iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

taught this on Wed & a smart student dug into how both human and natural education are acts of consumption (feed this mind of ours / in a wise passiveness); then they all got delightfully bogged down in whether drinking or feeding was more agential

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

it’s why teaching is always a leap of faith—& beautiful & necessary & worth devoting a life to

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

realized today that one of the myths I consistently write against is the guarantee that knowledge saves

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

best part is that it's a class about the rhetoric of nature!

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

update: taught, it was 80F and humid, so now I‘m as wrinkled as Davey too

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

indeed! almost as if defining queer--uh I mean weird--as inherently antinormative is at odds w any account of gender that sees some genders (here femme) as more radical than others tl;dr the nonnormative is a form & a position, pls stop trying to fill it w specific content, ur gonna do a hierarchy

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

one reason I'm not esp interested in this definitional debate per se is bc it always feels like it's rehearsing turf battles over "queer" that've been happening since 1980, only the oppressive norm is aesthetic instead of/also cultural. so adding queerness back into it is a funny ouroboros

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

and/or someone had a galaxy-brain moment that decrying coziness might be decrying cuteness which might be decrying femmeness which is, constitutively, radical, & so some weird backpedalling by way of egg-as-metaphor-for-revolution happened. some head-scratching stuff here

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

oh no they're using egg-hatching as a metaphor w intentional trans overtones that they have not actually thought through, lol I have 0 stake in defining the weird, but this feels like Discourse that simul wants to strike back & not upset anyone, which--isn't that the def of cozy they reject?

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

love her fiction obviously but The White Mosque is one of the best memoirs/travel books/essay collections I've ever read & it never got the press it should have

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

late summer prairie, Wisconsin; whenever I see the phrase "the door into summer," this is the summer I imagine beyond the frame

purple thistles and goldenrod in a Wisconsin prairie; behind, an aspen grove just starting to turn and deep blue sky

golden window through an oak savannah onto a wet prairie

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

LLMs being used to shortcut key scholarly processes--thinking, writing, learning a field--turns scholarship into a recursive exercise. it is w/o desire, sterile; it exists to line a CV. so of course it's environmentally destructive. there is no world beyond itself it honors or loves.

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

many of Crowley's characters are scholars or antiquarians & their defining trait is this desire; he honors even the most ridiculous of their number (& there are a lot of them, in Crowley) bc theirs is still a project of love. +

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

reading some John Crowley in the wake of his death & thinking abt LLM proliferation in scholarship. the thesis of Crowley's oeuvre is that esoterica & the desire for knowledge of a secret world is one way of rendering love for *this* world; the real was the secret, the marvel, all along. +

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

another AY, another year of confronting the reality that the worst abusers of AI in the university are not students but faculty & admin

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

TIL Wisconsin has an official state soil (Antigo silt loam) & there’s a song about it

text and music to the Antigo Silt Loam song by F.D. Hole

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

& we're not even a state uni! point is that white academics who get away with far worse behavior do so not just bc unis excuse them (obvs) but bc they know they have the weight of the white supremacist state/media behind them if they pitch a public fit

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

don't have better to say than what's been said, but I'll note that my uni had a white tenured prof in the 2010s who we tried to fire for doxxing a POC grad student so bad she got death threats. he sued & WI supreme court overturned the firing. not just allowed but legally enforced double standards

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

using this as an excuse to post an extraordinary description of shearing a sheep from Wescott's 1924 novel The Apple of the Eye. such perfect minute observation--the click of the shears on dried dung! the pith color of the inner fleece! even the choreography of sheep and human bodies is so exact

