Continuing my slow reread of Balzac’s works with his 1830 novella AT THE SIGN OF THE CAT AND RACKET, which immediately plunges one into the crooked streets of pre-Haussmann Paris. My 1898 copy has a frontis. that nicely depicts the legendary formidable tennis-playing cat of the title.

I was, I believe, 12 when I saw a late Friday showing of “North by Northwest” at the musty cinema in the resort town of my boyhood summers. Rapt, I saw each of the next six screenings and, by Monday, had every scene memorized. x.com/LostInFilm/s...

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Eva Marie Saint (1924-2026)

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At the close of Kinsky’s melancholy SEEING FURTHER, she returns to the town to see other collective dreams have also evaporated: a tattered circus encampment is now invisible under tall weeds; the bowling alley that was to replace her cinema lies unfinished, spiders having reclaimed the auditorium.

“The cinema still retains some mythic quality as a venue for seeing. The more the privatization of experience eats away at our lives, the more fabulous appears a venue where seeing was a collective experience.” Kisnky, SEEING FURTHER

Settling back into the city apartment after our western ramble to Colorado and the Tetons. Read Esther Kinsky’s SEEING FURTHER, which narrates a quixotic attempt to revive a forlorn cinema in a small Hungarian border town that itself seems to be shrinking into the surrounding muddy fields.

“I watched the cinemas die,” eulogizes Esther Kinsky in SEEING FURTHER. “Some went quickly and others with grinding slowness. They died due to a lack of audience, due to the rampant feeble opinion that it’s enough to watch digitized images flicker across any old screen.”

“The suburbs promise space but deliver emptiness” — listening to Daniel Immerwahr’s essay in “The New Yorker” on the effect of property values and the Jeffersonian grid on the American landscape.

Ten day western driving and hiking ramble, Minneapolis to Wyoming and back

“A friend. What is a friend in a world where any friend may be a lover at a new phase of the moon?” — Le Guin, THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS

Of prophecy in Ursula K. Le Guin’s THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS: “the gift is perhaps not strictly or simply one of foretelling, but is rather the power of seeing (if only for a flash) everything at once: seeing whole.”

“His long, clean, yellow teeth appeared and disappeared . . . he smiled again and every tooth seemed to have a meaning, double, multiple, thirty-two different meanings.” An observant envoy arrives at an alien court in Ursula K. Le Guin’s THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS

Sven Lindqvist, in A HISTORY OF BOMBING, on the insatiable nature of war planning: “Four years after Hiroshima, where new injuries from radiation were still being discovered; four years after the firestorms in Japanese cities; four years later, 800 new Hiroshimas were being planned.”

An opposition M.P. questions war strategy: “The government spokesman calls him ‘incorrigible,’ but still refrains from answering — a parody of keeping Parliament informed in a democracy. In a dictatorship such as Hitler’s, no government spokesmen whatsoever were available.” A HISTORY OF BOMBING

White House correspondents, D.C. bureau chiefs, and media execs: The German government expelled Dorothy Thompson from the country in August 1934. She's remembered and respected today for her important coverage and analysis over the next decade of the German regime. Be like Dorothy Thompson.

Early in A HISTORY OF BOMBING, Sven Lindkvist writes of the antique distinction between ‘bellum hostile’ (war between knights of the same race and religion) and ‘bellum romanum’ (war against subject peoples, i.e. colonial war). Brutal colonial war tactics and technology were soon applied to all war.

OpenAI and Microsoft knew they were starting a ‘doom loop’ for the web

OpenAI and Microsoft knew they were starting a ‘doom loop’ for the web

OpenAI and Microsoft knew they were driving us toward Google Zero, and they did it anyway. 

theverge.com

World War I’s costly, stagnant trench warfare leads to World War II’s indiscriminate bombing. A strategist quoted in Sven Lindqvist’s A HISTORY OF BOMBING: “Aircraft enables us to jump over the army that shields the enemy government, industry, and people and strike directly at the opposing will.”

“During the First World War, the term ‘military objectives’ was so flexible it scarcely provided any shelter anywhere; during the Second World War it was expanded further, until the entire globe was considered to be one giant military objective.” Sven Lindqvist, A HISTORY OF BOMBING

“This book is a labyrinth with twenty-two entrances and no exit” opens Sven Lindqvist’s compact but horrifying A HISTORY OF BOMBING, which sardonically excavates modernity’s genocidal imaginary — widespread fantasies of aerial mass destruction waiting to be enabled by technology.

I honestly don’t think most people outside of the DC area understand how cruel and punishing Trump’s conduct toward the city is and has been. I think at some level the perception is that it isn’t a city at all, not like Minneapolis or Chicago.

Jim Lokay@jimlokay.com · 4w ago

WaPo reports Kennedy Center may close by Tuesday and faces bankruptcy if Trump's name is not added to the center. "Trump is unlikely to provide “fundamental oversight” of that project or lead a financial rescue without “appropriate recognition” of his role." GIFT LINK: wapo.st/4cLnDHP

“What a state I’m in. I’m muddy inside and out.” Set in fascist Italy, the incessant fog, rain, and mud of Beppe Fenoglio’s A PRIVATE AFFAIR is both atmospheric and psychological. He addresses a memory: “Don’t you know that if I stop thinking of you, you’ll die instantaneously?”

“Imagine a sea of milk . . . we stamped our feet to make sure we were on solid ground and not on a cloud.” Spent the weekend with Beppe Fenoglio’s spectral, fog-bound wartime novella A PRIVATE AFFAIR (1962). “You had the optical illusion of chasms forming in front of you.”

Sentenced to three months solitary confinement in a damp, verminous cellar beneath the military post’s kitchens, Guyotat occupies his mind by reconstructing from memory scenes from novels, films, and paintings and greedily overhearing pop tunes from transistor radios. IDIOCY

Arrested for refusing dubious orders, Guyotat’s military superiors seize his writer’s notebooks — full of explicit first hand observation — and the charges quickly shift to subverting the morals of his unit: “Once a cutthroat’s accomplice, I now pass for a pornographer.” IDIOCY

Conscripted into the French army during the brutal suppression of colonial Algeria, Pierre Guyotat finds psychological refuge when assigned to a radio unit: “I learn Morse code. Its signals, rightly understood, recall the logic of sounds in music and poetry.” IDIOCY

“Slaughter my I, live without. Without restraint, the senses alone, animal. Exist without being.” — Pierre Guyotat, IDIOCY

“The idea I have been pursuing since the chilly outdoors, as I sit on this wicker chair, with hot and cold sweat on my brow and hands without reaching a conclusion, a straight and level idea at last, adjacent distractions cast aside, an idea of Being — human, animal, nature, object.” Guyotat, IDIOCY

“ . . . think all things at once, forge ahead in even the smallest idea with all my being . . .” Reading Pierre Guyotat’s memoir IDIOCY, on his desire as a youth to flee from life’s cultural, political, and economic constraints into raw being.

In Pierre Guyotat’s IDIOCY, a green parrot in the Paris apartment of an aged dowager is starved for speech to imitate, “holding forth from its repertoire of sounds gleaned from the hushed apartment: the old woman’s cough, the creaking floors, the paintbrush twirling in its pot, my footsteps.”

“Presenting himself as a pure man, Raoul had come to believe his own phrases. At first merely calculating and vain, his passion had become sincere. He had begun by lying; he ended by telling the truth.” In Balzac’s A DAUGHTER OF EVE, the serpent is caught in its own coils.