“a spectrum of chemical jams and jellies” — Fran Ross, Oreo (1974)

Can’t wait to read this, Nicholas Shapiro’s inspiring “chemical ethnography” of formaldehyde in budget mobile homes…

this is great 💊 "Polypharma Fiction" by Beth Blum academic.oup.com/alh/article-...

recent art photo dump w/ Paul Thek, Mike Kelley, Lee Seung Jio, Sophie Calle

Some close ups of Ambera Wellmann’s Death Masks Eternity (2025)

"one of those giant shopping malls surrounded by a wall that you bounced off like a rubber ball—unless you had a credit card on you" -- PKD, A Scanner Darkly (1977)

Hopefully there is already one in the works but Rosalyn Drexler's novel To Smithereens (1972) needs a UK publisher

strange days in Transnistria “Transnistria is not a real country […] It is basically a big business corporation owned and run by two local oligarchs who’ve made their fortunes on free supplies of Russian gas” on.ft.com/4gg2bew The secretive corporate empire that captured a breakaway state

“bones fuss about in your hand like spandex in a donut.” -- Keston Sutherland, Neocosis (2005)

“I gradually lost all fear of distortion. I perhaps oozed, rather than thought. What united and separated things? An imperceptible membrane, stretchy, spangled, gauzelike, of total vitality, which included laziness. A crystalline gel. An alphabet.” - Lisa Robertson's novel The Baudelaire Fractal

I wrote about doodles, democracy, & everyday aesthetics for @aeon.co. The essay is a spin-off from a chapter in my book Anexact Form & Modernist Culture!

Leigh Bowery at home in his London council flat (c 1980s) w/ Star Trek wallpaper, latex glue pour hair, kitsch Elvis Presley toy, psychedelic Dreamachine-style lamp, polyfoam shoulders, flowers, tele, etc.

Brilliant review by Eugenie Brinkema on Deleuze’s seminar On Painting... “Philosophy doesn’t work as TL;DR.”

“Leap over silent forms” - “Snow Line” (c 1928-1935) from Chika Sagawa’s Collected Poems

We are looking for multidisciplinary panels to be presented at our upcoming conference "Beyond Dualism—Thinking Creatively Across Worlds," which takes place in July next year. The full call can be found in the news section on our website: www.carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de/news/news_ev... (1/?)

strange cloud

“Oil is sentient babbling underfoot / AI break my face” new dark age "techno poetry" by Karina Bush ("I Wear My Tinfoil Hat as a Crown" from FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION SLUT) youtu.be/r4K5jF7U41A?...

Publication day for my first book! Thank you @edinburghup.bsky.social & everyone that has helped over the years. The book cover image is 'The Metaphysics of Mr Lucky' by the wonderful Jonathan Lasker. Please consider reviewing and/or ordering for your university libraries! (link: bit.ly/4lp8yxj)

"Kafka’s animals, crossbreeds, and uncanny nonhumans emerge at a precise point. They are the spokescreatures of a precarious borderland where the human-ness of the human being comes undone. They speak from and embody a crisis in the human self-image" (Aaron Schuster) www.e-flux.com/notes/675817...

Kids in smalltown 1950s MA were given perks for joining “Science Club”: baseball tickets, Mickey Mouse watches, free breakfasts Only, the cereal was laced w/ radioactive iron + the milk radioactive calcium - part of a secret experiment by the Atomic Energy Commission, MIT scientists, + Quaker Oats

It seems Federer, Sampras, Djokovic all hit the ball with polyester laced with cow intestines. It takes about two cows to string a pro tennis racket & often "natural gut" strings are mixed with polyester. There are also nylon filament "synthetic gut" strings that mimic the spring of cow intestines.

“to be made pure mucous membrane” (Sartre)

My first book ANEXACT FORM & MODERNIST CULTURE is published July 2025! I'm very excited for this to be out in the world + feeling grateful to everyone at Edinburgh University Press - especially series editors Georgina Colby & Eric White!! 🎉 ꩜ 🫟 @edinburghup.bsky.social /// tinyurl.com/3sf7yj8d

“drawings clean, clear but crazy like machines” Eva Hesse to Sol Le Witt (from Abstract Erotic at the Courtauld)

and we wander in Random in the alleys of their longfaced towns taking from their sickly mandibles handbills summoning our joint spirits. I sing Sousa. The desire to disintegrate the Earth is eccentric Ed Dorn, "Sousa" (1960)

The Carpenter greets a classical sculpture bottoms up in Chaplin's film His New Job (1915). Chaplin repeatedly uses classical sculptures as comedic props & the Tramp often finds strange affinities with such (kitsch, fake, mass-produced) visions of ideal form.