The shearer clipped down where the wool was thin over the belly, folded back the matted fabric, and cut between the skin and the two lapels thus formed, widening them quickly. When he came to the legs he slit open the bedraggled fringes, and as if he were skinning it, freed a tapering limb of wool. Where the ankle was hung with lumps of dung as large as birds’ eggs, the shears made a brittle click. The wool, solid like a hide, began to separate from the ewe’s body, and at last was attached only to her sharp back, from which it hung limply. Then he twisted about, pressed the head and forefeet in the crook of his arm, and worked downward along the spine. The wool, on one side grey with dirt, and yellowish on the other like the inner skin

of an orange, sank in a soft heap on the floor. He straightened up and stepped indifferently away. The sheep staggered a moment in her semi-human position, and fell forward on her feet; the pointed hooves struck the floor; the ankles crumpled forward and straightened; she kicked out her hind legs nimbly, and stalked helplessly forward. Her yellow, emaciated body, planed and pitted by the shears, looked raw and unfinished between the wedge-shaped head and the bony grey feet. She stumbled, and nodded her head sickly. The two men, moving forward, herded her toward the stall. On the floor, dented and crushed into splinters by the feet of the horses which had been driven in with loads of hay or grain, the fleece lay bright, warm, and limp like a skin.

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Love Wescott so much--brilliant stylist, keen observer of people & esp of smalltown rural WI life at the turn of the c20. Always thrilled to see his work republished!

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

yep. the usual destructive frustratingly persistent wagon-circling of any marginalized group determined to stick it to the big callous world, yet whose most available & so chosen canvas for proof is each other, & whose materials are often shame & rigid in/out cliques or categories. fun fun

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

there’s also the complexity of communities of writers having their own set of uninterrogated values abt what’s authentically queer, which run perpendicular to but aren’t less imposed than publishing’s; they are less remunerated but more strident for that

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

a minor part of the piece, but I esp appreciated O'Brien's diagnosis of the torturous queer spec cozy v weird Discourse as an interiorized margin-frame warped into a destructively unwinnable argument abt authenticity (like, uh, so much academic queer theory)

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

great state-of-the-problem essay that elegantly links the LLM-scandal newscycle's conseq for marginalized writers w extra/intracommunity discourses abt what counts as "authentic" rep & the industry's old, old racism problems; also applies to recent academic scandals.

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

if Hong wins the primary & establishment dems don’t get behind her & a far-right crank takes office, BUT they can then self-congratulate on telling a story that “progressives don’t win,” it’s gonna be over the bodies of a lot of trans kids. this is my biggest fear in re the gubernatorial race

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

still thinking abt the time 2 of my students insisted I must be neurodivergent in XYZ ways w the heavy implication that if I wasn't, I couldn't count as either a good or an interesting person

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

I had forgotten that Djuna Barnes's Nightwood takes place in the Les Misérables extended universe

She strayed into the rue Picpus, into the gardens of the convent of L'Adoration Perpetuelle. She talked to the nuns and they, feeling that they were looking at someone who would neer be able to ask for, or receive, mercy, blessed her in their hearts and gave her a sprig of rose from the bush. They showed her where Jean Valjean had kept his rakes, and where the bright little ladies of the pension came to quilt their covers; and Robin smiled, taking the spray, and looked down at the tomb of Lafayette and thought her unpeopled thoughts. Kneeling in the chapel, which was never without a nun going over her beads, Robin, trying to bring her mind to this abrupt necessity, found herself worrying about her height. Was she still growing?"

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

watching our DSA gubernatorial frontrunner negotiate this (not as gracefully as one could hope) in realtime

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

also have some Wisconsin trans folks from the 1890s: Mrs. Howe, a Kenosha woman who ran a charity dancing troupe, and Frank Blunt, a MKE/Eau Claire guy whose wife threatened to take their case to SCOTUS

"Anna Morris, alias Frank Blunt, the woman who has tried to be a man for the last 15 years was sentenced to the penitentiary for one year... She was arrested several months ago in Milwaukee, charged with stealing $175... It was then discovered that the prisoner was a woman, although she had worn masculine attire nearly all her life... After the sentence had been passed, Gertrude Field, a woman who claimed to have married the prisoner in Eau Claire, fell upon the neck of the prisoner and wept for half an hour. This woman has furnished all the money for Blunt's defense and now proposes to carry the case to the Supreme Court."

