Sal Randolph
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salrandolph.bsky.social
Sal Randolph
@salrandolph.bsky.social
2.3K followers 2K following 750 posts
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
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salrandolph.bsky.social
Licks over likes.
Close up photo of a cute brown fluffy dog gazing right at you with her tongue slightly out you. She’s about to give you a love-lick.
October 17, 2025 at 2:03 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
Agnes Martin, untitled, 1960, ink on paper.
A grid of faint lines in ink on cream colored paper. The horizontal lines vary in length so that the drawing has wavy, ragged edges on both sides.
October 7, 2025 at 2:39 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
“I NO LONGER KNOW IF I EVER FALL ASLEEP. IF I DO, I remain outside of sleep itself, in that constantly moving ring of icy asteroids that circles the dark and immobile hollow of oblivion. It is as if I never enter that shadowy vacuum. I toss and turn, literally, in the zone around it”

César Aira
Cover of the book Conversations by César Aira. The illustration, which extends across the whole cover is of many tiled conversation boxes, as you might see in a cartoon or text chat. Each is sloppily painted with a bright color.
October 7, 2025 at 2:35 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
It seems we are foraging.
Screenshot; A Post on Language It seems we are foraging, looking around in ourselves, and that’s what production is. I’m tired today, and all of the spatial and semantic clusters are hanging like grapes in the ripening vineyards. By which I mean it’s the end of summer. By which I mean I’m planning to describe a scene
October 2, 2025 at 6:32 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
“Expect to see more dictatorships.”
Sean Ashton, Massive Massive Oil Slick.
Screenshot: “Expect to see more dictatorships. Expect to see more dictatorships in formerly democratic states. Expect to see more men feel that they have what it takes to be a strong leader. Expect to see more dictators get what they want. Expect to see a few more dictators get exactly what they want, or what they think they want, in their capacity as men without a superego. Expect eight out of ten dictators to feel basically happy in their work. Expect eighty percent of the dictators and warlords who participated in our survey to admit to occasionally falling short of their objectives without letting it affect their home life; ten percent of dictators and warlords to admit to regularly falling short of their objectives and to be unable to prevent it impacting on their home life; five percent of dictators and warlords to meet all their objectives and to feel proud of their accomplishments; and the remaining five percent of dictators and warlords to exceed all objectives and to feel neither happiness nor regret, only a chilling indifference, their addiction to power only assuaged by increasingly heinous acts of cruelty that leave them unable to feel any emotion at all, even towards their own family.” Sean Ashton, Massive Massive Oil Slick.
September 29, 2025 at 3:27 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
NYC Tonight!

I’ll be reading at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn.

Come for Filip Marinovich, The Ghost Shepherds, Eddie Berrigan and our host, Bathtub Nebula — stay for me!

Thursday September 18 7:30-9:30 Unnameable Books 615 Vanderbilt Ave. Brooklyn

—
Screenshot of a very simple event flyer with black text on a white background. Bathtub Nebula Presents: Filip Marinovich 50th Birthday Bash, Unnameable Books, Brooklyn, Thursday September 18, 2025 7:30-9:30, Featuring Poetry and Music by, The Ghost Shepherds, Eddie Berrigan, Sal Randolph, Filip Marinovich, with your host Bathtub Nebula.
September 18, 2025 at 2:18 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
“So I am writing my life, after all, as a novel! Why not? It was a matter of finding a form, and somehow history, my history, has found the form for me...so my novel can still be a sort of memoir and a sort of diary.”

The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch
Cover of “The Sea, the Sea” by Iris Murdoch, a Penguin Classics edition where the lower quarter of the cover is plain black, with the title and author in white. Above is an illustration showing the torso and legs of man, facing away as he looks out a window (or looks at a painting of a window). The window shows the sea with sunlight reflecting on its waves. The room has a bright red wall, and the man is standing on a pinkish carpet decorated with Chinese dragons. One of the dragons has lifted from the carpet and is climbing on his leg.
September 15, 2025 at 5:44 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
“I have considered writing a journal, not of happenings for there will be none, but as a record of mingled thoughts and daily observations: ‘my philosophy’, my pensées against a background of simple descriptions of the weather and other natural phenomena.“

