‘I remember something Alan Moore told me: "It is so important to reenchant these places that we live in, to actually give back the energies that have been bled out of them. An empowered landscape creates empowered people, and the reverse is also true….”’

All cries and all complaints exhale a vapor, and from this vapor a cloud is formed, and from these heaped-up clouds come thunder, storms, the inclemencies that destroy every- thing. - Joseph Joubert, 1810

She has reversed the roles of thou and Thou not as a display of power but to force out of herself some pity for this soul trapped in glass, which is her true creation. -Anne Carson The Glass Essay

This morning I read "The moon had been up since long before the sun went down, had been hanging pale in the sky most of the afternoon, and now it flooded the snow-terraced land with silver." (Willa Cather, One of Ours)...

Lying awake at dawn, I heard the birds outside, and I suddenly remembered hearing them many years ago. I thought about the people who were no longer in my life. In the distance, the birds kept singing as if there were no yesterday.

Today's the festival of Terminalia! Why not celebrate by setting a boundary? Tell someone you've never liked their nickname for you. Tear your arm away from the person who pats it. Insist on your lunchbreak, fridge space, pronouns. (Then offer corn, honeycombs and wine on a crude altar.)

Happy belated Terminalia to all who celebrate.

Doth it now show very vilely in me to desire small beer?

Helium balloons in Paris--color photograph (autochrome) by the Lumiere brothers, 1914.

“Mostly it was an indulgent relief to shut the office door and phone him back; but I am ashamed to admit that at times I would avoid his calls […] unable to fathom how I could fit in a two-hour discussion of Lucie Brock-Broido’s newest poem in the New Yorker.”

I've created a new, ongoing, annotated bibliography of and about redacted poetry of all kinds. (And there are o-so-many ways to redact words!) It has links that let you see pages from most of the poetry titles. Even a few redacted novels snuck in. sebald.wordpress.com/redacted-the...

All words containing every letter of the word "moor" in Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (1847). All exact occurrences highlighted in green.

We should all post our favorite episodes. His interview with Sebald(!) was extraordinary on so many counts. www.kcrw.com/shows/bookwo...

it’d been a few yrs since the show had produced new eps., but 1) bookworm was a truly important, mass media venue for in-depth discussion abt books, presided over by Silverblatt’s incredible spirit; 2) tho it sounds hyperbolic, his death may seem to mark the end of an era in USA (broadcast bk media)

straight out of those Civil War histories where some ill informed white Union soldier got a view of slavery up close and became hyper abolitionist in an instant

she did not sleep and wandered in light of moon Art by Gertrude Abercrombie

“I was distorted by similarity to all that surrounded me. Like a mollusk in its shell, I had my abode in the nineteenth century, which now lies hollow before me like an empty shell. I hold it to my ear. What do I hear?” — Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900

While, on the other hand, good men...seeing their property destroyed; their families insulted, and their lives endangered; their persons injured; and seeing nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the better; become tired of, and disgusted with, a Government that offers them no protection...

out of the bottle, 2023 #photography #reflections #conceptphotography #stilllife

Reading these back to back is a hell of a drug. +

" Are you happy, Jane ?

“I do not know how to rid the world of evil, or whether one is simply supposed to endure it. But you are there and are having an effect, and the poems have an effect of their own and help to protect you—that is the answer and a counterbalance in this world.” — Ingeborg Bachmann to Paul Celan, 1958

Maybe a year or so ago my husband told me about low-background steel. I think about it a lot in terms of information integrity in the A.I./digital age and what we consider to be "uncontaminated data" equivalents now and in the future. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-bac...

Good story about UK temperance here, featuring the ever-brilliant Dr Annemarie McAllister, plus Fran Robinson of the Livesey Collection at the University of Central Lancashire, the most important British temperance collection... (h/t @addiebabe.bsky.social) www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... (1/3)

This essay captures nicely why I can’t imagine ever leaving the classroom/why I feel so intensely defensive of doing right by the kids who come into our school “Life, then, is the creation of childhoods. You have yours, and then you get to create childhoods for others.”

My 2026 resolution is to take things more personally. I learned this by reading Moby-Dick.

The silver lining that kept me going through the second half of this admittedly dreadful year -- and one of many things that has me looking forward to '26 and beyond. So grateful for the opportunity, and so looking forward to sharing more with you all soon.

When the sky looks like a sea or snowy mountain

The spirit of Christmas can be found in working with cookie cutters that are old enough to require tetanus shots while interpreting handwritten recipes that are the gentle ravings of a madwoman

"He was not a friendly man. When I told him I was in oil he said his first guess would have been grease."

Not enough Portis content on my skyline. On the merits of the ending, I place this on the list of best Christmas novels. On the merits of the entire book, one of my favorite reads of the year.

Oddly, everything I need to know I learned from a restroom, not Roald Dahl

Happy tenth anniversary to the first of all those posthumous J.D. Salinger books we were supposed to get: www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/b...

The most unrealistic thing about The Shining is that whenever Jack tells someone he’s a writer, they don’t ask “What genre?”

If you only look at one year-end "best of" books list, make it this thoughtful one of underrecognized gems from @literaryhub.bsky.social lithub.com/100-notable-...

Its Blake Friday! You know, when William Blake’s birthday falls on a Friday? Anyway here are his Toeses of Moses:

Gertrude Abercrombie. The Church. 1938.

Video game w Sebald walking and reciting from his books and fighting villains along the way

Here's a great poem for everyone to enjoy, especially @mbwwelch.bsky.social and @awestfell.bsky.social

no babe i loved your substack essay if anything i wish it was less publishable

I TRUST WE ARE ALL OBSERVING EDMUND FITZGERALD DAY

In his novel "Tomás Nevinson," Javier Marías describes the expressions on the faces of people in a photograph shown on the next page. The idea of reading faces like this gets its public scientific stamp of approval from Charles Darwin in 1872. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/11/03/t...

Silver gelatin print made circa 2011 / looking through old work #darkroom #silvergelatin #darkroomprint #bnwprint #bnwphoto #leeds

One of my projects has me immersed in Victorian literary culture, and anonymous reviews were a major component of that thriving print ecosystem.

Each day you will be confronted with three unmarked doors. Behind door one is getting all your work done. Behind door two is getting enough rest and exercise. Behind door three is a tiger. Good luck.

"...feels like a LinkedIn post mercilessly stretched to nearly three hundred pages."

“On the other side of the barrier of language, behind its curtain, stripped of its husk of speech, the spirit of man wanders ceaselessly.”

I also enjoyed John Robert Cozens and his 'Mount Etna from the Grotta del Capro', probably because it reminded me of Rembrandt's 'Rest on the Flight Into Egypt', which I'm a bit obsessed by.