"The society people of Kenosha are worked up over the discovery that a person known as 'Mrs. Howe' is not a woman but a man. He went there some time ago to get up a 'Kirmess' for a church, and several ladies joined in the performance. The peculiarity of her manners was commented on at the time, but none suspected the real truth. Now there is regret on the part of the participants that they joined 'Mrs. Howe's troupe of dancers.'"

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

finally reading Wisconsin Death Trip, only to discover it quotes extensively from my fav forgotten WI writer Glenway Wescott as a faithful chronicler of the c19-20 rural American nightmare

unmpress.com

Wisconsin Death Trip

First published in 1973, this remarkable book about life in a small turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town has become a cult classic. Lesy has collected and arra...

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

I've only read her new one actually (which I did like a good deal)! how cyperpunk is Fortunate Fall? I keep hesitating bc cyberpunk is alas very not my jam--as soon as I see ppl jacking in or doing bodymods in a misty neon city my eyes glaze over

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

I am charmed that one of the first responses to this is "Mann but BIGGER" & I am so game

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

oooh that's a Neon Hemlock one, will check out

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

so far this year, w notable exceptions of Plastic Prism Void & Magic Mountain, my best reads have been re-reads or unpublished MSes. & I've hit some stinkers--not "not for me" but books that gratingly fail to achieve their goals ANYWAY this is to say: rec me a thing u loved. doesn't need to be new

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

love this (and the driftless generally). the dream. maybe the goblins in the walls can befriend the tommyknockers down in Mineral Point

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

trying to imagine each of their Culver's order

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

reread Little, Big & while it's still a stirring love-letter to the real world (only half-disguised as a love-letter to the world beyond the real), man oh man we just did not need all that stuff about Frederick Barbarossa

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

not excited for yet another WI election that will significantly impact my ability to live here safely becoming a National Referendum

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

(also, CW for animal harm. not graphic, and in fact happens mostly offstage, but proceed with caution)

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

yesterday I returned from 2 weeks of hiking in the US west w nearly no internet. like its ppl, this country is at once brutal & deadly & heartbreakingly beautiful. it's also parched, charred, clearcut, often over 100F. idk how the west will survive the 2030s. anyway here's me at the Badlands

guy in sunglasses against sweeping dun and rose hillsides of soft, eroded rock; the west is shockingly pastel

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

ft the very wet, very green, & very beautiful Pukaskwa NP

rich green temperate rainforest coastline in grey fog

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

new one from me @lightspeedmagazine.com: a bird-and-people refuge/e camp in a water-wars future; children learning violence despite their parents’ best efforts; a ghost; a tragedy; maybe an epiphany. This one’s sad.

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

hello my small fable about the lake of all middles in this, along with some amazing writers!

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Locus Magazine @locusmag.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

INCOMING: The first part of the TOC for our new anthology project! First up, the short stories. We have so many amazing and talented writers in this section, give lots of love to all of them! Stay tuned for the NOVELETTES! Follow & back us @ kck.st/4wtYJ6X in bio

text: the short stories, 12 bubbles floating over a sky background, they read: "Wire Mother", Isabel J. Kim ,
"Magical Girl Antifa War Machine", Esther Alter
"The Peculiarities of Hunger", Woody Dismukes
"On an Unusual Kind of Spatially Distributed Haunting", Bogi Takács
"Because I Held His Name Like a Key", Aimee Ogden
"In My Country", Thomas Ha
"Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness", B. Pladek
"Arachnomorphosis", Beth Goder
"Slipcraft", Jarune Uwujaren
"Pandora’s Formula", Hannah Yang
"Landline", Kelly Robson
"Courtney Lovecraft's Book of the Dead", Sam J. Miller

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

yep, this. +++ to the additional weirdness of anglophone readers encountering her work for the first time via the Booker selecting The Witch (it's on my tbr, but of her 90s vs 2010s work I prefer the latter--Ladivine, La Cheffe. I hope The Good Denis gets translated soon)

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