James Reath

“Leap over silent forms”
- “Snow Line” (c 1928-1935) from Chika Sagawa’s Collected Poems

The graphic shows cultivated lands bordering on a river/wetland and collections of trees (credit: AXIO-IMAGES from Getty Images) in the background of text bubbles. The text summarizes key details of the conference. Please read the description and the full call on the RCC website for this information.

We are looking for multidisciplinary panels to be presented at our upcoming conference "Beyond Dualism—Thinking Creatively Across Worlds," which takes place in July next year.

The full call can be found in the news section on our website: www.carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de/news/news_ev... (1/?)

strange cloud

YouTube video by DeepSNAKES DeepSNAKES Techno Poetry Mixtape

“Oil is sentient babbling underfoot / AI break my face”

new dark age "techno poetry" by Karina Bush ("I Wear My Tinfoil Hat as a Crown" from FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION SLUT)

youtu.be/r4K5jF7U41A?...

copy of book Anexact Form & Modernist Culture, on table

Publication day for my first book! Thank you @edinburghup.bsky.social & everyone that has helped over the years.

The book cover image is 'The Metaphysics of Mr Lucky' by the wonderful Jonathan Lasker.

Please consider reviewing and/or ordering for your university libraries! (link: bit.ly/4lp8yxj)

How to Research Like a Dog - Notes - e-flux Aaron Schuster on Kafka’s short story “Investigations of a Dog.”

"Kafka’s animals, crossbreeds, and uncanny nonhumans emerge at a precise point. They are the spokescreatures of a precarious borderland where the human-ness of the human being comes undone. They speak from and embody a crisis in the human self-image" (Aaron Schuster)

www.e-flux.com/notes/675817...

Kids in smalltown 1950s MA were given perks for joining “Science Club”: baseball tickets, Mickey Mouse watches, free breakfasts

Only, the cereal was laced w/ radioactive iron + the milk radioactive calcium - part of a secret experiment by the Atomic Energy Commission, MIT scientists, + Quaker Oats

It seems Federer, Sampras, Djokovic all hit the ball with polyester laced with cow intestines.

It takes about two cows to string a pro tennis racket & often "natural gut" strings are mixed with polyester. There are also nylon filament "synthetic gut" strings that mimic the spring of cow intestines.

“to be made pure mucous membrane” (Sartre)

It’s an “academic” book, published by Edinburgh University Press

Book cover displaying a "doodle-painting" by abstract artist Jonathan Lasker. Red, blue, orange, yellow, green, pink, and purple squiggles parade a canvas, with many looping black gestures contained in a grid structure. Above the grid is a tangle of thick Play-Doh-like ooze that spoils the flatness.

My first book ANEXACT FORM & MODERNIST CULTURE is published July 2025! I'm very excited for this to be out in the world + feeling grateful to everyone at Edinburgh University Press - especially series editors Georgina Colby & Eric White!!

🎉 ꩜ 🫟

@edinburghup.bsky.social /// tinyurl.com/3sf7yj8d

“drawings clean, clear but crazy like machines” Eva Hesse to Sol Le Witt (from Abstract Erotic at the Courtauld)

and
we wander in Random in the alleys
of their longfaced towns taking
from their sickly mandibles handbills
summoning our joint spirits.

I sing Sousa.

The desire to disintegrate the Earth
is eccentric

Ed Dorn, "Sousa" (1960)

The Carpenter greets a classical sculpture bottoms up in Chaplin's film His New Job (1915). Chaplin repeatedly uses classical sculptures as comedic props & the Tramp often finds strange affinities with such (kitsch, fake, mass-produced) visions of ideal form.

“He’ll convert emergency into an occasion for pranksterism—for Nietzschean, philosophically motivated mischief.”
Wayne Koestenbaum in The Anatomy of Harpo Marx

- from John Hargrave's novel Summer Time Ends (1935)

“this interminable tangle of industrial-financial interlocking—combining, extending, merging—is spawned upon the machines + the machine-men by the never-ending intertwining fabulation of numbers out of numbers, [...] in high financial fantasy, [...] a gigantic numerical hallucination"

“I like to write alone, and I don’t like to talk much… Together, Félix and I would have made a good Sumo wrestler.”
— Deleuze, “Letter to Uno”

“Thought is molecular. We are slow beings, constituted by certain molecular speeds. Michaux says, ‘Man is a slow being, made possible only through fantastic speeds’.”
— Deleuze, “The Brain is the Screen”

Welcome, sad animals, to your movies.

Larry Fagin

"Philosophy is not so much in the fart itself, but in what is done with the fart, which is to say, its being counted, measured, and transformed into a law or principle rendered in mathematical terms" -- Annabel L Kim, Cacaphonies

One of the most promiscuous, brilliant, + endlessly fascinating novels of the 60s In Transit is being republished 🎉 Here “the empirical world shivers and becomes more malleable, more erotic, more wild. Bends into itself and returns,” as Helen Marten says of her own Aristotelian disintegrations...

immediacy helps commodify post-60s sexual freedom & domesticate “negative bonds" of "unloving" (FWB, ghosting, the ick) such that "the nonformation of bonds becomes a sociological phenomenon in itself, a social and epistemic category” (Illouz), and in turn the foundation for new aesthetic modes.

Surely Finnegans Wake has the most exclamation marks of any novel ever (ctrl+f-ing the Faber&Faber edition lists 4,727!)

Under The Powerlines (April 24 – September 24) Jesse Welles · Album · 2025 · 63 songs

In early 2024 Jesse nearly lost his dad and in shock he started writing protest songs that remake the legacy of American folk music for our time of Ozempic, United Health, Walmart. It’s a brilliant outpouring of simple songs for a beguiling moment

open.spotify.com/album/6Z499V...

Flower | Fitzcarraldo Editions ‘I like eating cold, clammy wraps from big pharmacies that are open late and sell just a few foods like protein bars and powders.’ Flower is a book of realistic admissions, likes, dislikes, memories a...

Looking forward to Ed Atkins's essay Flower & his Tate Britain exhibition, both coming early April

fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/flower/

www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tat...

‘Frenesi gestured with her burger, trailing drops of separating ketchup and fat, each drop warped by the forces of its flight into swirling micropatterns of red and beige, and – “It’s the Revolution, girl – can’t you feel it?”’
-- Thomas Pynchon, Vineland (1990)

I'll investigate the everyday aesthetics of irony & frivolity that help naturalize chemical regimes of living in the 1920s & 1930s by attending to the curious role of the world's first mass-produced bug-spray (the Flit Gun) in machine age comedy & beyond

I'm giving a talk!

"The Flit Gun Gag" [ 1-2pm, 19/03/25, CCEH @ Exeter Uni ]

ft. Harpo Marx on kerosene, Betty Boop War Machines, Harlem Renaissance vaudevilles, the Cowardly Lion, & drunken barroom shootouts in Madrid circa 1938

Eventbrite: shorturl.at/spbCr