On mice and men

I have very little to say this week because I've been caught entirely by this small moment in "Gravity's Rainbow," where Webley Silvernail speaks so tenderly to the caged mice that his unit experiments on. He tells them: "I would set you free,

On victory or defeat

In "The New York Review of Books," (which is still printed in a charming and fatass 10½ x 14½ format) Nicole Eustace raises important questions about history-telling in her review of Pekka Hämäläinen’s nonfiction book, "Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America." Hämäläinen’s

On not a whole lot

I didn't read shit this week. ...Okay, that's not 100% true, but what I did read has already been covered, and the world really, really doesn't need another "Gravity's Rainbow" blog because, perhaps unsurprisingly, there are already many out there—

On William Faulkner's "Knight's Gambit"

Last week I learned that William Faulkner wrote a collection of six short crime mysteries that all feature his own Southern Gothic version of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot—a "Gavin Stevens" who serves as the prosecuting attorney for the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County outside of Jefferson, Mississippi—

On, of all things, desegregation

This week, after being sent nearly into a coma by a never-ending stream of AI-enabled, Studio Ghibli-fied normie wish fulfillment ("Here's me as someone interesting!" they cheered), I read a review in The Atlantic about the non-fiction book "Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children,

On pattern-matching (and breaking)

The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, revealed this month that the company had trained a new artificial intelligence model that is "good at creative writing," and, predictably after posting the model's handiwork, everybody made fun of it. we trained a new model that is good at

On Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow"

Mania is stretching vinelike across this country and I'm having trouble slipping past its knots, but if ever there was a novel to provide context, "Gravity's Rainbow," by Thomas Pynchon, does marvelously. "Gravity's Rainbow" is an infinite numbers of things

On one bad word

Update: A version of this newsletter was submitted to The Atlantic on March 12. On display at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles is a document from California's genocide. It is a paid bond of $100, issued by the State of California, to raise

On Henry James' "In the Cage"

More than 10 years ago, a conspiracy theory emerged that the CIA, in efforts to tamp down the threat of Communism during the Cold War, funded the emerging—and eventually behemoth—Iowa Writers' Workshop, entangling pencraft with political statecraft so that, according to one former graduate's account,

On mixed metaphors

Modern guidance warns against "mixed metaphors"—no beating that horse when it gets there—but exceptions appear with enough reading. Again we're talking about William Gibson's "Neuromancer," which, after completing, I can say in full praise is the finest pulp novel ever

On William Gibson's "Neuromancer"

None of you told me this book was good and I'm very mad about that. Yes, I know it's a seminal work of science fiction, and yes, I know that "The Matrix" borrows lovingly from it, and yes, I know that William Gibson is

On Katie Kitamura's "Intimacies"

In explaining "Why Netflix looks like that," essayist Will Tavlin for N+1 Magazine recently wrote that, not only do studios know that audiences split their attention between smartphones and televisions, they cater to it: "Slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are