Alexander Lin
@tanz_um_mitte
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Writing @strange_matters | PhD candidate @UCBerkeley Comp Lit (20th c Ger/Jap lit, art history)
Berlin, Germany
Joined March 2022
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Last Seen Profiles
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Friends and fellow travelers through this inferno—I'm starting a reading group on Peter Weiss' novel "The Aesthetics of Resistance," in-person in Berlin and on Zoom.
Organizational meeting Wed 8th, first meeting on the 22nd.
See the next post for the full announcement.
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most fascists lack self-consciousness. mishima did not.
in his famous may 1969 debate with the radical tokyo u zenkyōtō, mishima says plainly that he "*at any rate decided* to make communism his enemy" and "struggle" with it for creative purposes—he had to "create the illusion/1
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You've got 17c neo-Confucian education popularizer and botanist Kaibara Ekken's "The Great Learning for Women," an instructional tract originally aimed at educated women of the samurai class and widely circulated in the 18-19c—a cornerstone of early modern patriarchy.
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nietzsche opens his emerson and immediately gets triggered by the bostonian's egalitarianism
emerson: any rational man can think what plato thought, feel what a saint felt
nietzsche: "Nein! Aber es ist ein Ideal!" (No! But it is an ideal!)
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of an other" as subject so that his writing could enter into a "relationship" in the genuine, oppositional (if no less illusory) sense of the term and thereby depart from an earlier one-sided "erotic" "reification" of the world as an "objet". audience gets the irony & laughs./2
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the feeling of power he loses after sustaining a career-ending injury, even in the absence of any ideological commitment.
idolize the man, if you want—to each his own eroticism and objectification—but don't forget that the writer tore him(self) apart... in writing./6
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the man who slit his stomach knew his hegel, or at least his sartre, whom he cites in the video, or mann, his favorite novelist.
by "confessions of a mask" he's already making fun of his own poses and desires./4
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Here's Peter Weiss saying the same: take the whole tradition of art and knowledge "against the grain", throw out the ownership of old privilege and claim it for your own secular demands—by learning what the supposed proprietors of that tradition have surrendered.
I spent my day at the Met teaching my undergrad students that classical art, history, and literature are for everyone. I came on here tonight to find a lot of anti-intellectual populist stuff about “snobby” Greek words. Stop it. THESE ARE YOURS TOO, ALL OF OURS. FIGHT FOR THEM.
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"kyoko's house" (1959), the untranslated major novel i keep saying i'll do something about, (spoiler alert) has a body-builder who gets beaten up (see the schrader film) and a boxer who joins a rightist group not out of belief but a cynical desire to recover/5
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nothing wrong w/ salacious anecdotes, except when they regress to the mishima mythos—mishima, the smart guy, wants to appear as or fuck his opposite; think charles swann to odette and the philistine verdurins—or just mishima at 16 y/o./3
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above is just how
@red_dilettante
and i talk about mishima, when we talk about mishima
@jake_romm
, curious what toscano makes of mishima, who has a few "theory of fascism" critical pieces from the late 60s
/7
I did a 2 part interview with Alberto Toscano for
@proteanmag
on his new book "Late Fascism" -- a really penetrating analysis into the present conjuncture that cuts through a lot of the bullshit in the "fascism debate"
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Meiji Enlighteners such as Fukuzawa Yukichi (who wrote a "New Great Learning for Women" in 1898) decried Kaibara's nineteen commandments for women as misogynistic; these aim at cultivating a wife obedient to her husband and parents-in-law
This is what the pages in your photo say:
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But as historian Kathleen S. Uno points out, the intersections of the spread of literacy, participation in economic life, reproductive labor, patriarchy, class, etc. in this text are more complicated than the modernizing perspective would have it.
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Abschiedsvorlesung von Joseph Vogl. Der Hörsaal überschwemmt.
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I wrote an essay for
@strange_matters
on essayist
@wesyang
, setting out to produce at once a thorough profile of Yang’s career and an unsparing critique of his turn from open-form essays to single-topic editorials.
This is how culture war brain ruins writers.
How does a great essayist become a mere Twitter personality?
How do others avoid the same fate in an age of microcelebrity, gimmicks, & political posturing?
These are questions
@tanz_um_mitte
wrestles with in his review of the former essayist
@wesyang
.
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1990 review of Mishima's "Temple of the Golden Pavilion" by Hungarian writer Péter Nádas.
