1.
JACK GLADNEY is having issues keeping Hitler Studies afloat because the “Hawaiian problem” has generated a tsunami of interest. When Japanese investors arrive in Blacksmith to settle some trades, a White worker is fired for suggesting that the bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor were made by Mitsubishi.
2.
All gossip aspires to the condition of literature.
3.
Fiedelnder Tod. The false notion that one community is more or less imagined than the other. All communities are gripped by the bow of death.
4.
MURRAY JAY SISKIND wears a size-14 white Reebok classic to the Whole Foods. He makes small talk with the in-store shoppers, asking pointed questions about what it’s like to fill the carts of absent Whites who no longer crave the consumer drug of an in-store shopping experience. Murray wears a Dad hat emblazoned with the Exxon logo. Murray’s an anti-natalist.
5.
“Every book has its shadow book,” Borges says. But he didn’t have a substack, did he.
6.
Central City Computer. The soul of the man who “accidentally” buried his bitcoin passwords in the city dump, and is now pleading with the city government to exhume his hard drive. To lose your bitcoin password is to lose your phallus, in an anti-Oedipal, all-garbage age.
7.
A moral failing, not grasping the moral imperatives of literature.
8.
BABETTE regularly uses a Peter Thiel sex doll. She also owns a yoga studio that tosses fresh, plant-based salads. This is not the fullest expression of Babette.
9.
“…he’d wanted since 2006 to title one of his books I Don’t Want to Sleep but I Don’t Know What I’m Waiting For”—resulting in usually four to ten hours of looking at the internet, reading, masturbating, etc. until morning, when he would eat something and sleep until night.”
— Tao Lin
10.
HEINRICH’s really, really into alt lit. Barcodes are for wimps. So is developmental editing. Ratner’s star is Heinrich’s favorite Don DeLillo novel. Underworld is an overcooked nothingburger of cis het nostalgia.
11.
The yawning chasm between radical poetics and radical poetry.
12.
STEFFIE whispers ashwagandha in her fitful sleep and spends her waking hours immersed in VR Žižek lectures. The Marxist/Lacanian concept of pleasurable surplus means she doesn’t want to take her finals. Steffie’s shopping a screenplay about a Karen who spends her whole life telling people not to buy books on Amazon. But when Karen is killed by an Amazon Prime van driven by a drill rapper who has a PhD in nuclear physics, she goes to heaven and learns St. Peter is St. Bezos. Oh shit.
13.
Noah Webster, who took the ‘u’ out of ‘mould’ would’ve been happy to see the ‘m’ drop off of nominal ‘random’ because in his own time the American User rejected ax, imagin, medicin, doctrin, wo.
14.
For compassion, there must be a vivid imagination at work. Empathy is not necessary. Only a vigorous imaginative engagement with another person's particularity will undo or prevent the ravages of group-based stigma and reveal citizens to one another as a whole and unique people.
— Martha Nussbaum
15.
THE AIRBORNE TOXIC EVENT goes offline and becomes a witty dinner party in a classic six, with each and every guest humming some variation on, man, climate change. It’s already here. Crazy.