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wdclarke.bsky.social
Dubyedee
@wdclarke.bsky.social
810 followers 220 following 740 posts
—Writer/border collie slave
—PhD English UWarwick 2009, PoliticalEcon & the Novel
—Published on Thomas Pynchon
—Blog: exploratory fic reviews, lit crit, political economy
—Two novels with @coronasamizdat.bsky.social
https://wdclarke.org Ontario, Canada
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wdclarke.bsky.social
We must approach the oddity of the truly sui generis like a negative theologian
—Arendt on Benjamin (w analogy to Kafka)
(fr Illuminations)
Posthumous fame seems: then: to be the lot of the unclassifiable ones, that is: those "hose u,ork neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre that lends itself to future classification. Innumerable attempts to write a la all of them dismal failures: have only senecl to emphasize Kafr.a's uniqueness, that absolute originality which can be traced to no predecessor and suffe1S no followers. This is "hat society can least come to terms with and upon v.•-hich it lvill always be very reluctant to bestow its seal of approval. To put it bluntly, it would be as misleading today to recommend Walter Benjamin as a literary crltlc and essayist as it would have been misleading to recommend in 1924 as a short-story "Titer and novelist To describe adequately his work and him as an author within our usual framework ofreference: one would have to make a great many negative statements: such as: his emdition Ivas great, but he was no scholar; his subject matter comprised texts and their interpretation, but he was no philologist; he Ivas greatly attracted not by religion but by theology and the theological type of mterpretation for "hich the text itself is sacred: but he Ivas no theologian and he Ivas not particularly interested m the Bible; he was a bom but his greatest ambition Ivas to produce a u,ork consistmg entirely of quotations; he Ivas the first German to tmnslate Proust (together v.•-ith Franz Hessel) and St.-John Perse, and before that he had translated Baudelaire's Tableaux parisiens, but he Ivas no translator; he reviewed books and "Tote a number of essays on living and dead writers, but he was no literary critic; he "Tote a book about the German baroque and left behind a huge unfinished study of the French nmeteenth century: but he was no hlstonan: literary or otherwise; 1 shall try to show that he thought poetically: but he was neither a poet nor a philosopher.
November 21, 2025 at 10:40 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
(+ footnote #1 above):
1. A few months after I had resignexl the ministry, my good friend and academic colleague Tony Aspromourgos, uvx)n hearing about my ex- changes With Larry Summers, my sus- picion when he sent me this quotation from Senator Elizabeth Warren, &umented in 2014: late in ffe evening, Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice He teed it up this way: I had a choice. I could an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want- But people on the inside don't listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But in- siders also understand one unbreakable rule: they don't criticize Other insiders. I had warnd John Cassidy (2014), 'Elizabeth Warren's Moment, New York Review of Books, Vol. 61 (no. 9), 22/5—4/6/ 14, pp. 4—8.
November 21, 2025 at 8:01 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
Found the actual passage
(interesting from what follows, just how many times Summers inserts himself enough into the story of the Greek crisis to merit mentioning in V's book [30!])
platter. Finally, after agreeing our next steps, and before the combined effects of fatigue and alcohol forced us to call it a night, Summers looked at me intensely and asked a question so well rehearsed that I he had used it to test others before me. I 'There are two kinds of politicians,' he said: 'insiders and outsiders. The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak version of the truth. The price of their free- dom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, f)l- low a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? AEcess to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful and outcomes.' With Summers arrived at his question. 'So, Yanis,' he said, 'which of the two are Instinct urged me to respond with a single vwrd; in- stead I used quite a few.
November 21, 2025 at 7:56 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
This is the way
November 20, 2025 at 1:36 AM
wdclarke.bsky.social
O bliss, Walter benjamin
("On Unpacking My Library")
O bliss Of the collector, bliss of the man Of leisure! Of no one has less been expected, and no one has had a greater sense of well- being than the man who has been able to carry on his disreputable existence in the mask of Spitzweg's ' 'Bookworm." For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector—and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be—ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.
November 19, 2025 at 12:23 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
Harvard, 1951 (via Adam Walker, STack)
ENGLISH COURSES OF INSTRUCI€I *English 181hf (formerly English 8b). The Study of Fine Books Half-course (extending throughout Jall and spring terms). Tu., at 2. Professor (xvi) W. A. JACKSON. English 181hf is intended for students interested in the collecting of books. The course will survey the history and methods of collecting. Enrollment in the course is limited and permission must be obtaincd from the instructor. Outside reading and papers will bc required. For students concentrating in English this course will count as elective work toward the degree.
November 19, 2025 at 12:08 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
Some 15min before sunset
November 17, 2025 at 9:47 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
But this exceeding posting day and night
Must wear your spirits low; we cannot help it:
But since you have made the days and nights as one,
To wear your gentle limbs in my affairs,
Be bold you do so grow in my requital
As nothing can unroot you. In happy time[!]
—All's Well That Ends... (V, i)
Sam Adler-Bell @SamAdler8ell • 34m They think Trump had sex with 15-yr-olds. And they're getting ready to defend it Republican Accountability @AccountableGOP • 48m Megyn Kelly. "l know somebody very close to this case...Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile...He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls...He wasnt into like 8 year a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old." 1:49 @adamjohnsonCHI Hell yes that's the good stuff Laura Loomer @LauraLoomer @AccountableGOP SiriusXM X.com You can't be outraged by the Epstein saga and simultaneously not be outraged by the fact that we have Muslims serving in Congress.
November 13, 2025 at 7:44 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
My annual reminder that, in spite of it all, November still sings
blog.wdclarke.org/november-song/
11 Tuesday Hopes And Wednesday Morns November paints her sad delight as August dreams on stolen cheeks, on the still-born arms of all that fall, doomed to so soon depart, to be caught bv silence, want, or scorn, surprised by sudden night; she paints her soft, weak, amused alarm on what Tuesday hopes and Wednesday mourns, easts a pale, wan, leafmeal light on unchanged sheets in mental wards, on migrant camps with hard dirt floors, (Where children learn how there shall not be more), on those lately polished window-panes...
November 11, 2025 at 2:56 AM
wdclarke.bsky.social
Sure, *they* are having fun, at least, but...it's...November *10th* FFS!
November 10, 2025 at 5:03 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
Javelin, Pole Vault
(fr The Ask, a novel by Sam Lipsyte (2010) and
Stalin's Carnival, poems by the late Steven Heighton (1989))
Once I walked this road on early spring evenings, knapsack slung on one shoul- der, the cars ripping along, headlights slashing the yard barrels and wet lawns, my hair wet, too, from the track team showers, my body sore and buzzy from the weight room, all those snatches and squats and curls. I threw the javelin then, was no cham- pion, not even a contender for regional ribbons, just good enough to know the happiness of making your body a part of that spear, to get a good trot up to the throwing line, to slip into a rabbity side- ways hop and snap your hips, launch a steel-tipped proxy of yourself at the sky. I would savor the long walk home, the sweet, achy daze of it, drift into the jagged excitements of my future, paintings, par- ties, people, women people, a ceaseless celebration of my greedy, spangled des- tiny. There was nothing noble about such want. But it was me, and maybe some of you, walking home from school in April drizzle, dreaming. HIGH JUMP Four strides the legs compass, close burst gravity's shell and vault as sunrise at the pole bends back, sickles the sun- sleek arc of dolphin, diver, gull, his skull at noon and hovering. There the body contends with higher things — sharp light, thinning air; the eclipse and setting of records; a fixed orbit he believes he frames. At his height he wavers, reels like a lover and prays his lunging survives him in a perfect act; feels time tug at his second hand as the earth draws breath, pole and body into ground. Hear it: a hissing of wind in the high arena, and his spikes rattle, raised like knuckles at the sky.
November 4, 2025 at 3:06 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
It takes guts to stand up to the homelessness-industrial complex!

