iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Dive into Beyond the Zero’s great interview with Lance Olsen on An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies, his marvelous novel-length portrait of Henry Darger! Along the way: memory, memoir, historiographic metafiction, and much more! open.spotify.com/episode/34WG... Cc: @beyondthezero.bsky.social

open.spotify.com

Lance Olsen - AN INVENTORY OF BENEVOLENT BUTTERFLIES

Beyond The Zero · Episode

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

One practice for being happier: laugh at yourself throughout the day. And if you can't find something to laugh about yourself, that's hilarious! www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKTT...

youtube.com

The Mirror Scene - Duck Soup (7/10) Movie CLIP (1933) HD

YouTube video by Movieclips

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Enter your book[s] published in 2026 for a chance to win a 2026 BIG OTHER Book Award! The awards aim to recognize excellence in literature and to promote and support the work of innovative writers and adventurous presses. Deadline is January 31, 2027. bigother.com/2026/07/27/a...

bigother.com

Announcing the Deadline and Guidelines for the 2026 Big Other Book Awards!

We are excited to announce the deadline and guidelines for the 2026 Big Other Book Awards! This marks the eighth annual presentation of the awards, which aim to recognize excellence in liter…

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Received today: Karen An-hwei Lee's MARIMO, MON AMOUR (Fiction Collective 2), which features "Einspänner," which I published in Big Other in 2025! Ka-pow! Cc: @fictioncollective2.bsky.social and @bigothermag.bsky.social

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Acquired today: Rae Armantrout's SAFE ROOMS (Wesleyan University Press), which includes several poems I originally published in BIG OTHER! Ka-pow! Cc: @weslpress.bsky.social and @bigothermag.bsky.social

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

167,000 people die every day. Millions from preventable causes. Yet a minor celebrity dies of a fentanyl overdose and suddenly it’s wall-to-wall coverage, tributes, and “gone too soon.” Every death is tragic. Why does fame determine which ones matter? (Image: Gustav Klimt's Death and Life (1915))

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I’m delighted to be part of Seven Spouting Devils—One Night, an evening of fiction and poetry presented by Spuyten Duyvil Press at this year’s Brooklyn Book Festival. The free event is at Young Ethel’s in Brooklyn tonight at 8:00 p.m. brooklynbookfestival.org/event/seven-...

brooklynbookfestival.org

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

"You can’t depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus." —Mark Twain

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Lance Olsen’s An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies (Dzanc Books) gets an enthusiastic review in Publishers Weekly, which calls it “admirable” and an “arresting portrait of a troubled figure.” (Message me for a review copy, etc.) www.publishersweekly.com/9781938603921 @publisherswkly.bsky.social

publishersweekly.com

An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies by undefined

Olsen (Absolute Away) gives voice to outsider artist Henry Darger, who died in 1973, in this admirable narrative. From a Chicago...

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

"The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions, and to all people, experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes into oneself." —Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

"Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news." —Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

"Utopia signifies not the unrealizable, but the unrealized. Yesterday’s utopia could turn into today’s reality." —Théodore Monod

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

"Images contaminate us like viruses...They are not informative images which inform us in the sense of feedback, and of comprehension, but in the sense of the epidemic, in the sense of contamination." —Paul Virilio

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

"It is, in fact, impossible clearly to distinguish economic war from information war, since each involves the same hegemonic ambition of making commercial and military exchanges interactive." —Paul Virilio

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

"All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it…The great stroke of luck for the military class’s terrorism is that no one recognizes it. People don’t recognize the militarized part of their identity, of their consciousness." —Paul Virilio

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

"When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution...Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress." —Paul Virilio

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Delighted to publish Ann Lauterbach's "Prelude & Consequence" in BIG OTHER today! It's a marvelous poem where shifting clauses generate and disrupt meaning within a world of historical rupture and uncertainty. bigother.com/2026/09/18/p... Cc: @bigothermag.bsky.social

bigother.com

Prelude & Consequence, by Ann Lauterbach

1. Looming the dark riddle repeated harbor sky an episode gradual but less than as if scooped from blue neither recollected nor answered as if a laminate hovers over the dark ridd…

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

"I write, as I said before, to untie myself, to stand clear. To extricate an absence, The ultimate hush of language, (fricative, verb, and phoneme), the silence that turns silence off." —Charles Wright

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

R.I.P., Annie Dillard, one of the great writers of attention, astonishment, and wakefulness, a lyrical contemplative who spent her life teaching us and showing us how to look harder, see more, and remain open to the mystery of being alive. bigother.com/2026/09/16/r...

bigother.com

R.I.P., Annie Dillard

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

bigother.com

R.I.P., Annie Dillard

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Next time someone says you're getting "carried away" with the language in your writing, tell them, "Well, how else is it supposed to happen?"

