Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 27/09/2026“A friend. What is a friend in a world where any friend may be a lover at a new phase of the moon?” — Le Guin, THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS 000
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 27/09/2026Of prophecy in Ursula K. Le Guin’s THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS: “the gift is perhaps not strictly or simply one of foretelling, but is rather the power of seeing (if only for a flash) everything at once: seeing whole.” 041
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 21/09/2026“His long, clean, yellow teeth appeared and disappeared . . . he smiled again and every tooth seemed to have a meaning, double, multiple, thirty-two different meanings.” An observant envoy arrives at an alien court in Ursula K. Le Guin’s THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS 130
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 19/09/2026Sven Lindqvist, in A HISTORY OF BOMBING, on the insatiable nature of war planning: “Four years after Hiroshima, where new injuries from radiation were still being discovered; four years after the firestorms in Japanese cities; four years later, 800 new Hiroshimas were being planned.” 052
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 19/09/2026An opposition M.P. questions war strategy: “The government spokesman calls him ‘incorrigible,’ but still refrains from answering — a parody of keeping Parliament informed in a democracy. In a dictatorship such as Hitler’s, no government spokesmen whatsoever were available.” A HISTORY OF BOMBING 100
Reposted by NoctambulateBill Kristol @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social · 19/09/2026White House correspondents, D.C. bureau chiefs, and media execs: The German government expelled Dorothy Thompson from the country in August 1934. She's remembered and respected today for her important coverage and analysis over the next decade of the German regime. Be like Dorothy Thompson. 7544211047
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 19/09/2026Early in A HISTORY OF BOMBING, Sven Lindkvist writes of the antique distinction between ‘bellum hostile’ (war between knights of the same race and religion) and ‘bellum romanum’ (war against subject peoples, i.e. colonial war). Brutal colonial war tactics and technology were soon applied to all war. 120
Reposted by NoctambulateCritical Digital Media @digital.therourke.net · 19/09/2026OpenAI and Microsoft knew they were starting a ‘doom loop’ for the webtheverge.comOpenAI and Microsoft knew they were starting a ‘doom loop’ for the webOpenAI and Microsoft knew they were driving us toward Google Zero, and they did it anyway. 0219
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 19/09/2026World War I’s costly, stagnant trench warfare leads to World War II’s indiscriminate bombing. A strategist quoted in Sven Lindqvist’s A HISTORY OF BOMBING: “Aircraft enables us to jump over the army that shields the enemy government, industry, and people and strike directly at the opposing will.” 010
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 18/09/2026“During the First World War, the term ‘military objectives’ was so flexible it scarcely provided any shelter anywhere; during the Second World War it was expanded further, until the entire globe was considered to be one giant military objective.” Sven Lindqvist, A HISTORY OF BOMBING 020
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 15/09/2026“This book is a labyrinth with twenty-two entrances and no exit” opens Sven Lindqvist’s compact but horrifying A HISTORY OF BOMBING, which sardonically excavates modernity’s genocidal imaginary — widespread fantasies of aerial mass destruction waiting to be enabled by technology. 120
Reposted by NoctambulateMatthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 14/09/2026I honestly don’t think most people outside of the DC area understand how cruel and punishing Trump’s conduct toward the city is and has been. I think at some level the perception is that it isn’t a city at all, not like Minneapolis or Chicago. 12810
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 13/09/2026“What a state I’m in. I’m muddy inside and out.” Set in fascist Italy, the incessant fog, rain, and mud of Beppe Fenoglio’s A PRIVATE AFFAIR is both atmospheric and psychological. He addresses a memory: “Don’t you know that if I stop thinking of you, you’ll die instantaneously?” 030
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 13/09/2026“Imagine a sea of milk . . . we stamped our feet to make sure we were on solid ground and not on a cloud.” Spent the weekend with Beppe Fenoglio’s spectral, fog-bound wartime novella A PRIVATE AFFAIR (1962). “You had the optical illusion of chasms forming in front of you.” 011
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 07/09/2026Sentenced to three months solitary confinement in a damp, verminous cellar beneath the military post’s kitchens, Guyotat occupies his mind by reconstructing from memory scenes from novels, films, and paintings and greedily overhearing pop tunes from transistor radios. IDIOCY 020
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 07/09/2026Arrested for refusing dubious orders, Guyotat’s military superiors seize his writer’s notebooks — full of explicit first hand observation — and the charges quickly shift to subverting the morals of his unit: “Once a cutthroat’s accomplice, I now pass for a pornographer.” IDIOCY 010