(Techbro Joe Lonsdale, from Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley (2025) by @jacobsilverman.com )
nation."" On his own blog, Lonsdale claimed that "Florida's homelessness revolu- tion" was at hand.12 "When we started working on homelessness, many people considered these ideas fringe," wrote Lonsdale after Florida banned street camping. "Activists have vociferously opposed us at every turn. It takes guts to stand up to the homeless-industrial complex. "13 Fringe ideas can be revolutionary, part Of an intellectual vanguard staking out a claim for progress, or they can be regressive, consigned to society's margins for understandable rea- sons. It's clear how Innsdale viewed his home- lessness policy. The United States' conservative-dominated Suptæme Court agreed with Lonsdale.
October 31, 2025 at 10:48 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
Well, there is a way to be immune to the algo...just use a browser not the app, add the extension "Control Panel For Twitter", and disable the "For You" feed. Voilà, you see only those you follow!

github.com/insin/contro...
Control Panel for Twitter Control Panel for Twitter is a browser extension for desktop and mobile browsers, which gives you more control over Twitter and adds missing features and Ul improvements
October 31, 2025 at 11:15 AM
wdclarke.bsky.social
@LouisArmxnd Rick Harsch update: Rick is awake & interacting, which is good news. The stroke was serious & his recovery is expected to take some time. I'll relay any further developments anon.
October 25, 2025 at 12:14 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
from the That Was Then, But This Is Now Dept.:
41 years ago musicians made "rockist" but "prophetic gestures" concerning massacres of Palestinians

