@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social was right abt this bk by Dan Elkind (Dr. Chizhevsky’s Chandelier’, Repeater, 2025): it is worth the detour. my life is a scatterbrained mess & for weeks i have not been able to exit the 2nd chapter, which reads like a funnier ‘Ragtime’ set piece, but that is all on me

if i resumed smoking cigarettes 20 yrs after i gave it up, it would be as a rebuke to modernity

was at the aquarium yesterday and let me tell you some of those fish are fucked up. Truly they have been exploring the boundaries and contours of what it means to be a fish in ways that put the rest of us to shame

Ive been enjoying this the last couple of days & a fine intro indeed the whole collection certainly befits the recent weather

JG Ballard sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/ballar... was born on this day, so here are some of his book covers (artist: Chris Foss, Wojtek Siudmak, Carlos Ochagavia and James Marsh):

never seen temps so stable

since the British 19C poet Amy Levy is in the news (a trove of letters was recently discovered & made available for research), I will share a link to the volume of her collected poems that we pub’d in the Empyrean Series (no. 30) a couple years ago asterismbooks.com/product/the-...

‘“Though she never quite found happiness, it was always something she insisted on: the right to be happy, even ecstatic.”’

after reading this memoir i have been reading, i can’t help but think i would be annoyed & paranoid (& surely a host of other feelings) if one of my parents were a memoirist who liked to publish details of our private lives

Life is pretty good when you listen to music.

there are two young people in here rhapsodisin' about John Steinbeck

Congratulations to my sister Andrea & her husband Scott at Urban Stead Cheese in Cincinnati, whose gouda & cheddar cheeses were awarded 4 silvers at the World Cheese Awards in Bern, Switzerland this week.

until now i haven’t bothered to ‘like’ my own posts. that ends now

Another Saint Lucia sighting, this time at the old Ursaline Convent here in New Orleans! She is everywhere! Her EYES are everywhere!!

I find the phrase “makes history” nonsensical. Have you seen the stuff historians study? Just dropping an old piece of farm equipment down a well or accidentally freezing to death in a glacier gives you a good shot at the history books

twenty yrs ago delillo was a lot more popular than now. ‘americana’, his first bk, remains probably one of his lesser known but it is tops

we’re getting towards the most magical time of the year: don delillo’s ‘americana’ season “Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year.”

We sell forbidden objects from places men fear to tread ko-fi.com/thedreadfulp...

We're launching a really exciting new MSt in Creative Translation - details here. Oxford has a wealth of brilliant translator energy and I am excited to see what will come out of this. Please forward to likely sorts! www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/news/2025/11...

Winter ride. Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

Gah what an absolutely wonderful review

imagine being the guy who has to come up with apple music descriptions for new guided by voices albums. “the ohio indie rock legends are back with their 67th album full of their classic quirk” “Robert Pollard and crew return for another round of wacky lyrics and guitars that sound like that”

retour de la grosse déprime

Washington DC is very evil but

’tis the season (for sputum)

Music is basically a detective novel where the musicians are the suspects/criminals, the listener is the detective and of course the music is the crime. The listener tries to determine what happened and what was the motivation, while the musicians try to obscure this, so they can get away with it.

pictures of my daughter at the stables that thru the falling snow look like paintings

when i was a boy i was always quite surprised how often my father would injure his hands with tools, small lacerations & so forth. if you asked him why his hand was bleeding he would kind of shrug. i no longer wonder because i understand

imagine the wild turkey, his size, his majesty… unthinkable

the stables at gloaming

…I did not want to want. I wanted, it seems to me, against myself, because I had no desire to want and nonetheless I wanted." - Henri Michaux, A Certain Plume

Happy 80th birthday to Neil Young, an Olympian figure and the subject of some of the funniest quotes in BACKBEATS thanks to his tempestuous relationship with Kenny Buttrey. “Neil hires some of the best musicians in the world and has 'em play as stupid as they possibly can.”

Perhaps a 600 page novel, devastatingly personal, exploring the depths of the long dark night of the soul just doesn't hit as hard when you can go online at any given time and see several oomfies posting through an all time crash out.

For anyone who is like “the creature is also named Frankenstein”; Mary Shelley went to see a play version of Frankenstein and was tickled that they listed the creature as “———“ in the dramatis personae: “this nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good” www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3...

some days i sing “why, oh why, oh why-oh, why did i ever leave ohio?” & i’m not even sure if i mean it

New Puffin Post perfection

i am reading ‘the weather fifteen years ago’, an idiosyncratic & oblique book consisting of an author & book reviewer discussing the author’s book. (the book exists only in the imaginary world of the novel). i think i discovered it via m.a. orthofer’s praise for it some yrs back. pretty good!

BACKBEATS is out today! Come see me & @andreapitzer.bsky.social at Kramers in DC tonight at 7: kramers.com/events/36367... DM me a receipt if you’d like a signed book plate in the mail. And read an excerpt in @rollingstone.com: www.rollingstone.com/music/music-...

Aside from the joy of reading about so many people's deep connection with this music (and the fun of seeing which artists picked the same songs), one of the best parts of editing this has been spending the week mainlining Neil Young albums all day long. The catalog just gives and gives.

This is a dust devil... on Mars.

watching ‘the adjuster’ on criterion. absolute hot mess of a film with elias koteas playing in the role of an insurance adjuster who is troubled by his being a kafkaesque go-between for an invisible process & entity. weird european horniness everywhere in this ostensibly north american film

i suspect every issue of Zoning Practice magazine features a societal ill and then suggests solving that ill through zoning.

heard a saccharine tune on the radio & spent a good 15mins kind of dissociating trying to recall what tune the vocal melody reminded me of. savage garden’s “truly madly deeply” (1997). so to all my haters, sorry, the old noggin works just fine

the antlers are playing a show in montreal next april 16. i might try to sneak off to that

this book looks awesome, almost irresistible. and i don’t even fish

Sarkozy's time in prison was shorter than a French prime minister's time in office

November 2025

anticipatively depressed for the dark & grey season