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 07/09/2026Conscripted into the French army during the brutal suppression of colonial Algeria, Pierre Guyotat finds psychological refuge when assigned to a radio unit: “I learn Morse code. Its signals, rightly understood, recall the logic of sounds in music and poetry.” IDIOCY 120
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 05/09/2026“Slaughter my I, live without. Without restraint, the senses alone, animal. Exist without being.” — Pierre Guyotat, IDIOCY 110
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 05/09/2026“The idea I have been pursuing since the chilly outdoors, as I sit on this wicker chair, with hot and cold sweat on my brow and hands without reaching a conclusion, a straight and level idea at last, adjacent distractions cast aside, an idea of Being — human, animal, nature, object.” Guyotat, IDIOCY 020
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 05/09/2026“ . . . think all things at once, forge ahead in even the smallest idea with all my being . . .” Reading Pierre Guyotat’s memoir IDIOCY, on his desire as a youth to flee from life’s cultural, political, and economic constraints into raw being. 020
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 05/09/2026In Pierre Guyotat’s IDIOCY, a green parrot in the Paris apartment of an aged dowager is starved for speech to imitate, “holding forth from its repertoire of sounds gleaned from the hushed apartment: the old woman’s cough, the creaking floors, the paintbrush twirling in its pot, my footsteps.” 020
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 02/09/2026“Presenting himself as a pure man, Raoul had come to believe his own phrases. At first merely calculating and vain, his passion had become sincere. He had begun by lying; he ended by telling the truth.” In Balzac’s A DAUGHTER OF EVE, the serpent is caught in its own coils. 120
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 01/09/2026Spent the morning in the Parisian salons and debauched demimonde of Balzac’s short novel A DAUGHTER OF EVE, which redresses the scriptural imbalance between the mythic vividness of Adam’s sons, Cain and Abel, and the textual void that surrounds Eve’s unnamed daughters. 110
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 01/09/2026In A DAUGHTER OF EVE, the seducer’s trap is sprung: “He played the serpent’s part well, and dazzled the countess’s eyes with the brilliant colors of the fatal apple. Marie left the ball in the grip of a deep remorse that felt almost like hope.” 010
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 01/09/2026In Balzac’s A DAUGHTER OF EVE, the monotony of prolonged marital bliss: “The perfect happiness that the first woman experienced in the Earthly Paradise gave the countess the nausea that prolonged use of sweet things produces; it made her wish to encounter some wolf in the sheepfold.” 010
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 30/08/2026“To my husband, I am the coat-rack of his luxury, the figurehead of his ambitions.” The misery of what would today be called a “Trophy Wife” in Balzac’s 1839 A DAUGHTER OF EVE. Balzac, citing Napoleon: “Nothing here below can be had without payment; everything has its price.” 130
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 29/08/2026The joylesssly strict education, verging on the punitive, of the two sisters in Balzac’s A DAUGHTER OF EVE: “Imposed upon the girls like a yoke and presented in its most austere forms, Religion wore out these two innocent young hearts, who were treated as if they were criminals.” 120
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 29/08/2026Balzac’s A DAUGHTER OF EVE opens in “a cold, perfectly orderly boudoir, as spotless as if it had been put up for sale, [with none] of that mischievous, capricious disorder that hints at happiness. . . . two women were weeping, and everything in the room seemed to be suffering along with them.” 030
Reposted by NoctambulateÉireann @eireannmor.bsky.social · 28/08/2026usually try not to repost w/o alt text but this is exactly what it says in the post text and it is so perfectly mn that I can't not 14613
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 26/08/2026“To live at all means to be under stress. It is only natural, then, that conflict should produce in us very early an intermittent yet powerful longing to escape from our lives” — Roger Shattuck, THE FORBIDDEN EXPERIMENT (1980) 000
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 26/08/2026Shattuck on the atavistic lure of the Wild Boy of Aveyron: “At times we wish to withdraw into a hole, into ourselves. . . . At such moments, any return to an earlier and simpler life attracts us, especially the kind of existence we believe animals have.” THE FORBIDDEN EXPERIMENT 100
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 25/08/2026Remarkable and disturbing episode in Shattuck’s THE FORBIDDEN EXPERIMENT where the teacher Itard sternly demonstrates to the gentle, former ‘Wild Child’ Victor the meaning of injustice as part of elevating the “man plant” into a truly “moral” being (and state subject in utero). 000
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 24/08/2026In Roger Shattuck’s THE FORBIDDEN EXPERIMENT, the human estate as prisoners of culture and society: “For we are all that kind of prisoner from birth: some part of us knows that in order to be human we need the restrictions we dream of throwing off.” 000
