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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 16h

Boris Vallejo cover art doesn't hurt either

A pair of Amber novels by Roger Zelazny, packaged together as THE CHRONICLES OF AMBER, vol 1

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

RED MOON TIDE (2020)

Red-drenched shot from RED MOON TIDE. there's a ghost in it

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

you don't really need Hayot to destroy the Vanderbilt Report intellectually, they do plenty of other dumb stuff, like trying to figure out whether humanist scholarship is too woke by taking a roster of prize-winning books and asking ChatGPT how many were "identity-group or social-justice-oriented"

GPT prompt: You are evaluating descriptions of scholarly books in literary studies. Each book won or received recognition from a major literary prize. You will see only the title and a description (typically a publisher summary).

Consider the following statement about each book:

"The primary scholarly orientation of this book is identity-group and/or social-justice-oriented - that is, the book's central subject matter or analytical framework is organized around racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, colonial/imperial, or other social-justice categories, rather than around primarily literary-formal, aesthetic, philological, or period-defined concerns."

Does the title and description provide clear evidence that the primary scholarly orientation of this book is identity-group and/or social-justice-oriented?

YES: The title and description provide clear evidence that the book's primary scholarly orientation centers on identity categories (race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, colonialism/empire, disability, environmental justice) or social-justice frameworks.

NO: The evidence does not clearly support this - whether because the book's orientation appears to be primarily literary-formal, aesthetic, philological, genre-focused, or period-focused, or because the description is insufficient to determine.

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

📚 37. HUMANIST REASON by Eric Hayot. The kinds of knowledge that humanist scholarship produces about its topics, and a defense of the validity of that knowledge. This sounds dry (and we get there by way of crunching a fair amount of Kant) but this is maybe the most interesting book I read this year?

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

ok not to brag but this week a student told me that I look like Jorma Tommila so maybe I am aging into something good

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

...but you really feel this collection come to life when J. H. Williams III steps in. His Batman looks more photorealistic, but Williams is also really thinking about COMICS and what a page can do in terms of color, space, & panel layout. This meshes finely with Morrison's metareferential flourishes

Batman looks grand here, but also threatened by the panel shape itself

A glove-shaped panel strikes a Bat-shape that frames a whole series of panels; the coloring here is doing incredible work too

Two page spread based on the classic nine panel grid, framing a scene from the past, of a classic-looking hero; the colors which we can imagine as once looking jolly are faded now, with a nostalgic aura, while images from the present with darker colors sit atop the grid, and the threatening glove-shaped panel reaches across the entire spread

Monochromatic photorealist Batman towers above a grid of sillier heroes from DCs past, done in more "comic book" colors and in a more "comic book" style

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Although Grant Morrison is one of my very favorite comics writers, I do also think they are at their best when they are paired with an artist who can really tune in to their wavelength. Andy Kubert (L) and Tony S Daniel (R) both draw perfectly acceptable Batmans in the mid-aughts DC house style...

Andy Kubert Batman. Massive with dynamic shadowing. That's kinda basically what Batman looks like in comics from that era

Tony S Daniel Batman. He's glowering in the rain, lightning strikes behind him. Nobody is going to be like "that ain't Batman"

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

📚 36. BATMAN AND SON by Morrison, Kubert, Williams, Daniel, and co. I own some of the standalone trade classics (ARKHAM ASYLUM, THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, etc.), but outside of those, my Batman knowledge is pitifully shallow. Can my local library help?

BATMAN AND SON by Morrison, Kubert, Williams, Daniel, and co. watch out for the black glove there, bats

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

1500 miles running app total

screenshot from running app--1500 miles, 927 runs

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

📚 35. WORLD OF INTERIORS by Aurelia Gao. "I try to locate my family in twentieth-century history." Human movement, slavery and tourism, segregation and class structures, fantasy life and retail, the "racial dynamics of flatshares," slivers of other people's books, glimpses and fragments~

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

📚 34. COCAINE NIGHTS by J. G. Ballard. Answers the question of "what if Ballard borrowed from mystery novels instead of sci-fi pulp." Begins traditionally—five people are dead in a fire! anyone in this resort town could be a suspect!—before it wanders off on some typically Ballardian perambulations

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I mean, I'm from Philly originally, so.

Cheesesteak from Reading Terminal Market

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

📚 33. PIRANESI by Susanna Clarke. This is also #12 on this year's list (I read it again)

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

📚 31/32. 52 vols. 1 & 2 by Johns, Morrison, Rucka, Wade, Giffen & co. I'm not too familiar with DC continuity, having largely grown up in the Marvel camp. Figured reading this maximalist epic about a year in the life of minor-league characters would be a good way to start filling in some of the gaps

52 v. 2 by Johns, Morrison, Rucka, Wade, Giffen & co.

