[P]art of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn’t obtain, how correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensification of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading.

Ben Lerner, 10:04

Algorithms may be randomised unless otherwise indicated. Running time is worst case. If is an algorithm, denotes running with random coins on inputs and assigning the output to . If any of inputs taken by is , then all of its outputs are . We let be the result of picking at random and letting . We let denote the set of all possible outputs of when invoked with inputs . Adversaries are algorithms. We require that adversaries never pass as input to their oracles.

Martin R. Albrecht et al., “Four Attacks and a Proof for Telegram”

I excelled in forgetting my failures—
for I, too, was a mammal, eager for simple happiness,
to be stroked the length of the back, behind the ears.

Distractions: ordinary. Omissions: rampant.
Thinking any of this peculiar to me.

No, I was not distinctive, among my kind.

Showered with pollen, I sneezed.
I ate, and by morning found myself once again hungry.

Jane Hirshfield, “I Was Not, Among My Kind, Distinctive”

                        Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

Marge Piercy, “For the Young Who Want to”

saw what did to .
Without even touching
. The image hurt
into ask. Into whose.

Zoë Hitzig, “Not Us Now”, in Not Us Now

[D]enial is arguably the opposite of recognition. But even denial is based on a kind of knowing. A willful turning from devastating knowledge, perhaps, out of fear. Think of Khaldun/Dov [in Ghassan Kanafani’s novel Returning to Haifa], denying his parents who have finally returned to Haifa. Of Peter denying Christ three times. Think of climate change denial. Think of the slave traders and economists of the nineteenth century who claimed that ending the enslavement of human beings was economically and politically unviable. The strength of their stated convictions resembles the arguments of the gun lobby in the US today, and of governments regarding the use of fossil fuels, and arguments that sanctioning occupying powers on the basis of crimes they commit against humanity is impossible. We’ve seen evidence very recently that this is not impossible. In today’s crisis of climate destruction, there will be moments—maybe they are happening right now, maybe they happened recently—that will later be narrated as turning points, when the devastating knowledge hits home to a greater and greater number that we are treating the earth as a slave, and that this exploitation is profoundly unethical. We are still seeking a language for this ethics.

Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

In 1985 John Cage composed the work ASLSP, with the instructions that it should be played As SLow aS Possible.

Two years later, he worked on a piece for organ. The score is eight pages long.

Gerd Zacher prepared a version that is twenty-nine minutes long. The directions given by Cage, who was present in the auditorium, were that it should be played like ‘a gentle morning’ and that at the end ‘it should disappear’.

Years later, a conference of musicians, theologians, and philosophers came to the conclusion that the longest possible time is that of the useful life of an organ, or until the harmony of a society breaks down.

And for this new performance, the town of Halberstadt was chosen because that’s where the first modern organ was constructed in 1361. The first one with twelve notes per octave (which suggests that the space of music opened up before that of painting).

The concert began on 5 September 2001. Six days before the Twin Towers fell. It will continue for 639 years, seven more than it took to build Cologne Cathedral.

Each movement will last for seventy-one years.

As in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, the first note of ASLSP is a rest.

Luis Sagasti, A Musical Offering, translated by Fionn Petch

As for the wicked child who can’t remember
what Virgil said about the vanishing of the bees,

he may have to witness sweetness
disappear from the earth in his lifetime
and never know why.

Li-Young Lee, “The Honey Alone”

To say or do
what you don’t think
you mean is scary—

and embarrassing.
But you have to
put it in perspective.

You have to wonder
how intention

differs from momentum
anyway, which one

came first.

Rae Armantrout, “Oops”

I thought by twenty-seven I’d stop searching
for the story, as if stories were simultaneous
with action, rather than events recollected
incorrectly, rife with holes. My character wades
waist-deep in the bay, waiting for a revelation.
I want the plot to start here, at the end
of the two-lane highway, and then in the moon-
like dunes, the scrubby grass we trudged through.

Madeleine Cravens, “Provincetown”, in The Pleasure Principle