Christina Tudor-Sideri
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dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
Christina Tudor-Sideri
@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
1.6K followers 1.2K following 670 posts
writer, translator, and researcher whose work unfolds at the crossroads of literature, philosophy, and critical theory (currently writing about relics and time)
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dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 27d
An Absence of Sea (April, 2026)
A fog-dense December afternoon in a small Black Sea town. The sky and sea blend into one continuous gray-blue surface, with no visible horizon line. Three birds appear far away as dark silhouettes, spaced apart and flying through the mist.
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
A Celanian night: the world is gone, I have to carry you.
January 17, 2026 at 10:34 PM
Reposted by Christina Tudor-Sideri
tobiasvryan.bsky.social
Impossible to Say: A Review of Glantz (2025) — @jayinnismurray.bsky.social

thevisionarycompany.net/2026/01/16/i...
Impossible to Say: A Review of Glantz (2025) by Tobias Ryan
By Jay Innis Murray As I think about works that are similar to Glantz, the troublingly great novella by Tobias Ryan, some novels by Saramago come to mind, but the itch I cannot scratch away is the …
thevisionarycompany.net
January 16, 2026 at 2:45 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
“And I too wanted to make our bed everywhere with lost edges where the land can be the sea and close its sheets of waters on us.”

Tomb(e), Hélène Cixous; tr. Laurent Milesi
January 17, 2026 at 1:04 AM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
“now when it’s evening
and fatigue rises like a straitjacket
if I refuse to think, if I sleep—
oh what emptiness
a collapsed mass
of blue and red veins
lungs breathing
clots and knots, blooming—
dangerous delusions
at death’s soft edge”

(Judith Mészáros, Angeliad)
January 16, 2026 at 7:04 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
“I return home along the banks of the angry river, rolling a pebble with my shoe, imagining I am young Rimbaud who imagines he is a shiny pebble on the bottom of an angry river, and the sad wind caresses the houses; imagine, no heaven—and then, circus lights flooding the city”
January 16, 2026 at 7:01 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
“this seed of a void in the museum of my former bones
out of reach, the murky river
the grace of a bridge, the echo of a bell,
and us, on the small terrace
endlessly preoccupied with our utopias”
January 16, 2026 at 6:58 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
“you throw a stone into the void and the void does not answer”

(Judith Mészáros)
January 16, 2026 at 6:50 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
midnight with the second elegy
you, who sometimes disappear, but only when the other takes over completely, I’m asking you about us. I know why you touch each other so ecstatically: that touch lasts. That place you cover with such tenderness doesn’t vanish, because you feel a pure duration there. In your embrace you almost find the promise of eternity. And yet, when you’ve survived the fear of that first look, the longing at the window, and that first walk in the garden, once: lovers, are you still the same? When you lift yourselves up to each other’s lips and begin, drink for drink— oh how strangely the drinker then slips from the role. Rilke, The Second Elegy, translated by A. Poulin Jr.
January 15, 2026 at 11:19 PM
Reposted by Christina Tudor-Sideri
tobiasvryan.bsky.social
thank you @wordkunst.bsky.social
January 15, 2026 at 4:41 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
Cioran:
I first met Shestov in the spring of 1924 at Jules de Gaultier’s home. Two years earlier I published, in Romanian, six chronicles dealing with his latest work translated into Romanian – “Revelations of Death”. I had no idea whether he was dead or alive, whether he was from this century or the past century. I never imagined him in any context, except maybe in Russia. And now suddenly I had in front of me this tall lanky old man, in that old-fashioned drawing room at de Gaultier’s.
January 15, 2026 at 1:45 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
Yes... I didn't either, I was looking for one of his translations of Gabriela Melinescu and came across the Fulbright obituary fulbright.ro/adam-j-sorki...
January 14, 2026 at 8:38 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
Saddened to learn that Adam J. Sorkin died on December 11, 2025. I remain in awe of the devotion with which he brought Romanian literature into English, and of the beauty and care of his language. A terrible loss.
January 14, 2026 at 8:23 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
— Did she exist? — Who? Who would not have existed? He says: Yes, she existed. In any case. She existed. Whoever she was, whoever she might still be, she existed. Exists. Marguerite Duras, Six Films (Le Navire Night), translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan.
January 14, 2026 at 7:25 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
In the midst of chaos, despair, and endless trying, snow falls upon the sea. “Our souls, exhausted by love and pain, are melting away and running off like water.”
January 14, 2026 at 12:57 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
“The lover makes appear the one whom she loves […] as an Orpheus of phenomenality […] makes him emerge from the depths of the unseen”
December 22, 2025 at 10:40 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
“[The] past will remain definitively over if elsewhere can no longer be expected, if it can no longer happen; by contrast, it will remain eventually provisional for as long as a new expectation can hope for the return of an absence still to come.”
December 22, 2025 at 8:41 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
On elsewhereness and the time of expectation:
Let us enter into the erotic reduction, where the event from elsewhere reigns. According to what moment of time does this elsewhere temporalize itself, and according to what ecstasy of time? It is temporalized in its coming about as event. Now it is proper to the event not to be foreseeable, or to be produced or even less to be reproduced at will. The event thus compels me to await it, subject to its initiative. I can decide to continue to love and to make myself loved, but I cannot decide the moment in which I will begin one or the other, because I cannot decide, by an act of will proportionate to a light in the understanding, if and when I will face the question "Does anyone love me?" Elsewhere, as event, compels me to the posture of expectation. The temporality of such an expectation remains to be determined. Paradoxically, while the time of the action, of the occupation and of the handling of beings, does not cease to flow, by immediately transforming the not yet into a now and the now into an already passed, or in short while time does not cease to pass and to pass away, by contrast, for as long as I wait, time does not pass. Erotic time does not pass as long as I wait, for a very clear reason: while I am waiting, still nothing happens; I am waiting precisely because still nothing happens, and, precisely, I am waiting for something finally to happen. The time of expectation does not pass, for nothing is happening. Only my expectation lasts: it suspends the flux of time, because it still finds nothing in time that arises and, thus, that can dis-appear. In the world's time, that which passes does not last. In the erotic reduction's time, only the expectation for which nothing happens lasts.
December 22, 2025 at 8:29 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
This is quite something: “wherever a person is found, there is no hell”

