NDG, Montreal

Today is the day!
(From Leonard Cohen'snovel, Beautiful Losers)

Really gratifying to be read so well, by such a good writer, in such great company. I esp. appreciate the mention of the book's prose--it's what I care most about...and what seems to get mentioned least in reviews. Thank you, Caleb!

I'll imagine this flock of wild turkeys as domestic so I can legit refer to them by the clearly superior "Rafter of Turkeys"

OED36829 come-at-able, adj. OED.2022.V4 Pronunciation: Brit. O/ l, U.S.O/ kmnlatabl Ikam Iædabal/' Frequency (in current use): frequency band (_sh_Qy_ pr)_ information Now rare. Able to be come at or reached; accessible, attainable, obtainable. Derivatives come- at-a bility n. the state or quality of being come-at-able. 1909 come- at-ableness n. 1837_1898 come-at-ability n.

(fr. ca. 1685, also, sans hyphenss fr 1708)

After these came a second set; among the most come-at-able of whom were Mrs. and Miss Bates and Mrs. Goddard, three ladies almost always at the service of an invitation from Hartfield, and who were fetched and carried home so often that Mr. Woodhouse thought it no hardship for either James or the horses. Had it taken place only once a year, it would have been a grievance.

"come-at-able"

[Emma, Jane Austen (1816)] #c18th #18thc

"David" McNally...good Freudian Slip ;) def would be interested in hearing him on 60 Min of all things, tho...

The word *literature* has no origin. […]
I will have devoted my life to an elusive prey
whose name had no meaning,
no use, no function, no design, no origin, no end.

— Pascal Quignard, L’Homme aux trois lettres (2020)

The Parthian Dart: Endings and Epilogues in Fiction PA T ROGERS MY TITLE refers to the sense one gets at the end of many traditional novels that the author is walking backwards out of the narrative, vacating textual space at his or her conclusion by reversing the perspective or redirecting the angle of one vision on events. The technique may loosely be called Parthian in that the author has saved up some of his or her best shots until the moment of departure (there is commonly a ceremony of leave-taking). Moreover, the reader is Often on the retreat as well: as soon as the credits come up, we head for the exit, craning over our shoulders to catch the final words. But the emphasis here will be on the writer's end of things.

Feels apropos somehow

A poet cannot read another poet, nor a novelist another novelist, without comparing their work to his own. His judgments as he reads are of this kind: God! My GreatGrandfather! My Uncle! My Enemy! My Brother! My imbecile Brother!

If good literaly critics are rarer than good poets or novelists, one reason is the nature of human egoism. A poet or a novelist has to leam to be humble in the face of his subject matter which is life in general. But the subject matter of a critic, before which he has to leam to be humble, is made up of authors, that is to say, of human individuals, and this kind of humility is much more difficult to acquire. It is far easier to say—"Life is more impoltant than anything I can say about it"—than to say—"Mr. A' s work is more important than anything I can say about it. " There are people who are too intelligent to become authors, but they do not become critics. Authors can be stupid enough, God knows, but they are not always quite so stupid as a certain kind of critic seems to think. The kind of critic, I mean, to whom, when he condemns a work or a passage, the possibility never occurs that its author may have foreseen exactly what he is going to say.

Authors, Critics
(fr W.H. Auden, The Dyer's hand)

Last day on the river this year...
14C and perhaps 40mm of rain tomorrow :(

In NLR 157: an interview with Ervand Abrahamian.

A leading historian of modern Iran on the power structures of the Islamic Republic and the long-incubated American-Israeli assault.

newleftreview.org/issues/ii157...

Standoff

It's pub day for my new novel, The Tavern at the End of History. When writing I imagined it like The Magic Mountain­, but shorter & with Jews. (& also angels, a dybbuk, & stolen art). Looking forward to sharing it with you all!

Genius Novels vs. Talent Novels and Martin Amis’s House of Meetings If I were to give Martin Amis a ‘report card’ (in the manner in which Kurt Vonnegut famously gave himself), House of Meetings would indeed get an “A” from me, though that in itself would …

I was going to write about Martin Amis's novel, House of Meetings...
...but ended up mostly mulling over his distinction between ‘talent novels’ and ‘genius novels’

blog.wdclarke.org/genius-novel...

An Offshore Finance Bestiary (Poem) (With apologies to Michael Donaghy) *

An Offshore Finance bestiary
(This actually the truncated version :P)
blog.wdclarke.org/an-offshore-...

Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism, by Brooke Harrington (Review) Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism, by Brooke Harrington, is a heavily-endnoted “Norton Short” of about 100 pages—at about half the length of Oxford’s VSI series, th…

“...at World Liberty Financial, Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered”
www.wsj.com/finance/curr...

