if you watch college students use LLMs, one of the more interesting things you’ll notice is that for every student who submits a wholly LLM-written paper, there are 3 or 4 who basically write their own paper, but off the instruction of an LLM-ideated outline

I'd always heard about Origen, a 3rd-century Christian theologian, volunteering for a kind of prototrans-adjacent castration. But only recently did I actually read his theology and realize he was preaching shit like "Be tranformed; resolve to know that in you there is capacity to be transformed."

Overheard on the radio “This is very normal in space”

Borrowing books is kinda the most stressful thing in the world

I am once again in the park where I read Malina

Not really a criticism, just that I think both positions (an opposition which electrifies against stupor, a stupor that grows so mesmerising as to liberate) deserve further consideration

I’ve been down the rabbit hole of Ray Davis’s blog for the last week, and it’s really incredible — found myself somewhat doubting this claim, or at least finding it no more self evident than Silliman’s blanket dismissal of the same.

There’s a fine line between theories of inchoate-but-everywhere-present madness and theories of inchoate-but-everywhere-present rationality

Probably the worst thing about living with family is that I have to keep a well regulated sleep schedule or I’ll go crazy but I feel kind of depressed by the same

I think the Malick-ian stuff felt much more like literary adornment than born-again-kino-eye this time; all the animal images and shots of work aren’t too far from Willa Cather. The translation across medium creates strangeness, which I always think of as a Bazin idea

It is kind of an arc where literature was thought of as one science or branch of knowledge among others, all undetermined elaborations of objects, then lesser or determined, then greater or determining, and finally one determined among others relating to a material base. For 20th c. specifically.

I feel like you could work out the permutations of lit theory's relation to science something like: 1) taking literature as its object (a science) 2) taking science as its model (structuralism) 3) taking sciences as images (post-metaphysical) 4) taking sciences as indexes (materialist or formalist)

Also I wonder how people read Malick's softening of the Gere character. He doesn't seem quite the neuroses-ridden, impotent guy that I think you'd expect from the part, there's a bit of boyish naivety about his scheming and a nobility and innocence that isn't really pierced.

Linda Manz's voiceover in DAYS OF HEAVEN is a perfect contrast to the diegetic mumbling and inarticulateness because it's lilting and darting and jagged enough to feel like the links between phrases are ambiguous; different ways to project depth beneath a surface.

I've had stuck in my mind for years this blurb of a Henry James book that exclaimed about his going to something like 170 dinner parties one year, as if it was a kind of scandalous or impossible thing to know about an artist.

I listened to the Doomscrolling podcast with Yungchomsky and I followed him on Instagram and see all his designer clothes modelling and I'm no closer to understanding who he is or why he has that name

It feels kind of amazing how tightly meshed supernatural images and tropes are; no less codified than allusions to myrtle and laurel in a classically oriented poem, for instance, but whereas those project temporal depth these keep up the pretence of random generation.

Even given they are the main character's names, "Mulder" and "Scully" make up a weirdly large proportion of the words in an X-Files episode

Reading Donne’s sermons changed how I take Emerson and Melville and Hawthorne’s style; less the play of the mind analogising, more a kind of forceful embroidery, like sawing with a needle

E eb een teld teath folded leseness heliplead spreenendi redumdichte pelluddeumne peraventurous delicaunterise feddendauraurec

These are my thoughts from reading David Melnick at 2 in the morning while I couldn’t sleep

a at alk adde autom faaded bulwark lakeness triadical cartingon citadformd farmdenloom prepalkladis andandandanda klokmalglottal opractimisation

i bi sic bric silld flickd fillyed millions lionising inneooten intentation accordioning briichtnesses prississistery witchenwagenden lichendloutednes improvisationally

One of my favourite memories of this year was hiking up a (small) mountain at Warrumbungle national park and when reaching its bald pate being circled by a wedged tail eagle -- a crowning moment, truly.

I’m both amazed at the utterly singular but very near world that Phenomenology of Perception opens up and kind of embarrassed by the ping-ponging between materialism and idealism? I suppose it’s kind of a Scholastic Pro-Contra structure.

Sianne Ngai's analysis of tone in "The Confidence Man" and envy in "Single White Female" kind of helped though -- both of them about the creation of a feeling "that no one actually feels", like a colourless medium or something, which seems like it is in the right direction.

I think those two things get tied up with narcissism or pretension, but if they are a truthful response to the materials I think there's some real duty to be served, as well as a desire for things to be other than they appear day to day.

I was talking to someone recently who said what they liked about Sydney is that it is a laid back place, and I know what they meant was that you get treated like a person instead of like competition but there's also something depressing about the lack of aspiration or ambition.

I think really I just am convinced by Heidegger's claim that we are "maintained and sustained by the essence of art", in the sense that art points out (models? creates? refines?) how we care about (rather than, what we care about). But I am so far from being able to argue it at all.

It’d be so cool to be a Jeffersonian yeoman