James

"Don’t you think . . . that we all stammer? That is to say before we encounter truth, before a writer does a final draft, the first draft is a form of stammering, trying to gum one’s way through the thing one doesn’t yet know how to say?"

Child’s Play, by Sam Kriss Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking

Going to start asking every new person I meet if they're "mimetic" or "agentic"

the computer should have never left this room. we have to go back

Hypothesis: AI writing is bad primarily because in general what makes writing good is the specificity of what it communicates and its information density, so the prompt that produced good AI writing would be as long as the output.

Silicon Valley’s Favorite Doomsaying Philosopher Nick Land believes that digital superintelligence is going to kill us all. In San Francisco, his followers ask: What if, instead of trying to stop an A.I. takeover, you work to bring it on as fast as ...

Duesterberg on Land

Michael Silverblatt, 'genius' host of KCRW literary show 'Bookworm,' dies at 73 Silverblatt’s 30-minute show, which ran from 1989 to 2022, included interviews with celebrated authors including Gore Vidal, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Foster Wallace, Susan Orlean, Joan Didion and Zadie S...

Very sad to hear about the passing of Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW's Bookworm. I spent hours listening to his conversations. Often listened to the same episodes dozens of times. Bookworm continues to shape the way I read, think, and teach. One of the great literary figures of this century. RIP.

enjoying Galloway on the unfortunate necessity of Cuck Theory: "Cuck is a subject position not a sexual position. The cuck is a specific subject position that combines deception in love and impotence in hate."

New definition of sovereignty dropped

We should stop saying “AI,” at least without a qualifier like “commercial” or “generative.”

Precisely naming the tools that work & the ones that don’t & their use cases & their social & environmental consequences would go a long way towards improving our communal understanding.

me in 2016: so-called "Man" is nothing but biological hardware programmed by media technical infrastructures

me in 2026: you can really tell when someone didn't use ChatGPT cuz it just feels more SOULFUL right?

Happy birthday to Alan Cumming, seen here in his brief but scene-stealing performance in Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT (1999).

"When it's snowing, the outdoors seem like a room." - Berman

YouTube video by John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke U. FHI Short Residency | Christopher Newfield on the University System in the Knowledge Crisis

Required viewing: Newfield on the present crisis.

"To be sure, prosaic creativity generally proceeds slowly, begins in narrow spheres, and is hardly noticeable. For that reason we do not see it, and think that innovation must come from somewhere else" - Emerson & Morson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (via Kate Briggs in The Long Form)

comfort will be found in the pages of the New Left Review, which will explain away all recent geopolitical turbulence as merely the latest and predictable confirmation of the enduring truth of the Brenner thesis

is this an active result of professionalization in PhD programs, or is it a result of not being professionalized enough? In my experience, professionalization meant having this tendency discouraged at every turn

Jodie Foster in Contact (1997)

That would be great. I'll be in touch!

beautiful piece

#MLA26: Looking forward to thinking about realism and distraction with these fine folks on Sunday afternoon. I'll be presenting a new paper on one of my favorite recent novels, @rosalindbrown.bsky.social's Practice (2024).

I found an old box of records I bought at Amoeba in LA between 2006 and 2010; the median price was $4–$15. Even used records today cost roughly three times that.

This year I watched 89 movies. Favorites include Safe (1995), Crumb (1994), Lost Highway (1997), and Strongroom (1962)

I held fast to my 2025 resolution: I did not once use a self-checkout machine at the supermarket this year

An Existential Guide to: Making Friends Friends Friends What Glorious Friendly Friends!

"The questionnaire kills warm-blooded animals. Come on! Instead: observe how they treat the waiter, how they talk about people who are absent, whether they slide their chair back when a toddler wobbles past. You are selecting a co-witness for the apocalypse. Choose for gentleness."

just purchased looking forward to listening

it's been almost 25 years
it's time for a spiritual successor of this type of film

Me, strolling around my parents' suburban neighborhood, pensive, lost in thought, keeping to myself:

Every single house : "Hello, You Are Being Recorded"

Writing Through Writer’s Block

inspired by @acolton.bsky.social's Writing Through Writer's Block today: "...for writers struggling with perfectionism, procrastination, fear of failure, evaluation anxiety, or... predetermination that one is, inherently, a 'bad writer,' the fiction of writer’s block offers an invaluable resource."

Michael Wood · Spellbound Gloaming: Bachelard’s Dreamwork Gaston Bachelard is inviting us to go beyond what we think we know. That is, how to counter boring intuitions with...

Steven Connor on Bachelard, via Michael Wood: ‘To think was always to break with what was given or immediate in experience. Thinking was what freed you from a life lived unreflectively from day to day, and so in a sense was a refusal of mere life.’