Andrew Wittkop
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awestfell.bsky.social
Andrew Wittkop
@awestfell.bsky.social
800 followers 600 following 180 posts
books, photography, place

THE SPIRIT AND THE DUST forthcoming from Belt Publishing
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Reposted by Andrew Wittkop
benwurgaft.bsky.social
Its Blake Friday! You know, when William Blake’s birthday falls on a Friday? Anyway here are his Toeses of Moses:
The Toeses of Moses as depicted by William Blake
November 28, 2025 at 8:49 PM
Reposted by Andrew Wittkop
bertrom.bsky.social
Gertrude Abercrombie.

The Church.

1938.
November 24, 2025 at 11:00 AM
Reposted by Andrew Wittkop
six18sfoundry.bsky.social
Video game w Sebald walking and reciting from his books and fighting villains along the way
Brush mustache on serious elderly man face. Black jacket. White shirt. B&W
November 19, 2025 at 10:59 PM
Reposted by Andrew Wittkop
atrubek.bsky.social
Here's a great poem for everyone to enjoy, especially @mbwwelch.bsky.social and @awestfell.bsky.social
November 18, 2025 at 6:46 PM
Reposted by Andrew Wittkop
hadas.bsky.social
no babe i loved your substack essay if anything i wish it was less publishable
November 12, 2025 at 3:35 AM
Reposted by Andrew Wittkop
seeshespeak.bsky.social
I TRUST WE ARE ALL OBSERVING EDMUND FITZGERALD DAY
November 10, 2025 at 12:59 PM
Reposted by Andrew Wittkop
vertigoterry.bsky.social
In his novel "Tomás Nevinson," Javier Marías describes the expressions on the faces of people in a photograph shown on the next page. The idea of reading faces like this gets its public scientific stamp of approval from Charles Darwin in 1872. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/11/03/t...
November 3, 2025 at 4:34 PM
Reposted by Andrew Wittkop
emilyhcoghlan.bsky.social
Silver gelatin print made circa 2011 / looking through old work

#darkroom #silvergelatin #darkroomprint #bnwprint #bnwphoto #leeds
October 19, 2025 at 11:45 AM
awestfell.bsky.social
One of my projects has me immersed in Victorian literary culture, and anonymous reviews were a major component of that thriving print ecosystem.
October 18, 2025 at 2:37 PM
Reposted by Andrew Wittkop
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Each day you will be confronted with three unmarked doors. Behind door one is getting all your work done. Behind door two is getting enough rest and exercise. Behind door three is a tiger. Good luck.
September 26, 2025 at 1:41 AM
awestfell.bsky.social
"...feels like a LinkedIn post mercilessly stretched to nearly three hundred pages."
nybooks.com The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · Sep 16
“[The Technological Republic] reads as the work of someone who wishes to be a public intellectual but isn’t willing to put in the effort to become one.” —Mark O’Connell
The War App | Mark O’Connell
Last year, according to a recent report in The New York Times, Alexander Karp received a total of $6.8 billion for his services as CEO of the data
buff.ly
September 21, 2025 at 2:38 AM
awestfell.bsky.social
“On the other side of the barrier of language, behind its curtain, stripped of its husk of speech, the spirit of man wanders ceaselessly.”
September 19, 2025 at 10:06 PM
Reposted by Andrew Wittkop
somemelodiousplot.bsky.social
I also enjoyed John Robert Cozens and his 'Mount Etna from the Grotta del Capro', probably because it reminded me of Rembrandt's 'Rest on the Flight Into Egypt', which I'm a bit obsessed by.
September 15, 2025 at 12:38 PM
Reposted by Andrew Wittkop
schleiermocker.bsky.social
if you’re an isolated, angsty, strange young man, please know that you can become a Kierkegaard scholar instead of joining fringe online communities
September 12, 2025 at 11:30 PM
Reposted by Andrew Wittkop
hanrahanistan.bsky.social
"London has always been a vast ocean in which survival is not certain."

