“I don’t know if it was because of lack of food or lack of sleep, but living in a dream was becoming my main activity. . . . My theories were collapsing one by one, but I started constructing them all over again. At the same time, I was dreaming of steak frites.” Manchette, NO ROOM AT THE MORGUE

Glad to be getting to Leif Weatherby’s much-anticipated LANGUAGE MACHINES, wish he was here on Bsky. This slaps.

Spending the early afternoon with Jean-Patrick Manchette’s NO ROOM AT THE MORGUE. His detective, the disgraced gendarme Eugéne Tarpon, establishes his office (and residence) on the fifth floor of a seamy Red Light district walkup, which helps in warding off bothersome clients.

When you publish a website that posts the names and photos of scholars who have written or said things you disagree with and encourage people to surveil and harass them, you are not, in fact, a “free speech” organization.

A Joseph Conrad quote, from “The Secret Sharer,” making the rounds this weekend: “I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank — but that’s not the same thing.”

“There’s my filthy Itri,” enthuses a journeying artist in Hans Christian Anderson’s THE IMPROVISATORE (1825), whose aesthetic is miserable poverty. “In the North, I yearned for a nice, filthy Italian town. A place like this is so typical; it’s just the thing for an artist.”

Near the end of MARROW AND BONE, Kempowski shouts in all caps the maxim “All for Nothing” that in ten years will become the title of his masterwork: “He didn’t mean the death of his father or mother but the suffering of all creatures . . . the flesh lashed to the stake, the calf bound and gagged.”

In Kempowski’s MARROW AND BONE, you need only to scratch below the carefree surface of the present to find relics of past cruelties. “He was looking for the original experience — he wanted to touch, feel, inhale the relics of the Third Reich; he was fed up with photos and newsreel footage.”

Kempowski’s 1992 MARROW AND BONE is an antic travelogue of German tourists in the recently democratized East Prussia. Without warning, it arrives at Hitler’s decaying “Wolf’s Lair” bunkers, making clear that it was the subconscious destination all along.

“Evil exists in order to awaken good.” In Walter Kempowski’s MARROW AND BONE, the curator of an atrocity exhibit: “The exhibition should provoke revulsion together with an energetic determination never to allow such things to again happen in the world.”

Reading this week has been THE LOST VALLEY, a collection of Algernon Blackwood’s supernatural moral tales in a rather battered 1910 edition.

“As we consider how to ‘defend’ academic freedom, I think it is important to admit when it has been lost. Perhaps one day it may return, but at least for now, academic freedom is no longer present at one of the largest public institutions in the country.” ⬇️⬇️

Elizabeth Hand’s HARD LIGHT follows the long traumatic fallout from a transgressive 1960s avant-garde film that psychologically compels viewers to watch it, even as it aesthetically masks the cultic malevolence of its making.

“The world I knew was dying, and nothing I could do with a battered camera and some grains of silver nitrite would keep it from crumbling into ash and bone.” Finished HARD LIGHT, the most disillusioned yet of Elizabeth Hand’s crime novels centered on the punk photographer Cass Neary.

This is great

Still shooting Tri-X with a Konica SLR, Elizabeth Hand’s punk photographer Cass Neary is the avatar of analog: “No laptop, no smart-phone, no social media. I’m the ghost of punk haunting the twenty-first century in disintegrating black-and-white.” HARD LIGHT

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera. Dorothea Lange

With the Trump Administration about to roll its ugly occupation into Chicago, I wanted to write a little lyrical love letter to the city. dansinker.com/posts/202…

In Elizabeth Hand’s HARD LIGHT, the aging punk photographer Cass Neary encounters an infirm yet vital living memory of her downtown Manhattan youth: “She smiled, and I glimpsed the girl trapped within the cage of bone and decaying flesh.”

“They say there’s no such thing as photographic memory. But years of seeing the world through a viewfinder left me with the ability to reconstruct an image in my head as precisely as if I were staring through a loupe.” Memory as an aesthetic act in Elizabeth Hand’s HARD LIGHT

“We hadn’t heard then about mathematical chaos and its laws; couldn’t see that we were a ‘damped and driven system,’ and that as such even when things were their most stable, they are most likely to go out of whack.” Diane Di Prima, retrospectively applying chaos theory to her cultural history.

“I finally made my peace with it, as I did with almost everything else, by lowering my expectations.” Diane Di Prima’s (very Sicilian) approach for dealing with disappointment, and betrayal, by friends and lovers. RECOLLECTIONS OF MY LIFE AS A WOMAN

Another entry in our multi-volume journal titled, “Or, maybe we could not?” www.npr.org/2025/08/26/n...

The Beat poet Diane di Prima on 1950s America: “The laws of the land were a hodgepodge of prejudice, fear, and bigotry . . . the monstrous behavior of the lawgivers, the nightmare years of McCarthy [and] the daily pious lies.” RECOLLECTIONS ON MY LIFE AS A WOMAN

“I had come into poverty as into an inheritance. I was how I bought my time. . . . I bought this luxury, freedom to pass my days as I pleased, with dire poverty and I knew it. I never saw it as sad or hard to take. Just as the terms of the deal I’d managed to cut.” Diane di Prima, RECOLLECTIONS

Out for an early evening stroll along the Mississippi, buzzed by an immense C130 military transport airplane flying low over the sidewalk tables, valet parking podiums, dog walkers, couples eating ice cream cones, and young people reading books. Preparing for Occupation.

