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... "it's hardly clear what good any novel can do for the poor, displaced people now picking their way through ... rubble." E. Frank, Stranger than Fiction, 2024, p. 303

... "it's hardly clear what good any novel can do for the poor, displaced people now picking their way through ... rubble." E. Frank, Stranger than Fiction, 2024, p. 303

This world, where a chicken could run without a head, where there was milk in the morning and frogs he could get to dance by holding their front feet—this world still preoccupied him. All this time David was being clasped by strong warm hands. He didn't feel

the books were never meant to balance

the books were never meant to balance

I live in a house of chartered accountants, so I really felt the leaders of the minor parties were talking to me. Over the course of TVNZ's multiparty debate (link), which I didn't stay (I get enough of it at home), apart from jumping into the

now some words from Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff's new book ...

now some words from Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff's new book ...

... before I lend it to M. to read: Toufic has a new book out, by the way, Two or Three Things I'm Dying to Tell You, which DeWitt was going to order for you on Amazon ... While writing (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film and

Requiescat In Natura: Wendell Berry 5 August 1934–31 August 2026

Requiescat In Natura: Wendell Berry 5 August 1934–31 August 2026

“And so I go into the woods. As I go in under the trees, dependably, almost at once, and by nothing I do, things fall into place,” he once wrote. “I enter an order that does not exist outside, in the human spaces. I feel my life take its place

“I don’t think character exists anymore.” –Rachel Cusk

“I don’t think character exists anymore.” –Rachel Cusk

... which is strange because this morning I was thinking exactly the same thing. However the thought is bluntly disputed by Brittany Allen. In her squib on Rachel Cusk's Life of M, more than likely about Natalie Portman, Allen writes, "Yet those are people, in her pages."

Werner Herzog: we lack adequate images

Werner Herzog: we lack adequate images

...There are few images to be found. One has to dig for them like an archaeologist. One has to search through this ravaged landscape to find anything at all... It's often tied up with risk, of course, which I would never shun, but I see so few people

"the Oort Cloud has been functioning for billions of years as a sort of 'natural LLM'"

"the Oort Cloud has been functioning for billions of years as a sort of 'natural LLM'"

—it is the “narraton particles” emitted from the Oort Cloud that explain the capacity of a certain well-known terrestrial species for telling stories, or in other words for presenting as true what is in fact false. –"Back from the Oort Cloud: An Interview with JSR in PLOOI Magazine,