Very astute formal observations here that go beyond the usual mythologizing and get at the challenge of, as I take it, "writing the void" after Nietzsche & with Bataille.
Thanks
@JakabfiK
@tanz_um_mitte
Péter Nádas wrote very positively about Mishima in 1990 as someone whose work has the ability to shake up "European literary conventions" with his radically different approach to writing and conveying messages.
Otherwise, I'm clueless about the Hungarian reception of Mishima.
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Really enjoyed this episode.
Rereading T.J. Clark's "The Sight of Death" to prepare for my ACLA panel, I was struck by the parallel of TJC's close seeing to this close reading: the endless hermeneutic gets at the "real complexity" of a picture/text that "holds and obsesses."
Happy New Year! I hope
@dan_sinykin
,
@johannawinant
, & myself can be good company for waiting in airport lines, driving across country, & generally trying to remain calm during these busy travel days.
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Solidarity with
@_ryanruby_
and
@Return2Sanders
for signing this important letter. Proud to call you guys my friends and to be part of a brave Berlin that rejects state oppression in all lands and stands with the oppressed at home and abroad.
An open letter I’m proud to have helped write, and which is signed by 120+ Jewish writers, artists, and scholars living in Germany, is now available in English at n+1
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heard today that the translation of vol 3 has just been delivered to duke up. everyone cross your fingers that fred jameson approves and the book comes out this year. may well be a generational literary event
Get past the cinematically agonistic cinematic Pergamon Altar opening that everyone knows it for and you get real gems, like old USPD members sitting in their kitchens trashing Bernstein, Kautsky, and Hilferding for their reformism and theories of monopoly capital.
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some 270pp later:
RWE: "For it is the right and property ... of all genuine talents ... to be for their moment the top of the world."
FN: Ja.
such a big, satisfied, concave J, with the period, that one can hear him do a belly grunt of approval
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People interested in the very colorful stories of Empson in Japan and China should see
@johnhaffenden
's 2 vol biography.
And an potentially intriguing comparison: Auerbach's emigration & teaching stint in Istanbul, starting in 1936, 2 years after WE returned to London./1
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Get past the cinematically agonistic cinematic Pergamon Altar opening that everyone knows it for and you get real gems, like old USPD members sitting in their kitchens trashing Bernstein, Kautsky, and Hilferding for their reformism and theories of monopoly capital.
in case you needed encouragement to read this book, here's Jameson's take: "For if the new cultural revolution, the new proletarian pedagogy [that the novel describes and embodies] is a kind of aesthetic education,..." 1/2
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german profs will be "prof. dr. dr." but will never be able to match this japanese art historian
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I took up identifying plants as a hobby during the lockdown; and lo, what a distinctively depressing experience to learn that the very flowers that catch one's eye (Bradford pears, honeysuckle) are invasive species flourishing where suburban housing has disrupted the environment.
“...man is undoing the work of organic evolution. By creating vast urban agglomerations of concrete, metal, and glass, by overriding and undermining the complex, subtly organized ecosystems that constitute local differences in the natural world..." (1/?)
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Btw there were many editions of the 『女大学』(Onna daigaku). One of the most common is the orig. 1733『女大学宝箱』(GLfW Treasure Box). Yours is 『女大学操箱』(GLfW Chastity Box); the "obi" paper slip indicates it was printed in Meiji. Continuance of tradition...
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Two recommendations for people looking for big novels to tackle, apropos Genji:
Mishima Yukio's "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy (1965-71)
and
Tanizaki Junichiro's "The Makioka Sisters" (1943-7),
two great anti-Genji's of the 20th century.
I have a tentative plan (i.e., untenable) to make it from ca. 1021-1922 this year.
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this for Japanese lit, except instead Hesse, Murakami. or instead of anime, just literature at all. (but with same nuance about what props up interest & publishing in the first place)
I see my job as taking people whose only experience with German literature is Hermann Hesse and showing them that there is good German literature as well
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couple of the most mishima sentences i've ever read.
someone should make a slapstick comedy biopic to supplement mishima: a life in four chapters. schrader's film is fantastic, but the guy deserves more than just hagiographies or dismissals as a fascist
finally got my hands on the full transcript of the july 1970 discussion between mishima and terayama & it did not disappoint. a classic buddy comedy
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the paris poem is actually just tweets that are actually just texting people that you're drunk?
(nothing wrong with drinking and tweeting, but how do people write, let alone live, without mediation between the different layers?)
