media" www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

It is the hint of the hollow which holds us, and the way a stone arm and circles nothing but atmosphere so lovingly we want to believe in our being there, also surrounded, and only then alive in our life as that stone. – William H. Gass

Beginning in January, this three-part course with @alinaetc.bsky.social 1)Techniques to Fictionalize Photography 2) Epigraphs in Fiction 3) Terrible and Beautiful Angelic Forms in Fiction We have FIVE spots for non-CWC members to join us:

The vain travail. - Ben Lerner, “The Rescue”

According to Bachelard, "there will always be more things in a closed box" than in an open one. This is because the opening verifies - and the verification "kills" - the image. And it is "more enriching to imagine than to experience."

The prohibition against Feeling broken like bread - Ben Lerner, “Pistil”

I myself have been all contradiction. - Czeslaw Milosz

i imagine the earth when I am no more: Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant - Czeslaw Milosz

This album— for the nostalgia, the postcards, and the synth :) youtu.be/RuTvAvzB3TY?...

In an essay drawn from her critically acclaimed book “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” Yiyun Li writes about the loss of her sons, and the type of sorrow for which there is no language. Read her account: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/cwGt5m

Alice Notley's translation of Apollinaire

I don’t understand holiday affects that fail to congrue around the Magnetic Fields. youtu.be/5VO4R98Ti6I?...

Too many puddings, not enough texts!

Just drinking my coffee and watching Peters perform Sondheim and trying not to cry like I every year around this time. :) youtu.be/5kMlQgyz834?...

joyce from ours to yrs

Rodrigo Toscano, WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. / @omnidawn.bsky.social @rodrigo-toscano.bsky.social ; robmclennan.blogspot.com/2025/12/rodr...

I blame this on Cassavetes and Mingus and Anna Wiener’s moving essay on Renata Adler in @theparisreivew.bsky.social maudlinhouse.net/pithecanthro...

No act of necromancy will breathe life into the vanguard party form today— nor do we think it desirable even if it were possible. Let the dead bury the dead. - Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, ASSEMBLY

a song that is always of the holidays for me youtu.be/kCzMZ-IuKTQ?...

Everyone says they know you youtu.be/IeMxD0Rb3HY?...

The green corner of Philip Guston's "Departure" (1963).

Reality is more farfetched than fiction.

There are moments—most of them have committed murder—and many have everlasting monuments. Who are the people, you may ask. Gazing over the torn flesh you spot yourself. - James Tate, "Rising Absenteeism" thomaswmorris.com/poetry/james...

Should I leap from the balcony and back up again like a great big Saint! If I pulled all these daggers out of my firehead I could breathe like a jet in an exemplory way like a sergeant, like a bean. O Heroes, I'll always need you from this time on: - James Tate, "Like a Saint"

This brush with my own capacity to kill what I love is forever embedded in my consciousness. I learned to drive, but I never got over the fact that behind the wheel I could thoughtlessly hurt someone. - Dorothea Lasky, Memory

The flames don’t dance or slither. They have painted the room green. Beautiful and naked, the wives are sleeping before the fire. Now it is out. The men have returned to the shacks, - James Tate, "Fuck the Astronauts" www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47813/...

From "Reflections on Projection” by Andrew Stark: 1/3 Two things can bear as little resemblance as chalk and cheese. But if we have forged an association between them—my math teacher threw a piece of chalk at me in 9th grade, for example, when I tried to eat a piece of cheese

Goodnight, skyline. as if a shower of meteors was a common occurrence around the bed each night

Poetry is not the same thing as the imagination taken alone. Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelations or interactions. - Wallace Stevens, "Adagio"

Remembering Samuel Beckett

Two indspendable texts from my december

We at the Middlesex Liberation Front have added the so-called magazine “The Fence” to our list for when the time comes. (editors note: the Middlesex Liberation front demands to never be initialised, please update your style guides accordingly)

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la dadada dAH youtu.be/_6IJfo4q1zk?...

I wouldn’t be editing this manuscript I’m trying to finish if it weren’t for Joshua Rothes who said “that’s an insane idea you should do it.” Writing often begins sin conversations with friends and peers. I owe these humans the joy and terror of my midnights with paper.