Michael Rizzo
@marizzo72.bsky.social
Pinned
Michael Rizzo
@marizzo72.bsky.social
· Mar 16
"But it should still give us pause that, in regards to the content and form in life, the difference between whether it is death or life that removes a person from view is not nearly so important as people would probably like to think." #wirn
“Franklin Rosemont, the great American historian of the Blues, American Surrealism, and the labour movement—who deserves a whole book to himself—calls Schwob a ‘precursor to Surrealism.’” #wirn
November 12, 2025 at 9:05 PM
“Franklin Rosemont, the great American historian of the Blues, American Surrealism, and the labour movement—who deserves a whole book to himself—calls Schwob a ‘precursor to Surrealism.’” #wirn
“The rich collect, and the poor hoard. It sounds obvious, but you have to have things to hoard and somewhere to hoard them. In other words: in a certain grey light, hoarding may look like a sickness of advanced capitalism, a disfiguring skin complaint on the surface of plenty.” #wirn
November 10, 2025 at 7:19 PM
“The rich collect, and the poor hoard. It sounds obvious, but you have to have things to hoard and somewhere to hoard them. In other words: in a certain grey light, hoarding may look like a sickness of advanced capitalism, a disfiguring skin complaint on the surface of plenty.” #wirn
“A fantasy of old-time Milwaukee, dairy-colored surfaces through the leisurely days imperceptibly continuing to darken behind a bituminous haze safe to breathe, never as bad as Chicago…” #wirn
November 4, 2025 at 10:09 PM
“A fantasy of old-time Milwaukee, dairy-colored surfaces through the leisurely days imperceptibly continuing to darken behind a bituminous haze safe to breathe, never as bad as Chicago…” #wirn
“…bartenders reliable as the law of gravity, one of the more appreciated side effects of Prohibition being what a bartender *doesn’t* do, and with how much finesse, sometimes genius, he doesn’t do it.” #wirn
October 21, 2025 at 11:52 PM
“…bartenders reliable as the law of gravity, one of the more appreciated side effects of Prohibition being what a bartender *doesn’t* do, and with how much finesse, sometimes genius, he doesn’t do it.” #wirn
“Yet, though the National Socialist League never made it much above the level of a street-corner slanging match, it was a slanging match Joyce kick-started with his customary relish.” #wirn
October 11, 2025 at 3:51 PM
“Yet, though the National Socialist League never made it much above the level of a street-corner slanging match, it was a slanging match Joyce kick-started with his customary relish.” #wirn
“Memory was increasingly not just a matter of utility for Emerson. It was a key to the future as well as to the past. ‘Memory is a presumption of a possession of the future,’ he wrote. He got his own future exactly reversed now when he said,…
October 4, 2025 at 4:00 PM
“Memory was increasingly not just a matter of utility for Emerson. It was a key to the future as well as to the past. ‘Memory is a presumption of a possession of the future,’ he wrote. He got his own future exactly reversed now when he said,…
“The heartlessness of most literary publishers (‘wretched hunger struck hyenas,’ Carlyle called them) was epitomized for Emerson by the sale in June 1842 of 750 copies of Alcott’s CONVERSATIONS ON THE GOSPELS to some trunk makers, at five cents a pound, for lining trunks.” #wirn
September 26, 2025 at 12:20 AM
“The heartlessness of most literary publishers (‘wretched hunger struck hyenas,’ Carlyle called them) was epitomized for Emerson by the sale in June 1842 of 750 copies of Alcott’s CONVERSATIONS ON THE GOSPELS to some trunk makers, at five cents a pound, for lining trunks.” #wirn
“He read…Forster’s LIFE OF OLIVER CROMWELL in Dionysus Lardner’s CABINET ENCYCLOPEDIA edition. Lardner’s volumes were small and handy…which were useful in several ways. A soldier at the siege of Lucknow found that one of the volumes could stop a musket ball after passing through 120 pages.” #wirn
September 22, 2025 at 6:35 PM
“He read…Forster’s LIFE OF OLIVER CROMWELL in Dionysus Lardner’s CABINET ENCYCLOPEDIA edition. Lardner’s volumes were small and handy…which were useful in several ways. A soldier at the siege of Lucknow found that one of the volumes could stop a musket ball after passing through 120 pages.” #wirn
“He packed off a bushel of potatoes to William in New York. The shipping directions got lost, but the potatoes arrived anyway. When William asked what kind they were, Emerson said they were automatic potatoes, ‘learned, self-relying,’ knowing their own destination and opening ‘a new science,…
September 22, 2025 at 6:30 PM
“He packed off a bushel of potatoes to William in New York. The shipping directions got lost, but the potatoes arrived anyway. When William asked what kind they were, Emerson said they were automatic potatoes, ‘learned, self-relying,’ knowing their own destination and opening ‘a new science,…
Watched half an episode of THE STUDIO; while naming a character Griffin Mills is both unfunny and obvious, I feel it is just, given Michael Tolkin’s involvement in THE OFFER.
September 20, 2025 at 2:59 AM
Watched half an episode of THE STUDIO; while naming a character Griffin Mills is both unfunny and obvious, I feel it is just, given Michael Tolkin’s involvement in THE OFFER.
