palizcat
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palizcat.bsky.social
palizcat
@palizcat.bsky.social
220 followers 430 following 86 posts
books, mostly 🍂
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palizcat.bsky.social
"How can a large lake be like a child—isn’t smallness what defines a child? […] But the child is dreaming … and with that a universe opens up within the child, who is large after all, containing worlds wider than even the largest lake."
Der weite See glich einem Kinde, das völlig still ist, weil es schläft und träumt. The large lake resembled a child who is completely silent because asleep and dreaming. How can a large lake be like a child—isn’t smallness what defines a child? It turns out they are alike in their silence, even though neither form of life is generally known for being completely silent. The child is silent because asleep, which explains it. But the child is dreaming … and with that a universe opens up within the child, who is large after all, containing worlds wider than even the largest lake. The animate child, stilled, is brought back to life, an inaccessible inner life. I am happy for this child; I love this child, as much as Walser loves and makes me love his lake.
August 16, 2025 at 5:20 PM
palizcat.bsky.social
This reminds me of a passage from Bertell Ollman's 2005 "Letter of Resignation from the Jewish People":
In claiming an equation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, of course, Zionists run the danger of having people accept the logic of their position but not the use to which they put it. According to this logic, one must be both anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic, or neither. The assumption is that faced with this choice, most of their honest critics will simply pack up their tents and go home. But given Zionism’s worsening record in Palestine, the choice could go the other way. That is, some opponents of Zionism, who are convinced by the logic put forward here and nothing else, might now embrace anti-Semitism as well. Rather than making fewer anti-Zionists, this approach is probably making more anti-Semites.
July 1, 2025 at 4:56 PM
palizcat.bsky.social
I like this one, from a researcher very fed up with other people in her field refusing to consider the obvious
Academic article "Porn Is for Masturbation" by Nicole Prause
April 26, 2025 at 2:02 AM
palizcat.bsky.social
And poetry (which I would like to read more of, in 2025).

As the year turns over, it feels appropriate to end with the last stanza of the Prologue of Bei Dao's Sidetracks:

When through the closed palace gates
through the cracks of the months and years
the bright rays of the flood overflows
Louise Glück - Winter Recipes from the Collective Bei Dao - Sidetracks When riding over on the East Wind from steeped tender young tea leaves comes the taste of the melancholy of spring When the first tone whistles out midnight unlocks a skyful of coughing stars When a pigeon's set free and the largest public square shrinks into a wordless chop mark When through the closed palace gates through the cracks of the months and years the bright rays of the flood overflows
January 1, 2025 at 6:42 AM
palizcat.bsky.social
Nonfiction highlights:
Leigh Claire La Berge - Marx for Cats Robert Glück - About Ed David Graeber & David Wengrow - The Dawn of Everything Anna Kornbluh - Immediacy Sofia Samatar - Opacities Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels - Democracy for Realists
January 1, 2025 at 6:42 AM
palizcat.bsky.social
💙📚 A selection of some of my favorite reads this year. First, the fiction:
Daniel Lefferts - Ways and Means B. Pladek - Dry Land Ravella Ives - Cold Comfort Allen Bratton - Henry Henry Robert Jackson Bennett - The Tainted Cup Aube Rey Lescure - River East, River West Vajra Chandrasekera - Rakesfall Patrick Nathan - The Future Was Color M.T. Anderson - Nicked Garth Greenwell - Small Rain Alan Hollinghurst - Our Evenings Clive Barker - Imajica
January 1, 2025 at 6:42 AM
palizcat.bsky.social
I’ve been meaning to read this for a while and I’m glad I finally found some time during the strange lull before the new year.

