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Dubyedee

@wdclarke.bsky.social
848 followers 229 following 879 posts

Writer. —PhD English UWarwick 2009, pubbed on Thomas Pynchon —Two novels with @coronasamizdat.bsky.social For now, not here much...active at goodreads.com/wdclarke wdclarke.org (reviews, crit, pol economy) Ontario, Canada

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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
The camera kinda underplays it, but I paused halfway up (L: down, R: wonky uphill) the steepest and highest hill in our already steep township ostensibly to give you some fall colours, but really to catch my breath
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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Avis is only no. 2 in rent a cars So we try harder
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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
It's... petering out, then?
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Andrea Kaston Tange @aktange.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Horrendous. It's already hard enough to write a book, get an agent & sell a book. And now authors have to worry their unpublished mss are being fed into the stealing machine to generate blurbs, while real artists lose jobs in favor of AI-slop covers & the next gen of editors don't learn the trade.
wired.com
Book Publishers Are Quietly Using More AI. Staff Are Revolting
Workers at three major publishing houses tell WIRED that LLMs are being used for publicity, cover art, back cover copy, and emails, as some execs push junior staff to champion the tech.
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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Agreed! I tried to do my bit to raise its profile writing a lengthy appreciation of The Asset Class over here: 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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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
With the spate of new trade books about data politics & too late capitalism, I fear this one might be getting lost in the shuffle. As important as Big Tech & Silicon Valley VCs are, you can’t understand the present without attention to the restructuring of capital around fund managers after 2008.
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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Symposia should limit themselves to 42 gallons of wine, else... consequences.
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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
When I was 12, a large nurses'conference my dad was attending (the only family holidays we got) rented all of Disneyland for an evening. I think we went on space mountain, the only real attraction, 20 times or more.
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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Grasp, compréhension; Understand, verstanden: With the Socratic elenchus or dialectical question-answering, embodied beings strive, via an agon or wrestling with the metaphors they live by, to grasp (lay hold of), body forth a dynamic knowing-space from/under which to stand
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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Not the author's argument, but) this is also why AI summaries are not, and will never be the same thing as the *experience* of Plato's philosophical text or other work of art... (fr Thomas Cooksey's book, Plato's Symposium, a Readers' Guide)
Plato did not choose to writea treatise, but to create a work of
He is not transmitting a doctrine that Can be reduced to a
series Of Wise maxims to be memorized and taken away as if they
Offered in the spirit Of traditional Wisdom literature. In a
Similar fashion, Say that We understand the Pythagorean
Theorem Simply because We have the formula or
even the Steps in the proof. the Steps and understand-
ing them are quite different. Rather, by creating a work Of art,
part narrative, part dramatic, Plato engages us in a more Visceral
process, the Vanous parts contributing to the impact Of the
Whole. We Can no more consider that We have grasped the
Symposimn by skipping Over the earlier speeches and paraphras-
ing what Socrates or Diotima says, than we Can say that ue have
experiencx•d the impact of Shakespeare's Hamler by skipping
straight to aet five. Diotim'fi metaphor Of initiation is impor-
tant. We must go through a process Only then might we grasp
what we are to understand.
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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
002
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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
"folly often mistook itself for wisdom, ignorance gave itself airs of knowledge, and selfishness, turning its eyes upward, called itself religion."
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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
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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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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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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Time will tell! I so hope it returns (as coining it my one claim to fame!!)
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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
link and the book in question: wdclarke.substack.com/p/wemmick-ya...
"From the Number 1 Bestseelling author, Yanis Varoufakis: Another Now: Dispacthes from An Alternative Present" (Book Cover)
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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
Novella in question: "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton" (Not at all like Silas Marner, this is very frequently drily funny, a continual, uncorseted delight—as was Jane Austen's own irrepressible debut, Northanger Abbey)
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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 · 30/08/2026
On First Reading Forster’s First Novel wdclarke.substack.com/p/on-first-r...
wdclarke.substack.com
On First Reading Forster’s First Novel
Notes Toward A Necessary, Future Re-reading
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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
☝️(From Oliver Stallybrass's Intro to Forster's debut novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread) 👇(A Room With a View)
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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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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
It's really good.
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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
n. b. I discovered this book via the redoubtable @doughenwood.bsky.social 's essential Behind the News on Berkeley Public Radio, and recommend beginning your Private Equity journey there: kpfa.org/episode/behi...
kpfa.org
The private equity racket | KPFA
Hettie O’Brien, author of The Asset Class, on the private equity racket—who they are, what they do
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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
AI Tide of Shit
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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 · 20/08/2026
From the ashes of the classics, the phoenix of the beautiful (?) —Curtis White, On Resistance (2026 @fictioncollective2.bsky.social )
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Dubyedee @wdclarke.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Eyes
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We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into
four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live
The first category longs for the look of an infinite number
of anonymous eyes, in other words, the look of the public.
That is the case with the German singer, the American actress,
and even the tall, stooped editor with the big chin. He was
accustomed to his readers, and when one day the Russians
banned his newspaper, he had the feeling that the atmosphere
was suddenly a hundred times thinner. Nothing could replace
the look of unknown eyes. He thought he would suffocate.
Then one day he realized that he was constantly being fol-
lowed, bugged, and surreptitiously photographed in the street.
Suddenly he had anonymous eyes on him and he could breathe
TEE
again! He began making theatrical speeches to the microphones
in his wall. In the police, he had found his lost public.
The second category is made up of people who have a vital
need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless
hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are happier than the
people in the first category, who, when they lose their public,
have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room Of
their lives. This happens to nearly all of them sooner or later.
People in the second category, on the other hand, can always
come up with the eyes they need. Marie-Claude and her
daughter belong in the econd category.
Then there is the third category, the category of people
who need to be constantly befcxe the eyes Of the person they
love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people
in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will
close, and the room will go dark. Tereza and Tomas belong in
the third category.
And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the cate-
gory of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are
not present. They are the dreamers.
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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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