Viz. my review of @ebharrington.bsky.social 's book, Offshore: Stealth Wealth &the New Colonialism:
blog.wdclarke.org/offshore-ste...
(+ a propos of my An Offshore Finance Bestiary, link in reply)

Indeed, It was something ofa personal joke of Dr. Ed's that Frud, that 'grat' dream-reader (Traumdeuter), that puffed-up old spinner of yarns, had 'discovered' or rather imagined there was a connection between an adult individual 's dream-states and the 'rpressed ' but psychically active traumas of childhood, and that the patient's dream was therefore the 'myal road to the uncon- scious'. And this imagmed connection, as Dr. Ed saw it, was based upon some rather spurious etymologizing on Freud 's part, or to use Freud's own terminology against him, upon some uncon- scious 'wish-fulfilment' of the late, grat Viennese witch-doctor's. Freud may have considered himself a scientist, but Dr. Ed's pin had him wriggling in an entirely different collection of exotic specimens: amongst the family of august, Germanic theoreti- cians, the species of the 'professional' philologist. Like his fore- runners Hegel and Nietzsche, Freud's reputation rested not so

X deleted this reply I made over there: a character in my first novel, a psychiatrist & lead researcher for a new antidepressant, was wont to speak ill of Freud, though he had never read him—as with most Marx-detractors, ofc!

The Song & The Singer At the end of 2025 I finally finished a song (lyrics, barebones melody) that I had begun over a year earlier, a song I had expressly written with a specific duo in mind—a very busy musician-friend/…

Just popping back in to share the lyrics to a song, begun in early 2024...
(not *at all* to ‘shame’ the very busy musician/writer friend I sent it to hahahahaha)
...that I finally finished at the end of 2025, after many a dead end...

blog.wdclarke.org/the-song-the...

bsky.app/profile/wdcl...

(Making scarce for a bit, then...
—I'll be back if I think I've written anything worth linking to...
+ Will end this pinned 🧵w/ a reminder ⬇️
for anyone looking for them of where to get my two books)

The 1744 version of the New Science was also revised by the author according to literary criteria. The new text was harder to follow than before, written as it was in a still more personal style which was turning into a private language as its author withdrew further into himself. The revised version is also more vivid, more concrete, more poetic, or—to use a favourite term of Vico's—more 'sublime'.

3) Give up reading newly-published books & Commence Endgame/literary Hail Mary Moonshot Dice-roll:
—Withdraw still further into Self
—Craft sentences exponentially harder to follow in a private language & an ever more personal style
➡️Enter the Vivid, Concrete, Poetic Sublime

Vico 's intellectual development misrepresentation' and felt obliged to reply to it at length, gs he had once answered the criticisms of his Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. His sense of being misunderstood and unrecognized, 'a foreigner in his own country' , was only confirmed. Indeed, in the 1720s, if not before, Vico seems to have withdrawn from society and retired 'to his desk, as to his high impregnable citadel' (A 200). In his melancholy solitude he appears even to have given up reading, or at least to have given up reading newly published books. To one of his foreign correspondents he wrote that in Naples the republic of letters was 'near its end' , for books in Greek and Latin were falling in price for lack of demand.

2) Conclude that when not simply ignored, you needs must be misunderstood, &so self-exile by withdrawing from the society of yr fellows to the impregnable citadel of yr desk
(fr the battlement of which yr initial diagnosis that the Republic of Letters is near its end shall be reassuringly confirmed)

Vico's gift [of his own book] did not elicit a response in this case either. The author was bitterly disappointed with the public reaction to his book, or to be more exact, with the lack of reaction. 'In this city', he wrote from Naples, 11 reckon that I have sent it to the desert, and I avoid all the main centres so as not to meet the people to whom I have sent copies, and if I cannot avoid them, I greet them hastily; and when this happens none of them give any sign of having read it, and so confirm me in my opinion that I have sent it to the desert.' Since the ideas of Descartes remained so fashionable in Naples, Vico commented sadly in another of his letters, it was only to be expected that his own work would be condemned.

Reposting/transmuting these monitory bits of critical biography as tripartite literary career-path/lifeplan 🧵:
(1) Deliberate self-exposure to the Vico virus

Your books deserve better plagiarists...could only give this show 15, ok 21 minutes of my time it was so preposterous...Billions same. .At the very least someone should adapt/update Gaddis's JR through the lens of Hayek's Bastards

The NYT Special: Confrontation occurred, rib broke

CNNification: Confronts Ice, breaks own rib

Rufology: (BLM + DEI)*CRT = ANTIFA 101 in the ICUs of MN
{FAFO in USA}

The Dipped Magic Wand: On Max Kommerell’s “Jean Paul” - Journal #157 Appearing for the first time in English, Walter Benjamin’s 1934 review of Max Kommerell’s book on the German poet Jean Paul.

“It is not through form [Gestalt] but rather through transformation that creatures can offer themselves inexhaustibly to poetry from this source.”

— Walter Benjamin

from an essay recently translated for the first time (shared by Winter Pallaksch):
www.e-flux.com/journal/157/...

Feeling anti-gravity's pull...

“Only in dreams, in poetry, in play […] do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.”

— Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch