iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

A map of Canadian fiction is just getting going, where you can discover novels by where they are set...look for, or request, your favourite titles here: canadian-literary-map.netlify.app

Outline Map of all Canadian provinces and territories with title "Canadian Literary Map"

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I wrote 7.5k words (in what I call an "Appreciation") on Hettie O'Brien's book, The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself wdclarke.substack.com/p/the-asset-...

wdclarke.substack.com

The Asset Class by Hettie O’Brien (an Appreciation)

How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I wrote 7.5k words (in what I call an "Appreciation") on Hettie O'Brien's book, The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself wdclarke.substack.com/p/the-asset-...

wdclarke.substack.com

The Asset Class by Hettie O’Brien (an Appreciation)

How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself

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Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The AI Productivity Delusion: As with previous tech revolutions, it is natural to focus on AI's net effects: Will it create more than it destroys? But unlike previous eras of creative destruction, the real question this time is, “Create more of what?” www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/a...

project-syndicate.org

The AI Productivity Delusion

Yanis Varoufakis sees the technology converting markets into fiefs and profits into rents, ending capitalism as we know it.

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Hope is the thing with seed pods

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Generals playing the braggadocio at the outset (George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life)

History, we know, is apt to repeat herself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume. From the time of Xerxes64downwards, we have seen generals playing the braggadocio65 at the outset of their campaigns, and conquering the enemy with the greatest ease in after-dinner speeches. But events are apt to be in disgusting discrepancy with the anticipations of the most ingenious tacticians; the difficulties of the expedition are ridiculously at variance with able calculations; the enemy has the impudence not to fall into confusion as had been reasonably expected of him; the mind of the gallant general begins to be distracted by news of intrigues against him at home, and, notwithstanding the handsome compliments he paid to Providence as his undoubted patron before setting out, there seems every probability that the Te Deums66 will be all on the other side.

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Humanities denial/Engineer's Disease

Humanities denial makes it easy to ignore inconvenient facts, or remain blissfully unaware of them in the first place.

Humanities denial is enabled—and enables—another affliction that’s endemic within the tech industry: “engineer’s disease,” the belief that expertise in one field (usually in STEM) makes you an expert on everything else too.50 Or, put another way, there’s only one thing that’s actually difficult, and you already know it, so everything else must be easy. Software developer Maciej Cegłowski explains the source of this hubris:

As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you.… But as anyone who’s worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Taxing the billionaires out of existence would be the most humane thing we could do for them—and us. (Eisenhower did it: why can't we?) (from Adam Becker's 2025 book, More Everything Forever)

Such criticism is easy, though. While I do genuinely believe that creating a complete vision of a good future isn’t something people do well—it’s certainly not something I do well—it’s also a convenient position for me to hold while I’m taking potshots at the leaders of Silicon Valley and their kept futurists. So here’s a specific policy proposal, one that’s even endorsed by a major science fiction author. “There should be no such thing as billionaires,” Kim Stanley Robinson tells me. “The Midas touch is not a happy thing—if you touch people and they turn to gold, then this is a serious barrier to intimacy. So it would be doing them a favor to tax them out of existence. The Republican Congress of 1953 under Dwight Eisenhower was pretty good at this—incomes over $300,000 a year were taxed at 92 percent for the overage. This was a society that understood the rich to be parasites and fools. We live in a stupider time, but we could change that.”78 The fact that our society allows the existence of billionaires is the fundamental problem at the core of this book. They’re the reason this is a polemic rather than a quirky tour of wacky ideas. Without billionaires, fringe philosophies like rationalism and effective accelerationism would stay on the fringe, rather than being pulled into the mainstream through the reality-warping power of concentrated wealth.

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Taxing the billionaires out of existence would be the most humane thing we could do for them—and us. (Eisenhower did it: why can't we?) (from Adam Becker's 2025 book, More Everything Forever)

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Corona\Samizdat Press @coronasamizdat.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Please be advised that since the untimely passing of Commandante Rick Harsch the new website is www.csindiepress.com and hopefully will open in November.

csindiepress.com

corona\samizdat

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Corona\Samizdat Press @coronasamizdat.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

My name is Draxtor. Rick's wife gave permission to restart c\s. I recently deleted all my socials so you gotta ask AI if I'm qualified to run this 😆 . I will keep everyone posted on progress. Please also follow instagram.com/csindiepress Thank you for your patience!

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Corona\Samizdat Press @coronasamizdat.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

website done = proof of concept! patience please: the earliest we start reopening the corona\samzidat store and make the back catalogue available will be NOVEMBER. Fingers crossed!

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I’ve considerably expanded this piece to include some ruminations on the perfect book for that questing, questioning 12-year-old in your life (in you), @yanisvaroufakis.bsky.social ’s Another Now (2020)…

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

An unfecundated egg (George Eliot's first novella, Scenes of Clerical Life (1858))

And now, here is an opportunity for an accomplished writer to apostrophize calumny, to quote Virgil,62 and to show that he is acquainted with the most ingenious things which have been said on that subject in polite literature.

But what is opportunity to the man who can’t use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity. So, as my memory is ill-furnished, and my note-book still worse, I am unable to show myself either erudite or eloquent apropos of the calumny whereof the Rev. Amos Barton was the victim. I can only ask my reader, did you ever upset your ink-bottle, and watch, in helpless agony, the rapid spread of Stygian63 blackness over your fair manuscript or fairer table-cover? With a like inky swiftness did gossip now blacken the reputation of the Rev. Amos Barton, causing the unfriendly to scorn and even the friendly to stand aloof, at a time when difficulties of another kind were fast thickening around him.

“Scenes of Clerical Life” by George Eliot

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Dispatch from the caveat emptor dept... On Resistance: A Manifesto by Curtis White (2026) (Book Review) wdclarke.substack.com/p/on-resista...

wdclarke.substack.com

On Resistance: A Manifesto by Curtis White (2026) (Review)

Dispatch from the caveat emptor dept...

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Bad tea + Horrible France + cranky mom ☛ Italy! Beauty!! (E.M Forster's journey of sublimation maybe not quite what Nietzsche had in mind with his dungheap-of-life ☛ floral- bouquet-of art prescription?)

ON 3 October 1901 E. M. Forster, then twenty-two, set out
with his mother on a prolonged visit to Italy. 'Start as bad
as Can well be imagined,' his diary records: by Dover his
mother had a headache, and at 12.20 a.m. they arrived at
Calais to find that the through train to Basle had been can-
celled, so that they had to go via Paris instead. Paris was fog-
bound and apparently cabless, there was a row with the
station people over tickets, no buffet was open at the Gare de
l'Est, they had to walk back to the Gare du Nord CM.'S
head now awful ; and when they finally escaped from Paris
the country was frightful, the tea on the train disgusting as
well as expensive. At the German frontier there was more
trouble with officials, and when they reached Basle their
heavy luggage had vanished. Next day it caught up with
them, but 'M. had a splitting sick head-ache, & couldn't
eat or drink', and the departure for Lucerne moved Forster
to record: 'The porters always grumble at what I give, so
shall try less.' Lucerne provided a breathing-space, but in the
St Gotthard tunnel everyone smoked and the carriage was
boiling hot', so that at Como, two days later, 'still we have
not recovered from the St Gotthard tunnel ' , not to mention
the appalling custom house examination at Chiasso. It was
an irritable couple who took tickets to Milan.
If that last sentence sounds vaguely familiar, the explana-
tion will be found on p. 91, where an almost identical
Sentence rounds off another paragraph-long travellers' tale
of woe. Even before Como, however, Forster had managed to
forget his mother for long enough to note that ' at Lugano
the sun was setting, and the whole lake filled with light.
Everything began to look like Italy.' And despite the horrors
of those first six days — and even these could be put to
artistic use — Forster had embarked on the most fruitful
journey of his life: out of it sprang his earliest stories and
two of his first three novels. He himself has expressed, more

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Meiselman: The Lean Years, by Avner Landes (Novel Review) wdclarke.substack.com/p/meiselman-...

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Laughter is the Measure. (Marginal note from EM Forster's debut novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread)

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Somewhat revised, a tad expanded: 4.5k words on the tyro (modernist) novel as psychomachia: wdclarke.substack.com/p/reading-th...

The Writer in The
Voyage Out, by
irginia Wool
The Tyro Novel as Psychomachia
AU That Is Solid Melts into Air
WDCLARKE.SUBSTACK.COM

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Toscha 🍂 @poemless.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

You've got to read this.

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Brían Hanrahan @hanrahanistan.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

here you have some excrements of an aged mind. now hard. now loose. and always undigested (Montaigne, "On Vanity")

tr. Donald Frame

Who does not see that I have taken a road along which I shall go, without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world? I cannot keep a record of my life by my actions; fortune places them too low. I keep it by my thoughts. Thus I knew a gentleman who gave knowledge of his life only by the workings of his belly; you would see on display at his home a row of chamber pots, seven or eight days' worth. That was his study, his conversa- tion: all other talk stank in his nostrils
Here you have. a little more decently, some excrements of an aged mind. now hard. now loose. and always undigested.

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Any other Curtis White fans out there? What are your faves? Here are mine...(semi-) ranked! (Spirit of Dis the tops, all to the right of Science Delusion TBR still) (I'm nearly done the new one... and it's a nice revisiting of some perennial themes.)

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

(L.) New novels quite literally just in: Two more galley-slaves' galley yarns from @galleon-books.bsky.social (R.) Galley slices: Galley slaves & Friendz

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself by Hettie O'Brien, is v well executed, (carefully researched, well-written). Essential reading, if you want to know what's happened to your neighbourhood apartment block, vet practice, care home, water supply...

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Curtis White' latest book (quoting Stuart Hall): Realism is (now) the ideological "of course"

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Don't know why I conflated the press (FC2) of which Curtis White was a founding member with his current publisher, @melvillehouse.bsky.social, but I did!

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Terry Eagleton, writing in 1988, anticipates Twitter... (Ideology: An Introduction)

it would seem that there is a kind of slipperiness or duplicity built into ideological language, rather of the kind that Immanuel Kant thought he had discovered in the nature of aesthetic judgements.23 Ideology, Althusser claims, ‘expresses a will, a hope or a nostalgia, rather than describing a reality’;24 it is fundamentally a matter of fearing and denouncing, reverencing and reviling, all of which then sometimes gets coded into a discourse which looks as though it is describing the way things actually are. It is thus, in the terms of the philosopher J.L. Austin, ‘performative’ rather than ‘constative’ language: it belongs to the class of speech acts which get something done (cursing, persuading, celebrating and so on)

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

First page has me going, yes-yes-yes, yes, please.

INTRODUCTION
PSYCHIC TREASON
1
am living in a world that no longer exists.
I once lived in a vital world whose only limit
was no limit, "free frame of reference," as the Haight
Street Diggers thought. It was a world of beatniks,
Buddhists, hippies, free-jazz poets, pacifists, wander-
ing guitar soloists, postmodern fabulists, soulful an-
archists, and collaborative maunderers. It was also a
world of close readers, deconstructionists, and afi-
cionados of the beautiful, all performing in the heady
atmosphere of refusal, a general strike of the Imagi-
nation.
It was the rebirth of the romantics, bohemians,
Poets with a capital P, and Oscar Wildean dandies. In
the face of the work ethic, bohemians old and new
had the "right to be lazy," as Marx's son-in-law Paul
Lafargue declared, or the right to "do your own
thing," as freak culture would later agree. Of course,

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Fiction Collective Two @fictioncollective2.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Curtis White co-founded FC2 in 1989, and his newest book, ON RESISTANCE: A MANIFESTO, available now from @melvillehouse.bsky.social , includes reflections on Fiction Collective and FC2 among other organs of resistance! Read an excerpt! fc2.org/the-fiction-...

