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September book update: books read (l.) and bought (r.) Not sure if Denis Johnson ever wrote a bad book, but I haven’t found it yet YTD: 41 read, 25 bought #booksky #litfic #poetrysky

Books read:
TREE OF SMOKE by Denis Johnson; ALIAS CITY by Carol Frost, THE OTHER LOVE by Henri Cole

Books bought:
MIDDEN WITCH by Fiona Benson, GAINING GROUND by Joan Barfoot, WHAT WE CAN KNOW by Ian McEwan

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 13h

September 30 | October 1

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

My bday presents to myself just arrived from England, both @backlisted.bsky.social coded: the Gaining Ground rerun obviously, but Andy read some Benson poems years ago (she’s mostly unpublished in the US) and now I'm hooked. Bless @blackwells.bsky.social for shipping over here for free #booksky

New copies of “Midden Witch” by Fiona Benson (Cape Poetry, 2025) and “Gaining Ground” by Joan Barfoot” (Faber and Faber, 2026) lying on a brown cardboard envelope from Blackwell’s.

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

My August books! “On the Calculation of Volume” is morphing from “Groundhog Day” for lit bros to “The Stand” for lit bros, and I’m fucking here for it Books read on the left, books (well, book) bought on the right. YTD: 38 read, 22 bought #booksky #litfic

Books read: THE COMPLETE WORKS OF RICARDO REIS by Fernando Pessoa, THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION by Lionel Trilling, ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME III, by Solvej Balle, JAZZ by Toni Morrison, PROVERBS OF LIMBO by Robert Pinsky

Book bought: ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME IV by Solvej Balle

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

“Did Pnin have hoes?” — @tricialockwood.bsky.social and @lrb.co.uk truly earning my $ for this subscription podcast today

“Who's Afraid of Realism? ‘Pnin’ by Vladimir Nabokov”

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

My July in books: this is what peak performance looks like for an English teacher home for the summer with few responsibilities other than walking a dog and cooking. (Books read on the left; books bought on the right) YTD: 33 read, 21 bought #booksky #litfic #poetrysky

Books bought: Hesiod, translated by Richmond Lattimore; "Eve's Hollywood" by Eve Babitz; "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver; "At the Foundling Hospital" by Robert Pindky; "Agua Viva" by Clarice Lispector; "Selected Poems" by James Tate; "Hard Rain Falling" by Don Carpenter; and "Come Closer and Listen" by Charles Simic.

Books bought: "Fight!" by Scott McLanahan; "Proverbs of Limbo" by Robert Pinsky; "The Other Love" by Henri Cole;" "Shakespeare's Kitchen" by Lore Segal; and "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith. I got the last one because I was in this tiny local bookstore where I'd've felt weird if I'd left without buying something.

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

I'm finally reading Under the Volcano, and (sort of inspired by a classic @backlisted.bsky.social episode that re-ran this year), I'm going to pair it with a bottle of $60 mezcal. Bad idea? Probably, but I'm on summer break, so. Watch this space to see which I finish first ... or vice versa #booksky

An unopened bottle of Casamigos mezcal (with George Clooney's signature visible) next to an upright yellow paperback copy of Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano" on an outdoor table with out-of-focus trees in the background.

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

June reading post: books read (l.) and bought (r.) Am I about to go on a Pessoa kick? Only time will tell YTD: 24 read, 16 bought #booksky #litfic

Books read:
* VEGAS by John Gregory Dunne
* SOMEONE ELSE'S WEDDING VOWS by Bianca Stone
* FLAUBERT'S PARROT by Julian Barnes
* HER FIRST AMERICAN by Lore Segal
* THE MIRROR WALL by Richard Murphy

Books bought:
THE BOOK OF DISQUIET by Fernando Pessoa
AT THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL by Robert Pinsky
THE COMPLETE POEMS OF RICARDO REIS by Fernando Pessoa

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Finally got deep enough into my TBR pile to read the subject of one of the most poignant @backlisted.bsky.social episodes ever, released less than two weeks before the author died at 96. It's great, and not enough people know about it — echt Backlisted. www.backlisted.fm/episodes/222... #booksky

"Her First American" by Lore Segal (1985), in the 2004 New Press twentieth anniversary edition with an introduction by Stanley Crouch.

The photographer (by the evidence of his hand, some white guy) is rather pretentiously holding the book against a background of green trees in full leaf.

