Having just mentioned the work of Vladimir Sorokin in a reply, I feel that I should also provide a content warning for his entire oeuvre: violence and body horror being the top contenders. Don’t let that frighten you off though; the sex scene between Stalin and Khrushchev is tender and sublime.
There is a whole paragraph (or two) in @maxlawton.bsky.social’s translation of _Blue Lard_ by Vladimir Sorokin about how Russia has _no_ philosophers to speak of.
Should I be instead: positioning myself within a tradition; finding my voice; writing an erotics of Susan Sontag?
Does this fall under the heading quotidian banal?
Thankfully, my partner and daughter are delivering it to me in town.
Forgot at home the one and clearly most important book for the first class of the semester.
This morning, my feed was full of solid writing advice. I have been writing “Cheap and Shitty” on notebook covers for years.
Perform an anti-ritual. Pick up whatever writing instrument you prefer: a pen, pencil, computer, notebook. It does not matter. Title your piece "shit" or "this is shit." Vomit whatever comes to mind—self doubt screeds, a sudden passage of beauty, the word "fuck" in ALLCAPS repeated 1000 times.
From “The Simpsons” house genius John Swartzwelder, interviewed in The New Yorker by Mike Sacks
Is posting on social media like being a photographer: there's maybe one good photo in every 100 taken?
As it turns out, no.
Surely there’s something to say about the 32 stops on the S6 between Mainz Römisches Theater and Karlsruhe Hbf. Surely.
National Poetry Month (via @chaudierebooks.bsky.social) : Jen Tynes, / @jentynes.bsky.social ;
chaudierebooks.blogspot.com/2026/04/nati...
The German word for flip book is “Daumenkino,” which translates to “thumb cinema.”
Papa es gibt nur Kreuzungen und halbe Wege. | Papa there are only intersections and half streets.
A fireman talks into his radio while looking over a mound of smoldering paper which was ejected onto the street by a garbage truck driver who did so to save the truck. Three other firemen look on from the far side of the mound.
Four crates of thirty eggs each stacked vertically on a stainless steel trolly. The eggs are green, yellow, blue, purple, pink.
I helped dye 120 Easter eggs tonight.
The connection between Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket and Colonel Henry Blake is “Abyssinia.”
I think hating a tree is wrong, but DAMN THE BIRCH!
And yet, the Lilliputians attacked Gulliver instead of asking to be picked up.
All any of us really want is to held again like when we were children, and yet, giants in literature are invariably portrayed as unsympathetic.
My ornithologist acquaintance says no, but I can’t get over the idea that birds apprehend time very differently because of their vertical axis of movement.
“A good question is very hard to answer. The better the question the harder the answer. There is no answer at all to a very good question.”
- Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds
Tonight in Freiburg: Canto Ostinato by Simeon ten Holt and played by the Black Forest Percussion Group. blackforestpercussiongroup.com
Mr. J. Pontefract Cholmondeley of Ottawa, Canada offering an opinion entirely appropriate to someone named J. Pontefract Cholmondeley.
Today is St David’s Day: patron saint of Wales, of course, but also of vegetarians and poets. He was reputed to have helped introduce bees to Ireland. He is famously quoted as saying “Gwnewch y pethau bychain”, meaning “Do the little things”. Small changes and good choices matter, especially now.
That video where the guy puts the big rocks in the jar first, and then the pebbles which fall into the spaces left by the rocks, and then the sand which fills in all the rest of the space, is not an illustration of how we should prioritize our time, but rather of how Germans stand in line.
“Radical softness is the idea that unapologetically sharing your emotions is a political move and a way to combat the societal idea that feelings are a sign of weakness.“ —Lora Mathis, interviewed by Hooligan Magazine
Fuck ironic detachment the time has come for earnest enthusiasm
“Ich meine, ein Bügeleisen, der nur lauwarm wird.”