Two novels with @coronasamizdat PhD @EnglishWarwick 2009 (published a bit on Thomas Pynchon) For now, not here much...still active at https://xitter.cf/t.co/Yfh913toEA

Al Purdy Country
Joined September 2012
Reposting/transmuting these monitory bits of critical biography as tripartite career-path/lifeplan 🧵: (1) Deliberate self-exposure to the Vico virus
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You all need to understand that there is a well-funded movement to kill Wikipedia as an institution. The dream of an internet that provided universal access to knowledge was a mirage. It threatened too many powerful people, so now we have AI summaries and illiteracy.
Can we also talk about how Wikipedia entries are no longer at the top of a search 😭
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The 17th Brumaire of Louis Quillette
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Gary Amdahl has wisely left SubStack, but has given me permission to re-publish our unending conversation about his latest novel, The Creative Writers (link in reply), from @galleonbooks
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Plato's Symposium: first modern novel?!
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(Source: Plato's 'Symposium' A Reader's Guide by Thomas L. Cooksey ) ((Highly recommended))
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Not (all) still in my list of top-ten faves, but these were the 9 most formative, beginning with the read that catapulted me outta a science degree
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Greenland has a secret function (fr Underworld by Don DeLillo (1999)
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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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I wrote about this distinction at some length here: longform.wdclarke.org/capita… If one has read little of Brenner's or Wood's (or Harvey's) work, it might prove a useful place to start
Replying to @ProfHall1955
The Braudel-Harvey school of capitalist history has a # of strengths, but the Brenner-Meiksins Wood school argues for the useful distinction b/t markets as perennial "opportunity" vs as coercive "imperatives" imposed on all actors by nations 1st to naturalize capitalist relations
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The full Democracy Perception Index 2026 is available at link below; As posted a while back, Israel is the most negatively perceived country in the world, followed by North Korea and Afghanistan. 146165116.fs1.hubspotusercon…
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While #68 is rear-ending #64 in his exploding Pinto
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AI and the Crisis of the AI Author
Great to see this from the Times Literary Supplement. All papers should ban AI writing.
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In the never-completed sequel to Martin Amis's Times Arrow, this is preceded by Michel Foucault's the AI Author Function (in his "What is an AI Author?") and followed by Roland Barthes' "The Death of the AI Author"
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Symposia should limit themselves to 42 gallons of wine, else... consequences.
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(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 Plato's Symposium, a Readers' Guide, Thomas Cooksey)
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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 retweeted
In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.
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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.netlif…
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Dubyedee retweeted
Update: Said "review" ballooned into what I call an "Appreciation": wdclarke.substack.com/p/the-…
Replying to @ProfHall1955
I read this by Hettie O'Brien last month and prepping a review of it now, and though dentistry in the UK was not a focus (Thames Water &c and care homes were, and OMG), she provides a useful potted history to how we got here
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