Ben Friedlander

Rest in Peace dear friend. Alexander Kluge. In his study October 2025. Munich.

A lot of bizarre foreign policy decisions can be explained by people not understanding the relationship between cause and effect.

@tanjil_rashid_ @BorisDralyuk @george_szirtes Alexander Kluge fits the bill. Jürgen Habermas too?

@nikhil_palsingh “I had a lot of dean-level conversations”

More signs—if you needed them — that most leading intellectuals are either cowardly or belated.

Last pair of leather boots lasted 25 years with resoling. Just bought a new pair. That should take me to the collapse of this reality.

@outsidadgitator That’s how I think of it too, but then there are poems that don’t exactly fit as praise or affirmation, like Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy.” I always accept the designation but feel funny saying it, like ordering food in a French restaurant knowing my pronunciation is awful.

@outsidadgitator And with regard to genre, this one by her is pertinent

@outsidadgitator Ode is a category I’ve never understood (Robert Hass calls it a mode, like satire, rather than genre), but anyway Julia de Burgos wrote quite a bit that I think fits, like this one for Grito de Lares.

@outsidadgitator Robert M Young had a foot in both worlds but don’t know if he tried to reconcile them.

@bdjansenphd @nrduford When I arrived at UMO many books still had pockets and check-out cards. You could see who checked them out and also their ID numbers…which were (I kid you not) social security numbers.

@bdjansenphd It’s idiotic we don’t have a digital subscription but we do have those early issues in microform. Admittedly, crowdsourcing is faster.

@arm_hist @peligrietzer I had that same difference between MA and PhD. The difference was revelatory.

@peligrietzer I am a survivor of that as well, at the master's level. I didn't ask for hand-holding, but I was treated like an academic piriah. I have a much more supportive PhD team @ another school, but my master's was brutal, and I'd never recommend that institution to anyone.

It's weird how much I didn't realize in real time that my grad department hating my work was doing a number on my psyche

@christianbok Tetrameter

BERNIE FOR BURLINGTON: The Rise of the People's Politician (Knopf, 2/03/26), with an astonishing cover by Alison Bechdel

THREAD. Today's article by New York Times reporter Devlin Barrett is a good example of how bad journalism can normalize authoritarianism. Let's look at a particularly egregious example.

@peligrietzer Ployes (gah, autocorrect)

@peligrietzer Here in French-speaking Maine we have played. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploye

The good people of Brittany solved food by inventing the buckwheat crepe

@AdamsOrArdor I edit Paideuma, which used to be the journal of Ezra Pound scholarship. We still receive several submissions a year on The Cantos, but nearly all of them are on Pound and China and most come from overseas.

@outsidadgitator I went that route around a year ago and only lurk for the sake of a few accounts, yours among them. Oh well!

Alice Oswald being arrested yesterday for supporting Palestine Action