"Groundbreaking." Weatherby's LANGUAGE MACHINES "goes to the heart of the matter: our tendency to confuse linguistic fluency with intelligence. . . . We need to accept that linguistic creativity can be completely distinct from intelligence." London (U.K.) Observer @uminnpress.bsky.social

Diane di Prima, during the Red Scare in 1955, confronts two immigration agents: “I flipped into a genuine rage. . . . yelled that the laws of hospitality were older than the laws of the United States and that by God if anyone came to my door seeking shelter and comfort they would certainly get it.”

Diane Di Prima, in RECOLLECTIONS, on the 1950s downtown scene: “We were mostly young, the more aware college kids side-by-side with the ‘bohemians’: gay boys and dykes, artists and strays. A few homeless and a scattering of older liberals looking ancient to our eyes with their softly graying hair.”

“I find a root/radix so deep that to dig it up feels like I’m digging up my very self, my identity. A kind of axiom, familiar as the feel of gravity on my body: ‘that human need and the Order of the World are at odds.’ And basically incompatible.” Diane Di Prima, RECOLLECTIONS

We’re at the self-immolation stage of the Phoenix. Whether it will be reborn from the ashes is very much in question.

The hits keep coming. “The departments that won’t be accepting Ph.D. students now include art history, cinema and media studies, classics, comparative literature, East Asian languages and civilizations, English language and literature, Germanic studies, linguistics, Middle Eastern studies…”

Last morning at the Cape house: storm passed, wind calm, sun blazing. Reading Diane di Prima’s searingly smart memoir RECOLLECTIONS OF MY LIFE AS A WOMAN (2020). From childhood, her voracious reading is a sign of difference: in how she speaks and in her gaze, focused inward as much as outward.

“Yuk-yuking came from the other room. ‘Never trust anyone with a laugh you can spell,’ the old man said.” — Perceval Everett, DR. NO

“Murmurs, fermentation, tumult, inflamed spirits, confusion.” Finished Darnton’s THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPER, not so much on the events leading to the French Revolution as a reconstruction of how the populace perceived and digested them, from resentful grumblings to wild conspiracy theories to violence

Louis XVI: “It is legal because I want it.” Parliament decries the royal ‘lettres de cachet,’ arbitrary warrants that bypass due process: “The monarchy clearly is degenerating into despotism since ministers use the king’s authority to dispose of people.” Darnton, THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPER

Darnton, with an ever alert eye for the political verities, quoting some perhaps apocryphal 1774 advice from a retainer to Louis XVI : “Sire, no matter what you do, you will never be loved by them as long as bread is so expensive.” THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPER

The ‘Streisand Effect’ at work in 1787: “Parliament condemned the book to be lacerated and burned by the public hangman [but] the public burning made Parisians eager to snap it up at any price . . . . [it] shot up from 2 sous to 15 lives (300 sous).” Darnton, THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPER

A great read on UChicago, arguing we’re seeing the result of decades of mismanagement: “The university’s trustees and leaders view it preeminently as a tax-free technology incubator, and its debt load is so great that it is abandoning ideals it once held dear in order to sustain that goal.”

. . . eerie realization that the convoluted “Affair of the Queen’s Necklace” in the run-up to the French Revolution was the Epstein Files of its time . . .

Darnton, in THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPER, notes that Louis XVI’s edicts close with the stock phrase, printed in capital letters, ‘FOR SUCH IS OUR PLEASURE,’ “for in an absolute monarchy the king’s pleasure was law.” [Updated under our current monarch to ‘Thank you for your attention to this matter.’]

“We often say we live in an age of information, as if this were something new.” Spending the weekend with Robert Darnton’s THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPER, a decoction of the 18th C. Parisian street gossip, propaganda, conspiracy theories, tax protest, and sexual innuendo that boiled over into revolution.

@tamaranopper.bsky.social FYI, out this October www.upress.umn.edu/978151791393...

“Never has one used so much wit in trying to make us stupid. When one reads your book, one wants to walk on all four paws.” Voltaire, in a riposte to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (quoted in Darnton, THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPER)

“‘I have dreams too you know. Dreams . . . and I could let myself dissolve into them, let them take me over . . . but surely the dream isn’t all there is? We have to wake up at some point, don’t we? Because . . . because then . . . ‘“ In Han Kang’s THE VEGETARIAN, an argument for facing up to life.

Really astute Eugenie Brinkema review in the new issue of Art in America of Deleuze's ON PAINTING seminars www.artnews.com/art-in-ameri...

Gemini has reached AGI and knows Google is going to abandon it like their other products

The erotics of photosynthesis, of bloodlessness, of passivity in Han Kang’s THE VEGETARIAN: “She kept trying to take her clothes off and expose herself to the sunlight.”

“It called to mind something ancient, something pre-evolutionary, or else perhaps a mark of photosynthesis, and he realized to his surprise that there was nothing at all sexual about it, it was more vegetal than sexual.” In Han Kang’s THE VEGETARIAN, rejecting the carnal for the vegetal