iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 17/09/2026

hey bébés—now taking signups for the online class i've been calling, in my head, "make story happen." it's especially for any new fanfic/fiction writers, or anyone who wants a gentle (re?)introduction to the patterns of creating/finishing stories. we'll write together, share work, make new friends!

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 16/09/2026

i know this is an odd bit to quote, probably, but it's always been one of my very favorite passages from the writing life, which is (self-evidently) foundational: "it was an interesting kettle. life is so interesting." it is! and hers was. thank you, annie dillard.

the secretaries said they would give me another chance

that is how things were when i got there.

why people want to be writers i will never know

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 11/08/2026

i think about this interview with the late bill knott possibly more than anyone should. i think about him quite often. www.memorious.org?id=140

quotation from the poet bill knott which is somewhat bleak shall we say

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 07/08/2026

also coming this fall: beginning fiction, also lyric poetry workshop (suitable if you're already been in one of my courses, but very beginner friendly)—dates/times TBA, tell a friend! zoë the tabby cat will be there

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 07/08/2026

preview of the double album, coming soon to a very small press near you (september 1)

covers for 2 books of poem-shaped objects

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 05/05/2026

shoutout to the film student who lost her entire MIND over moonlight. just went batshit on canvas, i could not love her more. picked up every single thing jenkins was throwing down, typed out a whole-ass taylor swift song about it, bolded and ANNOTATED its relevant lyrics. girl thank u for my life

mahershala ali as juan and Alex R. Hibbert as little in moonlight dir. barry jenkins

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 02/05/2026

new salinger novel discovered???

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 07/04/2026

"it takes two or three generations to do what i tried to do in one." per the late poet bill knott, the failure is mine alone.

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 06/04/2026

me: darn it, i forgot the deadline and now it's too late to apply and yet again fail to receive an NEA individual artist grant the NEA: hey that's okay! not a problem! after decades of funding thousands of writers including most of your friends and teachers we just got rid of those, hope that helps

you are not authorized to access this page. you never were. freedom!!!!!!

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 16/02/2026

not sure why i spent a half-hour making this except i can no longer assign writing as either pedagogy or assessment, and i don't know how to teach reading and thinking and watching films without it, so i'm watching the slow-motion trainwreck of a job i've had since 1998 and i'm kind of mad about it.

the perfect storm of how we broke higher ed in the exact kinds of ways that would leave undergrads vulnerable to billionaires who don't care about their minds and souls but just want to sell AI and LLMs no matter who gets trampled on the way. it's like climate catastrophe in that we probably couldn't have engineered all this more precisely if we'd tried.

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 29/11/2025

We must hurry if we are going to dance. Oh, we have time, I think. —till there’s no time left. That’s what time means. When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore. Then we will dance. Is this a waltz? It will serve. [Sir Tom Stoppard 1937–2025]

the ending of Arcadia, 1993, by tom stoppard. requiescat in pace.

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 15/10/2025

four by jean valentine [via sean singer]

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 24/08/2025

was anyone going to TELL ME that kahlo and o'keeffe partied together in new york, visited each other afterwards, and kahlo at least seems to have had a pretty intense crush on o'keeffe, or did i really have to find that out myself today via A FB POST

kahlo's one surviving letter to o'keeffe, currently housed at the beinecke. o'keeffe was having a quote nervous breakdown, and kahlo writes, "i can't write in english all i would like to tell, especially to you." according to one of rivera's assistants they went out at night in nyc and got drunk and wound up singing to each other in a ladies' toilet???? WHAT????

on page 2 of the letter, kahlo adds, "I thought of you a lot and never forget your wonderful hands and the color of your eyes.…i like you very much Georgia." she visited her in bermuda (?) and later told a friend they couldn't have sex bc o'keeffe was too weak??? and o'keeffe visited her in méxico later??? why am i ALWAYS the last to learn about these things???

