iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 11h

I was, I believe, 12 when I saw a late Friday showing of “North by Northwest” at the musty cinema in the resort town of my boyhood summers. Rapt, I saw each of the next six screenings and, by Monday, had every scene memorized. x.com/LostInFilm/s...

x.com

Lost In Film (@LostInFilm) on X

Eva Marie Saint (1924-2026)

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 21h

At the close of Kinsky’s melancholy SEEING FURTHER, she returns to the town to see other collective dreams have also evaporated: a tattered circus encampment is now invisible under tall weeds; the bowling alley that was to replace her cinema lies unfinished, spiders having reclaimed the auditorium.

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 23h

“The cinema still retains some mythic quality as a venue for seeing. The more the privatization of experience eats away at our lives, the more fabulous appears a venue where seeing was a collective experience.” Kisnky, SEEING FURTHER

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 23h

Settling back into the city apartment after our western ramble to Colorado and the Tetons. Read Esther Kinsky’s SEEING FURTHER, which narrates a quixotic attempt to revive a forlorn cinema in a small Hungarian border town that itself seems to be shrinking into the surrounding muddy fields.

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 23h

“I watched the cinemas die,” eulogizes Esther Kinsky in SEEING FURTHER. “Some went quickly and others with grinding slowness. They died due to a lack of audience, due to the rampant feeble opinion that it’s enough to watch digitized images flicker across any old screen.”

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

“The suburbs promise space but deliver emptiness” — listening to Daniel Immerwahr’s essay in “The New Yorker” on the effect of property values and the Jeffersonian grid on the American landscape.

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Ten day western driving and hiking ramble, Minneapolis to Wyoming and back

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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

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Of 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.”

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Finding “Left Hand” very interesting and engaging. (Up in the mountains. with scant internet, but will comment further when we descend).

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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

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Sven 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.”

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

[Begging the question, in our own Hegsethian moment, of the exact location of the line between parodic democracy and dictatorship]

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

An 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

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Lindqvist is really good on the “chastisement” element of war ideology.

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Following Lindqvist’s line of thought, in contemporary military parlance, colonial war becomes the “Police Action” in which subject peoples are corrected by a forbearing political “parent.” By their nature, police actions are domestic and thus exempt from the limits of international law.

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Bill Kristol @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

White 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.

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

In Lindkvist’s genealogy, colonial war becomes the model for modern warfare, or ”Total War,” in which the rules of international law either do not apply or are easily bypassed. A HISTORY OF BOMBING

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Early 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.

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

World 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.”

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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

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

“The dream of solving all the problems of the world through mass destruction from the air was already in place before the first bomb was dropped.” Sven Lindqvist, A HISTORY OF BOMBING

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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.

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

High ceiling. Nothing like an overnight bat vigil.

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Reposted by Noctambulate

Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I 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.

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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?”

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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.”

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Sentenced 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

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Arrested 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

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

“Our sergeant instructor, an academic who is a scholar of occultism, illuminism, Rosicrucianism, and vampirism, finally finding someone to speak with, lets me practice, learn as I please.” In Guyotat’s IDIOCY, finding intellectual fellow-travelers among the ranks of conscripts.

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Conscripted 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

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Mine was once more capacious, and operated like a digital form of the old Commonplace Book. The emergence of text mining and digital surveillance caused me to mostly trim it back to books — other peoples’ words.

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

The strict limits also stop me from getting too caught-up in transcription (and spending all my “reading” time typing) which turned into a problem when I tried a similar thing in blog form a decade or so ago.

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

This is good to hear. The quotes and occasional glosses help me think through the books I’m reading more-or-less in real time. And the severe constraints of the format (strict character count, limited editing, instant “publication”) add a puzzle element.

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

“Slaughter my I, live without. Without restraint, the senses alone, animal. Exist without being.” — Pierre Guyotat, IDIOCY

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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

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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.

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

In 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.”

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Matthew Kneale’s “English Passengers,” if you don’t know it, is a very good company — the misfortunes of a a crew of Manx smugglers who have the misfortune to become involved with an evangelical expedition to the antipodes.

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I’ve been carrying around a mass market paperback of that since the 1980s. So maybe time to dig in? I don’t recall seeing another copy listed or in a bookstore. Seems like good autumn reading.

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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.

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Spent 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.

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

In 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.”

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

“The world needs more good readers, not more bad writers.” My feelings exactly.

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Thanks! Just for myself, really. I read through Balzac in the 1990s and am planning a gradual re-read, probably focusing initially on the shorter novels (which I don’t recall as well as the major ones). Taking notes along the way on things that particularly strike me.

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

In 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.”

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Noctambulate @noctambulate.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

My reading of it was in 2009. Feeling the need, now especially, to go back to it.

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