R.
@sediziosevoci.bsky.social
"No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don't know what I don't see—what I don't fear!"
Crucial passage from Melinda Cooper's Life as Surplus:
December 3, 2025 at 12:48 PM
Crucial passage from Melinda Cooper's Life as Surplus:
This is a vast, sardonic, bleakly disabused narrative of work in two senses, that of the exploitative and degrading waged labor that the working-class narrator undertakes to support himself while he attempts to become a writer, and the labor of writing itself--
November 14, 2025 at 11:26 PM
This is a vast, sardonic, bleakly disabused narrative of work in two senses, that of the exploitative and degrading waged labor that the working-class narrator undertakes to support himself while he attempts to become a writer, and the labor of writing itself--
I work in a building where if I go upstairs they let me take away books for free and here are some of them.
November 2, 2025 at 10:07 PM
I work in a building where if I go upstairs they let me take away books for free and here are some of them.
If you attribute this novel's reductive heteronormativity, rigid sexual polarities, & preoccupation with male penetration as the central experience of life to the unreliable narrator--
October 27, 2025 at 10:59 PM
If you attribute this novel's reductive heteronormativity, rigid sexual polarities, & preoccupation with male penetration as the central experience of life to the unreliable narrator--
Bought this book online from a Pennsylvania bookstore for $8.16 plus shipping; it arrived this week. The bookstore's website noted that the book was signed by the author but did not mention that it was inscribed to Susan Sontag, most--but evidently not all--of whose personal library is at UCLA?
October 24, 2025 at 10:00 PM
Bought this book online from a Pennsylvania bookstore for $8.16 plus shipping; it arrived this week. The bookstore's website noted that the book was signed by the author but did not mention that it was inscribed to Susan Sontag, most--but evidently not all--of whose personal library is at UCLA?
--(Ginzburg later admitted that doing so was a sciocchezza), Franco Antonicelli took it on at the small publisher Francesco De Silva. Dust jacket features an etching by Goya, a study for The Third of May 1808. Pages slightly foxed!
October 3, 2025 at 10:39 PM
--(Ginzburg later admitted that doing so was a sciocchezza), Franco Antonicelli took it on at the small publisher Francesco De Silva. Dust jacket features an etching by Goya, a study for The Third of May 1808. Pages slightly foxed!
This first edition of Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo, his first book (1947), written soon after his return from Auschwitz, arrived at work yesterday from an Italian bookseller and was sent to me to deal with. Quite rare! After editors at Einaudi, mainly Pavese and Ginzburg, rejected it--
October 3, 2025 at 10:37 PM
This first edition of Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo, his first book (1947), written soon after his return from Auschwitz, arrived at work yesterday from an Italian bookseller and was sent to me to deal with. Quite rare! After editors at Einaudi, mainly Pavese and Ginzburg, rejected it--
Whatever deficits Wordsworth may have had in the shapely legs department, he wrote a reply to the wheedling, importuning fanboy letter of DQ (forgivable because of youth, of course) that is a model of kindness, generous forbearance, gratitude to a young admirer, and tact.
September 29, 2025 at 9:48 AM
Whatever deficits Wordsworth may have had in the shapely legs department, he wrote a reply to the wheedling, importuning fanboy letter of DQ (forgivable because of youth, of course) that is a model of kindness, generous forbearance, gratitude to a young admirer, and tact.
Though it is tempting, it would be a mistake to describe this haunted, shining memoir about the Cambodian genocide, intergenerational trauma, and the author's own fatal illness as "miraculous," or to say that it is written with "uncanny grace,"--
September 26, 2025 at 10:32 PM
Though it is tempting, it would be a mistake to describe this haunted, shining memoir about the Cambodian genocide, intergenerational trauma, and the author's own fatal illness as "miraculous," or to say that it is written with "uncanny grace,"--
--the miraculous way penury was always averted by some providential windfall of cash just at the right moment. More pettily, his legs are criticized ("not ornamental"), as well as his careless way with other people's books (cutting pages with a soiled butter knife!).
September 14, 2025 at 11:40 PM
--the miraculous way penury was always averted by some providential windfall of cash just at the right moment. More pettily, his legs are criticized ("not ornamental"), as well as his careless way with other people's books (cutting pages with a soiled butter knife!).
A deeply conflicted memoir, celebratory and yet subtly derogatory of its subjects, whose primary stimulus seems to be a narcissistic injury De Quincey suffered from Wordsworth through the latter's failure to fully appreciate and recompense the selfless devotion of his acolyte.
September 14, 2025 at 11:40 PM
A deeply conflicted memoir, celebratory and yet subtly derogatory of its subjects, whose primary stimulus seems to be a narcissistic injury De Quincey suffered from Wordsworth through the latter's failure to fully appreciate and recompense the selfless devotion of his acolyte.
This collection of writings and reviews by Goffredo Fofi, who died a few months ago at 88, is a rich chronicle of Italian leftist cultural, cinematic, and political life from the boom years of the late fifties through the Berlusconi era of crass acquisitiveness and meretricious display.
September 7, 2025 at 1:39 PM
This collection of writings and reviews by Goffredo Fofi, who died a few months ago at 88, is a rich chronicle of Italian leftist cultural, cinematic, and political life from the boom years of the late fifties through the Berlusconi era of crass acquisitiveness and meretricious display.