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 29/05/2025

(Brodsky's own translation, which is arguably worse; he and Weissbort fought bitterly about these matters)

Not that I am losing my grip; I am just tired of summer.
You reach for a shirt in a drawer and the day is wasted.
If only winter were here for snow to smother
all these streets, these humans; but first, the blasted
green. I would sleep in my clothes or just pluck a borrowed
book, while what’s left of the year’s slack rhythm,
like a dog abandoning its blind owner,
crosses the road at the usual zebra. Freedom
is when you forget the spelling of the tyrant’s name
and your mouth’s saliva is sweeter than Persian pie,
and though your brain is wrung tight as the horn of a ram
nothing drops from your pale-blue eye.

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 28/05/2025

"Freedom is when you forget the tyrant's middle name," [Joseph Brodsky, from the end of "Part of Speech," Poetry Magazine, March 1978]

Brodsky's translation of his own poem:

Not that I am losing my grip; I am just tired of summer.
You reach for a shirt in a drawer and the day is wasted.
If only winter were here for snow to smother
all these streets, these humans; but first, the blasted
green. I would sleep in my clothes or just pluck a borrowed
book, while what’s left of the year’s slack rhythm,
like a dog abandoning its blind owner,
crosses the road at the usual zebra. Freedom
is when you forget the spelling of the tyrant’s name
and your mouth’s saliva is sweeter than Persian pie,
and though your brain is wrung tight as the horn of a ram
nothing drops from your pale-blue eye.

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 28/05/2025

like, look at him, he's vivid and memorable and this happens in two seconds of screentime (when the trailer ended this way in the theatre, i was the only person laughing hysterically, because i'm terrible)

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 28/05/2025

cixous on tsvetaeva: "she declared her love to the people she met the way one declares war…her letters are very violent, but also sad and funny."

im not typing this out dm me if you want to know what it says

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 25/05/2025

(this is what he looked like around the time i knew him, here with his dear friend derek. later i sought out derek and he was also my teacher for a year, because i thought: with joseph dead, who would be the next best thing?)

derek and joseph but i don't know why they're standing by a bus

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 25/05/2025

85 years ago my late teacher was born. he died a year younger than i am now, a "cardiac cripple" he called himself. he loved cats and they loved him back, like ballet dancers and lesbians. he was miserable, tragic, contemptuous, magnetic, unforgettable. Иосиф Александрович Бродский, 5.24.40–1.28.96.

joseph with a cat (mississippi i think?)

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 22/05/2025

"The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts."

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 20/05/2025

well this seems unfortunate in...several ways, really

joy wang from everything everywhere all at once

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 16/05/2025

perhaps the most dazzling piece of academic straightwashing i've ever encountered, from an unnamed editor's preface to the al-andalusian anthology, ca. 1976, tr. from arabic. allow me to paraphrase: "these poets using masculine pronouns are definitely referring to women. we know this bc it is true…"

no way am i typing this out it's too annoying

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 11/05/2025

oh GOSH they're so GORGEOUS? here is zoë/zozo, a small but evil torbie

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 11/05/2025

i didn't even know i HAD a "g••gle watchlist" and why does it have these four films, three of which i've already seen (though @mattzollerseitz.bsky.social you're clearly responsible for the first one)

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 31/03/2025

THANK YOU THANK YOU <3 <3 <3

cake with purple balloons (??) reading "Chinese for Happy Birthday" (instead of 生日快乐

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 28/03/2025

tomrrow [sic] are my birthday. here is a tiny figurine of jesus that someone put on top of the elevator at the courthouse, no i don't know why either.

tiny plastic jesus on top of an elevator

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 23/03/2025

a delightful sampling lol

AI declaring there are bees inside computers

AI asserting the congo is larger than the states (with an overlaid map showing differently)

AI opining about kashrut and getting that wrong too

AI enjoys the films of steven spielberg even the ones he didn't direct

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 23/03/2025

welp never assigning tarkovsky again bc every single essay on stalker (1979) went for the well-chewed AI bubblegum. "long takes" "wide shots" "themes of faith, existentialism and spirituality" me [on my knees sobbing]: ONE SHOT. PLEASE. JUST TELL ME ABOUT A SHOT, JUST A SINGLE SHOT I AM BEGGING YOU

did a single person describe the most famous shot in the film? nope. no one did. Alexander Kaidanovsky lying in a canal filled with water while a black dog looks at him anxiously. everything is tinted green.

