John Ashbery by Adam Fitzgerald
“Roussel wrote the kind of French that students were instructed to write at the Lycée: grammatically correct and totally limpid and cold. I don’t know why it appealed to me so much. I don’t think I’m a cold person myself. Maybe that’s why.”

“You could say that Arte Útil is anti-capitalist, because it is placed within another social ecology and is produced for another social class. It doesn’t belong in a society of heroes or saints; it is a practice for a society of the commons.”

“I like flirting with disaster. I like terms that are open and provocative and unusual and evocative and we don’t know where things will be going next.”

“I begin listening and recognizing silence, meditating until I hear the blood circulating, and then start following the beats, making marks, one by one, line by line, emptying myself until the entire surface of the canvas is covered.”

Navigating the concentric interiors of the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art, the building unfolds along a serpentine walkway. Through the museum’s glass walls, the view opens uninterrupted.
“One is constantly working over what happened and constructing the future based on the past. So there’s no way of saying now we’re done with the past and it’s time to look for our future. No, there’s a direct continuity between these things.”
A fear of alienating myself from approval by revealing my truest self … a fear of not being heard, being judged, being misunderstood … These things make me tremble.
The woman is in Iowa now, I hear. She moved there with her husband shortly after, and now she sees.
The reflection between an event in time and the memory of that event: “something shimmers like a heat wave between them.”
The day after the gallery visit, I awoke with a lingering headache, alarmed by the sound of the phone.
LOTHIAN
it was a great rush
to confront solidity
Brian got up early that Saturday to do his laundry then tracked down a friend who owed him ten dollars and scored some crystal meth in the process.
CAUGHT
He spears me like a fish
on the spoke of pleasure,
In P__, we had a huge yellow kitchen. A garden.

With the landmark publication of De humani corporis fabrica in 1543, Vesalius may have forever linked human anatomy, at least pictorially, with the aesthetics of the sixteenth-century woodcut—its perfect draftsmanship, edifying gore, and rather ham-handed theatricality.

When I began to read Andrew Lampert’s introduction to The George Kuchar Reader, the anxieties, fears, and dim career outlook I have often experienced, eased.

While the now-accepted wisdom is that Bertolt Brecht was one of the major dramatists of the past century, this same acceptance often tends to obscure the most unique aspect of his work, namely: his struggle through the decades to find new ways to present his deep political and social commitment—not just in his subject matter, but, equally, in the formal strategies of his distinctive theatrical form.

We are not all Pierre Guyotat, writing of our capture and interrogation in Algerian solitary in 1962, our words and acts subject to violent retaliation, but maybe we’ve seen our own soul’s bifurcation.

Dedicated to poet, journalist, and activist Brad Will, a friend killed while filming a street battle in Mexico in 2006, Brenda Coultas’s The Tatters summons powers too seldom called upon these days.
Mika Tajima by Kareem Estefan
To kick with sabots, to willfully destroy, especially for political advantage. The Brooklyn-based artist and musician Mika Tajima is something of a saboteur.

Christine Wertheim’s recently released book mUtter-bAbel is gorgeously hyperbolic, a primordial pataphysics of text and drawings that explores relationships between babies, mothers, language, and “ugly archaic feelings and their troubling social effects.”
BOMB Specific by Matt Keegan & Kay Rosen
The following is excerpted from an ongoing physical mail exchange, started in 2009, between artists Matt Keegan & Kay Rosen.