Wrote about my friend Asad Haider, who passed away last month. substack.com/home/post/p-...

Did an end of year round up on what I wrote, and what I read (both books and articles) exitonly.substack.com/p/2025-in-re...

Team JDP, assemble

For The Metropolitan Review, I wrote about John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer, which turns 100 years old this year. In doing so I explore the intertwined legacies of modernism and urbanism. open.substack.com/pub/metropol...

RIP Asad Haider. Like so many things about him it is unbelievable. It was unbelievable he taught Lazarus in his graduate classes, it was unbelievable that we became friends, he was unbelievably generous with his time, and he held an unbelievably unshakeable faith in emancipation.

This year I'm thankful for the NYRB sales

inspired by post on Instagram, here are 12 books I think deserve more attention📚✨

My poem, 'The Death of John Ashberry' is out in the latest issue of The Exacting Clam (@exactingclam.bsky.social). Have a squiz if you like nonsense. Hell, it's barely a poem.

Wrote a little essay about inspiration and our dominant metaphors of it. One I prefer over others, is that inspiration is a pit. www.acwjournal.com/the-pits-of-...

Over at @negationmag.com I went long on Everyday Resistance, Revolution, and the Rarity of Politics. Along the way I get some help from Marx, Lefebvre, Scott, Certeau, Ranciere, Badiou and of course the GOAT, Sylvain Lazarus. www.negationmag.com/articles/mar...

Finished this today, jesus christ what a book

Wrote a late review of Kornbluh’s Immediacy wherein I call Bernard Harcourt “a glorified toastmaster”, Maggie Nelson “an easier intellectual target than a barn door comprised of Jordan Peterson quotes” and worst of all Anna Kornbluh “a North American" thehobbyhorse.substack.com/p/mediation-...

Don’t sleep on this wonderful essay on by Ethan Gibson on Lynch, Madness, Shell Shock and uh the novels of Rebecca West thehobbyhorse.substack.com/p/magic-circ...

“There exists in fascism the mythic desire for an object the true essence of which is death. And the real of fascism is something like a law of death…” - Alain Badiou

It's been awhile since i've put anything on the ole substack, but here's a new piece by me on Paul Valéry, the poem of the idea and the idea of poetry. exitonly.substack.com/p/the-twice-...

Now this, this is a good fucking poem www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/160609...

It's the centenary of Mishima's birth. To celebrate, why not read my ramblings on his death? thehobbyhorse.substack.com/p/did-mishim...

"If the logician could never be other than a logician, he would not, and could not be, a logician; and if the poet were never anything but a poet without the slightest hope of being able to reason abstractly, he would leave no poetic traces behind him.” - Paul Valery

"Well, my idea has never been that everything is political. My own statement is quite different; it is that politics has no specific object, which means that politics may happen everywhere at any time, but it may not happen as well." danieltutt.substack.com/p/interview-...

Nice to appear in Philip Harris' round up of Cleveland Review of Books' fall pieces, alongside luminaries like Bailey Trela and Mitch Therieau: www.clereviewofbooks.com/writing/fall...

I wrote about all the things I read, wrote and enjoyed this year. Enjoy: exitonly.substack.com/p/2024-in-re...

ICYMI —last week @ minor lits ... — an experimental essay from @duncanastuart.bsky.social minorliteratures.com/2024/11/26/e... — ficción en español by @endiaaz.bsky.social minorliteratures.com/2024/11/27/l... — a short story by Lion Summerbell minorliteratures.com/2024/11/28/l...

"To talk in purely practical terms; for us, individuals emerge from a depiction of the processes of human co-existence and they can be 'big' or 'small'." —Bertolt Brecht, "Against Georg Lukács"

Committing myself to doing a snowed-up reading in wool pants, using a frozen birdbath for a book-stand, possibly waving about a tambourine or whatever Elias Canetti was holding when reading from 'The Comedy of Vanity' in Switzerland, 1935.

Was recently reminded of Robert Minto’s wonderful 2019 essay “The Gesture of the Text”, on Kafka, Simenon and the embodiment of writing. www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-gest...