Reading Imajica has affirmed my intention to be more selective in my reading for 2025—which includes less chasing after new releases, more reading from the backlist. 💙📚
Imajica by Clive Barker
December 31, 2024 at 8:59 PM
palizcat.bsky.social
I finished Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst earlier this month, a sumptuously elegant novel that is also bleak in a way that resonates deeply with this historical moment. (1/2)
Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst
December 1, 2024 at 12:57 AM
palizcat.bsky.social
John Crowley's Flint and Mirror is such a beautifully elegiac novel of failures and endings. At the very end, Hugh O'Neill, aging and exiled in Rome after a failed Irish uprising, reflects on his life, and there's this moment of absolute transcendence:
He was altogether transfigured now; the hills of his own lost Tir-Oen came up into sight as though they rolled over in sleep. He saw ahead of him, crossing the land with quick steps longer than his own, the slight figure of the walking man, the courier who could never be explained, who looked back at Hugh as if to say follow. The long hill from where the poet O’Mahon summoned the pale warriors was before him now. He heard without any sound the clashing of weapons in celebration, and a woman, singing in his language without a pause for breath, the song rising and falling continuously like the far voices of seals on the sea-banks. He was known to all these, and he knew they awaited him; and when he came near, the doors of the hills were opened for him to enter in.
October 9, 2024 at 5:13 AM
palizcat.bsky.social
Books I enjoyed from September, including vibrant anticolonial fantasy, lyrical meditations on writing, a postmodern blend of history and myth, and a provocative dissection of cultural trends privileging flow and immersion. 💙📚
Blackheart Man by Nalo Hopkinson Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life by Sofia Samatar Hombrecito by Santiago Jose Sanchez Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life by Ferris Jabr The History of Sound: Stories by Ben Shattuck Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh The Melancholy of Untold History by Minsoo Kang Clear by Carys Davies
October 1, 2024 at 6:04 PM
palizcat.bsky.social
Reminds me of something Toni Morrison once said:

"All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was."
"You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally, the river floods these places. 'Floods' is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding: it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” —Toni Morrison (talk given at the New York Public Library in 1986)
September 28, 2024 at 2:17 PM
palizcat.bsky.social
However, as Walton argues, "We should at least consider the possibility that AI science fiction be not only an especially bad context for thinking about ML, but also an especially bad context for thinking about capitalism, racism, colonialism." /end
We should at least consider the possibility that AI science fiction be not only an especially bad context for thinking about ML, but also an especially bad context for thinking about capitalism, racism, colonialism, and that writers who succeed in being incisive and truthful about such themes do so despite, rather than because of, their genre’s affordances.
September 15, 2024 at 8:21 PM
palizcat.bsky.social
(Of course there are plenty of exceptions. E.g. Seth Dickinson's description of ML in his new novel Exordia is precise and incisive, but this type of critique seems all too rare.) 4/
And the universal theme of machine learning is thought without understanding. A properly trained machine learning system can build frighteningly accurate models of economic interdependencies in Southeast Asia, or deduce the spread of an epidemic in Africa from changes in satellite photos of crop fields, or predict political unrest in ex-Soviet client states from seemingly unrelated Google searches in Moscow. But it does not know what Moscow is, or what a human being might be, or even that it exists. It is simply building connections between points of data. The logic of those connections is left to the machine itself to devise. It has no prior knowledge of the universe. (Except anything introduced in the network’s initial values, or in data augmentation, but—those are added by human operators.) The machine might be absolutely and pathologically insane, with a model of the world straight out of Ligotti. But if that insanity produced useful responses, no one could know.
September 15, 2024 at 8:20 PM
palizcat.bsky.social
There's a morass of aggrandizing rhetoric around ML in contemporary SF, an emphasis on "coolness" rather than clear-sighted assessment of its harms & limitations. @vajra.me calls this out in a recent interview with @ancillaryreview.bsky.social 3/
From https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2024/06/19/at-the-periphery-of-the-grand-narrative-vajra-chandraskera-on-rakesfall/: VC: This is something I have been yelling about for a long time on social media. Every time I say it, someone gets mad at me, like I’m denigrating science fiction or whatever. But as a science fiction author, I’m allowed to say it! A lot of this is science fiction’s fault, and I think we should clearly acknowledge that. Because—you know the Torment Nexus meme? I love it, I enjoy it, but it also elides culpability in a way. It’s like, “oh, we were just warning you against it, we didn’t mean to make it sound cool.” You kind of did, a little bit, mean to make it sound cool.
September 15, 2024 at 8:19 PM
palizcat.bsky.social
Penzeys is great! FYI I'm seeing some recommendations for the Spice House since they're from the same family, but they are NOT the same. The Spice House is conservative & does not have a good relationship with Penzeys.

