What a filthy Presidentiad!
Are those really Congressmen?
Is that the President?
With gathering murk, with muttering thunder...
We will surely awake.
#WaltWhitman #HandsOff #Resist
@curiousbooks
Seattle librarian, storyteller, union thug & book reviewer (LJ's Classic Returns); narrator & publisher of intriguing overlooked gems as Curious Books. Get a free audiobook when we launch, at https://mailchi.mp/708a1d7a08af/curious-books-quarterly
What a filthy Presidentiad!
Are those really Congressmen?
Is that the President?
With gathering murk, with muttering thunder...
We will surely awake.
#WaltWhitman #HandsOff #Resist
#Solidarity Feels good. #HandsOff #Seattle
Apocalypse has its points.
AND bookshop.org, where you can buy print and digital online via you local participating indie bookstore.
Also, for audiobooks, use Libro.fm, which sells digital audio via a local indie store you can select. And then check out your libraryβs print and digital holdings, and investigate what reciprocal borrowing agreements they may have with neighboring systems, to expand your reach.
If you buy any used books, try searching for them at addall.com/used/ which searches a wide range of international sellers. You can often find the exact same copy listed on Amazon and the Amazon-owned Abebooks, and on non-amazon sites such as Biblio. Also, try the publisher: many sell direct.
OSS117 UNLEASHED!!
This is not a time to panic and catastrophize. It's a time to fight for the rule of law -- and the fight is already notching victories.
jaymichaelson.substack.com/p/the-fight-...
Collect βem all!
We are whomever our habits reveal us to be. As witness to my own fundamental unseriousness, the only habit I've kept to without fail in 2025 is to start the day by reading a few pages of #FinnegansWake aloud, to the cat. #FridayReads #JamesJoyce
No, of course theyβre not βthe best,β but these six #audiobooks are really really goodβ¦ www.seattletimes.com/entertainmen...
(It makes more sense when you know that series of boons is designed to be high interest simplified vocabulary reading for adult literacy and English as a Second Language learners. Not kids.)
#FridayReads GAME WITHOUT RULES, by Michael Gilbert. A clever marriage of the cold unease of Le CarreΜ and the cozy charm of Christie, these highly addictive tales of intrigue should pair well w/ Thanksgiving leftovers. #bookreview www.libraryjournal.com/review/game-...
Cover of the Pushkin Vertigo 2024 reprint of Weights and Measures, by Joseph Roth.
#FridayReads WEIGHTS AND MEASURES. Joseph Rothβs psychological insight and complex moral vision are distilled in this pitiable, poetic tragedy, which proceeds with the grim logic and economy of a fairy tale. www.libraryjournal.com/review/weigh...
At the start of last nightβs bomb cyclone, we had two Mitt Romney heads on the porch. This morning, one had fled the scene.
Imagine, if you will, venturing out into sheeting rain and 50 mph wind gusts, and seeing the head of Mitt Romney tumbling down the street.
@curiousbooks.bsky.social
Image of author Joanna Russ
Cover of On Strike Against God, by Joanna Russ
On Strike Against God, by #JoannaRuss
Vitriolic, vulnerable, polemical and devastatingly funny, Russβs uncompromising tour de force bristles with trenchant truth-telling that will make it a life-changing encounter for many readers. www.libraryjournal.com/review/on-st...
#books #bookreview
If you've never had the good fortune to live your way through Dorothy Richardson's vast stream-of-existence novel of novels, there'll be a chance to do so with company in 2026, w/ a spiffy new ltd. edition. THRILLING news! My own Viragos are getting real pulpy. #PilgrimageTogether #FridayReads
Sept 1930 Book of the Month Club insert in Mikhail Ossorginβs novel of the Bolshevik Revolution, Quiet Street. Outside, a lilac in winter.
#FridayReads QUIET STREET (1930) by Mikhail Ossorgin.
βStrange how fearless the wolves had grown.β
Chinese painter Yue Minjung's 2002 painting Everywhere, showing two people emerging from a hole in the ground, surrounded by rats, pointing and laughting in a rictus of hysteria.
"He laughed with whole-hearted gusto. The preposterous comedy of this gang of criminals branding everyone else as criminals was suddenly too much for him to take."
- Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone
German expressionist artist George Grosz's The Pillars of Society (1926), which mocks politicians, military men, and priests, who grit their teeth and puff their cheeks while violence and destruction loom in the background.
Stunningly good narration.
So true: itβs right there on the lobby card: tragicomic horror farce.
QUIET STREET, a disconcertingly upbeat 1930 novel about dire mayhem in the Bolshevik revolution, by Soviet exile Mikhail Osorgin. There's a more recent translation called THE RIVEN HEART OF MOSCOW, but I'm reading the old one. Unsettling, familiar, apt. neglectedbooks.com?p=6043
"Itβs raining, and I suddenly feel the terrible weight of being an animal that doesnβt know what it is, dreaming its thought and emotion, withdrawn into a spatial region of being as into a hovel, satisfied by a little heat as by an eternal truth.β
β Fernando Pessoa