There's a bit in the letters of Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport (maybe around 1976) where Kenner is proposing an anthology of style in the twentieth century and he's hoping to get the rights to this, which he wants to juxtapose with Gertrude Stein and computer-generated poetry. Didn't happen!
Nice to see Dan Beachy-Quick reviewing the Vidyā translation we published (along with new translations of Follain and Milo de Angelis): lareviewofbooks.org/article/poet...
This feels like a more exciting version of the Buddha Machine? www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/e... – I remember seeing the original looping devices in Chinese temples, not sure if that's still something people do though.
Just walked by a temple with one of these babies banging away and I gotta say I woud welcome a religious movement based around the development of more/weirder/wackier versions of such machines for worship
youtu.be/gujclncwrVA?...
( trainline.com is useful – there are two high-speed train companies on Italy, it compares times/prices)
If you do trains right, you can get a train direct from Florence to Fiumicino though that doesn’t run very often. Even so, travel time to Rome is less than to Venice. Also, I think KLM flies to Florence from Amsterdam and Paris – the Florence airport is EU-only though.
Okay, the problem with Rome is on the way back: most flights to the U.S. from Fiumicino leave early in the morning, before the train from Florence (1.5 hours) can get there. Check times first? It’s okay if you’re not flying directly to the U.S.
I cannot believe how good he is at this
Nice to see a Circumference book (available here: circumferencebooks.com/book/evoluti... ) in the NY Public Library's list of Best New Poetry Books:
www.nypl.org/books-more/r...
Two columns, one slightly taller than the other, with a little plaque in the middle saying that it is dedicated to the memory of September 11th.
If you turn around right there, you can see Rome's decidedly half-assed September 11th memorial in a traffic island:
They have a really good model of Eurysaces the Baker's tomb up at the Centrale Montemartini, which is of course worth visiting anyway. Happy to provide local suggestions if you need them . . .
Why I Don't Write like Franz Kafka
Sentiment & Metaphrasis
endlessbookshelf.net/2026/03/25/m...
I was pointed at that book by Joseph McElroy many years ago, who was aghast I didn't know Dorothy Richardson.
I wrote a thing about accessibility in book design, the first part of which is up at the Circumference substack:
circbooks.substack.com/p/part-1-thi...
His book on Proust is worth tracking down, even if only for its subtitle: "The Oak in the Acorn: On Remembrance of Things Past and on Teaching Proust, Who Will Never Learn".
Hugh Kenner to Guy Davenport, 2 November 1968, thinking about generative art:
I was surprised to find Miriam reading W. H. Mallock’s A HUMAN DOCUMENT in this one – the one thing I know about it is the one thing everybody knows about it, that it’s the source of Tom Phillips’s A HUMUMENT. I wonder if he found it here; though probably it wasn’t always so thoroughly forgotten.
I just watched BEING JOHN MALKOVICH for the first time since it was in theaters. It feels very Kleist-y? Maybe everyone noticed that at the time.
I was just thinking I should get around to reading that!
hmmm, that seems to have been fixed! And the headline is now "It’s Not Just Oil. The Iran War Is Disrupting Many Essential Goods."
cc: @lynneguist.bsky.social
headline of NYtimes article: "Aluminium, Helium and Sulfur"
Body text from that same article, which uses the American spelling "aluminum" repeatedly.
Have the NYTimes given in to the British on "aluminum"? Or do they no longer have copyeditors? I'm seeing "aluminium" in the headline, while "aluminum" is in the body. (The URL coyly avoids the word: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/10/b... )
There are more films of his work than you'd think? Walter Reade had a microseries of his adaptations maybe 15 years ago: trustmovies.blogspot.com/2009/09/fslc... – and there was an animated Cronopios e Famas on the festival circuit a while ago: www.imdb.com/title/tt3962... – can't say I loved that.
I'm confused by that as well – I read her in English in college in the 1990s and felt like I was decidedly late. I think the French theorists (Cixous?) might have been doing something with her?
Maybe worth noting that the Internet Archive has published all of Aruba’s historical documents – which includes all of the records from the slave trade: www.wired.com/story/intern...
I am slowly making my way through the Hugh Kenner/Guy Davenport letters, and in 1963 Kenner admits to having written an essay on Buster Keaton as emblem of modern man (I think it turns up in THE COUNTERFEITERS) without ever having seen a Buster Keaton movie, which might have been possible?
James McCourt!
Not sure if you caught this: www.leschepodcast.com/2388571/epis... – but Hanink and Kuin point out that Diogenes was the only Greek philosopher who'd been enslaved, which probably has repercussions for his thought?
the cover of "trompe le monde" by the pixies, some eye-like things in what is either a towel or snow.