www.newyorker.com/culture/anna...
Bill, Jr., spun off his own namesake spice company in 1986; Erd and her husband, Tom, took over her parents’ business in 1992. The two companies have not always coexisted peacefully: a Crain’s story from 2009 described a “palpable” tension between brother and sister. But, in the wake of Trump’s election, the sibling rivalry became a fundamental matter of business philosophy. Shortly after the Spice House distanced itself from Penzeys, Erd and her husband began reaching out to conservative bloggers, sharing a special offer for anyone in need of a new spice purveyor: free shipping to those who used the promotional code NOPOLITICS.
September 14, 2024 at 4:12 PM
palizcat.bsky.social
Here's the relevant paragraph:

"Shortly after the Spice House distanced itself from Penzeys, Erd and her husband began reaching out to conservative bloggers, sharing a special offer for anyone in need of a new spice purveyor: free shipping to those who used the promotional code NOPOLITICS."
Bill, Jr., spun off his own namesake spice company in 1986; Erd and her husband, Tom, took over her parents’ business in 1992. The two companies have not always coexisted peacefully: a Crain’s story from 2009 described a “palpable” tension between brother and sister. But, in the wake of Trump’s election, the sibling rivalry became a fundamental matter of business philosophy. Shortly after the Spice House distanced itself from Penzeys, Erd and her husband began reaching out to conservative bloggers, sharing a special offer for anyone in need of a new spice purveyor: free shipping to those who used the promotional code NOPOLITICS.
September 14, 2024 at 2:50 PM
palizcat.bsky.social
My favorites from August! I loved all of these, although it's been a while since a book has stressed me out as much as Navola did (complimentary) 💙📚
The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera Nicked by M.T. Anderson The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David Wengrow In Tongues by Thomas Grattan The Other Olympians by Michael Waters Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan
September 1, 2024 at 11:36 PM
palizcat.bsky.social
The novel depicts a world of pox and brutal invasions, but also one of tangible (and literally oozing) miracles and divinity. It's both deeply witty and shot through with moments of breathtaking grace, as in the passage below. (2/2)
[...] Nicephorus meditated on the fire, the assault, the holocaust, the weeping. It must have been a terrible night. Pray God there was no one inside when the torches were set to the beams. The monk closed his eyes and attempted to concoct the disaster, which was a frequent spiritual exercise of his. It is our duty, he thought, to imagine the suffering of all; for God is outside of time, and so should we be in weeping for the sorrows of others; as on a church wall, Jonah stands upon the ship and lies within the belly of the whale and dances under his woodbine all at the same instant, standing next to himself. The world is never young and never old. The refugees still tumble out of their burning homes, gagging on smoke, and are met by the invader’s sword. The father still weeps that the child is lost inside. Then he is slain. There is no safety, though now the sun is bright above the hazy fetches and the plateia is full of pigs.
August 29, 2024 at 5:59 PM
palizcat.bsky.social
Nicked by M.T. Anderson is at once a queer romance, a bumbling heist story, and a meditation on power & divinity. Set in the medieval Mediterranean, it's the story of a monk (a "holy fool") and a disreputable yet rakish relic hunter and their attempt to "liberate" the bones of St. Nicholas. (1/2) 💙📚
Nicked by M.T. Anderson
August 29, 2024 at 5:56 PM
palizcat.bsky.social
I loved Rakesfall, by @vajra.me: a phantasmagoric exploration of the struggle against injustice in every timeline, every universe, every mythopoeic form. 💙📚

