Time to see if my brain still functions after all the holiday revelry

Holiday cheer

Merry Christmas!

atop Gloss Mountain (northwestern Oklahoma)

Uwe Wittstock's Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature has just been translated into English by Daniel Bowles (Polity Press)

Here, on a snowy late November day in 1868, Custer's 7th Cavalry attacked Black Kettle's sleeping Cheyenne people camped along the Washita River in what is today western Oklahoma. Black Kettle, a survivor of the Sand Creek massacre 4 years prior, was killed, along with his wife.

Not particularly a Larry McMurtry fan (growing up in Laredo inoculates one against the Streets of Laredo), but the man was also a collector and bookseller. The book accumulation in here is magnificent and worth checking out, in the unlikely event you are anywhere near Archer City

"Un algorithme conventionnel - qui d'ailleurs n'a de sens que rapporté au langage - n'exprimera jamais que la Nature sans l'homme. Il n'y a donc pas à la rigueur de signes conventionnels, simple notation d'une pensée pure et claire pour elle-même, ...

The walk after final grades for all one's students have been submitted

"As 'generative' AI has entered the realm of culture, the question of whether these systems optimize well, whether they perform to benchmarks, no longer seems satisfactory. We have to know what these systems *mean*." ~ Leif Weatherby, Language Machines

"Not many general readers can grasp the intricacies of German Idealism, but everyone knows what it means to have a white poodle called Atma die and to replace it with a brown poodle of the same name, as Schopenhauer did[.]" Eagleton on Woods' new Schopenhauer biography: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/…

Recycled Books Denton, Texas

Over on the Bloomsbury website, there are Black Friday savings on Baudelaire's Bitter Metaphysics (still expensive, but authors don't make the rules) www.bloomsbury.com/us/baudelair...

Happy Thanksgiving!

The "commemoration" (i.e., building that is way too speculative to be a replica or reconstruction) marking the general vicinity (but not the exact spot) of San Francisco de los Tejas...

It’s publication day! Spread the word. The perfect Christmas gift for the pessimist in your life.

November morning

huge ty to everyone supporting the Substudies project, & in that spirit i finally finished the translation drafts i started a while back of Adorno-Benjamin’s joint critical (incredibly catty lol) “reports” for Horkheimer on 3 Paris conferences in early August ‘37! open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

An early imperial Roman lamp and a 5th-century Greek wine pitcher, both sparkling with personality ~ Detroit Institute of Arts ~

Good times at the Society for United States Intellectual History conference in Detroit. I'll be talking tomorrow about AI-generated/influenced documents in the historical archives of the future

Ahead of a conference in Detroit, while hanging out in Windsor I came across Biblioasis, a particularly excellent bookstore. It's got a thoughtfully curated selection of new books as a front for a glorious chaos of used books on the back shelves

From Occupied Paris to New York, 1943: Benjamin Fondane and the Partisan Review – Renaissance Animal renaissanceanimal.com/2023/05/13/f...

"A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule." (1/4) ~ Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

In this history of sanctified demagoguery in the U.S., Worthen samples episodes of charisma - "a contentious invitation to let some great and ungovernable power work through you, whether you were a leader or a follower" - across four centuries of theologico-political spectacle

The snake has arranged itself comfortably and slung itself across 2 empty LED light boxes

Social media was invented for this sort of thing:

Against *research as knowledge production*: "[A]ll those who are not ready for the work of reflection... can only regard one's research as 'positive' if something new is produced (even if it remains as 'un-understood' as the old that it replaced)." ~ Gadamer, "Reflections," tr. Palmer

“'Higher' education shouldn’t be higher just in its cost or in years—like it’s your thirteenth or fourteenth year of school. No, we should be thinking in terms of your highest aspirations as a human person." - Jennifer Frey over at @thepointmag.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/thepoint...

Following Rowman & Littlefield's acquisition by Bloomsbury, Baudelaire's Bitter Metaphysics is now available to read online at any university library subscribed to Bloomsbury Collections. If that describes your library, you can access the book here: www.bloomsburycollections.com

"If there is something comforting--religious, if you want--about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long." Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (p. 441)

“[C]ontrary to what [Adam] Smith thought, the goal of Company-States is not to enrich their subjects in order later to tax them [as a national government might], because they are not [pure] States. Nor do their interests lie in buying from and selling merchandise to them,

The Crow Museum of Asian Art at twilight, when the skateboarders roam

Just spent 50 minutes trying to convince college freshmen that the university will take your money and give you a degree AND let you cross that stage completely unprepared for what is coming next. The learning and shaping who they want to be is really up to them. Professors are here to help.

On the trail, it's not about the destination, it's about the snakes along the way

"A surprising amount of G.W.F. Hegel’s letters to friends and family touch on the subject of coffee." (Marie Louise Krogh) www.jhiblog.org/2025/09/22/h...

The western edge of the Ouachita Mountains, in southeastern Oklahoma

My German shepherd hasn't eaten many classic books, but when she does, she always chooses a German one...hmm... So far she has eaten an Albert Einstein and a Meister Eckhart. She's eating the big questions.

Arnaud Orain's book The Confiscated World, at once a genealogy and exposition of the current geopolitical mood of aggressive "finitude capitalism" (as opposed to a growth-oriented [neo]liberalism of "infinite horizons") is a timely, and, I think, important one. I'll be writing about it soon.

Cooper Lake State Park, enjoying the second wind of wildflowers that arrive at summer's end across northeastern Texas

Aaron Brice Cummings, Baudelaire's Bitter Metaphysics: Anti-Nihilist Readings by Fondane, Benjamin, and Sartre - @bloomsburyacad.bsky.social, September 2024 www.bloomsbury.com/us/baudelair...

Hazel

It lives! You can now preorder my philosophical biography of Schopenhauer. Out in November.

On the Bloomsbury Academic website, my book is currently on sale for 30% off the regular hardback price. Come for the conversation about the problem of nihilism in the face of fascism; stay for the detours into tortoises, geometry, and world-historical ennui. www.bloomsbury.com/us/baudelair...

First day of the fall semester at the Dallas campus of East Texas A&M University

My book's publisher recently joined the @bloomsburyacad.bsky.social family, so here is an updated link for Baudelaire's Bitter Metaphysics: Anti-Nihilist Readings by Fondane, Benjamin, and Sartre. www.bloomsbury.com/us/baudelair...

Whatever else one may think about OOO, Harman does manage one of the more intriguing discussions I've read lately of what happens behind the scenes of a metaphor

We blame the decline of epistolary writing on email, texting, & group chats, but in 1960 Gadamer worried about the effects of faster snail mail: "So we note that speeding up the post has not improved this form of communication but, on the contrary, has led to a decline in the art of letter writing."

Biographies of Mondrian and Gauguin -- finds from Plenty, an excellent indie bookstore in Cookeville, Tennessee -- and kindly procured by my superb spouse as an anniversary gift

"Only insofar as philosophical reflection corresponds to the structure of being alive does it acquire its own legitimacy." ~ Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, tr. Weinsheimer & Marshall

A hike through the state park near Mineral Wells, Texas