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Dion Dennis

@geriscape.bsky.social
32 followers 24 following 162 posts
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 10h
Piece #1: Nihilistic digital incel has a point about techno-utopians; he's ready to burn down the house. Piece #2, sly iteration of Brave New World, a eugenics dissenter mischievously hacking the machinery, rebellious at the rise of biotech genomics, a commercialized neo-Aryan asethetic.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 14h
W. Benjamin (1933): Fascism organize [s] the . . . masses w/o affecting the property structure . . . Fascism [allows] these masses not their right, but a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism give them an expression while preserving property.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 14h
Perhaps everyone with an adolescent has had this impulse, in some form, at some time, albeit it not so ironically rendered. The piece calls for a temporal/lifespan bookend: "It's just senility." Perhaps that piece would refer to the Senate. Recall Kennedy (R-LA) asking about "blue skee."
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Witty, macabre and pointed, a dis-ease of Self so intense as to motivate cannibalism. And the final denouncement, like a Chinese fortune cookie or a scratch ticket for a lottery: Inevitable and grimly sardonic, hilarious and necessary.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
The Short Edition TOS says, about IP, that "the contents of the website including . . . the text & images, are the property of or licensed to SE." In Sec. 6, below, the TOS says that authors assume all potential liabilities. Do authors lose IP rights but assume all possible risks?
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Imagine this in a file for a candidate in a physics, math, or chemistry department! It would be disturbing to the risk-adverse types, although wiser faculty, perhaps in the liberal arts or social sciences, might find it curious enough to engage more deeply. (What would an AI agent do with this?)
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Glad to hear it
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Witty, anthropomorphic tale about the collective misadventures of human communication.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
A flat, anonymous life in a town that gave its name to a form of boisterous, quasi-obscene form of song, essentially transgressive. Oskar's last acts in Slovenia were transgressive, child molestation & murder . . . The juxtapositions are jolting, song & acts & the town's name
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Interestingly complex piece: Blot can mean to soak up, make invisible or stain (even a moral stain). Typhoons & transparency (glaze) are an interesting juxtaposition, in terms of visuals & approaching death; forged goes to "fake" or created against forces. There's a lot going on in this micro-poem.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
The complexity of love, formed through time, shorn of illusions.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
The darkest elements of Christianity are expressed, here, equating concealment as the very heart of sin, only opaquely revealed through the frozen light of the photograph, conflating the entirety of a life with permanent sin. Dark, dark, dark
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
The minute the Dido and Aeneas analogy fell face down in the mud, I knew Ryan was desperate & delusional. It's also clear that he failed his comps because his interpretations of theorists must have been equally skewed. Intensity does not equal clarity. There's also a subterranean hint of violence.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
What's interesting about this piece is the reversal of the metaphor of "the high tides" as good fortune. Whether it's Ghosh's evocation of tides in his "The Hungry Tide" & other works, high tides, in human affairs, mark periodic loss & displacement, as it is here, in the figurative sense.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
An entertaining, plaintive iteration of the old maxim: "Be careful of what you wish for."
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Reminiscent, in a general sense, of a Paul Simon lyric: Kodachrome (which is from the same general era, btw).
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
There's a small inner voice that we can choose to pay attention to or deny/disassociate from. The cost of ignoring it is deadly to the Self. The narrator tried to erase himself but the aftermath of a sexual encounter nixed that. What died, in that black night of the soul, was the Self that denied.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
From Nobel Laureate, the late Czesław Miłosz: "When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished."
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
A nail fixes an object to a specific location. Here, the nail is a rhizome, a mobile signifier anchored to contagion, death, war, exile, fabrics & the author's dread & fascination toward disease. Finally, a nail fixes a name, an identity, as the wandering rhizome completes its journey.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
A compelling expression of our dystopian Zeitgeist, very much in The Handmaid's Tale wheelhouse, combined with elements of Camus' "The Plague" and the aftermath of the Nazi occupation, particularly in the first year of the series "A French Village."
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Reminds me of Rilke's discussion of masks: poetshouse.blogspot.com/2007/12/rain... Also, T.S. Eliot's Little GIdding: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
poetshouse.blogspot.com
Rainer Maria Rilke
Faces Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It’s still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time. Fo...
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
In Chicago, there was a politically-oriented restaurant that embodied the vanished Zeitgeist you described in a"Tale of Pearl-Grain Rice." No longer a Chicago resident, but miss it. Fits the description entirely (and replaced with a generic medium rise building: news.wttw.com/2018/12/20/h...
news.wttw.com
Heartland Cafe in Rogers Park Prepares to Close After 42 Years
After more than four decades, a beloved Rogers Park restaurant is shutting down – possibly for good – at the end of the year.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Having lived in Taunton, MA, I recognize where Ben locates this story. The coat is a strange attractor for the proliferation of stories across space & time, across the ocean & generations, of things found & lost. There's an unpacking of things good & great & not so great, a micro-panorama of empathy
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Of course, advertisers, 60s protest songs and propagandists have made use of this predisposition as well. (The 90s movie, Demolition Man spoofed ad jingles as Top 40 radio). Politicians haven't captured this tendency, so much.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Toxic parental dynamics tinged with rigid Catholicism. Any decent therapist would tell her to get away from the parental nest, find her way (and herself) in the world, while piercingly, the therapist would suggest therapy for the father (and perhaps the absent mother, as well).
