On a day I didn’t have my phone with me, I decided to follow the dogs of Venice.
The Minotaur at Calle Lanza, Zito Madu
I met Zito briefly when he did an “in conversation with” event for Joanne’s novel at Wonderville. I haven’t actually read all that much Italo Calvino, so I at best ambiently understand the extent to which the book evokes his work. A vestigial effect of having a journalist dad who regularly pushed me to pare down my elementary and middle-school works (he did not appreciate the premise of the “five-paragraph essay” homework assignment) is that I am a total sucker for writers who can be creatively unsparing in spare prose. The Minotaur at Calle Lanza is short, but not brisk. It dwells in time. It often has the quality of sinking below the surface of a lake, watching the light change underwater, before rising back into the world.
Some other bangers:
Only the half-businessmen facing the world outside.
My mother was the one who usually texted or called for help—everything I have to say about Microsoft Teams is improper.
(improper!)
The bus ride was wonderfully lonesome, as most of them were then.
It is not absurd that someone would become a bird under great stress.
Never had a market flatlined as quickly as the market for socialist-bloc cosmetics the day after the Wall was breached.
“Anarchist Calisthenics”, an excerpt from Two Cheers for Anarchism by James C. Scott in Harper’s
Protagonism is best left to teens and the insane
@ItsBCJim on Twitter, as seen in a screenshot on scumbagsblog’s Tumblr, first seen by me on Instagram
It’s important, I think, that this sentence as originally written does not have a period.
Just as the waste of time nourishes the hell of leisure, so technological wastes nourish the hell of war.
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Jean Baudrillard
You work around here long enough you start thinking things like, "I've seen every toaster," but you have to remember that life is full of the unexpected.
The US Consumer Product Safety Commission on Bluesky
LEDs, no matter how fine a reproduction they are, still look like the 2020s—and, too often, like a weed shop of the 2020s.
“The Slow Death of Neon”, Christopher Bonanos for Curbed
Seeing the world through the lens of selling and dealmaking can feel freeing, even empowering, but all you’ve done is condemn yourself to a life of never-ending nickel-and-diming.
“Smells Like American Spirit”, Franklin Schneider for Slate
Submitted by James.
When I look over my shoulder, I see a pyre, still blazing, of Incubus CDs, inflatable furniture, and back issues of Maxim.
“New Books” by Dan Piepenbring for Harper’s
We are looking for ghosts, we are looking for 1997, but all we get is the flat dial tone of real estate changeovers.
Dancing On My Own, Simon Wu
After Wu’s appearances in this newsletter via two very good Paris Review essays I decided I should buy his book. I have only read the first two essays so likely more will appear in next week’s newsletter.
I think a lot of contemporary critic writers secretly wish they were Roland Barthes—meaning, they wish they had the style and sensibility to write about they high-and-low-brow with Barthes’ curiosity and care. (Who doesn’t wish they could refract the light of everyday life into an ephemeral rainbow glimmer? Is that not what we’re all trying to do?)
I think a lot of writers fail at this task because although Barthes obviously put a lot of work into style and form, he was also very much himself in his prose—something made evident in fragmented, posthumous publications like Mourning Diary. People who have clawed their way into the position of “critic” or “culture writer” in the present-day nightmare of a media economy cannot and will not give themselves away. Some of this may be a consequence of so many of them writing about and for The Online Audience. Their personalities have been put through a rock tumbler, made smooth and shiny and un-cancellable if only to their particular parasocial audience.
The point here isn’t to say Simon Wu reminds me of Roland Barthes or a raw crystal but that his work is so resolutely his in a way that I appreciate a lot, especially in a time where “making it” in media largely means sanding off all edges. Zito Madu is also refreshing in this way.
More excellent sentences from the first two essays: