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Horace Mann could really write. Too bad he was so wrong. The Great Equalizer is merely The Great Scapegoat. 150 years after Mann’s ideology took hold, it turns out society’s biggest problems require not pedagogical, but political solutions.

I was expecting this to be a more difficult work. So far it’s some of Vollmann’s most straight-forward, which makes the length less daunting. If it carries along like this I suspect it may also be his best, though I’m barely into the Dreams.

Did you guys know Bob Ross is George Saunders’ dad?

So glad I put down Gold Bug. Fever and Spear is a fuzzy memory, but my enthusiasm for this series hasn’t faltered. Deza’s perspective on discourse is fascinatingly dark. I’m hooked.

Putting this aside for now. The prose is pretty obnoxious.

3rd read since 2010. Even better than I remember.

This is compelling me to read Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Stupefaction, here I come!

It’s funny how we’re brought up to think that the classics are old and stuffy when so many are horny and blasphemous.

That stench you’ve detected on the spring air is just a bit of respiratory Marie Kondoing I’ve undertaken in advance of hoovering up Smith’s whole corpus. What is it the kids say nowadays? Hold my NE IPA?

My first Ali Smith.

Day 2 is a shade less engaging than Day 1, due directly I think to the theme of happy endings.

It just hit me that I previously read a book by the daughter of Mr. Bateson and Margaret Mead. Meanwhile more and more ideas that seem to have influenced Deleuze continue to appear. One of those wonderful reading experiences that seem to synthesize and/or overlap with previous reading in brain-tingling ways.

Not finding the military exploits terribly engaging. So far I've gotten the most out of Plutarch's description of the society set up by Lycurgus, which is unfortunate because that was the very first Life in this collection.

Deleuze seems to have picked up a lot from Bateson, particularly in his (Deleuze's) ideas of difference and the refrain. This is also feeling a bit like a more readable Godel, Escher, Bach. Quite the pairing of brain-flavors.