In the episode, Dan touches a few times on the ecosystem (the tent furnished with the throw of negative criticism), and I think what the ecosystem benefits from, alongside all the other things, is critical texts which are good /as pieces of art in their own right/.

When I started writing reviews, I had no sense of a reader who might be consuming them or using them. The audience as an artefact of how I was writing was a construct, a genre convention to use in service of what I was actually doing - seeking clarity for my own thoughts, and trying to write a text.

I have been thinking A Lot about the conversation that this (very interesting!) episode has engendered about debuts, the purpose of reviews, and the role of negativity. And I have been coming back to not just who reviews are for, but how they function and what it clarifies about my practice

As a closing inchoate thought: publicity, marketing, material conditions are real & important. Objective or theoretical scholarly work is important. The secret third thing is *art*, the hard gemlike flame, that's bound up with the personal, the subjective, the aesthetic response.

A good companion to this episode’s discussion on when to go negative: a 2023 ep with @abigailnussbaum.bsky.social. “There’s a point where the tone of the review changes, where my goal is not to engage with what the book does, right or wrong, but just to say, ‘there’s nothing worth saving here.’

I don't only think that college should be FREE but I think young people should also receive living stipends while in school. Finally, I do not care what they major in because education needs to actually BE DECOUPLED from a future job. You are welcome. You should have 4 years to study anything.

the working class are allowed to experience comfort and joy. it is not being a good proletariat to deny yourself beauty, joy, comfort. having contempt for beauty only hurts yourself.

My biggest conspiracy theory is that telling working class people that engagement in the arts is a middle / upper class thing and to do so makes you a class traitor is a psyop to make them disengaged with themselves and the world and the beauty of being human, so that they accept worse treatment.

God help me but I made a video to talk about two things I hate

Don't threaten me with a good time motherfucker

look i was a bernie supporter so i've had to reconcile the fact that a lot of his online supporters were dumb as rocks but certain platner enthusiasts are really not doing their candidate any favors by advancing the "all american men have a nazi phase" argument

. @aoc.bsky.social responds to this trend: "BOOOOO" "This race to try to see who can be exempt from participating in society is not a conversation that I'm interested in," she tells me, calling it an uninspiring message. "I'm a Great Society Democrat, and I believe in building that together."

I may as well reshare it myself 😇

I'm not going to provide details, so don't ask. Nevertheless: No, it is not OK to have one hallucinated cite. No, you can't delete that and expect me to take the rest of your work seriously. No, absolutely not. It should never ever happen.

My flash “The Three Mothers You Will Never Meet” is free to read today over at @heartlines-spec.com! Go check it out if you like linen, cropworlds, space stations, mothers that you may or may not ever meet, or avocados 🥑 www.heartlines-spec.com/the-three-mo...

BEEP BOOP, I am your computer mother telling you to read this.

As of 2023, Sherlock Holmes is finally in the public domain in the United States -- which means that Arthur Conan Doyle's heirs and random other rights-holders can no longer insist that the character be free of any trace of homoeroticism. buttondown.com/charliejane/...

Lebanon Bologna! It's like. What if summer sausage tasted sweet and sour and almost . . . rotten?

I was talking about Adrienne Rich and misapplications of her work and my students were like "sounds kinda TERFy" and I was like, "girl, you got it."

I think some often-erased history is important here. A significant swath of second wave radfems were willing to team up with and/or take funding from the fundamentalist far-right due to their shared hatred of trans people and sex workers. Dworkin, Mackinnon, Brennan, WAP, etc. Plenty still are.

In the same manifesto, Palantir's owners argued that we need a national military draft, that soft power is over, and that we were too hard on Germany and Japan after World War II. I don't think that company should be allowed to exist anymore.

"AI fails to do what AI companies say it does" is in fact a full explanation.

They don't really want me using Borges's Library of Babel and Pierre Menard to explain how the randomized nature of LLMs is wholly dependent on the receiver interpreting the communication such that you hand over any possibility of creating a pure signal to the noise machine, but that's how AI works.

