We are meteors in a planet’s mouth. Our sky is a vigil, our course a chase, and our quarry a drop of light. -René Char (tr. Cid Corman)
Sal Randolph
@salrandolph.bsky.social
Artist & writer working between language & action. Art, attention, poetry, and Zen. My book is The Uses of Art. Co-founder of dispersed holdings, a publishing project. She/they. https://salrandolph.substack.com/ https://linktr.ee/salrandolph
I’m thrilled to be teaching a class next week with the amazing Sarah Kokernot, fiction writer, essayist, dharma friend, and author of the monthly, Your Wild and Radiant Mind. The class, More Than Seeing: Writing From Art, will meet online next week Thursday (August 27). I’d love to see you there!
More Than Seeing: Writing From Art
An online workshop with Sarah Kokernot and Sal Randolph coming August 27
salrandolph.substack.com
I’m back from this summer’s silent retreat, stepping into ordinary life again. Whoah! It was an intense time for for me, as you’ll see from this I gave at the retreat, in which I encounter myself in the form of a demon, in the form of a painting, and in the form of a hermit-nun.
If You See a Demon
Finding yourself in art, finding yourself in the world of ten thousand things.
salrandolph.substack.com
new workshop: The Art of Brevity: Prose Poems, Microfiction, Lean Verse, Minimalism. Reading Lydia Davis, Jorge Luis Borges, Elaine Equi, Charles Simic. Maxes at 15 participants.
Yesterday I handed my new book manuscript to my editor. Tomorrow I leave for two weeks of silence at the Village Zendo’s annual summer retreat. Somehow it seems part of the same gesture!
Just Sitting
Into the silence of deep summer.
salrandolph.substack.com
"Let us say that about one-fifth, then, of the papyri circulating at the peak were copies of the Iliad: so, between 200,000 and 500,000 Iliad rolls" — Netz, Reviel. “A Quantitative Model of Ancient Literary Culture.” Chapter 5. In Scale, Space and Canon in Ancient Literary Culture, 536-7 (CUP 2020)
Here’s another episode in my hot classics summer, in which I am visited by ghosts and cry out for the strength to wash away the deeds of the reigning Caesar.
I Hear a Ghost, I See a Sign
Another episode in my hot classics summer.
open.substack.com
Over at @parisreview.bsky.social, they've published the intro @annvandermeer.bsky.social and I wrote for 5, the new César Aira omnibus from @newdirectionsky.bsky.social! A great author you should be reading! www.theparisreview.org/blog/2026/07...
César Aira’s Art of Not Editing by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer
July 9, 2026 – “A bird, for example, flew into Aira’s café while he was writing, and he worked it into the story.”
theparisreview.org
"I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow." -- Virginia Woolf, The Waves #BookSky The Odyssey is much more than a tale of heroism. www.bbc.com/culture/arti...
'A story of sex, strategy and power': How women shape the plot of Homer's Odyssey
The protagonist of the epic poem is a heroic male – but the story is shaped by the stratagems and seductions of the women, nymphs and goddesses he meets along the way.
bbc.com
The books are shelved as he left them, using Eco’s “good neighbor” policy, and this is said to have helped him make unexpected connections. It also seems to me to hint at connections he made or hoped to make in work he may have left finished, a map to ideas he was still having. A profound honor.
Wanted in Rome@wantedinrome.bsky.social · 2mo agoBologna opens a new library containing more than 32,000 books from Umberto Eco's private study - arranged exactly as he left them - a decade after his death.
Welcome to my hot classics summer. Iʻve had Homer in my ears, and Virgil and Shakespeare. Such a confusion of glories, such poetry, such violence! Iʻm driving under the influence of all of them, but whenever Caesar comes, for me itʻs not only Julius who appears, but also Gertrude Stein.
Caesar Comes
Another episode in my hot classics summer
salrandolph.substack.com
5.30 p.m. I sit on the front steps, watching clouds … white-breasted waterhen cries in the paddy … tulsi plants flourish … a pair of white butterflies
While Pride month is still throwing its glitter around, I thought I would celebrate with this queer “way of seeing” from the archive. It takes inspiration from a passage on disorientation in Sarah Ahmed’s wonderful book Queer Phenomenology.
Ways of Seeing: Queer Disorientation
Inspiration from Sara Ahmed, Eve Kosfsky Sedgwick, and José Esteban Muñoz.
open.substack.com
The Iliad really has some brutally beautiful and detailed descriptions of battle wounds. Somehow I was not expecting like explanations of how the diaphragm got dragged out with a spear.
This week I’m writing from the season of storms. salrandolph.substack.com/p/lightning-...
Lightning Ragini
In the season of storms
salrandolph.substack.com
NYC: more evidence that JOY is the cure for what ails this broken country.
This is what happens to you when you finally read the classics.
Odyssey
This is a real voyage!
open.substack.com
I am away from home this week, spending some time near the sea. And you? Where do you find yourself? On land? On sea? Heading off towards adventure? Stranded on an island (metaphorical or otherwise)? Dwelling or abiding? Turning back home? salrandolph.substack.com/p/odyssey
Odyssey
This is a real voyage!
salrandolph.substack.com
Bluesky: Where everyone knows what kerning is.
Artologica aka Michele Banks @artologica.net · 3mo agoOn Bluesky? All of us
I wonder if there is a space to write about books you love that isn’t quite reviewing but something more like telling a tale or entering into the poem of a novel. I tried it out with Hiroko Oyamada’s The Hole
The Hole
A book story
salrandolph.substack.com