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Totally. Why else spend a sunny afternoon in the Alte Pinakothek getting lost in a Rubens oil sketch that may as well be a Blauer Reiter painting?
@samhaselby
@_ryanruby_
Indeed. One of the things Modernism attempted to do, I think, was to explode nostalgia by making the past active again, bringing it into flux with the present, and thus, the imagination of the future. The backward-lookingness of Modernism was anything but nostalgic, or static.
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素晴らしい翻訳だ。原文と比べれば色々考えさせられて、より感覚的かつ具体的にされたじゃないかと思う。失われたものを引き戻す記憶の力と復帰の方向性というテーマは「passage from the other world」を「もう一つの世界からの帰路」と訳されるのを通して強調し、/1
去年の今頃といえば、花の声をどのように日本語で伝えるか悩み続け、魂を抜かれた人のように近所を彷徨い、花を見つけてはそこにしゃがみ込んで話しかけていました。この詩集のタイトル詩、「野生のアイリス」をやっと納得がいく形に訳すことができた時、一つの地平が開けたようでした。
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Breathtaking combination of critical acuity and a very human humility; and also just one of the most vibrant prose rhythms I've read in a while.
Hats off to, among many other things, your sense of timing,
@sommainguyen
.
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Kawabata Yasunari also found the ending of Tanizaki Junichirō's "Makioka Sisters" to be "the strangest thing" in the novel.
I reread the last chapter in the original and then in the 1957 Seidenstecker translation, then made my own, more literal version. Judge for yourself:
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This was a magnificent reading, with
@lindsaylerman
's intimate-ominous and ever-searching voice bringing us into the dark, fraught lanes of the psyche, and to where they open out, above the rooftops, onto the stars.
Here's the book:
All my gratitude to
@WriteBerlin
and
@_ryanruby_
for putting on such a beautiful event the other night, and to everyone who attended, and to a.p. books (especially the brilliant Susan Finlay, who took this photo)
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in 1985/6 Jap. architect Isozaki Arata translates
...a 1973 book by Austrian architect Bernhard Leitner on
.... his 1969-71 publicistic efforts to save from demolition
... the 1927 townhouse Ludwig Wittgenstein designed for his sister in Vienna
/1
@dylan_dutson
Yeah, I'm super interested in how this happened in architecture and responses to "national style" in breakaway postwar movements in Japan specifically:
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My take on getting out from under the "long shadow" of Mishima I wrote at the end of a review article, where I politely but forcefully disagree with leading M. scholar Inoue Takashi.
M. represents at once a Japanese cosmopolitan dynamism & the dead-end of ethnocentrism./1
@dylan_dutson
Well I decided I'm trying to at least reclaim, for myself, battodo/iaido (Japanese sword) from the long shadow of Mishima's coup. This fall I'm trying a super liberal, gender-inclusive, queer-friendly dojo here in Brooklyn. We'll see ...
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these are actually the same story, quests for loves let go, with epiphanies at angkor wat (wong kar wai) and wat arun (mishima), postcolonial apocalypticism
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gilded age magritte
In 1902, a new fad swept Chicago: bathing in the morning dew.
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another side to the story of amazon and literature that marc mcgurl and
@dan_sinykin
have written on
‘Paper companies are producing more cardboard boxes for Amazon and less paper for books. As a result of the low supply, paper is getting more expensive for everyone. Even Amazon is having to charge more to print paper books.’
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from december after brunch w/
@brianhioe
, will definitely be back with more than my camera phone to think through these incredible spaces, learn more of the history, etc.
The lovely Lungshan Temple 龙山寺, one of the biggest in the city and dating to the mid Qing (via many vicissitudes and destruction by earthquake, typhoon, and war) /2
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pov you’re a european in an asian temple in the 20c, this what everything looks like to you
@artcrimeprof
Decorative abandonment as homelessness
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植物や「乾いた地面」といったモチーフと違って最後の節の「fountain」と「seawater」の水性を「深」まらせる三水の字を選んで、訳者が新しい詩的経験を生み出されたんだと思う。
やはり翻訳において、一つの国語に閉じ込められて蘇らせてもらったものは「声を見つけるのだ」ね。/2
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But actually, this is what good left political art *in the wake of left defeat* looks like. One gets the same feeling reading Victor Serge: at once taking account of fatal mistakes & keeping alive the necessary utopianism, with an honesty only tempered, not quenched, by despair.