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

[1/2] One recent and, erm, "authorit"-ative critical text might assert otherwise, but I say that the secret of criticism does not lie as much in the ability to form Judgements as to set aside one's judgements &affinities so that one can recognize originality (&new affinities)...

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The Lamentation of Natasha Stagg volume0.substack.com/p/the-lament...

"The book could have been more purposeful,
structured, dissectable. I hear disruptive, sticky,
urgent. I remember, in my creative writing MFA
workshops, the words people most often used to
discredit someone's story draft: pat, heavy-
handed, earnest. None of us wanted, then, for
our manuscripts to end up in airports or adapted
into miniseries."
VOLUME O and Natasha Stagg
The Lamentation of Natasha Stagg
VOLUMEO.SUBSTACK.COM

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Tom Bowden @motnedwob.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

In memory of Rick Harsch and the press he founded, corona\samizdat: links to some of the reviews and author interviews I’ve done for my column at the ever-estimable Book Beat. First up, W. D. Clarke and his novel White Mythology (2nd review down). tbowden.substack.com/p/w-d-clarke...

tbowden.substack.com

W. D. Clarke's White Mythology

The authors of corona\samizdat, part 1: Reviews of books published by Rick Harsch, along with interviews with their authors

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Brían Hanrahan @hanrahanistan.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

give others riches, power, and station / 'tis all on me a usurpation Jonathan Swift, "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D." (1731) www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45272/...

Vain human kind! fantastic race!
Thy various follies who can trace?
Self-love, ambition, envy, pride, Their empire in our hearts divide.
Give others riches, power, and station,
"Tis all on me a usurpation.
I have no title to aspire;
Yet, when you sink, I seem the higher.

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Dylan Reid @dylanreid.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

LOL - there are 3 bookstores in Lunenberg

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

RIP, my mischievously sweet and generous brother

$Press D @EquusPress I.M. RICK HARSCH We are heartbroken to learn of the death of Rick Harsch, & bid farewell to a magnificent writer, a fearless publisher, & one of the warmest, brightest, most generous people we have had the privilege to know. Through Corona\Samizdat, Rick conducted his tireless literary operations from Izola, Slovenia. From that unlikely hub he unleashed on the unsuspecting world some unruly, uncompromising, & criminally overlooked writing with an enthusiasm entirely his own. His solidarity with fellow independent presses was equally uncompromising. In his wonderfully digressive YouTube videos, he devoted time & attention to several Equus books, discussing them with the wit & infectious passion that made him such a rare reader & advocate for a common cause. In October 2024, he joined us in Prague for the Prague Microfestival, bringing with him that unmistakable mixture of erudition, mischief, outrage & immense human warmth. We were enormously fortunate to visit Rick in Izola last February, to see the place from which Corona\Samizdat carried out its improbable & essential work, & to enjoy his company, conversation, & boundless hospitality. Rick was one of the great independents: a writer and publisher who understood literature not as a career structure or marketplace, but as a form of selfless friendship & stubborn collective life. His loss leaves the small-press community immeasurably poorer, and all of us who knew him bereft. Our love and deepest condolences go out to his family, friends, writers, readers, & the entire Corona\Samizdat community. The mission continues, as it must. But without Rick, it will be a lonelier one. Ave atque vale.$

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

RIP, my mischievously sweet and generous brother

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Two fledglings on flight training, momma scolding them/me from the tree above

