phantasmagoric-al

[phantasmagoric-al]

"Ancestors" by Ekhmetjan Osman, translated by Joshua L. Freeman

[phantasmagoric-al]

tree of light candelabra

[phantasmagoric-al]

[phantasmagoric-al]

Leila Chatti, "Postcard from Gone"

[phantasmagoric-al]

Whether you come as a lover or an executioner, I am ready to receive you.

[phantasmagoric-al]

Verum La Priere tights, Grimoire

[phantasmagoric-al]

Mary Ruefle, from Trances of the Blast; “Abdication”

[phantasmagoric-al]

Anok Yai by Drew Vickers for D La Repubblica Magazine Summer 2025

[phantasmagoric-al]

[phantasmagoric-al]

“Roland Barthes says that even if a thing seems to be the same as another thing, treat it as if it were different. This is a behavioral exhortation, make no mistake. In Deleuze’s meditation Difference and Repetition, he too suggests that even a thing that repeats has differences worth noting, worth praying to. He doesn’t say the word pray but I know what he means. I don’t even mean pray when I say the word pray. I mean a different thing, but I use this word. (I’m not spiritual—this is doctrinaire—so PRAY TO WHOM would be my question.) In a not-so-strange fold, or LITERARY PUCKER even, this exemplifies my current point: a word seems to be the same but is in possession of differences worth noting, worth jacking off to, in other words. Super-sexy differences.”

— Harry Dodge, My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing

[phantasmagoric-al]

“I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read,“ a third reader says, “but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext.”

— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

[phantasmagoric-al]

[phantasmagoric-al]

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you think. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, difficult as it is...

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”

~ Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

[phantasmagoric-al]

[phantasmagoric-al]

Rare Encounters: Nancy Sheung’s Portraits of Hong Kong Women in the 1960s.

《珍影集: 常惠珍鏡頭下的1960年代香港女性》

[phantasmagoric-al]

Merab Abramishvili, Guardian Angel, 2001

[phantasmagoric-al]

Windows frame the view outside and can also make a striking interior composition. Glass block used as a border creates a geometric pattern.

The Not So Big House - A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live, 1998