the superb opening of Ackroyd's "biography of London"
Peter Ackroyd, "London: a Biography" (2000) CHAPTER I The sea! If you were to touch the plinth upon which the equestrian statue of King Charles I is placed, at Charing Cross, your fngers might rest upon the projecting fossils of sea lilies. starfish or sea urchins. There is a photograph of that statue taken in 1839: with its images of hackney cabs and small boys in stove-pipe hats the scene already seems remote, and yet how unimaginably distant lies the life of those tiny marine creatures. S the beginning was the sea. There was once a music-hall song entitled Why Can't We Have the Sea in London?', but the question 1S redundant; the re of the capital, million years betore, was covered by great waters. The waters have not wholly departed, even yet, and there is evidence of their life in the weathered stones of London. The Portland stone of the Customs House and St Pancras Old Church has a diagonal bedding which reflects the currents of the ocean; there are ancient oyster shells within the texture of Mansion House and the British Museum. Seaweed can still be seen in the greyish marble of Waterloo Station, and the force t of hurricanes may be detected in the "chatter-marked stone of pedestrian subways. In the fabric of Waterloo Bridge, the bed of the Upper Jurassic Sea can also be observed. The tides and storms are ctill around us, therefore. and as Shelley wrote of London 'that great sea still howls for more." London has always been a vast ocean in which survival is not certain.
September 10, 2025 at 5:44 PM
Reposted by Andrew Wittkop
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Daedalus adding hot sun skeptics to his prototyping team for viewpoint diversity
September 8, 2025 at 1:34 PM
Reposted by Andrew Wittkop
annedenoon.bsky.social
Yes! This (Titian's The Young Englishman, 1540-45) is the portrait that stopped me in my tracks in the Pitti Palace: a completely real person - although identity unknown in this case, I think - calmly looking back at the viewer.

🎨 #Titian #PalazzoPitti
A young man with reddish hair and beard, in a black doublet with a white collar and cuffs, wearing a long gold chain and holding a brown glove. Titian's The Young Englishman, 1540-45.
September 8, 2025 at 1:48 AM
Reposted by Andrew Wittkop
sparrowpost.bsky.social
They are set free, they have overcome death, and they return to share our lives.

Marcel Proust, The Swann Way (transl. Brian Nelson) #AContinuation25
I find very reasonable the Celtic belief that the souls of those we have lost are held captive in some lower form of life, in an animal or a plant or some inanimate thing, and are lost to us until the day (which for many never comes) when we happen to pass close to the tree or gain possession of the object that is their prison.* Then they quiver and call out to us, and as soon as we recognize them the spell is broken. They are set free, they have overcome death, and they return to share our lives. It is the same with our past. If we try to recall it, we strive in vain: all the efforts of our intellect are to no avail. The past is hidden somewhere beyond its realm, beyond its reach, in some material object (or rather, in the sensation that object would give us) of which we have no inkling. And it's a question of chance whether or not we come upon this object before we die.
August 17, 2025 at 1:14 AM
Reposted by Andrew Wittkop
tinyicybubbles.bsky.social
Early Warming Over the Southern Ocean During the Last Deglaciation - Zheng, Bauska and Osman - 2025 - GRL agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

I promise to write a serious thread of what (IMHO as Peisong's advisor) is an innovative analysis. This will have to suffice for now.
September 1, 2025 at 10:45 AM
Reposted by Andrew Wittkop
sparrowpost.bsky.social
Happy birthday to Elizabeth von Arnim, author of one of my favorite books, The Enchanted April. She was also a very mischievous person, scolded often throughout her lifetime, and was once called an “outrageous baked fish” (but in German). From The Solitary Summer:
That very day at the table d'hôte the abstracted lady sat next to me. A ragoût of some sort was handed round, and after I had taken some she asked me, before helping herself, what it was. "Snails," I replied promptly, wholly unchastened by the prayers I had just been writing out in every tense. "Snails! Ekelig." And she waved the waiter loftily away, and looked on with much supercili- ousness at the rest of us enjoying ourselves. "What! You do not eat this excellent ragoût?' asked her other neighbour, a hot man, as he finished clearing his plate and had time to observe the emptiness of hers. " You do not like calves' tongues and mushrooms? Sonderbar." I still can see the poor lady's face as she turned on me more like a tigress than the im- passive person she had been a moment before. "Sie unverschämter Backfisch!" she hissed. " My favourite dish—I have you to thank for spoiling my repast—my day!" And in a frenzy of rage she gripped my arm as though she would have shaken me then and there in the face of the multitude, while I sat appalled at the consequences of indulging a playful fancy at the wrong time.
September 1, 2025 at 2:10 AM
Reposted by Andrew Wittkop
marcelkrueger.bsky.social
A daguerreotype by Hermann Biow (1804-1850) of the destruction of the great Hamburg fire of 1842, a view from the roof of the stock exchange in the direction of Lombardsbrücke. One of the first photos of the city of Hamburg, and one of the first news photos in the world.
August 31, 2025 at 7:53 AM
awestfell.bsky.social
“Vates was the Greek word for the inspired bard, speaking the words of a god. To most people, this voice speaks only in a dream, and only in unremembered dream.”
August 29, 2025 at 10:43 AM
Reposted by Andrew Wittkop
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
“in the wide swathes of time,
everything will wash over us”

Afterbody, Medha Singh @medhawrites.bsky.social Blue Diode Press
August 18, 2025 at 2:10 PM
awestfell.bsky.social
Last glow of the evening sun.
Old two story commercial building, faded yellow brick. It features an assortment of doors and windows, fire escape, and a carport cut below the right corner of the second floor, occupied only by an old couch.
August 15, 2025 at 2:29 AM