Angry man. User:Tomia, original image en:User:Polylerus. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. I’m late with my blurb this week, since I was traveling on the day I usually write it. And it’ll be brief and uselessly indignant, because of post-trip catch-up and exhaustion, yes, but also thanks to the very weird...

Sung Ming Whang, Shanghai, 2010. CC BY 2.0 image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. All right. Sometimes I have nothing to offer but interesting phrases or words dished out by others. This time, one of those phrases comes from Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of this Planet. In the book, Thacker has an intriguing way of...

Kolektyw Kariatyda. CC BY-SA 4.0 image via Wikimedia Commons. Thanks to the bitchy ways of teenage girls and a classmate’s whiny-victorious, “Miss, she has a slam book,” my equally bitchy eighth-grade computer science teacher confiscated the fantastic slam book I’d created.1 We’ll set aside the fact that said...

La prière d'une vierge. Auguste Jean Baptiste Roubille, 1899. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. A weird little book found me this week, thanks to a little free library. I’d never heard of Catalan author Irene Solà, but seeing that Graywolf was the publisher of her I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward...

Dresden, 1973. CC BY-SA 3.0 DE image via Deutsche Fotothek and Wikimedia Commons. Friends, I thought I wouldn’t write a post today—that I’d take Labor Day weekend off like everyone else.1 But here I am, albeit briefly, pondering the fact that writing, the thing I do for myself, the activity for which I’ve dismissed...

Public domain photograph of Dolly Parton in 1970 via RCA Records and Wikimedia Commons. Look, I know a solid portion of the planet has been sharing their love of Dolly Parton, but damn it, in this instance, it’s the right thing to do. When a bedrock of true humanity is taken out of a world that seems ever less...

Fear. Henry Peach Robinson. Public domain image via Metropolitan Museum of Art and Wikimedia Commons. I keep subjecting myself to scary movies, in spite of the fact that the long-lasting and excessive fright they induce is just plain ridiculous. I mean look, I’m ostensibly so advanced in maturity that the AARP wants...

Mugshot of Raoul Villain, 1914. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. It took me a while to figure out why “Stuck in the Middle with You” has been in my head for most of the morning, and why it’s got me thinking about effective soundtracks. The song was (probably) most famously featured as the accompaniment to...

Václav Špála, 1924. Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. I continue to return to variations of the same conclusion: I lack the artistic creativity, vision, and intellectual confidence of true masters; in this case, Derek Jarman or Ansgar Allen. More than any of the other factors, the real lack may be the...

Friends of the Earth International. CC BY-SA 2.0 image via Wikimedia Commons. I feel like I’m in mourning. Reading my friend Dirk’s post yesterday, I learned about the generative AI crowds’ bulk purchase and destruction of printed, often rare, books to train their models.1 Buy the books, take them apart, scan and...

© Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar, CC BY-SA 3.0 image via Wikimedia Commons. “Make it new”: I long ago grew tired, not of the phrase itself, but of what felt like its celebratory militant insistence on busting through everything that had come before, leaving it in the dust and declaring adolescent victory over...

Jean Emile Laboureur, Lassitude, 1912. Public domain image courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France and Wikimedia Commons. Maybe every writer hits a point in a project where everything feels useless, your efforts stale and stupid. Where any energy you have, period, falls away and leaves brain and heart, soul and...