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Pathbreaking data work, but the key moment for me is
@dan_sinykin
's move from "total map" to individual "interpretation," from "sociological work" to a close reading of an Ada Limón poem – and from that, at the end, to a small press world and ethos beyond it all.
I wrote about who wins and who loses in the literary prize game, and about my dream of a total map of culture.
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Part of my work now is on the doublet history of this Lukács vs Heidegger, Marxism vs existential phenomenology debate – in the Japanese context, with sometimes literally students of L and H respectively.
This is the best take on the oft-made claim that Heidegger was responding to Lukács (and Marxism) in Being and Time. From Meszaros’ The Work of Sartre.
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@_ryanruby_
Dropped into a convo between 2 friends during college—2 people who edited the lit mag—heard: "So democracy works by each person voting for their own interests and it all combines in the end." Spent the next 10m humbly but exasperatedly explaining, as we call it, civics.
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translated some saigyō (for the snowy berlin evening):
Dividing my self –
no twig unseen, if only –
To exhaust the sight
of ten thousand mountains’
flowers’ fullness in bloom –
(no. 74 in Sankashū, first sec. on spring)
@VedantJ9
3/where text, scene, thoughts silently entwine. The trans. does the opposite, ending w a substantive noun (not particle) that is formulaically defined & remote ("10,000 mountains"). The viewer's not quietly suspended, but subjugated to a static tableau, cliché & English syntax, >
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nice little virtual exhibit of nietzsche's books and readings:
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@_saintdrew
On the side of the Kulturpalast in Dresden! And inside, you can spend the afternoon browsing the stacks of the Municipal Library and then head downstairs for an evening symphony in the concert hall.
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Goethe, like
@_ryanruby_
's quip on why art should be souped:
Once again there are strangers here with whom I sometimes view a gallery; they seem to me like wasps in my room that fly against the window, mistaking the bright pane for air, & then ricochet off and buzz on the walls.
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It was great fun hanging out! Keeping the common imaginaries and friendships of NYC-Berlin-Kyoto buzzing.
Would people be interested in starting a reading group for Japanese literature, culture, architecture, etc. with forays into classics and religion, in the new year?
When you finally meet the dazzling
@tanz_um_mitte
in person and you end up at Kinokuniya immediately afterward because he’s such a horrible-wonderful influence.
@ryanhasbadtaste
apparently we both desire a canonical Chinese classics for Japanese literature bootcamp!
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@Itmechr3
Paired with: Ulysses Grant's praise for noh drama during his visit to Japan helped save the samurai-sponsored theater troupes
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truly one of the most edifying experiences: walking through the agora of athens up to the acropolis while having my first hangover, every jagged block and rock and grassy space a new devastation, benjamin was right about history as a pile of debris, (almost) crying & throwing up
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First page (or two, if you count the woodcut of the glam photo) of Henry Miller's "Reflections on the Death of Mishima" lumping qualifications & fascinations about "Japan" as you would find in any writing by a westerner from 1863 to, well, 2023.
"there remains an aura of mystery"
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Issue 2 of
@strange_matters
, one of the best new little mags on politics & literature, coming soon!
I’m proud to have contributed to the first issue and am definitely writing more for them in the future.
No. 2 is jam-packed:
@ResistRun
on woke gentrification in Jersey City;
@red_dilettante
on the syndicalist economist who permanently demolished the price mechanism;
@storyshaped
on Situationism in literature & life;
@DaytonRMartind
on dinosaurs & the philosophy of extinction;
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@_ryanruby_
points, via Sebald on Weiss, to this promise of writing as a work of memory.
I'm also hearing the emphasis on the quasi-messianic persistence, or sheer presence, of past modernist "radical instants" in Ryan's Nabokov and Eliot essays.
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@_ryanruby_
michael fisch's An Anthropology of the Machine has some great insights, esp regarding corporate vs community tensions revealed in how subway systems adapt to accidents
a review here:
@NorikoAso
reviews Michael Fisch, An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo’s Commuter Train Network. “A future-facing theoretical analysis of the keystone transportation system of the Tokyo metropolitan area.”
@UChicagoPress
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Huge crowd here, very 68 energy
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S chops up sentences and trims off pleonasms. Hence the resulting prose reads very midcentury American. But Japanese, like German, is more allowing of long, flowing sentences across multiple clauses, and I daresay that with writers like Krasznahorkai (see )
The wonderful people
@strange_matters
let me go long on Laszlo Krasznahorkai (the king, the 🐐), the "end of history", deformed subjectivity, and paranoia.