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Books read (l.) and bought (r.) in May. The McNally Jackson reprint of "The Planets" is a gorgeous resurrection of a seventies artifact — a decorated hardcover with no dust jacket (although, weirdly, whoever designed it gets no credit inside) YTD: 19 read, 13 bought #booksky #litfic #poetrysky

BOOKS READ:
Elizabeth Hardwick: "Seduction and Betrayal"
Craig Morgan Teicher: "August, September, October"
Solvej Balle: "On the Calculation of Volume II"
Diane Ackerman: "The Planets"

Books bought:
Evelyn Waugh: "Scoop"
Thomas Mann: "The Magic Mountain"

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

@poetrydaily.bsky.social is cooking today poems.com/poem/civiliz...

The quiet of trees is like the quietest girl in gym class
standing against the retracted bleachers,
a moldy copy of Freud’s
Civilization and Its Discontents in her hands,
in which a handwritten receipt to her dead father
is tucked into section two as a bookmark.

— Bianca Stone, “Civilization and its Discontents”

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Books read (l.) and bought (r.) in April. (The Lerner and Riley are rare examples of me reading books as soon as I got them, so they count toward both totals.) YTD: 15 read, 11 bought #booksky #litfic #poetrysky

BOOKS READ:
* THE PRISONER by Marcel Proust
* FALLING AWAKE by Alice Oswald
* OMEROS by Derek Walcott
* THE PALM HOUSE by Gwendoline Riley
* TRANSCRIPTION by Ben Lerner

BOOKS BOUGHT:
* IN PARENTHESIS by David Jones
* THE PLANETS by Diane Ackerman
* SOMEONE ELSE'S WEDDING VOWS by Bianca Stone
* AUGUST, SEPTEMBER, OCTOBER by Craig Morgan Teicher

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

It's been quite a couple of weeks for authors born in the auspicious year of 1979. These two books came out on consecutive Tuesdays this month, and they’re as different as can be, but they’re my two favorites of 2026 so far #booksky #litfic

TRANSCRIPTION (Ben Lerner) and THE PALM HOUSE (Gwendoline Riley)

(don’t judge the four Franzen hardcovers (including PURITY!) partly visible in the background, okay? I'm much prouder of the used first edition of THE NAME OF THE ROSE)

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Books I finish (left) and bought (right) in March. “Portrait” was my first reread since college. It holds up extremely well, but still the 11th grade AP kids I was teaching it to mostly weren’t fans YTD: 10 read,5 bought #booksky #litfic

Books read:

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN (James Joyce)
THE SILENT WOMAN (Janet Malcolm)
COLD ENOUGH FOR SNOW (Jessica Au)

Books bought:
ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME II (Solvej Balle)
ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME III (Solvej Balle)
FALLING AWAKE (Alice Oswald)

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

Books finished in February, a month in which I also managed to buy no books. It was my third time through Wuthering Heights, which I just happened to be teaching to 11th grade AP students this month of all months. YTD: 7 read, 2 bought #booksky #litfic

“Wuthering Heights,” “Vigil” by George Saunders, and “Orphic Paris” by Henri Cole in a neat pile on a bookshelf evidently owned by someone with impeccable taste in books.

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Belated January book stacks: books I finished on the left, books I bought on the right. Decent start if I hope to read at least 50 books this year #booksky #litfic

Books finished:
ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME 1 by Solvej Balle
A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 1599, by James Shapiro
THE NEAR AND DISTANT WORLD, by Bianca Stone
FISKADORO, by Denis Johnson (in a first edition hardcover)

Books bought:
FLAUBERT’S PARROT, by Julian Barnes
VIGIL, by George Saunders

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

[Gift link] “Come back from the brink, Mr. Saunders. Please don’t disappear up your own kazoo.” Dwight Garner is NOT a fan of George Saunders’s new book! I’ve got tickets to see him tonight in Brooklyn and will be reading the fuck out of it anyway #bookskyn #litfic

nytimes.com

George Saunders Serves a Heavy Helping of Virtue in a New Novel

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

@biancatherosestone.bsky.social ’s new book arrived in the mail today, and before I even get to the poems I’m marveling at what a beautifully designed volume it is (Design credit to Beth Steidle at @tinhouse.bsky.social ) #booksky #poetry #poetrysky

"The Near and Distant World" by Bianca Stone

(An overstuffed bookshelf, a salt lamp, a Shakespeare candle from the Unemployed Philosophers’ Guild, and a Mark Rothko print in the background)

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

New favorite hat just arrived from @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social — it’ll serve as an expression of my opinion of the state of things, as well as a way to identify my Labatut homies in the wild #booksky #litfic

A baseball cap that reads WHEN WESL CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD, placed in front of a copy of WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD by Benjamín Labatut

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

My favorite books that I finished in 2025, not counting rereads, in the order in which I read them #booksky #litfic #poetry

