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Josh Rothes

@joshuarothes.bsky.social

Writer, editor, worker. Thinks a lot about moving books around. Founder at Asterism.

94 Posts970 Follower 168 Folgt

Jacob Siefring @jsief.bsky.social · 3mo ago

what do the people want? ninth-century Tang dynasty tales when do they want it? now asterismbooks.com/product/an-a...

Josh Rothes @joshuarothes.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I know I haven’t spoken much about it, but please know that I am adequately stoked about the new Boards of Canada

Imogen Reid @imogenreid.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Line Drawing, Layered Print on Fabriano Paper

Alina Stefanescu @alinaetc.bsky.social · 3mo ago

There is a strong gale blowing in David Lynch’s hair. I am trying to make my way through his tresses, but it is near-on impossible and there is freezing cold sea spray blowing in my face. - @vikshirley.bsky.social andotherpoems.com/2026/04/07/f...

from ‘Inside David Lynch’s Hair’

Vik Shirley Squall There is a strong gale blowing in David Lynch’s hair. I am trying to make my way through his tresses, but it is near-on impossible and there is freezing cold sea spra…

andotherpoems.com

Imogen Reid @imogenreid.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Line Drawing, Layered Print on Fabriano Paper

Josh Rothes @joshuarothes.bsky.social · 3mo ago

“And you stare at me / in your Jesus Christ pose”

Cat Fitzpatrick @catfitzpatrick.net · 4mo ago

Oh no me

LittlePuss Press@littlepuss.net · 4mo ago

READ @catfitzpatrick.net talking to @publisherswkly.bsky.social ! "Part of our determination to be funny and irreverent is undoubtedly about resisting the reduction of your humanity to your suffering. We’re like: no, we have many jokes and bright colors, thank you very much!" shorturl.at/Zd6KH

Josh Rothes @joshuarothes.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Reminding myself of what Ian MacKaye said when asked about ideas or methods for fighting the status quo in the music industry: “I'm not interested in fighting them. I'm in interested in doing my work despite them.”

Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 4mo ago

A short essay published three years ago in Firmament made out of fractured thoughts and discarded ideas. “Everything ends up making a body.”

ANOTHER KIND OF HUNGER
Christina Tudor-Sideri

"Everything ends up making a body, down to the very corpus of dust assembling and dancing a vibrant dance in the thin streak of light where the last day of the world draws to a close."
-CORPUS, JEAN-LUC NANCY (TR. RICHARD A. RAND)

RETENTION IS NOT MEMORY.
I let the thought wander through the corridors of an empty mind, alone, I let it tangle its arms and legs in the cobwebs of dreams that I myself have not rethought in years. Retention is not memory. And one after the other, the hours of the night pass before me like dresses on the clotheslines, gently swayed by the summer wind. I find that I am most comfortable with this: absence, and candor, and ruins, everything at once, interwoven in ways words cannot express, unless they themselves become part of this attach-ment. And thus, before me, perhaps the product of a hallucinatory state, words and fragments from created worlds, from worlds imagined, worlds desired, lining up to offer the one gift no one is ever able to receive: an extension of time. In the midst of a crowd of solitudes, my eyes gaze at this stitching on the veil of the night: hands, aspects, illumination, definitions.
Touch from beyond the impossibility of touch, aspects of the film experi-ence, Red Desert, phenomenology, Husserl, a blue piece of glass, contra-dictions, repetitions, endless nothings. I wander on. I step on pages; I stain my skin of ink. I wander on, the circle tightening, the grasp, evermore, the dream, the hallucination, whatever it is that my eyes perceive as reality in this very moment, in this one moment, whatever is given to me, I take it and divide it in fragments of the night, for the first time, for the last time, like curtains that were never drawn apart. One needs fragments, I say, as I walk and crush what lies at my feet: the oversimplification of bodies, bodies on the floor, bodies created, bodies imagined, bodies desired. A film plays in the corner of the room, and it is whe…