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 23/08/2026Shattuck of Victor, the ‘Wild Boy’ of Aveyron: “He was harmless. . . . From many material and moral points of view, he must be seen as better off and better behaved than, say, a child living in the lower depths of a big European city of that period.” THE FORBIDDEN EXPERIMENT 000
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 23/08/2026In Shattuck’s THE FORBIDDEN EXPERIMENT, the ‘Wild Boy’ Victor falls under the control of the newly founded (in 1799) Society of Observers of Man. “He had passed the first fundamental test: survival. . . . His situation seemed to call for the most basic response: live and let live.” 100
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 23/08/2026“As it turned out, the world seemed to be waiting for the Wild Boy — and then scarcely knew what to do with him.” Starting Roger Shattuck’s THE FORBIDDEN EXPERIMENT, on the history of the ‘Wild Boy of Aveyron’ who emerged naked and self-sufficient from the woods at the dawn of the 19th Century. 120
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 22/08/2026Finished Henry Williamson’s TARKA THE OTTER on the flight back yesterday. The otter’s ten hour battle for survival through a rural landscape strewn with metal debris, ringing with Tally Ho’s and the furious barking of hounds, traumatically recalls the trench warfare of the just-concluded Great War. 110
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 20/08/2026“The sickly trout had been dying for days. Tar from the road, after rain, poisoned it. A rat ate the body the next day and Old Nog [the heron] speared and swallowed the rat three nights later. The rat had lived a jolly and murderous life, and died before it could fear.” TARKA THE OTTER 020
Reposted by Noctambulatesean guynes @guynes.bsky.social · 18/08/2026Nerds everywhere! Vincent's book on DBZ is out today! 033
Reposted by NoctambulateJerry Boyle @jecboyle.bsky.social · 18/08/2026Records are fraught with danger. Santa is making a list and checking it twice, while Metatron puts everything in your Permanent Record. 1121
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 18/08/2026Up early at the Cape house with coffee and Henry Williamson’s ragrowstering TARKA THE OTTER (1927), a vivid, binocular chronicle of the seamless interplay of life and death — animal, plant, and human — in the Devon estuary country. 180
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 16/08/2026“Every August there was a dance, with programmes embossed with an otter’s mask in blue—the men wearing white kid gloves, tail-coats, tall wing collars and white ties with stiff starched shirts. We danced in the Assembly Rooms, the floor swung on hidden chains.” The Otter Hunter’s Ball in TARKA 000
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 16/08/2026“Now it is time to go. Upon the river lie the last sunset hues. In colder air moving down the moor the stony tongues of the water rise suddenly loud under the oaks . . . “ Starting Henry Williamson’s 1927 TARKA THE OTTER on an early flight to Boston for our annual Cape Cod visit. 010
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 15/08/2026Finished Caroline Fraser’s unremitting MURDERLAND, a study of the postwar spawn of American serial killers that can also be read as a case study in teratology — the toxins in the earth that create monsters. Its Pacific Northwest locus makes it deeply resonate with David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks.” 150
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 13/08/2026Inspired by the "crazy walls" of police investigations, in which red string connects push-pinned evidence, Caroline Fraser's grisly MURDERLAND maps corporate environmental crime to outbreaks of sexual violence, exposing fault lines of geography, governmental failure, and social psychology. 130
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 11/08/2026Said farewell to Dave Mathis, bartender and co-proprietor of our longtime northwoods hangout Trailways Inn, seen here experimenting with making cocktails from Easter peeps. Dave coached youth boxing and there was a 10 count salute on a ringside gong to send him off to his next bout in the afterlife 040
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 08/08/2026“It takes two great American family fortunes to build a city of serial killers: the Rockefellers and the Guggenheims . . . .” Starting Caroline Fraser’s MURDERLAND, on the nexus of environmental damage and psychological disorder. 031
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 05/08/2026"Retire? The word implied a separation between him and what he did. There wasn't. There never had been. That was why he was a good thief. "Pepper cursed and picked up his beer. He pulled jobs but they weren't jobs –– they were him." Colson Whitehead, COOL MACHINE 120
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 05/08/2026In COOL MACHINE, Colson Whitehead's OG hood Pepper looks askance at a stock ticker newly erected in midtown Manhattan: "AMER T&T 62 1/4 EAST KODAK 72 3/4 EXXON 37 5/8 GULF OIL 42 1/4 GTE CORP 46 5/8 –– like money mumbling to itself. . . . He took a swig of Pepto. He kept a bottle in his pocket." 000
Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 03/08/2026In Colson Whitehead’s COOL MACHINE, the satiation, the little death that comes post-heist: “The job’ll be done, one way or another, and then there’s what I call ‘a moment of radiant calm’ in the aftermath. I’d live there forever if I could, basking in the afterglow of the heist.” 000
