I wrote about two paragraphs, one in Shadow Ticket and one in Kafka's Amerika. open.substack.com/pub/unconsol...

"Philosophy will have conscience of tomorrow, commitment to the future, knowledge of hope, or it will have no more knowledge." - Ernst Bloch, 1954

Magic Circles On Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier and David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return

For The Hobbyhorse, I wrote about Twin Peaks: The Return, and a novel that lets us see the former in a new light. I'm grateful to Adam for taking an interest in this piece, and for providing the editing it needed.
open.substack.com/pub/thehobby...

Seth, I miss you, but posts like this are why I'm still on twitter

You can't be complaining about sniffies. It's sniffies

You were crazy for this

Feeling like not applying to American PhD programs was wise

I wrote a little something about The Brutalist, a film I wish was better and more interesting.

open.substack.com/pub/unconsol...

I'm with Kelly here: deeply interested in leftism as a political project but have no interest whatsoever in leftism as a subculture. the stakes of leaving this behind are hopefully clearer by the day

I wasn't really planning on having a take on it but the pervasive dumbness has forced my hand

W. G. Sebald: A Belated Modernist From an ethics of reading to the politics of form

I’ve posted an essay on Sebald (alongside Adorno, Bergson, Proust, Mann, Eliot, Woolf, Borges, et al.) that I wrote a few years ago. It’s no longer entirely representative of my thinking on modernism, but it does still describe why I think Sebald matters.

unconsoling.substack.com/p/w-g-sebald...

MLA 2027. Four of the then-remaining seven tenured literary scholars, all independently wealthy, delight the audience with fresh takes on the "novel of tariffs." Groundbreaking stuff: Knausgård, Rooney, Pynchon. All panelists agree: "These are no Little Dorrit."

Neither of these claims is even remotely true

I remember the office as the show that convinced me (in high school) to avoid offices at all costs

Oddly, it's one of the better Fleming novels

Real

Chime is really remarkable

'I never thought leopards would break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry,' says woman who calculated it in advance and incorporated it into the ritual

An exciting development

And the fact that this is the reaction of weakness to difficulty is a small consolation and a little excuse

My answer is simple: if you're a serious person the novels of more or less disreputable major authors are your homework. Defending them, or shirking judgment, is for teenagers

Wenn ich mich bei X einlogge

An ideology in Marx's sense is less an imaginary relation to something antecedent and more an ecological niche

Still waiting for this place to make me laugh. I'd settle for a chuckle

?

Who are you

lord make me offline - but not yet

Who?

I feel we’ve been circling the drain for months, and now are being rinsed down the plughole. Hello, darkness, my old friend. I’m nauseous and have difficulty breathing. If I looked in the mirror—which I do often these days, purely as a function of disbelief, because I feel I no longer exist—I fancy I would see Ford Madox Ford, a soup-strainer mustache and the appearance of a boiled egg in his mouth, but actually only a gasp because “mustard gassed voiceless some seven miles behind the lines at Nancy or Belleau Wood.” As the poet said. Preserve my words, preserve my words. The wantonness and wickedness of it. I’m sorry for the rest of the world for having something as rancid and pampered and apparently resistless as America in it. Who ever thought male suffrage was a good idea? Come on in, the water’s boiling in this reddened and ever redder and reddening state. Not much meat on these snow crab legs, but you’ll enjoy the crack of your tax cut. Or is it the vertebra of the last surviving trade unionist? It says in our new constitution we’re allowed to hunt and fish. Well, halle-fucking-lujah. And $2 gas a birthright in perpetuity. If only it were some small and out of the way place. Make Armorica Great Again. Make Armorica Great Again. Make Armorica Great Again. But no, this is that shining city, and that last best hope. Gone, all gone. Stick a fork in it. There is only money, bare-faced lies, and evil intentions. The playground inversion of everything. You’re the fascist, you’re the racist, you’re the one threatening me with violence. It’s no consolation, but this country will not know what hit it, and first the low-information electors with their red caps for brains. No overstatement is possible. I feel species disgust. Of course, impetuous. Of course, poet and fine frenzy and all that. Of course, nonsense and hysteria. Oligarchopolis, here we come. Yes, we only live in it. It’s yours, and don’t I know it. [Character limit prevents posting the rest, sorry!]

The great translator and poet Michael Hofmann, who has the misfortune to teach in Florida, on the new US regime (from the NYRB blog):

www.nybooks.com/online/2024/...

@richardcrossing.bsky.social welcome 😌