doleful moo of a cow
@oulipien.bsky.social
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B810. The Man who Bit Himself on the Ear. A man explains to his doctor that the wound on his ear (or forehead) is where he bit himself. He explains, "I stood on a chair." Signal: oulipien.12
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oulipien.bsky.social
Connoisseurs of spoonerisms in literature obviously hold the sex scene in Tlooth in high regard, but it's too infrequently remarked how skillful a move it was for Mathews to use "she ceemed exsited too" as the first, and inaudible, spoon
oulipien.bsky.social
No moral narcissism or smugness detected here, thankfully!
oulipien.bsky.social
It is also offensive to people with taste
oulipien.bsky.social
One-day blinding stew
uncleduke1969.bsky.social
salt-n-pepa: *nod approvingly*
Several signs on a door instructing to "Push to lock" without turning the lock.
oulipien.bsky.social
that hike you did on 300ml of water is finally catching up to you
oulipien.bsky.social
someone I actually positively like got a MacArthur! (Craig Taborn)
oulipien.bsky.social
What could possibly be cool about this laconic man in black? Look how disrespectful he is!
Johnny Cash middle finger ad
oulipien.bsky.social
Who, I would like to know, originated the practice of putting this nonsense part of the message in the from part of an email, and how may we arrange for them to be broken upon the wheel?
Game on
Josh Shapiro sounds the alarm about...
Defend Our Courts has been blaring the...
oulipien.bsky.social
call me tantamount to psychotic I guess
oulipien.bsky.social
The long, winding sentences of Louis-Ferdinand Céline … the almost open sadism of Charles Lamb …
oulipien.bsky.social
I guess it does have references to classical music
oulipien.bsky.social
since we're on the subject, and since this line about "brodernism" is odd at best ("yes, these books are largely masterworks, but have you considered that annoying people like them?"), a question: has Perelmutter actually read Wittgenstein's Mistress?

Strangely, the phenomenon I reference—call it brodernism, with apologies for yet another portmanteau—doesn’t end with translated literature. It expands toward works described as “maximalist,” “difficult,” “avant-garde,” “epic,” “excessive,” “oblique,” “speculative,” “experimental,” “modernist,” “postmodernist” and “post-postmodernist.” Though men are not its only practitioners, male writers dominate the corpus, and a tendency for phallic competition underlies the formation’s core texts. These include William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955), Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid (2015), William H. Gass’s The Tunnel (1995), Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories (2005), Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser (1983), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard (1999), Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men (1987), Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh (out later this year), Miquel de Palol’s The Troiacord (2001), Jon Fosse’s works, Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (1982), Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930–43), Mark de Silva’s The Logos (2022), David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy (2006–09), and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971). David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) is rather too mainstream and easily read. 
Most concerning, for me, is that brodernist criticism interprets foreignness itself as “difficult.” The brodernist measures of “challenging” literature are a constrained series of attributes: winding sentences, explicit references to entropy and math and classical music, metanarration, anti-realism, lonely and existential male protagonists, brick-length tomes, cringey and misogynistic sex scenes, the stench of once having read Nietzsche, the words “psychedelic” and “oneiric,” half-hearted genre-play. Kafka, poor
Reposted by doleful moo of a cow
wordsmithgetxo.bsky.social
In an old ad for board game Scattergories in Spain a player was shown flouncing out while anothet said “OK, we’ll accept ‘octopus’ as a pet”.
“Aceptamos pulpo” has now entered the language in the meaning of “that’s a bit of a stretch but let’s go with it just for the sake of argument”.
oulipien.bsky.social
In the words of the great Sidney Morgenbesser, "nu, if they'd made an award like that you'd still be complaining"
Not that long ago, the Nobel was fun. It was a topic of metaphorical watercooler conversations (metaphorical because the watercooler industry cratered after the rise of “alternative seltzers” and also because nearly everyone who cared about it was unemployed) and metaphorical drawing-room chatter (metaphorical because the only people who can afford drawing rooms are venture capitalists who have lost the ability to communicate verbally). In a given year, the prize could be won by an oral historian whose work was necessarily given over to the voices of other people; a writer whose perspective on Serbian culpability in the 1990s was more avant-garde than his boundary-shifting prose; and a self-described “song and dance man” whose first and third-eldest sons produced arguably more deserving work (How High and “One Headlight,” respectively).
oulipien.bsky.social
BE NOT AFRAID
pitchingninja.com
All 8 of the Blue Jays Pitchers from Yesterday (overlay)
oulipien.bsky.social
I actually completely didn't notice
oulipien.bsky.social
I'm not sure I can agree that this is "fine in a lightly used, unclipped and unfaded dust jacket with just a couple small nicks and a bit of spotting along the edges"
According to the catalogue copy, this is a "Fine in a lightly used, unclipped and unfaded dust jacket with just a couple of small nicks and a bit of spotting along the edges" first edition of the recognitions
oulipien.bsky.social
Honestly you could get dozens of cards out of The Recognitions
oulipien.bsky.social
lol it actually comes from Speak, Memory