So many thanks to
@red_dilettante
for his patience and incredible editing (
@FrancesSteere
too)
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today's haul from
#LabyrinthBooks
n.b. they have a few tables' worth of old Oxford UP titles on sale downstairs, i asked and apparently they just purchased a bunch from the press' archives
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"The art is off-centered and highly gestural. So too the commentary upon it, decentered and decentering in a multiple play of shifting perspective, altered stress, and vivid relighting."
—Mary Ann Caws' "The Eye in the Text" (1981), a classic of phenomenological criticism.
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Liking the green Loeb-like cover design + clear text layout. Now if only this had Reclam prices...
In its first English translation by
@VictorXiong
, A THOROUGH EXPLORATION IN HISTORIOGRAPHY / SHITONG by Liu Zhiji provides textual criticism and annotation crucial to appreciating this monumental work.
#ClassicsofChineseThought
#newlyreleased
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why yes i am in fact more loyal to new jersey
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@lastpositivist
history within ink wash: the expressive, often contemplative style most familiar now is southern song (12-13c); this tradition is picked up by early ming (14-15c) zhe school painters like lü and likewise valorized by the jap kano school (15-19c). so this is like a raphael
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@Fionnindy
@ajournomento
Wenn man einen Hammer hat, sieht alles wie Nägel aus. Und wenn man solch einen Resonanzbegriff hat, klingt alles resonant. Vorbildliche Antihermeneutik. Würde mich interessieren, wie er überhaupt mit Verzerrer-Pedalen zurechtkommt.
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Apropos Artaud: should I buy Mishima Yukio's copy of his Le Théâtre et son double? (Title translated by Andō Shinya as "Theater and Its Metaphysics.")
No indication of markings, other than this dogear. (Canny bookseller would have marked it up.)
A piece of history, in any case.
“It’s not that he has a beautiful prose style. It’s not that he is creating an intelligible multi-language. It is that he is living at a degree of extremity in extremis that few people do. And it is her aim to track the movements of that kind of thinking.”
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@mervatim
pair with the sumptuous 1983 adaptation dir. Ichikawa Kon, with a spot-on casting of each of the four sisters and all the colorful kimonos one could ever want on screen
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@B4Btv
Reminds me of this funky translation of Nietzsche's "Zarathustra" as a Pure Land sutra I came across while trying to trace how "The Birth of Tragedy" got into Mishima Yukio's hands (and became his favorite book). Wonder if it's discussed.
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just got all four wisdom teeth taken out
now i'm ready to star in a yakuza film
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throwback to when i was a pop star in 80s japan
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So far, this post-Twitter work barely interests me, except as part of his larger, incomplete story. Yang has claimed for years that he will return to something like the literary writing he wanted to do all along. I really wish you would,
@wesyang
, and I'm sure many others do too.
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Important insight from a splendid piece of criticism: the aesthetics and politics of a certain liberal defeatism are inextricably bound together. Representing the Brixton uprising through mere allusion and feeling powerless in the Labour Party are two sides of the same coin.
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Huge congrats to
@_ryanruby_
! I feel immensely fortunate to count myself among a readership that has banded together around the generosity, unabashed sense of wonder, and wit of Ryan's essays. Just a look through the comments and RTs gives a sense of his work's reach.
Honor of a lifetime to find myself in the company of the brilliant
@parul_sehgal
@TimothyDSnyder
@itscaitlinhd
@tausifnoor
& T.J. Clark in a citation for a prize named for the legendary Bob Silvers. Deepest gratitude to
@DAMendelsohnNYC
the board of the
@silversfound
& the jury.
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This was Dostoevsky, for me.
Also, lots to be said about the adolescence-existentialism-orientalism complex.
Post-WWI UK & Ger. saw a flowering of interest in the Far East, Woolf was praising (Waley's) Murasaki, etc. But flattened the contemp. & polit., which we have post-Said.
I like that in John Pistelli, I have my own personal critic. While I don't think his argument is coherent, my position on Hesse is not far from his: read his work when I was 12-14 and he was a gateway writer to serious lit for me. Remain grateful for and loyal to that experience.