The labyrinths of the in-between, of what I see when I happen to pause, between a scene and another, tiny fleeting moments that I did not catch when gazing directly at them, when letting them play out before me as all films do. The dizziness, the personification of love and corporeal trance, pulls me deeper into these images. It creates before me the ball of thread, with its knots and lustful rest stops, its hungering waves of fabric and possibility, its slithering lines of red and repercussion. I gather everything, ravenous, want-ing-in praise of absence and paraphernalia. The devouring of language.
Language as the other, language as the self, language as the world. Hunger to hold everything in one's grasp: the abandoned, the forgotten, the unwrit-ten. I wander on, my body still, my mind in awe. The text comes as dream, as film, as idea. I see Ingrid Bergman playing the piano. I see her hands. I hear Chopin's Prelude. I see the hands of Käbi Alma Laretei. The mind goes to Through a Glass Darkly. I return to the hands, I drift through memories of reading about Maria-Luisa Strub-Moresco, her piano teacher, a photograph of the two of them over the piano, and I wonder-the grandmother, in Fanny and Alexander-but no, I return. The photograph, another one, that of a letter from teacher to student, the writing illegible. Ingrid Bergman is playing the piano, still, but I am no longer there. I no longer see nor hear, I am traveling the paths of other films, I am hearing the music of other hands. On such a day-The mind wanders yet again, and Ivan guides the camera. A few more steps, farther away, Rodin's Eternal Idol, hand behind his back, open like the depiction of possibility. I revel in the blurriness of life brimming with oneiric landscape. Who can say whether I am the same as I was yesterday? Who can say that my stations and my longings remained those of primal years? I untie a knot, and then another, and through this consolation, my hands venture backward in time. Tomor…

out of the mouth like dolls on the theater stage, their limbs maneuvered by the soul in hiding. To take possession of such shores, to pause there and bask in the promise of water, is to observe this spectacle, to let the dream tremble before me, waiting to become a manner of living, at night, when pleasure is at its most confident, when farewells are tiny perfections embroidered on the heart, when the tongue speaks but the mouth does not utter a word. At night, when the resolution to forget becomes forgetfulness itself, when drowning, when gasping, when the body twists and turns and experiences, at night, no doubt, one word, a single word, could cut through the oneiric and the real, and from that wound, give birth to another kind of catastrophe. I wander on. A note on the floor, I lift it and rewrite its content word for word inside my journal, letting the mirroring of these thoughts, thoughts created, thoughts imagined, envelop and carry me with the pace of another repeated imagery: that of waters rushing home. Another one: to darken the door of death. These thoughts-small hungers, desires, impressions on the skin and on the mind, the confidences and cries and brutalities of living apart from oneself. Thoughts on Kleist's oppositions and how they cancel each other out, on Trakl's rats squeaking eagerly as if insane, on Canetti's destruction of the library; thoughts-Tarkovsky's theory of time-pressure, Merleau-Ponty's flesh as ontological reversibility, Cel-an's coffin-beautiful morning, Cohen's iodine, Blanchot's stone before the tomb, Blecher's 'knowledge' as traces left on the body, Resnais' Catherine, Noica's severed and suspended individual, Bachmann's female 'I; Eliade's escape from time, Cioran's savage, drunken language, Beckett's texts for nothing, Bergman's illicit interlude, Abe's paroxysm of nausea, Kieslowski's blind chance, Rimbaud's dark armchair, Turgenev's fear of phrases, Schulz's tiny veins marbling the darkness, Montt's ephemeral hemlock, Bulgako…

Josh Rothes @joshuarothes.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I am not tired. (That’s it. That’s the joke.)

[name of author]@nameofauthor.bsky.social · 4mo ago

on this day every year I think of my friend @joshuarothes.bsky.social and hope this is the year he makes his triumphant return to social media with a well-crafted whopper

Josh Rothes @joshuarothes.bsky.social · 4mo ago

This kind of limp self-congratulatory nonsense is why “we” are going to lose.

Post nicht verfügbar.

Yoon Kim @yoonkim.bsky.social · 4mo ago

“neither bed nor body neither subject nor object neither time nor hands but something else… …not from anywhere I search to borrow words for this eternal letter but something trembling unnamed a grammar of flesh that cannot be conjugated only endured” 🖤 Christina Tudor-Sideri, An Absence of Sea

Future Tense Books @futuretensebooks.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Kevin’s new novel comes out tomorrow (3/17)! Reading Wednesday at Powell’s!

Portland Mercury@portlandmercury.com · 5mo ago

Kevin Sampsell's new novel sees the world through the eyes of a two-year-old (who believes their departed father is the moon). The novel follows young Tony Volcano Ventura through his childhood as he grows from a very curious baby into a street-smart toddler and preschooler.

Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Forthcoming on April 16—An Absence of Sea—a letter across time woven from dreams, intimacies, lived fragments, and remembered voices, where the self meets its double and those who echo within it. www.erratumpress.com/an-absence-o... My gratitude to @ansgarallen.bsky.social @erratumpress.bsky.social

Josh Rothes @joshuarothes.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Your reminder that every form is artificial.

Josh Rothes @joshuarothes.bsky.social · 5mo ago

New office dog didn’t get the Casual Friday memo.

Leviathan Bookstore @leviathanbookstore.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Hey, that new bookstore art we mentioned is now available on merch. Order early and often! www.bonfire.com/store/leviat...

Leviathan Bookstore | Official Merchandise | Bonfire

An independent bookstore for all kinds of independent readers, located in the heart of St. Louis, near Tower Grove Park

bonfire.com

Josh Rothes @joshuarothes.bsky.social · 5mo ago

In Baltimore for the thing.

Yoon Kim @yoonkim.bsky.social · 5mo ago

“A new language is what responds to reality where a moral, epistemological jolt has occurred.” — Ingeborg Bachmann (from the first Frankfurt lecture)

Josh Rothes @joshuarothes.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Taxation season. Be a shame if no one felt they had representation…

Meg Reid 🦦@megireid.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Absolutely not trying to make the terrible news of the closure of Washington Post's Books coverage about me or anything, but I cannot stress how bad this is for books. The biggest divide between Big 5 and independent/nonprofit press books is not quality--it's the marketing spend.

Josh Rothes @joshuarothes.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Thinking about him again…

Josh Rothes @joshuarothes.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Seattle friends, Asterism is open 10–5 today for a holiday book sale!

Jacob Siefring @jsief.bsky.social · 9mo ago

since the British 19C poet Amy Levy is in the news (a trove of letters was recently discovered & made available for research), I will share a link to the volume of her collected poems that we pub’d in the Empyrean Series (no. 30) a couple years ago asterismbooks.com/product/the-...

Josh Rothes @joshuarothes.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Can’t wait for you all to get these in your hands!

Jacob Siefring@jsief.bsky.social · 10mo ago

It’s been a long while! Empyrean Series nos. 46–50 are announced & available for preorder as of today. Books by Jean Paul, Pierre Custot, & Fernando Pessoa are due out in November. Ludwig Tieck & Niu Sengru will be published next spring. asterismbooks.com/publisher/em...

Jacob Siefring @jsief.bsky.social · 10mo ago

“And here the earth returned from its year and flew down from the sun above, and the sound sang ever more beautifully and soft: ‘Go to your earth, you who have not yet died.’” —‘The Parson in Jubilee: An Appendix’ (1797), trans. @unpaginated.bsky.social

Jacob Siefring@jsief.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Jean Paul’s ‘The Parson in Jubilee: An Appendix’ (1797) is translated from German (and studiously annotated with footnotes) by Matthew Spencer. Publication date of Nov. 18. See here for a partial preview of the book’s interior: asterismbooks.com/product/an-a...

Adrian Minckley @aminckey.bsky.social · 10mo ago

asterismbooks.com/product/the-burial-of-the-white-wolf-marcia-barbieri Pre-orders are available for the second installation of the Trilogy of the Body, written by Brazil's freakiest living writer and brought to you by @sublunary.bsky.social.

The Burial of the White Wolf | Asterism Books

The second in her Trilogy of the Body, *The Burial of the White Wolf* follows Barbieri's *The Whore* down a different delirious rabbit hole, this time centered on the murder of a woman of many names, ...

asterismbooks.com

Minx Marple @minxmarple.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Fully excellent post courtesy of @joshuarothes.bsky.social / NOT IMMUNE FROM POLITICS

Yellow pamphlet, Hydra,
Certain Biological and Psychoanalytical
Considerations of by Joshua Rothes

Not Immune from Politics
What other motto can a collection of heads astride a single body have but one of solidarity? How else would they, this multitudinous maw, treat their collective labor? Should one go hungry because another's jaws snapped shut first? No! Because they, more than we, understand that there may be many gullets, but only one belly!
And so I would posit the hydra as communist agitator.

Josh Rothes @joshuarothes.bsky.social · 12mo ago

It was hot today so I made some chapbooks. Will send you one. Inquire within.

Josh Rothes @joshuarothes.bsky.social · 12mo ago

It was hot today so I made some chapbooks. Will send you one. Inquire within.