Ryan Carroll

incredible that Soderbergh has done every single one of these (uncredited stunt double for Rebel Wilson in pitch perfect 2)

Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.

I seek the Venn diagram so small that my audience could fit in a utility closet

Vernon Lee is 90% Merleau-Ponty?

Zorg. A story of British Guiana. book by Vernon Kirke Buy a cheap copy of Zorg. A story of British Guiana. book by Vernon Kirke. Free Shipping on all orders over $15.

no but seriously read Zorg—violence, maternity, infidelity, deception, Chopin’s-The-Awakening-by-way-of-colonial-Guyana

it seems to be available at just a handful of libraries around the world, but there’s a cheap Apple Books version and a paperback—well worth!!

www.thriftbooks.com/w/zorg-a-sto...

successfully discovered the true identity of an author about Guyana from 1893, currently levitating. all fans of ZORG: A STORY OF BRITISH GUIANA, our time has come

paying a nominal fee for a library digitization

Ekphrasis Ex Machina: Desire and the Death Drive in the Age of AI Emily Singeisen contextualizes AI, a technologically novel way of exploiting language, within some very old fantasies.

Thrilled to be included among fabulous contributors to the latest edition of Dilettante Army, “Ekphrasis.”

Read on for speculations about AI boyfriends, avant-garde burlesque shows, killer machines, and the Freudian death drive.

dilettantearmy.com/articles/ekp...

*vibrating in Merleau-Ponty*

wake up at 3 AM. find it impossible to get back to sleep. read Ode to a Nightingale to pass the time. think of sudden amazing insight about poem. fall asleep, completely forget insight

Image of a substack post showing a cyanometer, a tool to measure the intensity of blue in the sky. Its caption attributes the cyanometer to Horace Benedict de Saussure, whose great-grandson is the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.

great-grandfather to ferdinand de saussure. signification dynasty

wish i knew

Congrats!

Thanks so much!

I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.

Iconic exercise in the heresy of the paraphrase

Thanks so much!!! Zany is the goal!!!

Thanks so much to @ayeshaasiddiqi.bsky.social for caring so deeply about this piece and to @stephaniedegooyer.bsky.social, of course, for everything!!

I wrote for @newinquiry.bsky.social about the psycho-political agons of 90s sitcom neighbors like Kimmy Gibbler, Steve Urkel, and co.—why they showed up, why they were thrown out, and why they kept coming back. Give it a read!

thenewinquiry.com/new-neighbor...

Thanks so much to @ayeshaasiddiqi.bsky.social for caring so deeply about this piece and to @stephaniedegooyer.bsky.social, of course, for everything!!

Broadly IMO novels and films aren’t the main mediums for Developing Thought rn, soapbox-style arguments are—social media posts, essays, reels, etc. most ppl writing novels or making film are getting their political thought from those, which is why didactic art often has hammy literalistic speeches

I think this is true in one way but it also seems right-wing art is also deeply didactic (ranging from heavyhanded jokes about SJWs in Tim Allen sitcoms to “Classical Man” Twitter accts saying that Objectively Good Art is Moral and Edifies the Soul)

this is my specialty!!

- Guillory, The Memo and Modernity
- Maurice Lee, Overwhelmed
- Nunberg, Farewell to the Information Age
- Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism
- Lisa Gitelman, Raw Data" is an Oxymoron
- Peters and Cmiel, 'Promiscuous Knowledge'
- Eric Hayot's intro to 'Information: a Reader'

This Man is My Dad

kind of gobsmacked by the volume of “so clever, so true, so sad” comments about a….free association of major news topics?

Congratulations!!

I still have the abstract art-doodles you made when I gave the protozoic version of this essay at NAVSA 2022!!

An adult jellyfish becomes a fertilized egg???

My article “The Form of Information and Informational Form in The Woman in White” was published in Studies in the Novel (@studiesinthenovel.bsky.social)—give it a read!!

muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

Victorian Studies: Who Cares? The 2025 conference of the Victorians Institute

"Victorian Studies: Who Cares?" Come to the Victorians Institute 2025 conference at Furman University in Greenville, SC this Sept 14-15. CFP deadline now May 31. Please submit and share! vi2025.wordpress.com