“Orpheus’s complex: Eurydice is found everywhere, except in Hell (wherever a person is found, there is no hell, not even Hell)”
December 22, 2025 at 8:14 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
“I need to turn to the other and address myself to her, and thus address her with speech and await her response. […] Precisely by virtue of that of which l cannot speak, l must speak to the other. Thus the erotic reduction redefines the rules of language.”
December 22, 2025 at 7:58 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
“each flesh, the phenomenon of the other flesh, and thus of the other”

Jean-Luc Marion

“each one the other’s phantom limb in the sea”

Marin Sorescu
December 22, 2025 at 7:41 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
A Monday evening with “The Silence of Love,” Jean-Luc Marion’s introduction to The Erotic Phenomenon, and one of my favorite philosophical texts. In the translation of Stephen E. Lewis.
December 22, 2025 at 6:43 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
“For one must speak of love in the same way as one must love—in the first person. […] l will therefore say I at my own risk and peril. But, dear reader, know this: l will say I in your name.”
As a result we must attempt the impossible: to produce what we will show starting from itself. To be sure, anyone who writes, especially conceptually, must, to one degree or another, assume this responsibility. But here, when one tackles the erotic phenomenon, this assumption imposes itself without the least restriction. For one must speak of love in the same way as one must love— in the first person. Indeed, loving is only properly spoken of and made in its own right —first and foremost, without any possible substitution. Loving puts in play my identity, my ipseity, those resources of mine that are more inward to me than myself. In love I put myself on stage and implicate myself, because in loving I make a decision about myself like nowhere else. Each act of love is inscribed forever in me and outlines me definitively. I do not love by proxy, nor through a go-between, but in the flesh, and this flesh is one only with me. The fact that I love cannot be distinguished from me, any more than I would want, in love, to distinguish myself from that which I love. To love— this verb is conjugated, in all its tenses and modes, always and by definition first in the first person. Thus, because one must speak of love as one must love, I will say I. And I will not be able to hide myself behind the I of philosophers, that I who is supposed to be universal, a disengaged spectator or a transcendental subject, a spokesman for each and everyone because he thinks exclusively what anyone can by right know in the place of anyone else (be-ing, science, objects): that which concerns no one personally. In contrast, I am going to speak of that which affects each of us as such; I will therefore think about what affects me as such and constitutes me as this particular person, whom no other can replace and from whom no other can exempt me. I will say I starting from and in view of the erotic phenomenon within me and for me—my own. [...] And obviously, I will do it badly; I will do this phenomenon ill, but that will do me good—if only because it will make me feel my incapacity to say it, just as it will make me take note of my powerlessness to make it. I will therefore say I at my own risk and peril. But, dear reader, know this: I will say I in your name. Do not pretend to be unaware of the erotic phenomenon, or to know more about it than I. We don't know the same thing about the erotic phenomenon, yet we know as much; we remain in front of it with an equality that is as perfect as our solitude. Thus you are going to allow me to speak in your name, because I am paying the price here of speaking in my own name. Of course, I am going to speak of that which I barely understand — the erotic phenomenon— starting from that which I know badly— my own amorous history. May it disappear most of the time within the rigor of the concept. Nevertheless I will keep within me the memory, new at each in-stant, of those who have loved me, who still love me, and whom I would like to be able to love, one day, as they should be loved —without measure. They will recognize themselves in my grateful recognition of them. This book has obsessed me since the publication of The Idol and Distance in 1977. All the books I have published since then bear the mark, explicit or hidden, of this concern. In particular, Prolegomena to Charity was published in 1986 only to give witness to the fact that I had not given up on this project, despite the delay in completing it. All of my books, above all the last three, have been just so many steps toward the question of the erotic phenomenon. Today, as I finish this last essay, I want to express my gratitude to Françoise Verny, who, as soon as the first book appeared, bound me by contract to this one: after twenty-five years of patience and reminders, she is finally able to see it appear. J.-L. M. Chicago, April 1998—Lods, September 2002
December 22, 2025 at 6:43 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
An Absence of Sea (April, 2026)
A fog-dense December afternoon in a small Black Sea town. The sky and sea blend into one continuous gray-blue surface, with no visible horizon line. Three birds appear far away as dark silhouettes, spaced apart and flying through the mist.
December 21, 2025 at 3:19 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
“Many lines of rupture traverse us—”

(Jean-Luc Nancy)
December 21, 2025 at 2:31 PM
Reposted by Christina Tudor-Sideri
tobiasvryan.bsky.social
a recording of last night's reading is up @ Attic Scraps

thank you to those who came and participated!

tobiasryan.substack.com/p/glantz-rea...
GLANTZ reading
& discussion
tobiasryan.substack.com
December 20, 2025 at 11:01 AM