“This is the view that the world itself is symbolic, the view C.S. Lewis adopts when he notes that in symbolism it is we who are the allegory, the view that Robbe-Grillet rejects when he says, disapprovingly, that if you begin by believing in metaphor you will end by believing in God.” #wirn
September 17, 2025 at 10:51 PM
“This is the view that the world itself is symbolic, the view C.S. Lewis adopts when he notes that in symbolism it is we who are the allegory, the view that Robbe-Grillet rejects when he says, disapprovingly, that if you begin by believing in metaphor you will end by believing in God.” #wirn
“Murat’s Italian sympathies fit in nicely with a southern point of view. Accustomed to thinking of how Rome was destroyed by barbarians from the north, he set down a largely unflattering picture of the North: ‘The Northern States are jealous of our slaves and our prosperity; we envy them nothing.’…
September 13, 2025 at 7:19 PM
“Murat’s Italian sympathies fit in nicely with a southern point of view. Accustomed to thinking of how Rome was destroyed by barbarians from the north, he set down a largely unflattering picture of the North: ‘The Northern States are jealous of our slaves and our prosperity; we envy them nothing.’…
My kid has a quiz about 9/11 today; hopefully he doesn’t take my suggestion that he incorporate the three year anniversary of Javier Marías’s passing to heart.
September 12, 2025 at 8:16 PM
My kid has a quiz about 9/11 today; hopefully he doesn’t take my suggestion that he incorporate the three year anniversary of Javier Marías’s passing to heart.
“…looking down on the greens of the lower lawn and the leaves before they’d cried out their colours, before they’d seized separate identities here in vermilion haste gone withering red as old sores…” #wirn
September 7, 2025 at 6:38 PM
“…looking down on the greens of the lower lawn and the leaves before they’d cried out their colours, before they’d seized separate identities here in vermilion haste gone withering red as old sores…” #wirn
I wouldn’t have thought that Spike Lee would become a director who epitomized a certain (quaint) variety of Late Style; also, HIGHEST 2 LOWEST most reminds me of those promo spots he made for Ed Schultz, years back.
September 5, 2025 at 6:00 PM
I wouldn’t have thought that Spike Lee would become a director who epitomized a certain (quaint) variety of Late Style; also, HIGHEST 2 LOWEST most reminds me of those promo spots he made for Ed Schultz, years back.
Reading, by happenstance, CELESTINA by Fernando de Rojas at the same time as I’m re-reading CARPENTER’S GOTHIC; stylistically and in other ways, there is very little adjustment necessary to go from one to the other.
September 3, 2025 at 5:09 PM
Reading, by happenstance, CELESTINA by Fernando de Rojas at the same time as I’m re-reading CARPENTER’S GOTHIC; stylistically and in other ways, there is very little adjustment necessary to go from one to the other.
Reading THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS; wondering if he originated the concept of “fuck you money” (viz. “Sellers hid behind his money—what he called his FUCK YOU money, the large amounts of money which bought him the power to hire and fire and to walk out if he felt like it.”). #wirn
September 1, 2025 at 4:15 PM
Reading THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS; wondering if he originated the concept of “fuck you money” (viz. “Sellers hid behind his money—what he called his FUCK YOU money, the large amounts of money which bought him the power to hire and fire and to walk out if he felt like it.”). #wirn
“Part of his intolerance over his children was linked to the fact that he had made them, and this undermined his comforting fantasy that he was a nothing, a nobody, a trick of the light….Children belonged with a world of sun and solid things, as Chesterton would put it;…
August 29, 2025 at 8:17 PM
“Part of his intolerance over his children was linked to the fact that he had made them, and this undermined his comforting fantasy that he was a nothing, a nobody, a trick of the light….Children belonged with a world of sun and solid things, as Chesterton would put it;…
"But it should still give us pause that, in regards to the content and form in life, the difference between whether it is death or life that removes a person from view is not nearly so important as people would probably like to think." #wirn
March 16, 2025 at 4:59 AM
"But it should still give us pause that, in regards to the content and form in life, the difference between whether it is death or life that removes a person from view is not nearly so important as people would probably like to think." #wirn
Read LA GRANDE by Juan José Saer, which feels less complete than the translator suggests; there is a long passage concerning a character’s painstaking efforts at sewing which is far more involving—wittingly, perhaps—than the long afternoon party that ends the book.
October 23, 2023 at 12:47 AM
Read LA GRANDE by Juan José Saer, which feels less complete than the translator suggests; there is a long passage concerning a character’s painstaking efforts at sewing which is far more involving—wittingly, perhaps—than the long afternoon party that ends the book.
Watched THE CAINE MUTINY COURT-MARTIAL: I like the fact that the cover of MULTITUDES, MULTITUDES looks like a book published in the 1950’s, and I assume Friedkin fully intended the anachronism (though it’d be even cooler if he didn’t).
October 17, 2023 at 12:32 AM
Watched THE CAINE MUTINY COURT-MARTIAL: I like the fact that the cover of MULTITUDES, MULTITUDES looks like a book published in the 1950’s, and I assume Friedkin fully intended the anachronism (though it’d be even cooler if he didn’t).