Hyperglobalist

think can be developed even further not only in its current quasi-mathematical form but even in a more rigorously mathematical way.

Liked this essay a lot and its central claim of "iterative narrative" (where a single narrative assertion encompasses multiple repeated events of similar nature like going for a walk or sleepless nights) that structures Proust's text. Genette's structuralist criticism has a mathematical feel that I

Fall sale underway @dukepress.bsky.social What a lot of prizewinning, relevant books. Check this out: t.e2ma.net/message/dh88...

strict appropriateness of the symbols chosen, but despite the semantic misfit it got the point across.

Today's mail. Jumped right into the Genette essay on Proust in the Essentials book & probably for the first time (in my limited reading of literary criticism) saw an efficacious use of mathematical notations. They distilled in a line what took a page to describe. I have quibbles still about the

Of course, Miss MacIntosh herself is a character no surrealist novel can contain, she being so practical minded and free of any illusions that she doesn't even dream. A dreamlike novel with a central character who sleeps dreamless sleep.

Littératures francophones : Parodies, pastiches, réécritures Au moment où on s’interroge sur le sort des langues dans une perspective de mondialisation, il est important de réfléchir aux conditions d’existence des littératures de langue française, à leurs inter...

"To what extent does the hybridity which francophone writers must face lead to “forced poetics”, in the words of Glissant, or the invention of new forms of literary expression? What aesthetics are involved?"

Book examines Quebecois, Belgian, Caribbean and African literature

#OpenAccess #French

"What was God doing with himself before the creation?" - From Beckett's Molloy.

So far this reads a bit like a cross between dreamlike surrealism of Breton's "Nadja" and the baroque decadence of Huysmans' "Against Nature", since one of the characters is somewhat reminiscent of the protagonist Jean des Esseintes in the Huysmans' book.

This is what I recall about Tabucchi and Pavese, both of whom I last read more than a decade ago, as authors I like quite a bit without being able to quite grasp the source of pleasure. Pavese is even more elusive and subtle for me than Tabucchi.

I am in no position to enjoy the transformations he is making as I have negligible knowledge of the source material. And even in its own terms the language appears hard and impenetrable, where most sentences require a second reading to grasp their shadowy meanings.

In a realist novel or even in a highly abstracted, stylized version of it, much of my pleasure derives from having some sense of the gap between the source reality and its estranged form in the work. Schattenfroh hits the reader in its initial pages with bits of semiotics, metaphysics of Being, and

Come on, people! If you like Big Ambitious Doorstopper Literature, read "Making of Americans" by Gertrude Stein, "Miss MacIntosh, My Darling" by Marguerite Young, "Almanac of the Dead" by Leslie Marmon Silko, "Merry Men" by Carolyn Chute, "Mosquito" by Gayl Jones. Plenty more to choose from!

Money and sex. This second novel in the Rougon-Macquart series is off to a banger of a start. Hugely entertaining.

Read the Mario Bellatin since it was so thin. A pastiche of a certain kind of Japanese literature embellished with narrative tricks that makes for a somewhat enjoyable reading. He has been lauded as one of the leaders of new Latin American literature as well as a prankster. The latter fits more.

I, a French Jewel Thief, Refuse to Rob the Louvre Before Mid-Morning “Thieves in balaclavas broke into Paris’ Louvre museum on Sunday morning, using a crane to smash an upstairs window, then stealing priceless object...

"My typical heist morning routine goes like this: wake at leisure, cigarette, croissant and cafe au lait, read a chapter of Voltaire, stroll along the Seine, browse the Paris flea market, THEN robbery."

CHICAGO! get heisty: interccect.com/2025/09/26/w...

www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-a...

And here's the first review of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, from @profdgd.bsky.social in @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social
lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...

Alive with beauty, sorrow, fear and mystery. If you want to read an exceptional novelist there’s always Mercè Rodoreda.

Nicolas Sarkozy to enter prison for criminal conspiracy over Libyan funding Former French president set to start five-year sentence for scheme to obtain campaign funds from Muammar Gaddafi’s regime

'Sarkozy, 70, told Le Figaro that he had packed family photos and three books, as permitted for the first week. “I’m bringing The Count of Monte Cristo and two volumes of the biography of Jesus by Jean-Christian Petitfils,” he said.'
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...
So Bluesky: what three books?

No matter what philosophical ideas underpin the work they have to be transmuted into aesthetic literary forms as this book does so well unlike Schattenfroh where the whole machinery feels like the rusted hulk of an abandoned ship. Maybe I will feel differently as I go back and forth between these 2.

For a little less than a year in 2004-2005, The New Republic ran "Lost and Found," a feature in which writers discussed books they considered to be at risk of being neglected. You can read their candidates and comments here:

neglectedbooks.com/?...

The Master of Contradictions The arresting story of how Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain as a defeated Germany descended into political chaos   Like many writers of his generation, ...

Morten Høi Jensen, The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of "The Magic Mountain" - @yalepress.bsky.social, October 2025
yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

Loved the first volume. Hence checked out the next in series.

Spoiler alert! The word Dasein is used on the second page as well as the sentence, "Thus spake Schattenfroh."

Read a couple of pages of Schattenfroh. It promises to be as miserable a reading experience as I had thought it would be not least because of its prose which frankly feels drab. Will see how this progresses.

I was reading Keats the other day and happened upon the line "sweetly with dumb endeavour" and from now on I have taken this as my motto for studying mathematics.

Today's mail. Looking forward to the Sarraute essay on the nouveau roman.

Since the spines do not show them, the subtitle for the Bucholz book is "Impossible Community and the Outsider's Monologue in German Experimental Fiction" and the one for Broch is "The European Imagination, 1860-1920".

Forthcoming (April 2026): The Essential Senghor: African Philosophy and Black Aesthetics - Edited by Doyle D. Calhoun, Alioune B. Fall, and Cheikh Thiam | Duke University Press | More information can be found here: www.dukeupress.edu/the-essentia...

Cover of an ebook called "Miss Macintosh, My Darling" by Marguerite Young.

Seeing if I can read this on my phone.