Dear visitor, if you take the trouble to read : I apologize for all the bad, syrup-thick blog prose here. Man is it bad, so much of it. I wish hereby to take responsibility and express regret for many wrongs committed by keyboard.  — pdb

H ere is a nice little Latin phrase, and rare too, (one can’t be too recherché or brief in one’s Latin, it’s getting so common) …

That’s Poe in full smirk, ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’ — parody it might have done me good to come across sooner than I did, some years back now.

Quare id faciam I pulled from one of Catullus’ better-known little verses, encountered in low-level Latin courses in college. Embarrassing, yes, that I borrowed it in the first place (albeit without much pretension; just liked the excised snippet for itself) twenty-odd years ago. More embarrassing that I’m kind of using it as a handle still !

Well, I’m kind of attached to it still — what can I say? Not every dumb thing you do when young has to be repudiated utterly.

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Briefly

21 Jan 2021updated : 28 Sep 2022

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I’ve made a little push to add some blog functionality in the last couple of days here — something I’d been side-track scheming for a few months without getting to. In a strict sense, you could say, it’s a separate blog, but the practical end is that I have a  …

Business

9 Dec 2020updated : 14 Dec 2020

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In May this year I stepped for the first time, in a formal way, into the labor organizing world, joining the National Writers Union. I’m not primarily a writer at present (nor aim to be) and by and large in my working life haven’t had writing-centric roles as employee, so  …

Among the Nazis

11 Oct 2020

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A lot of us are thinking more than we might’ve once been used to about fascism these days, and I’m no exception. I was already thinking about the subject a good deal — partly through my part in a modest, sort of oddly enduring project called Solidarity Hall, which has  …

Abolition & freedom

1 Oct 2020

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Below, an excerpt from a podcast-produced interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore by Chenjerai Kumanyika for The Intercept, from June. I didn’t learn of it until a few days ago (via another, recent, with Mariame Kaba). So it wasn’t in mind when I wrote that long June post, of course, but  …

Credit

2 Aug 2020

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I’ve just learned of Christian Wiman’s ‘All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs,’ published in January, in catching up on recent episodes of the Commonweal podcast. This little poem goes too well with the previous public-facing post for me to forgo a mention. It’s too short a thing, for that  …

now on 3 of 14 pages