“Epistemological configurations are never replaced by the appearance of new orders; they compose strata that form the bedrock of the present.” - Michel de Certeau

OUT TOMORROW! Monthly Dispatch #18 — ft. @louisarmand.bsky.social @duncanastuart.bsky.social @preetivangani.bsky.social Brian Muraya, Lion Summerbell, Jonathan Larson, Julian George, @saintsoftness.bsky.social Hilary White, Vanessa Saunders, @endiaaz.bsky.social & more ... minorlits.substack.com

Haul from the recent NYRB classics sale.

“Elsewhere Althusser theorises ‘overdetermination’. The key: something remains, the previous remerges. The complex whole proves unhistoricisable. The case considered here? Modernity erases the ancient.” Emerence et Ennemonde — @duncanastuart.bsky.social minorliteratures.com/2024/11/26/e...

My latest, now up at Minor Lits. On depictions of peasant life in European literature and written under a certain constraint...

Wrote a little reverse lipogram on Magda Szabo's The Door and Jean Giono's Ennemonde and the depictions of modernity and peasant life in both texts. minorliteratures.com/2024/11/26/e...

Writing seriously for the first time in a few months, I had forgotten the pleasures of the word document and the footnote and the bon mot and the despair of two ideas you cannot bridge

This is huge, hugely overdue, and necessary. Big win for the NTEU indeed!

Lots of new followers; welcome all to my terrible posts. Here's something I wrote a long time ago that I still think holds up... www.3ammagazine.com/3am/kafka-in...

The UN has now formally found Israel's genocide "consistent with genocide", including the use of weaponized starvation. www.ohchr.org/en/press-rel...

Jared Pollen on Ryan Ruby's Context Collapse. As the audience gets further away, the text becomes more hermetic. www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/162...

Five writers of whom I've read 5+ books Jacques Ranciere Walter Benjamin Friedrich Nietzsche Franz Kafka Yukio Mishima

This is apparently comparable both to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter. Which presumably means I won’t get around to reading it for a decade.

"Beckett belongs to a lineage...but he comes at the end of it, or, at least, at an end of it. His work is a project of winding down, of reaching towards the final terminus of the thing which began to end with the development of Modernism." thehobbyhorse.substack.com/p/the-barest...

"By sanctioning the taking of a life, we prevent any possibility that the condemned might someday reconcile with the world and with God—it is as violent and unjustified an act as any crime that could tempt us to employ it. " www.nybooks.com/online/2024/...

Wrote about Yoko Tawada's Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel and Paul Celan, of course. www.clereviewofbooks.com/writing/yoko...

Reupping this piece on the occasion of Nietzsche’s birthday. Herein I tackle recent attempts to discredit Nietzsche, his uncomfortable affinities and uses by both the left and the right, and why we keep coming back to him. exitonly.substack.com/p/nietzsche-...

I had a pretty productive summer. I wrote four longish essays. Covered everything from the aestheticization of life to politics at a distance from the state. Three of the essays appeared at The Hobbyhorse. Find them below. 1.“Kafka's Hypographs” - thehobbyhorse.substack.com/p/kafkas-hyp...

Went long on the life and times of Mishima, asking the crucial question: what if, when turning your life into a work of art, you create a faulty artwork? thehobbyhorse.substack.com/p/did-mishim...

Wrote about Foucault, Lazarus and Marx exitonly.substack.com/p/a-certain-...

I wrote about Flaubert and the creative process for The Hobbyhorse. thehobbyhorse.substack.com/p/saint-bovary

"The naiveté of the student, to whom the difficult and formidable seems good enough, is wiser than the adult pedantry that admonishes thought with a threatening finger to understand the simple before risking that complexity which alone entices it." - Theodor Adorno, The Essay as Form

Walter Benjamin was born OTD in 1892. Celebrate by reading my cooked take on his infamous essay “Critique of Violence.” jacobin.com/2021/08/walt...

Read this gorgeous essay by Avalyn Wu on Johnnie To's The Mission substack.com/home/post/p-...