(The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch)
Cover of “The Sea, the Sea” by Iris Murdoch, a Penguin Classics edition where the lower quarter of the cover is plain black, with the title and author in white. Above is an illustration showing the torso and legs of man, facing away as he looks out a window (or looks at a painting of a window). The window shows the sea with sunlight reflecting on its waves. The room has a bright red wall, and the man is standing on a pinkish carpet decorated with Chinese dragons. One of the dragons has lifted from the carpet and is climbing on his leg.
September 6, 2025 at 3:52 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
“I write in these notebooks so that the experience of time can, in fact, be absorbed. I thought that one day, reading these texts, which come from my tension of dissipating and accumulating in metamorphoses, might offer me clues to the eternal return of the mutual.”
A book is lying on weathered boards: “A Thousand Thoughts in Flight; The Diaries of Maria Gabriella Llansol,” translated by Audrey Young. The cover is filled with an illustration of an expressive, abstracted flower and its leaves and stem. The style of the illustration is flat colors and organic, undulating forms.
September 5, 2025 at 2:13 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
When the Art Gallery of New South Wales commissioned a self-portrait from Margaret Preston she accepted but responded with characteristic acerbity: “I am a flower painter — not a flower.”
Self portrait of Margaret Preston, a white woman in early middle age with red curly hair parted in the center. She has a resolute gaze and reddened cheeks, and is wearing a black drapey garment and holding a painter’s pallet and three brushes. Behind her is a potted plant with bright red blossoms.
August 26, 2025 at 2:45 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
Margaret Preston, Banksia cobbs, 1933, Art Gallery of New South Wales.

A black vase contains stems of Australian banksia pods, with dark stiff lobes and bristles, and thin green serrated leaves. The pods and leaves appear to writhe with dark shadows and starkly illuminated surfaces.
A black vase contains stems of Australian banksia pods, with dark stiff lobes and bristles, and thin green serrated leaves. The pods and leaves appear to writhe with dark shadows and starkly illuminated surfaces.
August 24, 2025 at 1:19 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
Margaret Preston, Western Australian gum blossom, 1928, Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Margaret Preston’s painting Western Australian gum blossom. A vase containing green-white eucalyptus leaves makes a column at the center of the painting. The leaves are strongly lit and shadowed. Near the bottom of the arrangement are three round gum blossoms in bright pink and yellow. Behind the vase are cream colored panels. A single green bud is placed next to the vase on a dark, reflective surface. The feeling is one of great intensity.
August 23, 2025 at 1:40 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
Margaret Preston, Implement Blue, 1927, Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Margaret Preston’s painting, Implement Blue. A strongly-lit, still life composition of three cups and saucers, two stemmed glasses, and a pitcher, all of which cast dark blue shadows on a cream surface. The objects are outlined in black with a stark, geometric, modernist feeling. One glass contains a submerged lemon; another glass, cubes of ice. Behind the objects are black lines which meet in an angle towards the top right of the image and frame the central composition: perhaps representing the edge of a table or tray.
August 22, 2025 at 1:55 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
A Post on Modification
Screenshot: A Post on Modification Imagine a crab which is also a cheetah. Would it be fast, or would be be furred? Would it leave the water and climb a tree to wait for something that will never come? Someone on the internet is telling jokes and other people on the internet are taking every statement as truth. Tell me, could the world be funnier than it is?
August 18, 2025 at 6:26 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
A post on a squirrel
Screenshot: A Post on a Squirrel She’s the squirrel of the day, stretching her body from branch to branch to get his mouth close to the berries. With one little upright ear she is listening to all of the nearby conversations. There are problems, apparently, in the story. What does the tree stand for? What is its name? Its name is mulberry and it stands for all the data in the world.
August 16, 2025 at 1:17 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
A Post on the Democratic Machine
Screenshot: A Post on the Democratic Machine Clearly they see the narrative going in a certain direction. Myself, I’ve never understood the story, not the hero’s journey, not the rising and falling arc. I seem to be doomed to my own particular confusion. The governor mouths words, and even though they are captioned, I do not read them because I do not need to. Before I’ve even arrived I know the ending.
August 15, 2025 at 8:04 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
With Frank O’Hara’s poems in my pocket even New York’s hottest days are imbued with what he calls a “luminous humidity.” The city’s dirt becomes beautiful. “Does it just seem dirty / that's what you think of in the city / you don't refuse to breathe do you,” he asks.
Cover of Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara. The title and author are in white against a very dark blue background block. Around the block on three sides is a bright red-orange background which includes the words “The Pocket Poet Series” above and “Number Nineteen” below.
July 5, 2025 at 12:53 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
The opening of Paterson, William Carlos Williams.
Screenshot from the opening of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson: : a local pride; spring, summer, fall and the sea; a confession; a basket; a column; a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands; a gathering up; a celebration; in distinctive terms; by multiplication a reduction to one; daring; a fall; the clouds resolved into a sandy sluice; an enforced pause; hard put to it; an identification and a plan for action to supplant a plan for action; a taking up of slack; a dispersal and a metamorphosis.
May 26, 2025 at 3:35 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
A Photograph of a Victory
Screenshot of the words: A Photograph of Victory Here is the place where buildings and bombs met each other, an ordinary ruin where the surface of the emulsion is broken in lines and scratches. The sun is made whole by shadow. Where there were windows are mouths; where I am standing, you were standing. I cannot loosen my mind from this. There were heaps of apples, there were leeks and potatoes and cabbages, all now become the damaged blue-green sky
May 19, 2025 at 9:43 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
Twenty-one hours ago, a woman looked to the left.
Screenshot of the words: A Painting with a Signal Twenty-one hours ago, a woman looked to the left. She was unfortunately pixilated, skin mottled with compression artifacts. She sat perched on a balustrade—it could have been California, it could have been Italy, it could have been Greece. Like her garment, I am caught in the eye. The centuries are rosy and confused. All I want is a tall tree to define the world. Painting of a woman sitting on a decorative balustrade. She is wearing a red and cream dress in the Grecian style and is looking out over a bay with one hand raised to shield her eyes. The painting is The Signal by John William Godward from the Getty Museum.
May 18, 2025 at 4:39 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
First of all, there is too much light. As if light requires that you only see light.
A painting of a farm on a frosty morning with a group of cows illuminated by the rising sun. The painting is Spring Frost by Australian painter Elioth Gruner, 1919. Screenshot of writing that says: A Painting with a Spring Frost First of all, there is too much light. As if light requires that you only see light. A man says, I am waiting for you. Five minutes ago, ten minutes ago, as if there is nothing but waiting. I’ll admit each cow is perfectly in its own time, whether its head is lifting, or neutral, or reaching for the grass. The farmer is only there to represent satisfaction and dissatisfaction. I am here to marry it all in one body.
May 17, 2025 at 4:46 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
A Post on Species