Also, (slight spoilers for a book that cannot really be spoiled in the next post)—
Cover of Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera
August 26, 2024 at 7:21 PM
palizcat.bsky.social
An especially appalling recent example of this is the difference between the US & UK versions of Henry Henry by Allen Bratton
US cover of Henry Henry. A well designed cover featuring a painting of a white man gazing to the right on a light blue background UK cover of Henry Henry. Garish purple and green block text on a white background with accompanying clip art
August 26, 2024 at 1:46 AM
palizcat.bsky.social
I'm glad my library hold for this came in before the end of the Olympics. The Other Olympians tells the story of pioneering trans and intersex athletes in the 1930s—but also how fascist ideology underlies modern gender regulatory regimes in sports. 💙📚
Cover of The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports, by Michael Waters
August 10, 2024 at 1:09 AM
palizcat.bsky.social
Mean Boys by Geoffrey Mak is a collection of personal essays, both intimate and wide-ranging, that investigates status, desire, and the paranoia of the present era. I especially loved this meditation on the connection between queer aesthetics and spirituality. 💙📚
Mean Boys by Geoffrey Mak In queer erotics, the sexual is freed from the biological, the realm of reproductive (heteronormative) function, and into the aesthetic (queer) realm where the ends of pleasure and intimacy are paramount. … In the grafting of theology explicitly within a lineage of queer aesthetics, which finds beauty and erotics when morality is suspended, spirituality, too, can be a tautology for masochism. Job, which scholars believe to be the earliest-written book in the Bible, appears meant to prepare us to face calamity by modeling a spiritual masochism. There is no moralistic lesson to be gleaned from Job’s affliction (God never answer’s Job’s “Why?”), only aesthetics, desire, even perversion. When he asks God, “Does it please you to oppress me?” God does not give an answer, though (incredibly, ridiculously) it must be yes. This might be unacceptable on moral or even rational grounds, only sensible as an erotic truth.
July 5, 2024 at 1:14 AM
palizcat.bsky.social
Ursula Le Guin had some choice words for this type of person 💙📚

(if anyone knows the source of this quote aside from Goodreads/tumblr 💀 please let me know)
A writer sets out to write science fiction but isn’t familiar with the genre, hasn’t read what’s been written. This is a fairly common situation, because science fiction is known to sell well but, as a subliterary genre, is not supposed to be worth study—what’s to learn? It doesn’t occur to the novice that a genre is a genre because it has a field and focus of its own; its appropriate and particular tools, rules, and techniques for handling the material; its traditions; and its experienced, appreciative readers—that it is, in fact, a literature. Ignoring all this, our novice is just about to reinvent the wheel, the space ship, the space alien, and the mad scientist, with cries of innocent wonder. The cries will not be echoed by the readers. Readers familiar with that genre have met the space ship, the alien, and the mad scientist before. They know more about them than the writer does. In the same way, critics who set out to talk about a fantasy novel without having read any fantasy since they were eight, and in ignorance of the history and extensive theory of fantasy literature, will make fools of themselves because they don’t know how to read the book. They have no contextual information to tell them what its tradition is, where it’s coming from, what it’s trying to do, what it does. This was liberally proved when the first Harry Potter book came out and a lot of literary reviewers ran around shrieking about the incredible originality of the book. This originality was an artifact of the reviewers’ blank ignorance of its genres (children’s fantasy and the British boarding-school story), plus the fact that they hadn’t read a fantasy since they were eight. It was pitiful. It was like watching some TV gourmet chef eat a piece of buttered toast and squeal, “But this is delicious! Unheard of! Where has it been all my life?” ― Ursula K. Le Guin
June 20, 2024 at 6:44 PM
palizcat.bsky.social
My favorites from a great month of reading.

Special shoutout to Cold Comfort by Ravella Ives, since it deserves more a lot recognition. It's a beautifully written gay historical romance set during the ill-fated Allied intervention into the Russian Civil War 💙📚
Robert Jackson Bennett - The Tainted Cup Allen Bratton - Henry Henry Judith Butler - Who's Afraid of Gender? Ravella Ives - Cold Comfort Premee Mohamed - The Butcher of the Forest Anthony Oliveira - Dayspring
June 1, 2024 at 5:22 AM