iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 12h

Lots of people will weigh in with thoughts on Anne Carson in the coming days, but I will just note that she wins the epigraph game

431364

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

385 years before Taylor Swift described Travis Kelce’s dick as a redwood tree in song, Thomas Carew wrote “A Rapture”

092

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

always an honor to be included in Greil Marcus’s Real Life Rock Top 10, which I’ve been reading since high school greilmarcus.substack.com/p/real-life-...

171

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

we're like if the dinosaurs built the asteroid themselves

0102

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I’m doing this tomorrow. Should anyone find themselves in Montclair with a hankering for classic Howard Hawks

032

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

but it hasn’t kept my dad from being a Cubs fan

010

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

my relative (great-great-something) Nixey Callahan pitched the first no-hitter in American League (not just franchise) history for the Chicago White Sox on this date in 1902

150

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

the old Norton Critical Editions were endearingly ugly

3425

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Camera Lucida print vs e-book … hmm

380

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

When exactly was the US committed to these values? How does any self-respecting author continue to write for The Atlantic

041

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

The room where John Keats died, in an apartment adjoining the Spanish Steps in Rome. These are not the original furnishings, which were burned for fear of contagion. I bought a little edition of his poems, though I already own all his poems several times over. This one came from this house.

0122

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

in the last year of his life Harold Bloom managed to condense all his worst impulses into a single insane paragraph

161

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

this has been on my mind—lines from my new poem in Granta (which I'll post when it comes out online)

000

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Dear Mr. President, just thinking out loud here ...

1111

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I sing of the cover art of the mid-century mass-market paperback

211720

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

the more i think about it, the more this seems like a viable project (hint hint editors). it probably all stems from how i would get mad seeing sgt pepper at the top of the dumb lists of the 500 greatest albums of all time or whatever. like that's not even a top 3 beatles album

072

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

sometimes when Ursula jumps in a box I put on a newscaster voice and say things like “a cat in New Jersey is in a box, it’s unprecedented. no one knows quite what to make of the situation. more on this story as it develops”

1100

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Whoever put this in the free-books box at my university, you’re crazy

071

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

sometimes i like to share a new poem instead of trying to get it published somewhere. i've been published in all the places i wanted to be published when i was young, so who cares. anyway, hope you like this, loosely inspired by the shijing

0175

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

I wrote about songs (it seems like) no one loves but me (includes playlist) gunsnrobbins.substack.com/p/songs-no-o...

143

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

I love the contrast between this book’s cover and its opening epigraphs (though “the two terms of an opposition are merely accomplices of each other”)

0177

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

now do “100 Trillion Things We’ve Gotten Wrong”

061

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I wrote about the Stones, nostalgia, French teenagers, that sort of thing substack.com/home/post/p-...

1101

michael röbbins @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

My mass-market paperback shelves (repurposed CD shelves). A great shame that these have mostly disappeared. We need books that fit in your pocket. That’s how I first read A Portrait of the Artist and The Crying of Lot 49, not to mention The Left Hand of Darkness and a thousand more sci-fi novels.