The sand lizard and the adder are among those who have benefitted.…
Screenshot of a prose poem: A Post on Species The sand lizard and the adder are among those who have benefitted. By themselves, they did nothing to influence the outcome. Somewhere, right now it is raining. Maybe there will be damaging winds. A child is looking at two pictures, trying to find the differences between them. In one, there is a cloud. Meanwhile, on a bed of fallen leaves, a rough green snake is swallowing a large caterpillar. Nothing happens without a photograph.
April 22, 2025 at 5:44 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
Screenshot: A Post on Animation Perhaps it is an insult to life itself, perhaps there is nothing that can be done. An artificial woman is weeping as an artificial man snaps the handcuffs shut. She is also a real woman, and he a real man. Tell me, what is the problem here? Sometimes we fail and fail, overriding the self. Sometimes the failure and the loss is what is sacred.
April 21, 2025 at 12:45 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
A Post on Kittens

There were three, swirled like a cinnamon bun, then there were four, then five.…
Black text on a white background that reads: A Post on Kittens There were three, swirled like a cinnamon bun, then there were four, then five. Some slept through everything, some tumbled and chewed on any ear available. This is all a kind of sweetness, like rushing somewhere in the morning; what do you put in your mouth? I put everything in my mouth, and much is bitter, much is filth. Among the troubles are the new troubles, clawing each other with soft, open paws. Where is the honor among kittens?
April 19, 2025 at 1:27 PM
salrandolph.bsky.social
A Post on Risk-Taking

Unsurprisingly, it is good; there is little risk in taking calculated risks.…
The image consists of text: A Post on Risk-Taking Unsurprisingly, it is good; there is little risk in taking calculated risks. Apparently it’s like moving through the city on an afternoon when no one is thinking of me. I could turn right, I could turn left, I could go into the movie house. Not even a quantum computer could predict my choices. Near me are groupings of artificial plants. They look plausible enough, but their roots are purely in imagination.
April 18, 2025 at 7:47 PM