“He’ll convert emergency into an occasion for pranksterism—for Nietzschean, philosophically motivated mischief.” Wayne Koestenbaum in The Anatomy of Harpo Marx

“this interminable tangle of industrial-financial interlocking—combining, extending, merging—is spawned upon the machines + the machine-men by the never-ending intertwining fabulation of numbers out of numbers, [...] in high financial fantasy, [...] a gigantic numerical hallucination"

“I like to write alone, and I don’t like to talk much… Together, Félix and I would have made a good Sumo wrestler.” — Deleuze, “Letter to Uno”

“Thought is molecular. We are slow beings, constituted by certain molecular speeds. Michaux says, ‘Man is a slow being, made possible only through fantastic speeds’.” — Deleuze, “The Brain is the Screen”

Larry Fagin

"Philosophy is not so much in the fart itself, but in what is done with the fart, which is to say, its being counted, measured, and transformed into a law or principle rendered in mathematical terms" -- Annabel L Kim, Cacaphonies

One of the most promiscuous, brilliant, + endlessly fascinating novels of the 60s In Transit is being republished 🎉 Here “the empirical world shivers and becomes more malleable, more erotic, more wild. Bends into itself and returns,” as Helen Marten says of her own Aristotelian disintegrations...

immediacy helps commodify post-60s sexual freedom & domesticate “negative bonds" of "unloving" (FWB, ghosting, the ick) such that "the nonformation of bonds becomes a sociological phenomenon in itself, a social and epistemic category” (Illouz), and in turn the foundation for new aesthetic modes.

Surely Finnegans Wake has the most exclamation marks of any novel ever (ctrl+f-ing the Faber&Faber edition lists 4,727!)

In early 2024 Jesse nearly lost his dad and in shock he started writing protest songs that remake the legacy of American folk music for our time of Ozempic, United Health, Walmart. It’s a brilliant outpouring of simple songs for a beguiling moment open.spotify.com/album/6Z499V...

Looking forward to Ed Atkins's essay Flower & his Tate Britain exhibition, both coming early April fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/flower/ www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tat...

‘Frenesi gestured with her burger, trailing drops of separating ketchup and fat, each drop warped by the forces of its flight into swirling micropatterns of red and beige, and – “It’s the Revolution, girl – can’t you feel it?”’ -- Thomas Pynchon, Vineland (1990)

I'm giving a talk! "The Flit Gun Gag" [ 1-2pm, 19/03/25, CCEH @ Exeter Uni ] ft. Harpo Marx on kerosene, Betty Boop War Machines, Harlem Renaissance vaudevilles, the Cowardly Lion, & drunken barroom shootouts in Madrid circa 1938 Eventbrite: shorturl.at/spbCr

“I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces […] stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water” — William James

Such a treat to write about MediCinema - the charity that brings film into hospitals - ahead of their Bafta award this weekend and speak to patients and staff who care so passionately about this lifeline endeavour www.theguardian.com/film/2025/fe...

Interesting essay on “toxic melodrama” & the overwrought aesthetics that mediate the felt impossibility of containing industrial chemicals in late capitalism (communicated, in part, by way of "flaunting a commitment" to the "rank interpretative pathology" of paranoid criticism)

Alongside Koons’s “chrome-plated Balloon Dog (1994–2000), the history of art and balloon modeling overlap in the work of two American contemporary balloon practitioners, Ralph Dewey and Larry Moss.” Latex balloons inspire some of post45 pop culture’s stranger manipulations of synthetic matter 🎈

excited for this—Massumi on cultures of molecular fascism + twenty-first century politics

“it’s the war on terror coming home” - Arun Kundnani on a key aspect of Trump’s 21st century fascism that accentuates facets of neoliberalism while revelling in the chaos of its collapse. Unlike the centre left’s nostalgia (for some 90s Third Way heyday?), Trumpism is very much of this century

from this morning circling the Sella Group in the Dolomites 🏔️ ⛷️

the evil supernatural industrialist Hank morphs The Detective in Lynch’s great unfinished early work Ronnie Rocket: The Absurd Mystery of the Strange Forces of Existence (c 1978):

One second from every episode of Twin Peaks.

“The Groovy: An Everyday Aesthetic of the Sixties” was amongst Textual Practice's most read articles in 2024 🎉 It's about how a black 1940s colloquialism—“groovy”—morphs into an aesthetic indexing trippy post-capitalist desire's dissolution into gimmicky thermoplastic irony tinyurl.com/yczcz4n6