Category: General

  • a pattern we are doomed to repeat

    Dave Karpf is doing sterling work on what we might call the uppermost archaeological layer of paleofutures—to the extent that the various vague plans I had to write more in this direction have been shelved pretty much permanently. Leave it to the person with the headstart and the bit between their teeth, you know? There…

  • tools to cudgel or flatter

    tools to cudgel or flatter

    Bit of a callback here to last week’s post: Addressing the vacuity of the words fascism and democracy, [Orwell] wrote “the word fascism has no meaning except insofar as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” Calling something a democracy is not very different except that “we are praising it.” Fascism is reduced to meaning not good…

  • 09JAN23 / accessions

    Moore & O’Neill’s League omnibus: somehow the institution never got around to acquiring this one, nor even reading it? It was mentioned at Eruditorium Press a few weeks back, it was there on the shelf, and the department did what the department does. Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time: because all sorts of people—including the sort of…

  • you can never step in the same blog twice

    I think I’ve known this for a while, and I dare say it’s been obvious to many others for even longer, but I finally hit on a concise formulation of it, and wanted to get it down for my own benefit as much as for any other reason: The reason it’s hard to (re)start and…

  • tools for fools

    Chased out of my own home today, like yesterday, but the sound of heavy powertools being applied to the apartment upstairs. 7:30am they started this morning, for fuck’s sake… who’s together by then? You can still taste the toothpaste. Those sorts of sounds always provoke in me a desire to cause harm to people and…