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
A bit short of Titticut Follies, nevertheless, when the nurses routinely rape drugged clients, as a way to exercise control, the piece takes the 1960s institutionalization critiques of Szasz & Laing to heart. Given the arsonist's propensity, play the"Burning Down the House" while reading this piece
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Intertextuality @ play with A Good Man: Fealty to work & punctuality, neglect of familial relationships w/o fealty to time & acts of violence. Here, the protagonist smashes the gift watch, a momentary rebellion, but orders a new one. He's"In Time Again" @ work, yet defers familial commitments.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
The old adage applies: "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," albeit with denotative/connotative twists on the meaning of the word "screw." Literal screws, the term for sex, the ultimate outcome (they're screwed, husband, wife and daughter) plus some S/M, as well. From light to dark, indeed.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Patinkin is so, so on point.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
The perception of time is related to degrees of absorption/concentration vs. distraction/boredom. These are ontological/experiential matters, existential, matters of being and doing, rather than abstraction. Perhaps Clancy has read and applied too much Heidigger, too literally.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
A classic case of the gap between professed and actual values.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Norm was a singular personality, to be sure. The piece highlights the strength of the parasocial, and the paradoxical element around a real or imagined cancer diagnosis. Norm kept his secret. The author announces his fear of cancer, a 180 degree turn around disclosure.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
The old adage: Let sleeping dogs (or in this case, deceased cats, buried memories and boxes) lie.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Witty. The piece takes the multiple narrative convention in A Chronicle of a Death Foretold & others, displacing multiple human viewpoints with articulate non-human voices that constitute the piece's construction. Funny, pantheistic & ultimately very Hindu, after a fashion, as well.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
therangyanreview.org
therangyanreview.org
The Rang Yan Review — Literature, Philosophy, Solidarity
The Rang Yan Review is a literary and philosophical journal of critical thought, culture, and human solidarity.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Many thanks to the editor, Aleksky Porvin, for giving this piece a home.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
therangyanreview.org/prose/under-...
therangyanreview.org
Under the Portals: Antigua Guatemala, 1974
Antigua, 1974: a young Chicagoan reading Asturias meets Porfirio, who lives under the portals of the Parque Central. The friendship ends in gifts, a beating, and a question that has lasted fifty years...
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
"Imagine no religion" hits home. The opening lines have a bit of resemblance to the rhythm of Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
The Loss & The Damage Done to one's inner theater, crippling the ability to function: As for her poem, Neruda's "If You Forget Me" fits: "And you decide to leave me/at the shore of the heart/where I have roots/remember on that day . . I will lift my arms/& my roots will set off/to seek another land"
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Learn, recognize and reflect: It's a somber read. If I enjoy anything in the analysis, it's the display of your keen analytical intelligence. My piece, a couple of decades ago, The Christo Terminator turned Robert K Merton's typology on its head: journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ct...
journals.uvic.ca
View of The Christo-Terminator: The Unsustainable Present, the Nostalgic Glance Back as Prequels to the New American Legitimation Principle. | CTheory
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Kyla Scanlon's analysis on the structural dynamics around "The New American Dream." Impressive mapping of the decline: kyla.substack.com/p/how-to-get...
kyla.substack.com
How to Get Rich in America
on wealth vs labor and ownership vs effort
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Take Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegone, add Wisconsin beer and brats, put in a blender with Raymond Carver's alcoholic, working class milleu and angst: Out comes this piece.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
When the figurative becomes literal. . . In the spirit of who had the proverbial "last laugh."
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Another PM Chamberlain move with the same consequences: Rewarding aggression on the European continent will not lead to peace. How soon we forget history! The DSA needs a refresher.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
Moving piece. I have similar sentiments, about a different place, sometimes iterative, arising in the detritus of memories of my dreams.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
An amalgam of Nietzsche & The Alchemist. Onasis (Ona) refers to benefit or profit . . . producing an ersatz eval for Corporate Governance; Coeus, "The Greek God of the Intellect," relates, via Rudolpho "Only the superstitious cling to concepts of divinity." Quasi-medievalism & hyper-digital fused
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
The discordant Greek chorus of adult frogs, a prediction of their future world; Cody as a surrogate father (fatherly hands); loss & death preceding rebirth, as two tadpoles die under the barbecue set . . . Read the Bull piece on the gap between recognition & understanding. Enjoyed that as well.
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
One of life's most profound truths: Recognition precedes understanding (if and when the latter comes, as it did in this tale). A fleeting world fully and eloquently rendered. My favorite phrase: "She has leadership qualities, which is another way of saying that she sucks at socializing."
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
". . . the worst are full of passionate intensity . . . The darkness drops again." Extracted from William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming."
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Dion Dennis @geriscape.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
This pair has a thematic antecedent: Stephen Crane's minimalist piece, "A Man Said To The Universe." (1899)
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