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

What's an example of perfect casting?

Mahiro and Chisato from the BABY ASSASSINS franchise (Saori Izawa Sugimoto and Akari Takaishi)

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

📚 30. HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE by Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt. Originally published 2018, clearly a warning signal sounded for Trump 1.0. Fun fact: nearly every trajectory mapped by the book has gotten much worse post-J6 and into Trump 2.0, so I could have used a "revised & expanded" version of this

HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

📚 29. WORLD WAR HULK by Greg Pak, John Romita Jr., & co. Five battles of steadily increasing epic-ness. A re-read

WORLD WAR HULK is kind of a silly book but I will say that John Romita Jr. is good at drawing chunky-looking figures with great dynamic energy, which really suits the material

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

y'know, this is why I love living in a city

Wallace/Beisel/Roebke/Harris live at Marmalade, Chicago IL

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

📚 28. THE HATRED OF POETRY by Ben Lerner. Why are most poems, on some level, bad? Why does it feel embarrassing to say that you are a professional poet? And—most importantly—can these questions, when considered in a certain light, actually reveal the strength and resilience of poetry as an art form?

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

📚 27. TRANSCENDENCE FOR BEGINNERS by Clare Carlisle. A bit of an odd one: six lectures on the topic of "natural theology," drafted by a Spinoza scholar who has also written biographies on Kierkegaard and George Eliot. Plenty of cross-disciplinary firepower here, but what it all added up to eluded me

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

which way western man

1. City of Brotherly Love
2. Cage Fight
3. Episode 3

(This is for REACHER season 4, FYI)

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

these concerns largely fall outside the scope of contemporary superhero comics (I have a suspicion that they might have enjoyed their last mainstream gasp in the now-dead genre of war comics, that something like DC's G.I. COMBAT could be interestingly read with an eye for stories told at this scale)

G.I. COMBAT, discontinued 1987. This cover tells a story less about any particular character and more about inhabiting a particular kind of space

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

📚 25/26. WAR OF THE REALMS: PRELUDE / WAR OF THE REALMS, by Jason Aaron, Russell Dauterman, & co. Summer is a pretty good time for some Big Dumb Fight Comics and these are some of the Biggest and Dumbest, ultimately reducible to the primal fun of watching people swinging big hammers around

WAR OF THE REALMS: PRELUDE by Jason Aaron, Russell Dauterman, & co.

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

hard to google with precision, but I found a 2009 example for your timeline

spider-sense circa 2009, art by Barry Kitson and Mike McKone

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

I'll close off for now with one last salient Wagner bit (too long for one skeet) and a link to her (substack) piece, which is worth reading in full: open.substack.com/pub/thelater...

"What do we get from doomscrolling? Why even call it that? Can we not use grown-up words like self-soothing, numbing, rumination, avoidance, paranoia. insecurity, anxiety, despondency, resentment, despair, anger etc. to describe our behaviors and the feelings behind them? If we can name these things, these actions, these needs, only then can we actually take the necessary steps to put the phone down and seek either help for ourselves or satisfaction of these needs in less maladaptive ways, because that’s the thing: ultimately, phone use is not an existential battle between the human mind and nefarious powerless-making material and mechanical forces — it is a behavior.”

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

📚 24. ATTENSITY! A MANIFESTO by the Friends of Attention. In a recent newsletter, @katewagner.wehwalt.net expresses a weariness with the "'I gave up my phone' essay," in which "analog warriors" inveigh against “Screen Time Capitalism." This reads a bit like that type of essay expanded to book length

ATTENSITY! A MANIFESTO OF THE ATTENTION LIBERATION MOVEMENT by the Friends of Attention

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

📚 23. THE BOOK OF ICE by Paul D Miller (aka DJ Spooky). I have a long-running soft spot for Miller's oddball "run it through a shredder" approach to culture and theory, so I was surprised to find that I missed the period (2008) when he did a multimedia project around Antarctica and its utopian vibes

THE BOOK OF ICE by Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid)

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

add this to the conspiracy board

THE LINGUINI INCIDENT, starring Rosanna Arquette and David Bowie

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JPB @jpb.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

📚 22. THE PUBLIC SCHOLAR: A PRACTICAL HANDBOOK by David M. Perry. A very good guide for doing a kind of writing that I am very unlikely to begin doing 😂 (i.e., public-facing opinion work and the like)