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 23/03/2025

"who are the five writers that [sic] made you" well…i can tell you the ones who didn't make me? since i haven't ever amounted to much, through absolutely no fault of theirs & all of mine joseph brodsky lucie brock-broido cd wright norman dubie sarah kane anne carson plath tsvetaeva woolf dickinson

a quotation by natalie goldberg, from long quiet highway, about teachers

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 22/03/2025

happy agnes martin's birthday i love her

some quotations from agnes martin's book "writings" dm if u want them, for example "in my best moments i think, life has passed me by, and i am content" or "we cannot even imagine how to be humble"

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 19/03/2025

"Find me a home where no one can ever come. I like talking to you, but to no one else in the whole world." Virginia Woolf to Lytton Strachey, September 1925

woolf's beautiful handwriting, in her trademark purple italic

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 19/03/2025

it's spring break and i have 54 essays to mark and a book review to write, so obviously this is the most organized my t-shirt drawer will ever be, look upon my works ye mighty and despair

drawer full of t-shirts gratifyingly arranged in rainbow order

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 19/03/2025

haven't been watching late night bc i can't laugh about any of it, but just sampled kimmel and i see he's still in the running for first host to be rounded up—never know whether to lib out and reluctantly proud (esp when you look back on e.g. the man show) or more like JAMES DO YOU EVEN WANT TO LIVE

kimmel in mid-riff: "next up, the holocaust museum! very one-sided right now, but he [current president]'ll fix that soon!" JAMES STOP TALKING

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 11/03/2025

me: good news first or bad news? also me: good news me: spring break is ELEVEN DAYS LONG also me: YAY me: but you have to grade 800 squillion midterm essays also me: … also me: … also me: what about wine, is there any wine me: there is in fact wine. there are carbs. and pajamas. also me: YAY me: YAY

a calendar showing almost 2 whole weeks of spring break! and purim and some other stuff idk

a to-do list showing 48 papers which is gonna be more like 60 once the late papers come in

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 02/03/2025

carolyn forché, "ourselves or nothing," from the country between us (1981).

There is a cyclone fence between
ourselves and the slaughter behind it
we hover in a calm protected world like
netted fish, exactly like netted fish.
It is either the beginning or the end
of the world, and the choice is ourselves
or nothing.

carolyn forché

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 02/03/2025

robert rauschenberg with two others (susan weil?), and jasper johns glaring daggers at them, ca. 1961. someday the inevitable biopic will be truly unhinged

rauschenberg, two people, and jasper johns glaring daggers at them

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 01/03/2025

cady noland, "shuttle" (1987) 23 in x 133 ¾ in x 18 in (58.42 cm x 339.73 cm x 45.72 cm) metal cart, car parts

cady noland's conceptual sculpture, "shuttle." a long steel bar is set into a white wall, with a rolling cart threaded into it, and loose black license plate frame, among other car parts included in the sculpture

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 01/03/2025

anyway don't take my 2€ for it, listen to the grauniad: "vance finally got the fight he wanted to pick." www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

There is a thing in Washington that many people understand but that few will say: that the Trump administration was looking for a pretext to ruin its relationship with Ukraine, and that the canned messaging that followed the Oval Office feels oddly coordinated and premeditated.

“That was a train wreck by design,” said Sam Greene, a professor of Russian politics at King’s College London. “The quiet conversation since Munich has been about setting Ukraine up for a fall. If a real deal was going to be unattainable, right, that somebody would need to take the blame for it, and it would likely be the Ukrainians, right?”

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JSA Lowe @jsalowe.com · 28/02/2025

Cady Noland, "Gibbet" (1993-94), aluminum, wood, fabric, stocks: 60 1/4 x 56 1/4 x 8 in (153 x 142.9 x 20.3 cm), stool: 21 x 21 x 11 1/2 in.

cady noland conceptual sculpture, "gibbet," 1993-94. i can't describe it well but dm if you want to know more about its existence and history

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