Category: Books
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I’m x-posting to substack. Also some stuff about politically correct fiction
Okay after six months of waffling, I’m doing it. I’m going to Substack. The readership of this blog on WordPress has been dwindling for a bit, and with Twitter ending, I’m looking for a new social home. Substack is the only place on the internet where people discuss literature and ideas. Of course some of…
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Criticizing Nietszche for misogyny seems somehow to miss the point
Hello friendly people, I realized a lot of my essays started as blog posts that got too big for me to put on here. In fact, I started a blog post yesterday with this same opening, and it turned into a three thousand word essay about how my career has been defined by the ten-year…
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Some stings
Hello friendly people: I have a few upcoming publications. I’ve recently looked at galleys for stories in WE MOSTLY COME OUT AT NIGHT: 15 QUEER TALES OF MONSTERS, ANGELS & OTHER CREATURES (ed. Rob Costello) and Out of Our League: Sixteen Stories of Girls In Sports (ed. Dahlia Adler and Jennifer Iacopelli). My story in…
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Digital piracy, crisis of the negro intellectual, pindar’s odes, my face hurts!!!!!
Like most elder millennials, I’ve engaged in my fair share of digital piracy. When I was in college, we had an app called MyTunes (and another one that did the same thing, called OurTunes) that let you download any of the files in the iTunes folder of anybody in your dorm. I downloaded a lot…
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Adjusting To The Nonfiction Writer Lifestyle
I’ve been working on my nonfiction book recently. It’s called What’s So Great About The Great Books and is tentatively due out from Princeton University Press sometime in 2025. I am having so much fun. It’s an amazing privilege to get to pick apart the issue of the canon and the classics in detail. But…
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Extracted and analysed ten years worth of my Kindle highlights
Have spent a dozen hours this week slowly getting my highlights out of the Amazon cloud and then putting them into my own note-taking software. This lets me access roughly ten years of highlighted passages from over 500 books (it doesn’t include the large number of public domain books that I read and highlighted, which…
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Switching to Android; and reactions to Aldington’s DEATH OF A HERO
Hello friends. I got a new phone, and it’s an android. My wife said moving to android had impacted our marriage way more than me transitioning did. She’s not wrong! I just wanted a change, and I got tired of feeling beholden to a hardware company. Nothing wrong with Apple, but I should be able…
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Books show people at their best; Twitter at their worst
I’ve gone off the socials lately. I got really sad for a few days and was like, the socials are just making me unhappy. Not because of envy: mostly because of how dumb and transphobic everyone is. The number of people who are overtly transphobic in my end of the literary world is just depressing.…
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“Long life brings many shames. At most before his fortieth year is full, it is seemly for a man to die.”
Been having a lot of self improvement energy lately. This happens to me periodically. I get amped, make a lot of plans, develop new systems and new ways of being, and oftentimes see really good results. I mean, I lost a lot of weight and kept most of it off for almost ten years now.…
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Gone full productivity nerd, also a review of Hitler’s Commando
Hello friends, I’ve gone full productivity nerd. It’s a bit of a problem! Around the same time I started doing nerdy things like installing Typora, switching to windows, and cataloguing all my books, I also installed a note taking system called obsidian. Like Typora, obsidian is markdown based, which means you’re more “future-proof” than when…