ANGELS by Denis Johnson
OLIO by Tyehimba Jess
PNIN by Vladimir Nabokov
THE RADETSKY MARCH by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hoffman
TODAY IN THE TAXI by Sean Singer
THE ILIAD by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
MRS. DALLOWAY by Virginia Woolf
FIRST LOVE by Gwendoline Riley
RED COMET: THE SHORT LOFE AND BLAZING ART OF SYLVIA PLATH by Heather Clark

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

October–November in books: bought (l.) and read (r.) YTD: 38 read, 24 bought (i’m cheesing it a little with Lincoln in the Bardo: it’s my third reading and second time teaching it, but i *did* read and annotate every page) #booksky #litfic

Books bought:
L. P. Hartley, THE GO-BETWEEN
Garth Greenwell, SMALL RAIN
Claude Simon, THE FLANDERS ROAD
Ishion Hutchinson, SCHOOL OF INSTRUCTIONS

Books read:
Percival Everett, JAMES
Thom Gunn, SELECTED POEMS 1950–1975
Dante Alighieri, THE NEW LIFE (translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti)
Dante Alighieri, VITA NUOVA (translated by Anthony Mortimer)
George Saunders, LINCOLN IN THE BARDO

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

Now seated at The 92nd St. Y and fanboying tf out (moderately!). Yakkin’ about William Maxwell, let’s go @backlisted.bsky.social

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

August and September combined: bought (left) and finished (right). YTD totals: 33 read, 20 bought I'm also still plugging away at Proust and the thousand-page Plath biography, so hundreds of pages that I've read aren't represented here (yet) #booksky #litfic

Books bought:
AGUA VIVA by Clarice Lispector
POETRY IN THE MAKING by Ted Hughes
VEGAS by John Gregory Dunne
THERE ARE RIVERS IN THE SKY by Elif Shafak

Books bought:
THE SELECTED POEMS OF DONALD HALL
STORM by George R. Stewart
THE ESSENTIAL RUTH STONE, edited by Bianca Stone

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 09/08/2025

I usually wait till the weekend to listen, so I didn't know till yesterday that Backlisted is doing a live show at 92NY in October (!!!) I metaphorically jumped on those tickets, & it's a good thing this is the internet because I might have physically shoved people out of the way for them

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

July in reading: eight books read (l.) and two bought (r.) YTD totals: 30 read, 16 bought — finally starting to make a noticeable dent in my TBR situation #booksky #litfic

A stack of eight books on the left that I read this month:
* Gwendoline Riley, "First Love"
* Jean Rhys, "Wide Sargasso Sea"
* Ursula Parrott, "Ex-Wife"
* Virginia Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway"
* Sylvia Townsend Warner, "Lolly Willowes"
* Reginald Dwayne Betts, "Doggerel"
* Eamon Grennan, "Still Life With Waterfall"
* Layli Long Soldier, "Whereas"

A stack of only two books on the right that I bought this month:
* Joy Williams, "Breaking & Entering"
* Don Carpenter, "Hard Rain Falling"

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

RIP Michael Madsen, author of much more interesting poems than James Franco [CW for pretty much everything in the poem; I opened the book at random] #booksky #litfic

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

Books read (l.) and boughr (r.) in June YTD: 22 read, 14 bought #booksky #litfic

Books read:

* Joan Didion, SALVADOR
* Henry James, WHAT MAISIE KNEW
* Ted Hughes, GAUDETE (1st. ed., Harper & Row, 1977)
* Robert Lowell, NEAR THE OCEAN (1st. ed., FSG, 1967)

Books bought:
* Katie Kitamura, INTIMACIES
* THE ESSENTIAL RUTH STONE, edited by Bianca Stone
* Layli Long Soldier, WHEREAS

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 01/06/2025

Books bought/given* (left) and finished (right) in May YTD: 18 read, 11 acquired #booksky #litfic 🖋📚💙 (*thanks @poetrydaily.bsky.social for sending me Octavio Quintanilla's book)

Books bought:
The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty, Doggerel by Reginald Dwayne Betts, Los Horos Impossible/The Impossible Hours by Octavio Quintanilla

Books read:
Crush by Richard Siken, Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Today in the Taxi by Sean Singer, Water by Rumi (translated by Haleh Liza Gafori), Gulf Music by Robert Pinsky, and The Iliad of Homer (translated by Emily Wilson)

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

Books bought (left) and read (right) in March and April YTD: 11 read, 8 bought #booksky #litfic 🖋📚💙

Books bought:
Rumi, WATER
Christopher Hitchens, LETTERS TO A YOUNG CONTRARIAN
Sean Singer, TODAY IN THE TAXI
Richard Siken, CRUSH
Vincenzo Latrionico, PERFECTION