Got these for a song at a used bookstore on Baxter St. in Athens, Ga. recently.
September 5, 2025 at 10:48 PM
Got these for a song at a used bookstore on Baxter St. in Athens, Ga. recently.
A spectral séjour through the sepia-tinted spaces of an itinerant childhood passed in a state of vassalage to faintly disreputable parents, neglectful and domineering by turns, who scrouge out a living,--
August 17, 2025 at 8:59 PM
A spectral séjour through the sepia-tinted spaces of an itinerant childhood passed in a state of vassalage to faintly disreputable parents, neglectful and domineering by turns, who scrouge out a living,--
A rigorous analysis of revolutionary state formation and the mostly dire fate of leftist political insurgencies in post-colonial Africa and the Caribbean by the late, lamented Manning Marable, who was mostly a socialist of the C.L.R. James variety,--
August 15, 2025 at 9:48 PM
A rigorous analysis of revolutionary state formation and the mostly dire fate of leftist political insurgencies in post-colonial Africa and the Caribbean by the late, lamented Manning Marable, who was mostly a socialist of the C.L.R. James variety,--
Like Dangarembga's superb (classic!) Nervous Conditions, this novel about a brainy scholarship girl caught between the conflicting claims of skin color and class is a crystalline depiction of the Fanonian divided self that colonial societies produce, particularly in their most gifted members.
August 10, 2025 at 12:30 PM
Like Dangarembga's superb (classic!) Nervous Conditions, this novel about a brainy scholarship girl caught between the conflicting claims of skin color and class is a crystalline depiction of the Fanonian divided self that colonial societies produce, particularly in their most gifted members.
This novel follows the jagged trajectory of an obsessive, toxic relationship between two writers/academics with palpitating immediacy while mapping the constricted heteronormative romantic space available to its participants,
August 8, 2025 at 11:34 AM
This novel follows the jagged trajectory of an obsessive, toxic relationship between two writers/academics with palpitating immediacy while mapping the constricted heteronormative romantic space available to its participants,
Leyla Erbil and Tezer Özlü, 1984
August 2, 2025 at 9:48 PM
Leyla Erbil and Tezer Özlü, 1984
This blind-stamped and gold-stamped book, in original publisher's binding, looks enticing enough to eat, but I am contenting myself with gazing at it, as a mouthful would probably taste of dust, old foxed paper, decay.
July 16, 2025 at 8:57 PM
This blind-stamped and gold-stamped book, in original publisher's binding, looks enticing enough to eat, but I am contenting myself with gazing at it, as a mouthful would probably taste of dust, old foxed paper, decay.
This never previously published novella by Brennan languished for years in the archives at Notre Dame before being "discovered." One wonders whether it perhaps should have remained there, if the author was not wise in withholding it from publication, for this Irish tale of exile & homecoming--
July 13, 2025 at 7:06 PM
This never previously published novella by Brennan languished for years in the archives at Notre Dame before being "discovered." One wonders whether it perhaps should have remained there, if the author was not wise in withholding it from publication, for this Irish tale of exile & homecoming--
The first thing to be said about Zubok's new Cold War book: it's a page turner, moving adroitly & with great assurance through space and time and the many stages and settings of the conflict. While hardly pro-Soviet, Zubok rejects the triumphalist western narrative that Reagan "won" the Cold War,--
July 6, 2025 at 11:19 AM
The first thing to be said about Zubok's new Cold War book: it's a page turner, moving adroitly & with great assurance through space and time and the many stages and settings of the conflict. While hardly pro-Soviet, Zubok rejects the triumphalist western narrative that Reagan "won" the Cold War,--
Extraordinary Little Free Library finds from early this morning—such a change from the usual ratty copies of Fern Michaels/ Nora Roberts/Ninja toaster oven recipe booklets.
April 23, 2025 at 11:01 AM
Extraordinary Little Free Library finds from early this morning—such a change from the usual ratty copies of Fern Michaels/ Nora Roberts/Ninja toaster oven recipe booklets.
Though at times it reads like a sequence of splendidly written literature reviews in which the author’s own viewpoint sometimes seems to vanish entirely, this is a worthy critical intervention on the fraught intersection between psychology and left political action--
April 20, 2025 at 6:23 PM
Though at times it reads like a sequence of splendidly written literature reviews in which the author’s own viewpoint sometimes seems to vanish entirely, this is a worthy critical intervention on the fraught intersection between psychology and left political action--
Eloquent book-length essay on the falsifications of memory and history necessary to sustain the Israeli apartheid project and on the irreconcilable tensions within Israeli society that a constant war/genocide footing helps keep in abeyance.
April 12, 2025 at 12:05 PM
Eloquent book-length essay on the falsifications of memory and history necessary to sustain the Israeli apartheid project and on the irreconcilable tensions within Israeli society that a constant war/genocide footing helps keep in abeyance.
A memoir written in a lambent, fresh, spring-like language that captures the violently contrasting sensorium of war with radiant, youthful ~leggiadria~: gathering cherries in the high Friulian summer at one moment, the stench of death and poison gas the next,--
March 30, 2025 at 4:36 PM
A memoir written in a lambent, fresh, spring-like language that captures the violently contrasting sensorium of war with radiant, youthful ~leggiadria~: gathering cherries in the high Friulian summer at one moment, the stench of death and poison gas the next,--