Joined October 2025
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May 24
"I merely want to remind us that cyberspace is a literary invention and does not really exist, however much time we spend on the computer every day."
-- Fredric Jameson
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Jun 14
I'm looking forward to this piece. One of my hopes for the future of reading and, ahem, literature, is that it will help those who are not used to solitude, who have not cultivated solitude, to understand what a healthy and productive and interesting solitude can be. Literature is cultivated solitude.
Jun 13
Why is the fertility crisis so universal?
I argue that there’s a human drive toward solitude, which technology and markets keep getting better at delivering. Here’s the evolutionary logic.
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Jun 6
“Even when I was a child, adults would ask me: little girl, may we take your picture? And then one day they stopped asking. The right of the camera was elevated above all other rights and that changed everything, absolutely everything.”
-- from Immortality by Milan Kundera
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Jun 6
Ariosto deserves a revival. Of all the canonical Europeans, he seems to me one of the most neglected.
Jun 6
It amuses me that Milton’s line “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” is itself an allusion to Ariosto’s “A tale in prose ne verse yet sung or sayd.”
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Jun 5
Dig: the hipster is eternal and reborn or reinvented for every generation.
Jun 5
This was hipster music
open.spotify.com/track/2LXIS…
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Jun 5
I agree. So much fun. Joyce was the only author to write in dialect convincingly because he knew that dialect was a fiction and thus created his own universal dialect that any reader is free to switch in and out of, depending on whether she decides to read aloud or silently. Almost like the oral law and the written law, there is the oral Wake and the written Wake.
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Jun 5
Without irony: this seems like a good way for humanist or literary intellectuals to actually make money these days. Find a finance bro. Modern patronage.
I’m obsessed with “read classic books” (who cares which) as basically a health optimization trend
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Jun 1
The problem is that everybody is trying to get around the actual work of deep reading. It is better to actually read a book and misunderstand it than to attempt an understanding without reading. And in Nietzsche's case especially: he the literary philosopher par excellence (i.e. no way to summarize his ideas like you could Aristotle's or Locke's), a reader who is exercising a will-to-power or interpretation over past tradition in an attempt to defeat his own belatedness. People who sink their teeth in Nietzsche without a prior knowledge of Plato, the Bible, Kant inevitably end up lost. And then there is Wagner...
The claim of the "Peterson Academy" is to teach its paying subscribers "how" to think instead of "what" to think. Listening to the moralising lecture by Peterson on Nietzsche, whose ideas Peterson is clearly shocked by, all he does is tell his audience exactly what to think.
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Jun 1
To the extent that it has led to this--Twitter, YouTube, etc.--I'm inclined to agree, at least lately. But the quoted black-pilled post seems like a symptom of the very illness it is trying to expose. A lot of people believed and continue to believe that the arts, admittedly only a single dimension of culture generally, are a noble endeavor. Why not take stock and propose something positive instead?
“Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other peoples’ convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well-treated by culture.”
― Terence McKenna
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May 29
Hear, hear! Stated with simplicity and nobility.
May 29
If you make art for art's sake, or write poetry for poetry's sake, and you aim for something greater than "self-expression" and political signaling, you are creating and preserving culture. You're doing real work in the face of looming dystopia. Keep going. Share your work. Be the counter-revolution culture requires at the root in order to thrive. Refuse to be demoralized.
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May 27
Bob Dylan was one of the greatest singers of the 20th century.
May 25
Bob Dylan, who turns 85 today, is a fine lyricist, put out a few very decent records, and is one of the worst singers ever to hit the top 5.
The Byrds got to number 1 with Mr. Tambourine Man (a good song!) because he couldn't sing and they could.
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May 26
May 26
It is with deep sorrow and profound love that we announce the passing of Sonny Rollins. The Saxophone Colossus died this afternoon at his home in Woodstock, NY at the age of 95. 1/2 conta.cc/4wFIDrM
ALT Sonny Rollins in 2009. Photo by John Abbot.
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May 25
Sounds right. Emerson sounds better, though.
May 25
"the assimilation of texts is a search for self-knowledge in an exegetical universe comprised by tradition."
-Sara Rappe, Reading Neoplatonism: Non-Discursive Thinking in the Texts of Plotinus, Proclus, and Damascius
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May 25
My sense is that the extent and mode of abundance cancels out the aesthetic.
May 25
It’s very odd that despite all the abundance of this century, it still lacks an aesthetic, no major non political and purely artistic movement, no "new avant garde," despite all the complains about individualism, conformity and "community" have never been so overwhelmingly present, weird. Maybe some movements are taking shape and I don’t see them yet.
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May 24
A lot of people will react to pieces @j_amesmarriott's about the alarming decline of reading with "moral panic" or "it was always like that" etc. But then I read this.
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