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sselisker.bsky.social
literature prof at U of Arizona. books: HUMAN PROGRAMMING (on metaphors for ideology), SOCIAL MEDIUM (on social networks in narrative and recent history, in the works). he, suh-LISK-er, views mine.
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En route a day early to Society for Novel Studies. Talking about cultural appropriation w/ a social-networks angle, via Zadie Smith. I’m still building up endurance, tolerance for busy places after my brain interlude—will be pacing myself but am so excited to see so many folks whose work I admire.

submitted 9 hours ago • 0 comments

Just for fun, marked the end of an unusually challenging academic year by laying down some liquid drum n bass compositions on the sampler, “Winds in the nighttime carry light vapors athwart the sky, and the constellations seem then to glide against the clouds”-Lucretius youtu.be/Si8eaBxocLI?...

submitted 23 hours ago • 1 comment

Recent reading Benjamin Labatut MANIAC- if you break enough rules writing a von Neumann biography … it’s a novel. Into it. Katie Kitamura - Intimacies, yes, gotta read the others Helen Macdonald H is for Hawk and TH White the Goshawk: the Dark Souls of pet

submitted 23 hours ago • 0 comments

Full program for SNS 2025: Novel Languages now available! So happy to see this event come together and to have so many good people descend on Durham, NC! Come for the terrific panels and seminars and stay for signature novel-inspired cocktails and bookish swag!

submitted 20 days ago • 3 comments

Excited to see my ARC essay on Tolkien and the Silicon Valley right is live. I learned a lot from @roberttally.bsky.social and @gerrycanavan.bsky.social while researching this.

submitted 27 days ago • 1 comment

Sharing Something Good (jazz): Floating Points, "Silhouettes II" (2015). Here's wishing y'all an ascendant one... youtu.be/BG0XBnMyXcQ?...

submitted 40 days ago • 0 comments

Also celebrating the *Gatsby* centennial by mercilessly dragging someone who fears that the “white race” will be “submerged” by immigration.

submitted 48 days ago • 0 comments

Celebrating the *Gatsby* centennial by having an affair, changing into dresses of crêpe-de-chine, muslin, and chiffon … and purchasing a “little dog” “for the apartment” that I don’t live in.

submitted 48 days ago • 0 comments

Neighborhood beauties:

submitted 48 days ago • 0 comments

Hey look here it is guys...

submitted 50 days ago • 7 comments

I'm finding this in-memoriam writing practice (for an admired former colleague) to be an unexpectedly joyful meditation on making time to do the things we love. Here's to Aurelie, and to April, with thanks to Ander.

submitted 51 days ago • 0 comments

Recent reading: Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay: as @tedunderwood.me promised, it’s an imaginative take on the Area X beat. But it’s also a campus novel about unionization against austerity, love to see it. Kishimi/Koga, The Courage to Be Disliked: Adlerian psychoanalysis as a way of life, cool.

submitted 52 days ago • 1 comment

I want to take the optimistic view, based on my experience of ChatGPT papers generally being terrible and obvious: What if this promo is OpenAI signaling that their paying customer base has plateaued based on the finite set of tasks ChatGPT is well-suited to?

submitted 52 days ago • 1 comment

Not Nabokov making sure his French translators know the different connotations of "spurt" and "squirt" while claiming it's Kinbote--Kinbote!--who in another passage "allows himself the sad luxury of an obscene metaphor" (from Brian Boyd's spectacular Pale Fire book...)

submitted 56 days ago • 0 comments

*Wolf Hall* hits a little different in 2025, but the new season is streaming on PBS, and the first episodes suggest Mark Rylance will keep up his superb performance through my favorite of Mantel's novels...

submitted 58 days ago • 0 comments