At the moment I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf 1925-1930

“She did not plan; she merely let herself go, and the overwhelming life in her did the rest. It is only when youth is gone and experience has given us a sort of cheap courage that most of us realize how simple such things are." F. Scott Fitzgerald, “First Blood”

Happy Birthday to Ringo Starr. Bob Dylan summed him up perfectly:

These heavy years have passed like summer clouds

maybe the best American painting

'...illness...batters its victim until they get along with one another.' ... '...I do not intend, my stormily pounding heart does not intend, to lie down and be covered by stupid, precise cystallometry.' Revisiting The Magic Mountain today, as one does.

juncture, 2026 #photography #concept #streetphotography #leisurevsloth

Long time since I've had any mushy peas.

Notes to a Black Woman by Françoise Ega (Author), Emma Ramadan (Translator) “The extraordinary testimony of a daring Caribbean writer-activist, determined to expose injustice &defend the dignity of migrant workers. In the 1960s, hundreds of women traveled from French colonies in the West Indies.”

Samuel Bourne / The Manirung Pass, 1866

Fascinating read -- Mankato has a complex and quite troubling history, but I'll be on the lookout for Betsy-Tacy books now.

- the sublime fanaticism of OU Sooner sports fans - Indigenous counterstories - introducing neurodiversity for educators - the combat future of the human body University press books = not boring!!! Take a look at the new @oupress.bsky.social Fall 2026 catalog > www.oupress.com/fall-winter-...

Terry Pitts, proprietor of the indispensable Vertigo blog, had an early look at my book, and called it “a fascinating group portrait” and “a visual delight”. Read his review, subscribe to his newsletter, and browse his formidable archive from here: sebald.wordpress.com/2026/06/29/w...

“There is a class of men who seem to think it their especial business to superintend the wardrobes of both men and women . . . with all the importance of authorized dictators.” - Amelia Bloomer, 1853.

Great Lakes, Rust Belt, art criticism, the 19th-century social circles -- am putting it on my personal shelves of books.

‘Say yes and never do it’ Mel Brooks knew how to deal with the studios

25 June 1824: Edinburgh mineralogist Tom Allan visits Lyme Regis and goes fossil-hunting with Mary Anning. He was impressed by her knowledge and expertise and was amused by her stories of her arguments with Oxford professor William Buckland 'whose anatomical science she holds in great contempt'.

Even the judgy snitch I wear on my wrist and call a watch thinks it’s too early to get up.

Anna Jameson’s 1837 pencil illustration is one of the best depictions of Saint Mary’s Falls prior to canal construction in the 1850s.

solstice eve

idle as a painted ship / upon a painted ocean Ivan Aivazovsky, "Landscape with Sailing Ship" (1874)

He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair. Thoreau

Some photos I took on a walk in Toledo‘s Old West End neighborhood today.

english isn't for cowards. if you're not saying 'torpify,' that's a skill issue. there's no Académie Française telling you what to do. if you try to type 'pallific' and freak out when you see a little red underline, maybe you're not ready to roll with the big dogs.

Packing for a visit to Oberfranken and realizing I'm bringing an A-list crew of Bluesky translators along @wordkunst.bsky.social @unpaginated.bsky.social @dances-with-voles.bsky.social @genesegrill.bsky.social

The whole thread is amazing icym the incredible Brontë news yesterday.

"That sentence alone is enough to send indie Berliners of a certain age into a spell of Sebaldian melancholy so extreme it can only be resolved by a twenty-minute angry nap." Read @ajbwells.bsky.social's piece to find out what the sentence was! open.substack.com/pub/theaufla...

Looking for new perspectives on German history? This month's reviews: @ajbwells.bsky.social on rock in the GDR, me on Alice Miller's search for her family's story, and John Owen on interwar Weimar (the city, not the republic).

A copy of Odawa historian Andrew Blackbird's 1887 book History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan with birchbark binding and porcupine quillwork decoration by his sister Margaret Boyd.

“The emperor of the Southern Sea was called Swoosh. The emperor of the northern sea was called Oblivion. The emperor of the middle was called Chaotic Blob, who always waited on them quite well.” -Zhuangzhi (tr. Brook Ziporyn)

Plus excellent epigraph.

The axe of civilization is busy with our old forests, and artisan ingenuity is fast sweeping away the relics of our national infancy… It behooves our artists to rescue from its grasp the little that is left, before it is too late. This is their mission. -Anon(?), Literary World, March 15, 1847

Dostoevsky also very much wanted to know where the nearest roulette table was.

“…Woolf wrote that ‘there is no “I” in Wuthering Heights’, but she could equally have written that there was no ‘I’ in Emily Brontë. Like the bluebell, which Emily called a sacred watcher, she observed the world unhindered by the blot of the self…”

It was for that reason, he said, that the young don’t read Carlyle. A crusty old grumbler who lost his temper if the porridge was cold, why should he preach to us? -Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Said before and will say again (and again &c.) that Anne’s team at Belt did an amazing job with the design for this. If you like books that explore the possibilities of text/image take a look!

@downpourdw.bsky.social’s great cover for the upcoming Literary Voyagers! @awestfell.bsky.social details the complicated meeting of two underappreciated 19th authors in northern Michigan, and the impact it had on their lives. (A trip to Mackinac Island in 1830!) Preorder: tinyurl.com/43x8hvwc

Statelymaxxed, plumpmogged Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing an iphone on which tiktoks played.

"...And maybe the ocean vanishes when you run out of blue. Maybe a line is the sound blue assumes when someone misses you. The vowels of your name clattering like hooves over the cobblestones of Sibiu."

At LAT, I reviewed Gail Crowther's "Marilyn and Her Books," about why we still can't see Monroe as a reader despite plenty of photographic evidence: www.latimes.com/entertainmen...

He knows that every man who has some music in his soul can write poetry ten or twelve times in the natural course of his life, if the stars are propitious, but he does not propose to abuse that modest privilege. -Jorge Luis Borges, from “The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald” (tr. Eliot Weinberger)

My book LITERARY VOYAGERS is now available for pre-order everywhere books are sold—check with your favorite bookseller, make an inquiry with your library, or order directly from @beltpublishing.bsky.social. beltpublishing.com/products/lit...

why "read" if you aren't going to read, why "write" if you aren't going to write, why "think" if you aren't going to think.... maybe just go see about becoming a sea sponge or something else less psychically deleterious

“Her life has been so dreadfully unhealthy. She seems to have become weak-minded. All her old interests have gone; she reads nothing but novels, day after day.” -Gissing, The Odd Women

@yanina.bsky.social is the best

This is a 120 watt bass head I just completed for myself. I sold the prototype over 5 years ago, and have wanted one ever since. It goes boom.

So it's our pal Jonathan Richman's birthday today and he's 75 and it's getting warmer outside so let's hear "That Summer Feeling," because it's never too soon to get nostalgic about what's to come. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zmy...

evergreen