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@AnnaKrauthamer
@dora__zhang
's Strange Likeness will get you to a specifically textual/literary atmosphere, if i'm reading the opposition right
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@brianhioe
there's also, around the corner in wanhua in a tea shop, the most rambunctious, so adorable you could just die kitten 小包子
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I still stand by this piece, which I wrote in 2019. But it's really more a meta-argument about allegory and interpretive method around the Mishima phenomenon than a thick engagement with his work, which I've tried to do elsewhere./4
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not as cringy/bad + a24 (ok) but surely i'm not the only one who found the "amorphous force of evil threatens our world's order" fantasy politics of everything everywhere all once (2022) infantilizing, or at best very outdated, coming after the floyd uprising, covid, etc. /1
@saintsoftness
it's cringy & bad (w/e, lots of that) + in the new yorker (see above) but (& here's the rage) it presents a lazy reactionary touristic nostalgia for Paris at the same time as France is erupting over the state murder of a teen who is implicitly excluded from this vision of France
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Finding this a very insightful and lucidly written book.
A fascinating moment in media history: Japanese military authorities commandeer civilian media – newspaper presses, an ad balloon, and radio – as psychological warfare, to convince the rebels to surrender.
A lot has been written on how to carry out a coup d'état, or on the success and failure of military uprisings. Much of it interminable. The most under-appreciated, yet for my money perceptive accounts, is Shillony’s ‘Revolt in Japan.’ Should be required reading.
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(Split up the paragraphs to try to make it readable. Otherwise not sure how to do long text here. This is the last of three paragraphs.)/3
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@ryanhasbadtaste
@aliner
@Greg_Gerke
@cgass_photo
Haven't read it yet, but Henry Miller wrote "Reflections on the Death of Mishima" in 1971, shortly after Mishima's suicide; same year Gore Vidal wrote what I remember to be a pretty dismissive NYRB review
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just watched
also, just wrote a 10+ tweet thread analyzing the film in relation to eeaao, in the mood for love, and peppermint candy that took all of one close-tab hotkey stroke too much to lose!
maybe i'll resurrect it for an actual review if anyone's taking
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"Japanese Photography Magazines 1880s-1980s," beautifully formatted volume, available for preorder.
Promises to be a monument in photo historiography, not just on a genre, but on the platforms in which one of the greatest corpuses of 20c art developed.
私の共著である『Japanese Photography Magazines 1880s-1980s』（英語版、Goliga）ですが、台湾のVoices of Photographyに特集されました。台湾方面の方、ぜひ手にとってみてください。
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On the Berlin S-Bahn: man across from me is trying to focus on Adorno’s “Versuch über Wagner” but keeps looking up getting distracted by the busker doing a great Bob Marley rendition.
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Here I translate the last page from the article in『三島由紀夫研究』(Mishima Yukio Studies), with a few silent emendations.
Just occurs to me,
@saintsoftness
,
@ryanhasbadtaste
,
@_ryanruby_
,
@lhkuroda
: you guys know any mag that would want a full translation, or expanded essay?/2
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Ok but later on he starts writing to "my dear Mishima" and it's so precious but so good, a erotic meeting of minds that never happened. One imagines Mishima's eyes lighting up at the last name in the list, Nietzsche, asking Miller his opinion on Mann, etc.
"A trip, a real trip."
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Bought issue no. 3 and read a bunch of pieces on a flight the next day. Turns out having uncut perforated pages makes for great advertising, because every time I ripped open a new page the person sitting next to me would stare at the pink cover like "What the hell is he reading?"
Scenes from the first (and certainly not the last!) ERB reading in Berlin, with a thousand thanks to
@acudmachtneu
Galerie and do you read me?!, and to the contributors who ripped from their own essays & poems.
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Work & life, politics & aesthetics are infamously difficult to parse in the case of Mishima. This piece was a slight tugging at that knot, pulling at the thread of national cultural identification (Mishima=Japan) that his death-performance & his int'l reception strung taut./5
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friend of mine brought freud to a paradisal californian nude beach
What's the most non "beach-read" book you've ever read at the beach?
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It is once the characters read social history of the Hellenistic kingdom that they emerge from overwhelmed speechlessness into a garrulous mastery of the Altar that remains, for others, a fetishized, monumental "mass of stone." See this counterposed mass of speech:
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Apropos, Yang's Substack is a step up/back from the Tweets, but also just him on the other side of the Twitter meat-grinder. If the blank page already knows that the Left alone is to blame, etc. is what fills it really an essay, just because longer than 280 characters?
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