I understand the impulse but whenever people dunk on someone for doing something dumb on a game/reality show I think of how many times I have crumbled under the very light pressure of ordinary social interactions at like the grocery store.

Counterpoint: I use em dashes with abandon and will not let "AI" steal them from me. I was overusing them first and will continue to do so long after "AI" is a crater in our financial system, or our merciless overlords, or both

this one doin numbers on mastodon but bsky doesn't let me have enough characters

YES.

Welp, time to talk about the spear-Danes again.

Today would've been John M. Ford's 70th birthday. Here are his two most famous sonnets.

lately ive been foaming at the mouth feeling so angry and helpless. i still feel that way, but this poem was a necessary reminder for me that transness is power

There are readers who are looking for books without certain topics and content, and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that, and those books exist and should exist. THIS framing, though, is one built on "We're not like the other guys," and it does harm.

This. This is a publisher saying they are better than the books being banned nationwide. This is them saying that the lives of those who live in the margins don't matter. That kids who live in a diverse world shouldn't experience that in and through literature. What "readers" do they mean here?

It feels like a lost cause but i hear you, intensely: the idea that any justification for education other than naked instrumentality at the level of economic production has just gone away is — striking. Nobody even talks about “democratic citizenship” anymore! Bleak stuff

Developing a radical new theory of literature based on the idea that it is good when books are interesting and also good when books are well-written.

Just because he backed off shouldn’t stop efforts to remove him. He is dangerous and cannot be left in power.

I just shared the beauty of Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" with a student looking for poetry. This poem does things to my heart.

April is for poetry not genocide Attn @houserepublicans.bsky.social

No matter what does or doesn't happen tonight, don't let any of these monsters steal your joy or the belief that there are still good people in the world. You're not a bad person for wanting to take care of yourself or spread some joy to others.

i will vote for dems who say this stuff and act on this stuff! i will give them money! i will tell my friends to do the same! it is what i want from government more than anything else right now!

I think one of the reasons why Artemis II had us all so captivated was that it was one of those times where we feel on such a visceral level what Carl Sagan got across in his Pale Blue Dot monologue: that we are simultaneously tiny and precious and we need each other youtu.be/wupToqz1e2g?...

Sagan was writing and thinking during the Cold War, when nuclear annihilation was a constant imminent spectre, and you hear it in his words there. I believe Sagan would have been a passionate humanist regardless of that spectre, but I do believe it filled him with a very particular urgency

It made him even more determined to be clear about the value of each human life, about the goodness and beauty that exist side by side with all the evil of which we’re capable If you’re struggling today, it’s because a deep part of you feels that too That in itself is worth holding onto

Reading is the fix to the reading crisis. Not programs, interventions, specialists, curriculums... A plethora of diverse and interesting reading materials readily & easily accessible. (That would be in a well-funded & appropriatedly staffed school library.)

The Trump administration has DROPPED its appeal in Rhode Island v. Trump, meaning that the victory for the Institute of Museum and Library Services in the case STANDS. Let's celebrate the win and then work like hell to restore IMLS funding in 2027: bookriot.com/rhode-island...

If you let them ban porn, they will call you pornographic when they ban you.

Our reviews, alas, don't have mushrooms. But they're still pretty good! Frinstance, here's @tristanbeiter.bsky.social on the mechanics of genre in the video game Shuten Order: "artifice is not presented as a problem with the genre, merely the conditions of its meaningfulness." Great reading, this.

There are good reasons to think my art is bad! That one is very silly! I think, and I am not saying this to be unkind, that a lot of good books are somewhat over the heads of many readers right now. And it isn't their fault. To be a good reader you need not just ABCs literacy but context literacy.

Man, one of the most depressing aspects of modern scholarship is finding a great article and then looking up the scholar to see what else they’ve done and just catching a glimpse of an abbreviated career hopping between visiting positions and publishing great pieces before disappearing from academia

I like this analogy, and I'm going to try to figure out how to expand it to encompass the fact that at volumes greater than a sip—a novel, a movie, even a three-minute video clip—AI turns inevitably to bilgewater.