Opening Quote

---

It may be that friendship is nourished on observation and conversation, but love is born from and nourished on silent interpretation…The beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us…that must be deciphered.

------------------------Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, as quoted by Rivka Galchen ------------------------in Atmospheric Disturbances

----

From Europe Central

Behind the wall, rubberized black tentacles spread across Europe. Military maps depict them as fronts, trenches, salients and pincer movements. Politicians encode them as borders (destroyed, razed, utterly smashed). Administrators imagine that they're roads and rivers. Public health officials see them as the black trickles of people dwindling day by day on Leningrad's frozen streets. Poets know them as the veins of Partisan Zoya's martyred body. They're anything. They can do anything.

William T. Vollmann (photo via postpacific)

From Comfort and Critique by Peter Sotos

Parents trust reject-magic. Especially. Maybe. When their children are hurt by something unfair and completely out of their control. They look for messages and bent reason and talk about bonds and clarifying connections. Purity. Love that is tangible. Electric. It has to be. And the superstitious shrimp that don't grab for something pathetic like god and nature are the sicknesses that sink back into themselves only to ask you later to excuse their repulsive frailty.