Books read:
Sean Singer, HONEY & SMOKE
Sonya Walger, LION
Joseph Roth, THE RADETZKY MARCH
Arthur Sze, COMPASS ROSE
Charles Simic, THE LUNATIC

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William Shakespeare @shakespeare.lol · 02/04/2025

First, heaven be the record to my speech

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

Elizabeth Bishop — even flipping through her collected poems at random to one of the less familiar ones, chances are you’ll find something astonishing and new. How great is this stanza (from “Song for the Rainy Season”) #booksky 💙📚

At night, on the roof,
blind drops crawl
and the ordinary brown
owl gives us proof
he can count:
five times—always five—
he stamps and takes off
after the fat brown frogs that,
shilling for love,
clamber and mount.

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

Books bought (left) and finished (right) in the first two months of 2025. OLIO and ANGELS in particular are absolute masterpiece bangers that not enough people have read, and which you’d thank yourself for picking up #booksky 📚💙

Two stacks of books on a bookshelf.

In the left-hand, "books bought" pile: Sonya Walger's LION (NYRB, 2025), Arthur Sze's COMPASS ROSE (Copper Canyon, 2014), and Ted Hughes's GAUDETE (Harper & Row, 1977; first edition).

In the right-hand, "books finished" pile: Novalis's HYMNS TO THE NIGHT (1800; translated by Dick Higgins; McPherson & Co. 1988), PROFESSOR BORGES: A COURSE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE (tr. Katherine Silver, New Directions, 2013), Vladimir Nabokov's PNIN (1957; Vintage International edition, 1989); Denis Johnson's ANGELS (1983; Harper Perennial, 2002); Richard Wilbur's CEREMONY AND OTHER POEMS (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1950, first ed.), and Tyehimba Jess's OLIO (Wave Books, 2016)

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

Gift link to this very long (almost 5,500-word) NYT piece with way more detail and context than most of us probably want on how and why Elon Musk is putting thousands of civil servants out of work and killing people.

nytimes.com

How Elon Musk Executed His Takeover of the Federal Bureaucracy (Gift Article)

The operation was driven with a frenetic focus by the billionaire, who channeled his resentment of regulatory oversight into a drastic overhaul of government agencies.

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

Ladies and gentlemen, we can make this happen

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

Obsessed with this 1st ed. of Richard Wilbur’s second book (pub. 1950) that I got for $15 in Boston last summer. It seems to have been once owned by Barbara Swan, who did Wilbur’s portrait sketch and also collaborated with Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin. I want to know who “Bill” was, though #booksky

Front cover of Richard Wilbur’s CEREMONY (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1950)

Inside flap of CEREMONY with inscribed flyleaf. The inscription reads, “For Barbara and her part in making this book ‘beauty joined with energy.’ With love, Bill”

* “Bill” misquoted slightly one of Wilbur’s poems in the book. The line (from “Museum Piece”) is “Beauty joined to energy.”

The back flap, including Barbara Swan’s sketch of a very young (and surprisingly handsome?) Richard Wilbur. Also visible is a receipt from the Brattle Book Shop dated 07/06/2024.

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

This delightful relic from the 70s came in the mail today . #booksky

First U.S. edition of Ted Hughes’s GAUDETE (Harper & Row, 1977)

Cover art by Leonard Baskin, naturally

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Reposted by Brendan

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

Dude this is so fucking bleak; I know I’m naive but I still genuinely cannot believe we have people in the humanities normalizing this stuff

Think of an LLM as a research assistant. An extremely knowledgeable, well-read, and over-caffeinated research assistant. They can accomplish quite remarkable things but they will also make mistakes - like mixing up “Selia” and “Delia”. Unlike most research assistants, LLMs will occasionally hallucinate (ie. make up) things that sound quite convincing. Don’t take their output at face value and always check their work.

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

A somewhat @backlisted.bsky.social - inflected selection of my favorite books of 2024. I finished only 41 this year, but at least Middlemarch was one of them

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Mick Garris @mickgarris.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

It is with a very heavy heart that I share the passing of the beautiful, talented, kind and loving Olivia Hussey on December 27. One of the loveliest people I’ve ever known, let alone had the honor and pleasure to work with. Special condolences to daughter India Eisley and her partner David Eisley.

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

nothin’ but faith in nothin’ 🫡

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

my one quibble with this post is those guys are the NYPD (and mayor Adams), not the feds

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Brendan @brendanbe.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

okay this pic of William James (on p. 65 of Simon Critchley's MYSTICISM) goes hard af

william james in brazil in 1865, looking like a badass

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Cam @camislike.com · 26/11/2024

Putting the Barry Lyndon/21 Savage edit here because it needs to be here please tell me who to originally credit

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