(from Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk, 1978-84 by
Simon Reynolds)
declared earnestly. The spur for this 'rockist' attitude shift wasn't so much Thatcher-induced economic blight, though, as the massacres of Palestinian refugees in the Lebanon. 'I was baffled,' Oakey says now. 'They came on TV and told you something really incredible and horrible: and they didn't say what you could do about it. Here are these people, in these camps, and the Israelis just stood there while the Christian militia: who are supposed to be Christian, went in and shot women and children. Next news item. And you sit there and think, Do we 'nte for somebody? Do we send money?' The song spawned by Oakey's sense of paralysis, 'The Lebanon': finally appeared as a single in May 1984 — an advance herald for Hysteria: the group 's disappointing (and Rushent-free) sequel to Dare. Like ABC's 'That Was Then' the single broke with The Human League's classic sound and 'no standard instrumentation' mission statement — it featured electric guitar prominently. And just like ABC's single, it didn't even make the Top 10. Aesthetic and commercial failures, maybe, but 'The Lebanon' and Beauty Stab were prophetic gestures.
October 22, 2025 at 4:14 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
Back thru the woods to the riverrun for the first time since an early spring ice storm arbocide made the trail unpassable
October 22, 2025 at 11:47 AM
wdclarke.bsky.social
"Louis Armand Rick Harsch update: Rick is in a stable condition, no longer in a coma, though still not awake after surgery. Doctors are apparently optimistic, so things are looking up."
October 19, 2025 at 3:27 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
October 19, 2025 at 2:58 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
V poignant words, Matt. Please pass along this troubling news to friends and colleagues of novelist and publisher Rick Harsch
Louis Armand @LouisArmxnd Devastated that Rick Harsch, publisher of Corona/Samizdat & writer of extraordinary books, has suffered a stroke & is presently in a coma. Hoping like hell that he'll recover. Expecting further news in the coming days.
October 18, 2025 at 6:03 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
Remarkable novel with alternating POVs:
(1) interviewer writing about legacy of Ayn Rand figure
(2 above and here) interviewee, Rand follower, sexual abuse survivor
My mother wanted me to make lists of the things that made me happy and the things that made me unhappy. On the happy list I put "reading in bed," fralking to Donna," "lime sherbet," 'ÅMatching horror movies," and "George Orwell." On the unhappy list I put "walking to school from the car," class," "study hall," "dinnertime," "going to bed," "getting up in the morning." My mother took the list and tacked it up on the inside of a cabinet door, along with newspaper recipes, a grocery list, and a reminder to call Dr. Adams. -- You am an argument for abortion," said my father. "If I had known you were going to happen, I never would've had a child."
October 18, 2025 at 11:42 AM
wdclarke.bsky.social
Reading Orwell in Mary Gaitskill's 1991 novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin
I mad 1984, by George Orwell. I read it voluptuously, loving the pitiless description of a panicked fat man weeping as he vainly tried to escape machine-gun fire, of a terrified woman trying to protect a doomed child with her body, of the toothless old whore that Winston had mistaken for a pretty child-harlot. It wasn't the brutality I loved, it was the bravado in Orwell's monotonous treatment of horror, and the pathetic human efforts to stand against it, or even to believe in the existence of something else. "Ihe outburst of humanity between Winston and Julia was a feeble blow against the malign forces of Big Brother, beautiful only in the moment it dared to come into being before crumpling and dying like a leaf. *Ihe unbeautiful monotony of prose was like Winston's affair with Julia: a slight, spare poem pitching itself against the horror it evoked, and dying in the attempt.
October 17, 2025 at 9:16 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
(a wee bit more of that mighty-fine aesthetic debate action)
"You give the viewer too much power," her advisor had said. Her chapter was stacked neatly on his desk, and he was poking it with bottom of his pen, as if to check if it were really dead. "I care less what one sees than what Lurio intends them to see. Does that make sense?" His voice was patient, kindly, he was talking maybe a little slower than usual. "After all, Lurio is the one making them look." "But they might not look," Rachel said. "They might choose not to look." "To not look at a painting is not a form of knowing what it means." The same professor in class had once described Rothko's work as a seduction. "He's forcing us to stare at him, to interpret him, to invest his forms with meaning. But Rachel thought: that's not how seduction works. Seduction is not a performance, but a gaze. You seduce by seeing. By letting another realize that you see them and letting them see themselves through your wonder. An artist does not seduce, but begs to be se- duced.
October 13, 2025 at 7:14 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
"...caught like a message on an electric wire, between who was seeing whom and how..."

—The Tavern at the End of History, the next @morriscollins.bsky.social novel, forthcoming in 2026 from Dzanc
For Lurio, a painting occurred at the intersection of different gazes, or as Rachel framed them, converging intimacies. The tensions, the energy, the sensuality of a work caught like a mes- sage on an electric wire, between who was seeing whom and how—
October 13, 2025 at 7:09 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
He'd be 87 today... I read this poem from Hugo Williams, which has haunted me all my adult life, at his eulogy
Young boy in shorts with suspenders on large front-wheeled tricyle in back yard with brick house, daylilies in background of ... circa 1941 or 2... 'Now That I Hear Trains' Now that I hear trains whistling out of Paddington on their way to Wales, I like to think of him, as young as he was then, running behind me along the sand, holding my saddle steady and launching me off on my own. Now that I look unlike the boy on the brand new bike who wobbled away down the beach, I hear him telling me: 'Keep pedalling, keep pedalling.' When I looked over my shoulder he was nowhere to be seen.
October 11, 2025 at 10:36 AM
wdclarke.bsky.social
Lovely! I empathize with that aporia, sir, and very sorry for your loss.

... 2nd absent bday of my own tomorrow... I tried to write him a poem on last October and only a bit of him could get in

blog.wdclarke.org/its-not-poem/
October 10, 2025 at 11:19 AM