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Showing posts from November 6, 2022

digression

  “Feeds on meat, carcasses, farinaceous grains, but not cabbage; digests bones, vomits up grass; defecates onto stone: Greek white, exceedingly acidic. Drinks licking; urinates to the side, up to one hundred times in good company, sniffs at its neighbor’s anus; moist nose, excellent sense of smell; runs on a diagonal, walks on toes; perspires very little, lets tongue hang out in the heat; circles its sleeping area before retiring; hears rather well while sleeping, dreams. The female is vicious with jealous suitors; fornicates with many partners when in heat; bites them; intimately bound during copulation; gestation is nine weeks, four to eight compose a litter, males resemble the father, females the mother. Loyal above all else; house companion for humans; wags its tail upon master’s approach, defends him; runs ahead on a walk, waits at crossings; teachable, hunts for missing things, makes the rounds at night, warns of those approaching, keeps watch over goods, drives livestock from f

why don't you be stupid instead of smart: on unspelling

  Does it help that Yeats was dyslexic? The editors of his letters, where the texts are raw, have decided that Yeats’ spelling was idiosyncratic. That’s a good word. It doesn’t have the same word-injuring psychosis, the same serial killer among the letters, that is baked into dyslexia. Rather, it understands that spelling is a curious procedure, full of mirrors and disorientations. A spell, as Yeats (who at one point belonged to the same organization as Aleister Crowley, the Golden Dawn) was always aware, was a matter of magical summoning. Spelling, too, is a magical summoning, made domestic by our schoolrooms and four hundred years of rules, so that the words appear under our pens. That the first words we learn to spell are often animal names makes complete sense from this point of view, for animals were, after all, the first things humans drew. But there’s a certain graffiti impulse that lies just outside the spelling book, under which we run away from the rules concerning what to wr

the twitter comedy

  I like twitter. I get a lot of info from it. For instance, when Libgen fails, I always find somewhere on twitter how to access it again. However, it has an exaggerated effect as a social media platform, since all the meat press – tv, magazines, papers – have an exaggerated sense of it, which they push on down the line. The racists who get their N word jones on twittering and trolling get a lot more attention than the cops apartheid style management of urban life and the systematic racism of the economic system, from job hiring to mortgage making, that does its best to insert a bit of misery into the day to day of   African-Americans. So Elon Musk’s buying of Twitter has the downside that pretty surely he is going to run it into the ground. However, I am fascinated by the business aspect. I am fascinated by the way Musk is hopping down a path once hopped down by Forbes’ Magazine’s boy genius of 2004, Eddie Lampert. For those who don’t remember: Eddie Lampert was one of the evil