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

When a politician says "Let me be clear," get ready for some deliberate obfuscation.

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

History repeats itself but with minor revisions and worse consequences.

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

"Every word written is a victory against death." —Michel Butor

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

"It is salutary to maintain a space for the foreign. It is an expression of friendliness that makes it possible to become other to oneself." —Byung-Chul Han (Images: René Magritte's Not to Be Reproduced (1937); The Double Secret (1927); and Decalcomania (1966))

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

"The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder." —Virginia Woolf

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

"Strong people don’t need strong leaders." —Ella Baker

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

"If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art." —Arnold Schoenberg

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

It’s satire, of course, but what I remember about that time was the fear, grief, and flags everywhere, the country fracturing into hate, rancor, scapegoating, Islamophobia, militarism, surveillance, and permanent emergency—and, yes, the bipartisan blind bloodlust. theonion.com/americans-fo...

theonion.com

Americans Fondly Recall 9/11 As Last Time Nation Could Unite In Bloodlust

WASHINGTON—As they reminisced 20 years later about a devastating and historic national tragedy, Americans reportedly took note Saturday of how the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were the last time the cou...

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

The Cassandra-industrial complex: predict catastrophe, miss the deadline, move the deadline. Anxiety, but make it a content strategy. Doesn’t need to be right—just scary enough to sell subscriptions. Every year is the year everything falls apart. Please subscribe.

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Never forget the false WMD pretexts that helped launch the War on Terror: 900,000+ direct deaths, millions more from indirect consequences, millions displaced, and trillions squandered. And generations still bear the cost of wars sold on lies. costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/human?...

costsofwar.watson.brown.edu

Human

Costs of War research examines the human toll of U.S. military operations and spending, for U.S. service members, veterans, military contractors, and allies; and for civilians killed and displaced.

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

"But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions." —D. H. Lawrence

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

"Wrong life cannot be lived rightly." —Theodor W. Adorno

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

"Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark." —Agnes de Mille

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

"Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth." —Theodor W. Adorno

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

bigother.com

Announcing the Deadline and Guidelines for the 2026 Big Other Book Awards!

We are excited to announce the deadline and guidelines for the 2026 Big Other Book Awards! This marks the eighth annual presentation of the awards, which aim to recognize excellence in liter…

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

"The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us. There is the same interchange between these two worlds as there is between one art and another, migratory passings to and for, quickenings, Promethean liberations and discoveries." —Wallace Stevens

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

"I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go." —Anaïs Nin (Image: Alex Grey's Seraphic Transport Docking on the Third Eye)

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Sometimes getting from point A to point B means going backward through the alphabet—Z, Y, X—and sometimes it means admitting that "alphabetical thinking," which is to say, linear or procedural thinking, the tyranny of assumed order, etc., was the problem.

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

We were outraged that a billionaire’s yacht failed to answer a distress call, though it was reportedly the nearest vessel. Fair enough. But how many distress calls do we hear every day and decide are not ours to answer?

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." —Elizabeth Appel

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I’ve long loved Ann Lauterbach’s poetry—its restless intelligence, linguistic experimentation, and refusal of conventional ways of making meaning—so you can imagine how delighted I am to soon be publishing one of her poems in BIG OTHER. www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ann-la...

poetryfoundation.org

Ann Lauterbach

Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

“We live in illusion, the appearance of things, but there is a reality and we are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That’s all there is.” —Kalu Rinpoche

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

bigother.com

Announcing the Deadline and Guidelines for the 2026 Big Other Book Awards!

We are excited to announce the deadline and guidelines for the 2026 Big Other Book Awards! This marks the eighth annual presentation of the awards, which aim to recognize excellence in liter…

030

John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

"The Church says: The body is a sin. Science says: The body is a machine. Advertising says: The body is a business. The body says: I am a fiesta." —Eduardo Galeano (Image: Alex Grey's Transfiguration, 1993)

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John Madera @johnmadera.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

"I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness." —Simone Weil

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