Casey Boyle

Yea….times of exception are upon us. But also….at the same time…same as it’s ever been.

Be prepared for everyone to claim a state of exception, as if it had not been organizing things all along.

A lesson to learn: power expands at the speed of tolerated transgression. Each crisis that fails to end someone’s transgressions resets the threshold of what comes next.

That Overton Window slides pretty fucking fast.

What are we to make of Janet F., this sign of the repressed, this Freudian slip of a female who, with a flick of a "u" (the U-shaped table at which she sits?), goes from Freed to Freud, Freud to Freed? Thinking of'her, I am reminded of Dorothy Smith's suggestion that men of a certain class are prone to decontextualization and reification because they are in a position to command the labors of others. 59 "Take a letter, Miss Freed," he says. Miss Contesting for the Body of Information 1 83 Freed comes in. She gets a lovely smile. The man speaks, and she writes on her stenography pad (or perhaps on her stenography typewriter). The man leaves. He has a plane to catch, a meeting to attend. When he returns, the letter is on his desk, awaiting his signature. From his point of view, what has happened? He speaks, giving commands or dictating words, and things happen. A woman comes in, marks are inscribed onto paper, letters appear, conferences are arranged, books are published. Taken out of context, his words fly, by themselves, into books. The full burden of the labor that makes these things happen is for him only an abstraction, a resource diverted from other possible uses, because he is not the one performing the labor. Miss Freed has no such illusions. Embedded in context, she knows that words never make things happen by themselves— or rather, that the only things they can make happen are other abstractions, like getting married or

This Hayles quote is never not relevant:

The world could be such a nice place if we allowed it. It's all so goddamn unnecessary. There's no need for any of it. It's so beautiful here. It should be so cool to be alive

When there are no consequences for the last bad thing, you'll get a next worse thing.

Masthead: The Washington Post: Democracy Dies in Darkness Headline: Good night, stars. We are on the cusp of turning darkness into day.

Masthead, then headline, then kicker...I ask...is this vertical integration?:

"Maybe the significant gains to humanity from these new satellites are worth the losses to astronomy, to the atmosphere, to biodiversity, to human health and to the night sky. Reasonable people can disagree about that."

No Fixed Abode: Ethnofiction by Marc Augé | Seagull Books In No Fixed Abode, Marc Augé’s pathbreaking ethnofiction—a fictional ethnography—a man named Henri narrates his strange existence in the margins of Paris.

seagullbooks.org/products/no-...

LOVE THIS

25 February. Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don't surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment. I spent this evening at the family table in complete indifference, my right hand on the arm of the chair in which my sister sat playing cards, my left hand weak in my lap. From time to time I tried to realize my unhappiness, I barely succeeded.” Kafka’s diary entry on Feb 25th, 1912

Same.

(Kafka’s diary entry on 25 Feb 1912).

still frame from the beginning of Twin Peaks it is February 24th and Special Agent Dale Cooper arrived in the town of Twin Peaks

Good morning

On the So-Called Reading Crisis as Class Warfare “A book is a powerful weapon, it can defend you in your mind.” —Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin French theorist Pierre Bourdieu once described photography as the art of the middle class. The wealthy know exp…

I wrote about how the reading crisis can only be understood within the context of class warfare, and how culture and capitalism continues to be intertwined

lithub.com/on-the-so-ca...

“I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.” ~SAMUEL JOHNSON
(in Boswell's The Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides)

Community meme: I CAN EXCUSE FASCISM. BUTI DRAW THE LINE AT MERCANTILISM.

The Supreme Court:

Sounds like someone needs a cat video

I’m developing a class called Reading In Slow Motion with similar vibes.

Next year it’ll be Greenland

Every time you unsubscribe from a Dem campaign, they add your number/email to three others you also never subscribed to.

This image comes to mind every time I learn about some new AI tech. Globalization, and the global inequality, is just the real world version of a green screen.

March for Billionaires — San Francisco, Feb 7 Stand up for the entrepreneurs, innovators, and risk-takers who build our economy. February 7, 2026.

In this economy???

marchforbillionaires.org

Just sayin’!

Hazard pay?

The “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment” is lasting ten years.

“...poetry today might have more to teach us than economic science, the human sciences and psychoanalysis combined.” ~Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis

Traveling to Minnesota, you get to be in Minneapolis…traveling to Georgetown you just end up in….Georgetown.

Whew

Noooooooo