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Q: Truth is stranger than fiction? A: Nothing is stranger than fiction (but…) —Martin Amis's 2020 novel, Inside Story

are almost touchingly naive. One thing literature
can do, and has always done and will always go on
doing (with no particular exertion), is conjure up
characters stranger than Trump. As for satire: while
turning him into art, would Swift, Pope, Dickens,
Evelyn Waugh, or Don DeLillo, say, feel that there
was nothing to add?
...In real life — in society, in civilisation — we bow to
the old rule, No freedom without laws. Novels and
stories aren't like that: in fiction there are no laws
and at the same time freedom is limitless. Fiction is
freedom. Mm, I suppose that's what some people
find so terrifring, early on, about the blank sheet of
white paper: write anything you want; no one's
stopping you.
Still, I've come to an awkward conclusion: there
are certain things that fiction must broach with
extreme caution, if at all, certain sizable and
familiar zones of human existence that seem
naturally immune to the novelist's art. At the least,
fictional successes, in these areas, are dismally rare.
Just the three things, by my count (though there
may be more) — and that's not many things.
One. Dreams. This would be the least

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

The Atlantic (“Clickbait, yes, but in such large portions”): single-handedly saving Reading Culture, one interminable hate-read at a time...

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

There's your bog standard end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it doomscrolling, and then there's death-of-the-novel-meets-death-of-the-reader doomscrolling. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

theatlantic.com

The End of Reading Is Here

Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

The history of the novel, the history of music as (World Cup?!) football match (in Milan Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed (1993)) [1/2]

The Two Halves
The history of European music covers about a thou-
sand years (if I take as its beginnings the first experi-
ments in primitive polyphony). The history of the
European novel (if I take as its start the works of
Rabelais and Cervantes) covers about four centuries.
When I consider these two histories, I cannot shake the
sense that they developed in rhythms resembling, so to
speak, the two halves of a soccer game. The caesuras,
or halftime breaks, in the history Of music and in that
of the novel do not coincide. In the history of music,
the break stretches over a big part of the eighteenth
century (the symbolic apogee of the first half occurring
in Bach's The Art of Fugue, and the start of the second
half in the works of the earliest Classical composers)
the break in the history of the novel comes a little
later: between the eighteenth and the nineteenth cen-
turies—that is, between Laclos and Sterne on the one
side and, on the other, Scott and Balzac. This asyn-
chronism shows that the deepest causes governing the
rhythm of the history of the arts are not sociological or
political but aesthetic: bound up with the intrinsic
nature of one art or another; as if the art of the novel,
for instance, contained two different potentialities (two
different ways of being a novel) that could not be
worked out at the same time, in parallel, but could be
worked out only successively, one after the other.
The metaphor of the two halves of a game came to
me some time ago in the course of a conversation with
a friend and does not claim to be at all scholarly; it is
an ordinary, elementary observation, naively obvious:

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Morris Collins @morriscollins.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

from my essay on Kafka & Scholem & also an inspiration for my novel The Tavern at the End of History, which asks what use are our accounts of our experience. What can the novel say/what can be expressed? 1/

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Morris Collins @morriscollins.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Kafka's birthday is prob. a good time to repost this essay about Kafka, Jewish mysticism, and the difficulties of knowing how we should be living...

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

I wrote about the life of the artist in Virginia Woolf's novel, The Voyage Out open.substack.com/pub/wdclarke...

open.substack.com

Reading the Readers in The Voyage Out, by Virginia Woolf

The Tyro Novel as Psychomachia

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Most novels... (Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed)

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

A superb meditation on how our imaginations mysteriously lead us on, through lives non-identical with those visions of ourselves which we cannot help but harbour (+ a phantom skeleton key to @morriscollins.bsky.social 2nd novel, The Tavern at the End of History?!) substack.com/home/post/p-...

substack.com

Kafka’s Angel

In a letter to Walter Benjamin from Jerusalem in 1934, Gershom Scholem included a poem he had written about the relationship between Kafka’s The Trial and Jewish mysticism.

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

On Cory Doctorow' book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (Capsule review & Partial/Tendentious Glossary) substack.com/home/post/p-...

substack.com

The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow

A Capsule review & Partial/Tendentious Glossary

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