JPB

new music tuesday! here's a new EP. two tracks: a shorter, prettier one, and a longer, harsher one. both feature guitar samples contributed by the poet Eric Burger. EP title and track titles come from a list of phrases Eric and I drafted collaboratively 20+ years ago www.subvert.fm/personriver/...

📚 43. RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA by Arthur C. Clarke. The pleasure of this is all engineering: it's clear that Clarke set himself to imagining how a spacefaring megastructure might be constructed, and the narrative proceeds by watching a team puzzle through how to understand/navigate Clarke's solution(s)

📚 41/42. 52 vols. 3 & 4 by Johns, Morrison, Rucka, Waid, Giffen & co. Wrapping up a delve into DC continuity that began earlier this year

digital collage from 2024

📚 40. AFFINITIES: ON ART AND FASCINATION by Brian Dillon. Dillon, one of the greatest prose stylists working today, wanders through 300-odd years of visual culture, contributing short essays on individual works that attract his eye, with special attention paid to 20th century photography

—nevertheless, Dillion is a careful observer and a marvelous writer, and it hardly matters that in the end you learn less about any individual photograph or photographer and more about Dillon as a perceiving and discriminating person. In fact, in a way that's the point

📚 40. AFFINITIES: ON ART AND FASCINATION by Brian Dillon. Dillon, one of the greatest prose stylists working today, wanders through 300-odd years of visual culture, contributing short essays on individual works that attract his eye, with special attention paid to 20th century photography

But writing on a photograph? It's just you, the image, the photographer, and (arguably) the photographic subject. Writing on a photo at length requires the discipline to have a sustained experience of perceiving (hard) and the ability to report back on that experience via language (harder)

📚 40. AFFINITIES: ON ART AND FASCINATION by Brian Dillon. Dillon, one of the greatest prose stylists working today, wanders through 300-odd years of visual culture, contributing short essays on individual works that attract his eye, with special attention paid to 20th century photography

Sunday evening listening--this really special and strange album from the good people at Shelter Press. Nina Dante, Christina Vantzou, and Félicia Atkinson contribute language

Ben Vida has been having a pretty good run of 2026 releases, check this trio out

📚 39. MUSKISM: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED by Quinn Slobodian & Ben Tarnoff. As an obvious key figure for our terrible historical moment, Musk has been well scrutinized by countless commentators, so it's hard to think of who might still be "perplexed." Nice to have one book that sums it all up, though

HAYEK'S BASTARDS is a thrilling (if dispiriting) history of ideas, especially because to assemble it properly, one must dig around in disreputable corners (right-wing newsletters, advice manuals, coin collecting forums, ethnonationalist novels, etc.), work which Slobodian sets himself to assiduously

📚 39. MUSKISM: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED by Quinn Slobodian & Ben Tarnoff. As an obvious key figure for our terrible historical moment, Musk has been well scrutinized by countless commentators, so it's hard to think of who might still be "perplexed." Nice to have one book that sums it all up, though