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mpallen.bsky.social

@mpallen.bsky.social

154 followers 570 following 118 posts

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

A Frank Norris reference in the New York Times!

OPINION
JAMELLE BOUIE
The Railroads Were Once the Octopus That A.I. Is Now

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Screenshot of: Amy Ash
@lolennui.bsky.social
(me making fun of your crop rotation idea and thereby holding our people back another 5000 years) jeff thinks the beans have to take turns Imao
Aug 6, 2023 at 11:38 PM

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

A restaurant where every customer is John Malkovich

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

This is not what vouching is—this is a different form of misconduct (which they did) from vouching (which they also did).

Boutros told U.S. District Judge April Perry that while attempting to secure an indictment, prosecutors had dismissed jurors who disagreed with the charges - a form of prosecutorial misconduct known as vouching

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Anxiety

I'm having a real day of it.
There was
something I had to do. But what?
There are no alternatives, just the one something.
I have a drink,
it doesn't help—far from it!
I
feel worse. I can't remember how I felt, so perhaps I feel better.
No. Just a little darker.
If I could
get really dark, richly dark, like being drunk, that's the best that's open as a field. Not the best,

but the best except for the impossible pure light, to be as if above a vast prairie, rushing and pausing over the tiny golden heads in deep grass.
But still now, familiar laughter low
from a dark face, affection human and often even—

motivational? The warm walking night wandering
amusement of darkness, lips
and
the light, always in wind. Perhaps that's it: to clean something. A window?

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

“une personne indécrottable” this online French course is teaching me so much.

Exact
Dans « indécrottable », on retrouve le mot « crotte », qui signifie « excrément ». Cela fait donc référence à une crotte dans laquelle on a marché et que l’on n’arrive pas à enlever de sa chaussure.

Autre signification : une personne indécrottable est quelqu’un qui persiste dans ses défauts ou ses erreurs.

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

From a Survivor

The pact that we made was the ordinary pact of men & women in those days

I don't know who we thought we were that our personalities
could resist the failures of the race

Lucky or unlucky, we didn't know
the race had failures of that order and that we were going to share them

Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special

Your body is as vivid to me
as it ever was: even more

since my feeling for it is clearer:
I know what it could do and could not do

it is no longer
the body of a god
or anything with power over my life

Next year it would have been 20 years
and you are wastefully dead
who might have made the leap
we talked, too late, of making

which I live now
not as a leap
but a succession of brief, amazing movements
each one making possible the next
[1972]

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 10/01/2026

Yet if I should get married and it's Connecticut and snow
and she gives birth to a child and I am sleepless, worn,
up for nights, head bowed against a quiet window,
the past behind me,
finding myself in the most common of situations
a trembling man
knowledged with responsibility not twig- smear
nor Roman coin soup -
O what would that be like!
Surely I'd give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus
For a rattle a bag of broken Bach records
Tack Della Francesca all over its crib
Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib
And build for its playpen a roofless Parthenon -

Gregory Corso (from “Marriage”)

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

Foreword
'Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,' such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. 'Humbert Humbert, their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of the District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client's will which empowered my eminent cousin to use his discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of 'Lolita' for print. Mr. Clark's decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work ('Do the Senses make Sense?') wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed.

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

The cover of Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas depicting a piece of soap by a drain

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

This pleasant tale is like a little copse:
The honyed lines do freshly interlace To keep the Reader in so sweet a place, So that he here and there full-hearted stops;

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

I keep hearing that objections to the garish White House decorations are just *aesthetic,* but aesthetics matter to politics; aesthetic revulsion against Trump is an expression the ethos of civic republicanism captured so well here

"Whenever democratic states degenerate from those noble republican virtues which constitute the chief excellency, spring, and even basis of their government, and instead of industry, frugality, and economy, encourage luxury, dissipation and extravagance," Joel Barlow, a poet, politician and later United

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

Nests of golden porridge shattered in the silky-oak trees,
cobs and crusts of it, their glory-box;
the jacarandas’ open violet immensities
mirrored flat on the lawns,
weighted by sprinklers; birds, singly and in
flocks
hopping over the suburb, eating, as birds
do, in detail
and paying their peppercorns;
talk of ‘the good life’ tangles love with will
however; if we mention it, there is more to say:

- Les Murray, “Equanimity”

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

AI leading to incredible developments in American historiography

Gemini AI overview : “There were no "British" students at Harvard during the War of 1812 because the term
"British" would have referred to people from Great Britain, not the colonists in America. At that time, anyone from the American colonies was technically a British subject, so Harvard students were all considered "British" in that sense, though they were colonists in the Americas. During the War of 1812, American…”
:

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

The cover of a copy of Partisan Review from 1962.

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

Left: The real opening of Charlotte’s Web
Right: Some AI sludge beginning “It was a bright sunny morning on the farm”

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

“This is a work of nonfiction. All characters and descriptions of events are the product of the author's imagination” *whose* imagination?

Left:
Copyright, 1952, by E.B. White
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of the book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Right:
Copyright © 2025
All rights reserved
This is a work of nonfiction. All characters and descriptions of events are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental. The information in this book expresses the author's views and opinions and does not necessarily represent the views of any organization.
First published January 2025

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

Left: The real ToC for Charlotte’s web; example: XVIII. The Cool of the Evening
Right: The AI Table of contents; example: Chapter 8: The True Meaning of Friendship

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

Butlerian jihad when?

Left: The cover of EB White’s Charlotte’s Web
Right: The cover of something purporting to be “Charlotte’s Web by Ella Blue”

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 19/10/2025

cover of the 1st ed. of ‘Arsène Lupin: Gentleman Cambrioleur by Maurice Leblanc

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 20/09/2025

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

When my third daughter was an infant, I could place her against my shoulder and she would stick there like velvet. Only her eyes jumped from place to place. In a breeze, her bright-red hair might stir, but she would not. Even then, there was profundity in her repose.

When my fourth daughter was an infant, I wondered if her veins were full of ants. Placing her against a shoulder was a risk both to her and to the shoulder. Impulsively, constantly, everything about her moved. Her head seemed about to revolve as it followed the bestirring world.

These memories became very much alive some months ago when-one after another—I had bear cubs under my vest.

- John McPhee, “Under the Snow”

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

A quotation from the Boy of Winander Episode:

And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill:
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

A quotation from The Intimations Ode:

Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

Text in a Google AI summary box reading:
The quote "In which the a little while" refers to the title of a short poem by George Eliot called "The Little While". The poem explores themes of fleeting time and the importance of making the most of it. George Eliot, the author of
'The Little While," was a prominent Victorian writer known for her novels, particularly "Middlemarch". She chose to write under a pen name because she believed women writers were not taken seriously.

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

I am prepared to offer test-prep services for a reasonable fee

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

never believe that reading hundreds of detective novels is a waste of time. Peter Wimsey’s disquisition on the English attitude to return addresses helped me ID unknown letter writer in the archive

The Englishman, in his bluff, hearty way, is content that under such circumstances the post-office should violate his seals, peruse his correspondence, extract his signature and address from the surrounding verbiage, supply a fresh envelope and return the whole to him under the blushing pseudonym of 'Hubbykins' or 'Dogsbody' for the entertainment of his local postman. But the Frenchman, being decorous, not to say secretive, by nature, thinks it better to preserve his privacy by providing, on the exterior of the missive, all the necessary details for the proper functioning of this transaction.

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