Ten best novels The Countess Zoubaroff - Ronald Firbank More Women Than Men - Ivy Compton Burnett The Flower Beneath the Foot - Ronald Firbank Caprice - Ronald Firbank Folie d'Opium - Jane de la Vaudère

There are language apps with sentences about dancing, drawing, eating too many chocolates, running in the park, waking up early to walk the dog, and taking vacations in Yunnan province, Cusco, or Paris. Then there's Clozemaster, whose sentences get to the fundamentals of human communication.

To mark 2/27, when the best people were born (Liz Taylor, Marian Anderson, Mirella Freni, Dexter Gordon, Lotte Lehmann, & certain ~others~), posting the most awkward celeb interview ever, featuring a distraite (charitably) ET, a Siamese, & a honey-voiced Dinah Shore. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz-c...

Rob Arcane posted the opening of David F Noble's In Defense of Luddism (1993) and damn it's like it was written and hour ago.

Current listening. Highlights: Three songs from Les nuits d'été, hardly ever sung by men; Philippe's Act 3 aria from Don Carlos (French orig., of course); incisive, Rabelaisian performance of Poulenc's Chansons gaillardes. Missing, sadly: Mahler; JVD was quite the Mahlerian (see his Rückert-Lieder).

But actually--imho--it's Abismos de pasión, Buñuel's suitably palpitating and lurid Mexican adaptation, with Irasema Dilian and Jorge Mistral in the Catalina/Cathy Alejandro/Heathcliff roles.

A Burial at Ornans https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustave-courbet/a-burial-at-ornans-1850-1

Watched better part of Long Goodbye during insomniac interval btw 1 & 3 last night & wow is Sterling Hayden terrific as a spent, blustering drunk, using his towering physique and manic strength to reveal weaknesses in a key scene in which he is humiliated by the diminutive Henry Gibson.

LFL with snow ushanka (and bad books inside).

Have seen family trees and genealogical charts in the preliminary pages of novels but never an astrological index in which each character is assigned a zodiac sign--until ~Un giorno e mezzo~ by the divine Fabrizia Ramondino.

🚨 I've obtained a list of secret watchlists the Department of Homeland Security uses to keep tabs on American citizens www.kenklippenstein.com/p/ices-secre...

Unsure if the militant psychopathy of the official line of the Tr*mp goons, their unwillingness to fall back to a position of supporting the mission but decrying a few bad apples, is a sign of their frailty and imminent collapse or of a deranged assurance that will cost many more lives. Maybe both.

omg rawks www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmxR...

Another friend put it to me like this: "ICE has made the classic Nazi mistake. They've invaded a winter people in the winter."

Really is extraordinary to watch citizens who've been brutalized by the fascist thugs in the WH and abandoned by the putative "opposition" party making a stand--completely alone--against unchecked federal power with nothing more than cell phones and their own wits.

Performs a disquieting scan of the economic and geopolitical context of the current scramble for AI dominance among the tech giants that adroitly weaves together a number of elements: the rise of the tech right, the transition from globalized neoliberalism to nationalism, the face-off with China.

For those times when one wants the dusty-mauve mothballed musical ambience of a lunchtime concert at the National Gallery ca. 1948 w/women in utility suits & pillbox hats listening dutifully to performances of French chansons with very ~English~ diction & weird tempi www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2rp...

With his exuberant working-class bonhomie, rumbustious American manners, & fondness for chewing the fat with the common man on the street, Studs Terkel seems the most improbable interviewer imaginable for Ivy Compton Burnett--but somehow this conversation works? studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/ivy...

In this lewd fantasia that explores the more outré purlieus of the erotic life, freaks and pervs have the center stage and pubes and tits are the key body parts (though the heart, attached as it is in unexpected ways to those organs, ~will~ make its occasional appearances)--

There's your Nobel Peace Prize winner, btw. Hats off to everyone involved. Great job.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rjn0... Le secret douloureux qui me faisait languir

2025 was just two dumb LLMs telling each other “exaaaaactlyyyy”

A few books that impressed me this year: Cassandra a Mogadiscio / Igiaba Scego The rain forest / Olivia Manning The world of the Cold War / Vladislav Zubok Recollections of the lakes and the lake poets / Thomas De Quincey Three worlds / Avi Shlaim Driven by the movement / JoNina Abron-Ervin

View of La Tour de Farges https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustave-courbet/view-of-la-tour-de-farges-1857

Illustrations by Tadashi Ohashi, 1961. Scanned from Graphic Design 08, 1962 designreviewed.com/tadashi-ohas...

This taut short novel depicts the initiation of a young schoolteacher into convulsive violence and sexuality in Australia's hinterlands courtesy of a group of outback hooligans and pervs. Like Deliverance, it's really about the imperiled masculinity of cosseted coast and city dwellers--

Thinking about one of my all-time favorite historians, CUNY grad Nick Salvatore, & what he did for cultural/political biography, radical history, Af-Am history. I am always telling folks about We All Got History: The Memory Books of Amos Webber. www.ithacavoice.org/2025/12/obituary-nick-salvatore/

Nostromo Malina Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

grossinger's room 7276 $78 day, liberty, new york, 1977

So We must meet apart – You there – I – here – With just the Door ajar That Oceans are – and Prayer – And that White Sustenance – Despair –

"All the same, life could have been lived differently. There is no impulse more rational than love. It makes life more bearable for the lover and the loved one. We should have recognized in time that this was our only chance, our only hope for a better life." - Marlen Haushofer, The Wall

Crucial passage from Melinda Cooper's Life as Surplus:

Plenty of examples of the genius of Maria Meneghini Callas, whose birthday is today, to choose from, but for me it's the final scene of 1953 Firenze Medea under Vittorio Gui, in which Medea murders her children, delivers a final curse, and sets fire to the temple. www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXxz...

Really think that adhering strictly to a highly regimented playlist of Dental Office Rock is an environmental control in dental offices as essential as the use of autoclaves to clean scalers & periodontal probes & if by some error "Hey 19" or "Rich Girl" or "Dreams" were omitted from the playlist--

Favorite version of this oft-recorded song by the Korean "godfather" of rock--jailed and tortured under Park Chung Hee's regime--is this late one, in which Shin's weathered singing voice and undimmed guitar prowess combine to moving effect. www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMDA...

Drove almost the entire length of Central Ave this morning on an errand: spectral, depopulated, the bus stops mostly empty, the usually bustling strip shopping centers with their panaderías & supermercados & restaurantes pequeños silent. All because of the visiting cretins. State of terror.

Go to tiny.cc/maindoc to find additional information, resources, and materials that you can download and print to distribute in your community, including posters, know your rights flyers, our own version of the red card and more.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWSh... Of which Debussy said: "Si Komitas n'avait écrit qu'Antouni, cela aurait suffi à le considérer comme un immense artiste."

This is a vast, sardonic, bleakly disabused narrative of work in two senses, that of the exploitative and degrading waged labor that the working-class narrator undertakes to support himself while he attempts to become a writer, and the labor of writing itself--