Aaron

Guys, he’s back

Alright, it’s got a cover and a pub date and can be yours for four interest-free payments of $4.75 via Klarna, for some reason! www.mcnallyeditions.com/books/p/elis...

There’s a guy running for city council here on the slogan: “Empathy with restraint.”

Thanks!

Niche request, I know, but I’d be grateful for any info on the best Francophone bookstores, used and new, in Montreal . . . particularly shops with good film sections . . .

In the background, an enormous leering snaggletoothed hippie deity of some kind painted on a theatrical backdrop, in the foreground, stilt-walkers and audience members; at Bread and Puppet, West Glover, VT.

An array of wall-mounted security and safety devices (two black-dome cameras and a smoke detector (?)) in a local food co-op in New Hampshire, triangulated so that they resemble a pair of eyes and a nose; they have been provided with a hand-drawn toothy grin on a sheet of 8 1/2 x 11” paper. To the right, a sign reading “Probiotics”.

Vermont / New Hampshire

Oh man, July’s almost over, better get started on lesson planning so that I’m 100% prepared for my first day of classes at the

The Raúl Ruiz Diaries | Substack I upload a daily entry of the Raúl Ruiz diaries. I'm just translating these entries from Spanish to English because I think they need to be shared with a wider audience. Any tip or donation helps a lo...

New entry at the Ruiz Diaries.
ruizdiaries.substack.com
This Friday it's Ruiz's birthday.
I'm not sure what to do or if I'll be able to do anything for it.
Hope you enjoy.

It’s in this volume of selected poems, from 1993! (I really like the printed boards.)

The World Association of Ugly People (in Italian Club dei Brutti) is an organization dedicated to fighting for the recognition of ugly people, in a society that places a high value on physical beauty. The group's motto is "A person is what he is and not what he looks like".

A sticker of a pensive (purple? I’m colorblind) cartoon bear standing in more humano with hands behind its back, seeming to look away from the viewer off into the space of the page to which it’s affixed, at the title printed at its head: “Poemas y antipoemas” [1954]

Whoever’s kid did this to my copy of Nicanor Parra was channeling Caspar David Friedrich

Mourning Fanny Howe this afternoon—please go read Night Philosophy, and One Crossed Out, and The Needle’s Eye, and everything, everything.

Just noticed that on the world map above the door to Harvard’s Yenching Library / East Asian Civilizations building, East Asia is basically invisible. What Could This Possibly Mean. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/07/u...

There’s your problem right there

“The Achievements of Capitalism: (a) The curtain wall (b) Artificial rain (c) Rockefeller Center (d) Casals (e) Mystification” from “The Rise of Capitalism” by Donald Barthelme

From Donald Barthelme’s “The Genius”: “A giant brown pantechnicon disgorges the complete works of the Venerable Bede, in all translations, upon the genius's lawn—a gift from the people of Cincinnati!”

Mods are asleep, post rare Barthelmes

I felt an immediate and shattering sense of remorse for having extracted them from their ageless sleep. Back to your niche, little artifacts.

Found in a stair-hole at the Harvard Natural History Museum: vintage apple juice & camera flash. Surely I’m not the first visitor to have been tall and/or bored enough to shove his whole forearm beneath this particular riser since the early 1970s?

Thomas Bernhard: It makes no difference what you read, in the end it will become ridiculous and in the end it will be worthless.

TIL that this book, which I desperately wanted to teach with but thought had not been translated, is coming out in English in October! Profs teaching tech / labor / digital society take note! www.penguin.co.uk/books/465353...

It’s like a regular tape-measure, except that you can only use it to find the length of one very specific thing.

It feels like the Largest Rosary in New England arrives a little bit earlier every year.

The texts get richer as the rot takes hold.

L’Amour par terre has an official runtime of 2 hours 56 minutes, but realistically you’re going to need at least five hours to get through it since you have to go back and rewatch every shot with Jane Birkin like three times.

Cinema Guild Acquires Restored Films Of French New Wave Master Luc Moullet Cinema Guild will mount a touring theatrical retrospective of Moullet’s work starting at Film at Lincoln Center in New York in August.

▸ @cinemaguild.com takes N. American rights to restorations of Luc Moullet’s films and is planning a touring retrospective.

deadline.com/2025/03/luc-...

Celebrating @cinemaguild.com 's Luc Moullet news by recalling the time Éric Rohmer explained to him how uncomfortable it is for a dude to run while naked ("because of the balls"). Not wrong!

Teaching The Battle of Chile next week, I’m rewatching it in this Blu-Ray edition, which is based on the 2K restoration released in 2023 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the coup. terrifying to watch a film about the rise of authoritarianism under current circumstances, so many parallels.

Documenteur

Documenteur

For someone born in San Francisco in 1980, watching any of Agnes Varda’s early-80s California films is a real plunge back into the primeval sensorium. A textile, a plastic toy, a period gait or vernacular hairstyle—it’s like somebody firing madeleines into your mouth at a high rate of speed.