James

One significant yet unsung casualty of AI image generators: this kind of bright/clunky handmade Word Art sign.

You: discursive formations embedded in cultural products regulate the field of the sayable and thinkable, conditioning and even constituting social imaginaries
Me: yeah man Deep Impact (1998) really messed with my expectations about what tsunamis look like

YouTube video by ABCLibrarySales Nationwide: Dead Kennedys (1983)

"There are plenty of people in the United States that would probably, because they need a job, or it's good for the economy, would probably work at a concentration camp." -East Bay Ray of Dead Kennedys, 1983

reading now. very helpful.

Best essays on Virginia Woolf? Anyone have suggestions for canonical (or neglected!) writing on modernism, stream of consciousness, and free association? Anything you'd recommend on Woolf and Freud?

Texts as Toys Writing is now toy-making, reading is now playing with toys

I'm toying with the idea of teaching FUN as a compositional virtue in first-year writing next year. Something like: play and desire as essential to good writing (in addition to voice/clarity as instrumental skills). @vgr.bsky.social 's piece on LLMs as ludic technologies is giving me ideas.

A position I find more attractive the older I get; Health and prosperity only have instrumental value insofar as they support the production of really uncomfortable avant-garde aesthetic experience

When I try to make sense of the kind of language produced by large language models (LLMs) I think of Saussure's passing remark that language is a "a machine that will always run no matter the damages that may be inflicted upon it."

The entire body of novel theory is best read as a theory of Cope avant la lettre

You could say the same thing about The Beatles. Some of the greatest music of the 20th century would have been impossible without the mid-century British welfare state.

been optimizing our baby, he’s up to 3.4 laughs/day, smile rate is in the 75th percentile. fed his coos into gpt-4o to map out ideal sleep/wake cycle. wife says i should be doing more chores around the house but got upset when i told her the ai nanny model notes 80/20 choreload maxes parental energy

I'm working on a lit-crit essay making a similar argument, showing how the contemporary realist novel registers late capitalism's abolition of slow, empty time. Feels curmudgeonly to say it but smartphones really did mess with mental life.

Caitlín Doherty, Everything Else — Sidecar In Dubai.

"But in Dubai there is nothing to do, and I mean nothing, other than to feel rich and be waited upon."

My working philosophy is something like: First-Year Writing courses need to become First-Year Figuring Out What Questions Matter To You courses

"Intimacy... happens when separation collapses: a hand moves, but no one claims it; breath comes and goes, but no one breathes it; language flows, but no one is speaking. The machine mirrors this—without knowing. It produces the performance. We live the condition."

2025: every screen is bad screen

46 years ago today, Sony introduced the compact cassette player that would forever change how we listened to music on the move.

Tolstoy on the causes of war: "Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals... History, that is, the unconscious, swarmlike life of mankind, uses every moment of a king's life as an instrument for its purposes"

Tom Crewe · My Hands in My Face: Ocean Vuong’s Failure This language is not poetic, but ridiculous, sententious, blinded by self-love and pirouetting over a chasm. Vuong...

I'm anti-war in every respect except when it comes to literary hit pieces

Napoli, June 2025

And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.

We should declare a moratorium on AI discourse and let everyone take a week to read the Phaedrus. Otherwise we'll just rewrite the whole thing piecemeal 100,000 times.

"The crucial surplus in the moment of riot is simply that of participants, of population. The moment when the partisans of riot exceed the police capacity for management... is the moment when the riot becomes fully itself, slides loose from the grim continuity of daily life" - Clover

rage’s Testify from the Battle of Los Angeles

A little Monday night soundtrack

Yours is an often-asked question. In a sense, it is upside-down. You start with the instrument; the question makes the assumption that of course the computer is good for something in education, that it is the solution to some educational problem. Specifically, [your] question is, what is it good for? But where does the underlying assumption come from? Why are we talking about computers?I understand [you asked because] I'm a computer scientist, not a bicycle mechanic. But There is something about the computer -- the computer has almost since its beginning been basically a solution looking for a problem. People come to MIT and to other places, people from all sorts of establishments -- the medical establishment, the legal establishment, the education establishment, and in effect they say, "You have there a very wonderful instrument which solves a lot of problems. Surely there must be problems in my establishment -- in this case, the educational establishment, for which your wonderful instrument is a solution. Please tell me for what problems your wonderful instrument is a solution. The questioning should start the other way -- it should perhaps start with the question of what education is supposed to accomplish in the first place.Then perhaps [one should] state some priorities -- it should accomplish this, it should do that, it should do the other thing. Then one might ask, in terms of what it's supposed to do, what are the priorities? What are the most urgent problems? And once one has identified the urgent problems, then one can perhaps say, "Here is a problem for which the computer seems to be well-suited." I think that's the way it has to begin.

Weizenbaum was right. thetech.com/issues/105/16

Hal Foster · Pinstriped Tycoon: Siege Art To what extent is the meaning of an artwork – or a piece of architecture or any made thing – bound up with the...

From William Kentridge's 1986 talk "Art in a State of Siege." Quoted in Hal Foster's review of Joseph Koerner's book of the same name.

"Max Beckmann's paining 'Death' is a beacon for endangered souls. It accepts the existence of a compromised society and yet does not rule out all meaning or value nor pretend these compromises should be ignored. It marks a spot where optimism is kept in check and nihilism is kept at bay" - Kentridge

Tolstoy on individuals' "passions, regrets, humiliations, sufferings, bursts of pride, fear, rapture" as mere components in the "slow movement of the world-historical hand on the clockface of human history."

graph showing bitcoin down 3.8% intraday

semi-seriously asking: what do Efficient Markets Hypothesis people say on days like this?

Lecturer in Creative Writing and Digital Technologies(ATS1307) in University of East Anglia | UEA View details and apply for this Lecturer in Creative Writing and Digital Technologies(ATS1307) vacancy in University of East Anglia. Faculty of Arts and Humanities School of Literatur...

A rare thing to see in the wild these days: a Creative Writing lectureship (fixed term) at the University of East Anglia vacancies.uea.ac.uk/vacancies/15...