Insanebiopics

Surnames

2023-01-07: test of cross-posting from micro.blog to mas.to

2023-01-06: About Endlessness (2019) What would happen if Gregory Crewdson hired Wes Anderson’s entire production crew and tried to make …

2022-12-21: Watched Banshees of Inisherin. Pretty good. Two big quibbles: one, the way the donkey dies was …

2022-11-30: Saw the Conny Plank documentary. A parade of musicians expressing their admiration and gratitude for …

2022-11-30: If music was on when he had to get up and leave the house, he generally left it playing. This way he …

2022-11-20: On DeLillo Somehow I find myself closing in on completing DeLillo’s oeuvre after finishing a couple of his …

2022-11-19: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain Not a great movie, but I will always watch any biopic about an Insane Genius, especially if there’s …

2022-11-12: Interesting Takes A writer who always has interesting takes on things wrote a piece in The Atlantic stating maybe it’s …

2022-11-06: SMOYER German-American surname of the day is SMOYER, alteration of SCHMOYER, itself an Americanized form of …

2022-11-05: Adorno, from the first chapter of The Authoritarian Personality. These days the quiz would break …

2022-11-04: TURNUPSEED German-American surname of the day is TURNUPSEED, presumably an alteration of TURNIPSEED, a …

2022-11-03: Watching Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises, a biography of the engineer of the Zero fighter aircraft. The …

2022-11-03: OVERACKER German-American surname of the day is OVERACKER, an Americanization of ÜBERACKER, a habitational …

2022-11-01: Errol Morris documentary about Elsa Dorfman. He has to have seen her as a peer. No interrotron …

2022-11-01: Big unanswered question about the metaverse is whether we can watch it on the 3D tvs we bought five …

2022-11-01: threat detection It’s been shown that we can roughly evaluate a man’s intelligence with a single glance at his face. …

2022-10-31: Don DeLillo I keep all my audiobooks as mp3s in the app formerly known as iTunes, a dumb system to …

2022-10-17: COVID risk mitigation, Oct 2022 I sent this text detailing my current risk mitigation strategies out to all my in-laws. Having done …

2022-06-25: On Enthusiasm Just finished a fairly literary book by someone highly influenced by William Gibson. I am generally …

2022-05-19: In the Lateness of the World by Carolyn Forché. 📚I used to eschew political poetry, probably because …

2022-05-08: Design Fiction Currently reading The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. 📚 I have read a few of …

2022-04-04: On Brahmins Capital and Ideology, by Thomas Piketty 📚 Much of the bulk of this long book is statistical details …

2022-03-08: 📷 Shawnee Lookout 2022-03-06

2022-02-06: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. 📚 Meanders for a long while, but my …

2022-01-23: McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh. 📚This one inhabits a drunken, psychotic delirium, where her earlier …

2022-01-22: The Ghost Variations by Kevin Brockmeier. 📚One hundred short-short ghost stories — but these are …

2022-01-15: Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman. 📚 JG Ballard for normies.

2022-01-09: Ordesa, by Manuel Vilas An “autobiographical novel” about a middle-aged Spanish man contemplating the state of …

2021-07-08: Philip Ó Ceallaigh: ‘There’s one word and that’s what life is about’ Most novels don’t pay back …

2021-06-21: 📷 Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati. April 2021.

2021-03-25: Vineland, Thomas Pynchon A craft note — perhaps the aim is something overtly bullshit, but also compelling. To induce a …

2021-03-21: The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig Stefan Zweig had the good fortune to be born in Austria in the last decades of the nineteenth …

2021-03-16: Strikingly internet-age insight from Musil. Epigraph to Elizabeth Goodstein’s Boredom and Modernity …

2021-03-15: Bartleby, The Scrivener; Herman Melville The story is ultimately a bit of a disappointment because of the conventionality of the framework …

2021-03-14: Kissa By Kissa, Craig Mod An interesting limited edition photo/narrative documenting a 960 kilometer walk from Tokyo to Kyoto. …

2021-03-08: The Plague, Albert Camus Camus keeps his philosophical agenda somewhat low key, but if a similar novel were written in …

2021-03-04: The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, Bohumil Hrabal I read the NYRB Classics edition, which contains two linked novellas about the same characters. The …

2021-02-06: Adam Curtis On the Unfolding Epistemological Crisis After the violence and social experiments of the twentieth century, it made sense to give up on …

2021-01-29: Metamorphica, Zachary Mason I started to read Mason’s first book, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, a few years ago, and it …

2021-01-05: Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen I want to highlight the loaded phrase “an elopement without the intention of marriage.” 📚

2020-12-27: The Door, Magda Szabo. I always have high expectations when opening an NYRB Classics book, but this one felt a little …

2020-12-27: Life of the Party, Olivia Gatwood Thoroughly investigating the predicament of being an attractive young woman in a misogynist society. …

2020-12-24: Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf Lighthouses appear, as do waves. Sensibility has to come before style, is what I take away from …

2018-08-23: 📝 Garcia Marquez adopts the demeanor of Buster Keaton to tell his stories: I discovered that what I …

2018-08-20: Sebald on narrative literature 📝 Sebald on narrative literature, froma 1999 profile in the Paris Review. “I have an aversion …

2018-08-18: Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon I’m old enough to have some books in my tsundoku pile whose pages have turned yellow with age while …