Jesse Raber

@jraber.bsky.social

904 Followers 1170 Following

Working on a literary history of Chicago - Author of Progressivism's Aesthetic Education: bit.ly/2AhdjaH - Co-creator of the Chicago Writing Gallery at the American Writers Museum - let's talk about cooking, ceramics, ebikes

Morbo from Futurama: "Windmills do not work that way!!!"
"A steppe is a steppe is a steppe. The problems of the cowboy and the Cossack are very similar. Their courage and philosophical attitudes are similar and then steppes of Russia are much like the prairies of America."
Flier for an "Art of the Obama Years" exhibit
HOSANNA The cornfields shall be the mothers of men. They are rich with the milk that shall suckle men. The bearded men shall arise. They shall come sturdy and strong out of the West. [You may prick the new men with spears. Their blood shall run out on the snow but they are my men and shall survive. I am a child and I weep. My hands are red and cold. I run along and blow upon them. In me is the blood of the strong men. A little I have endured and shall endure. I am of the blood of strong bearded men. The milk of the corn is in me. Sweet, sweet, the thought of the new men. I am cold and run through the streets of Chicago. I blow upon my red hands. Sweet, sweet the thought of the new men.
SONG OF THE MATING TIME Out of the cornfields at daybreak, Ready to run through the dawn to the place of beginning, Creeping, I come, out of the corn, Wet with the juice of bruised corn leaves—out of the corn I come. Eager to kiss the fingers of queens, Eager to stand with kings, To breed my kind and stand with kings. Out of the corn at daybreak, Brother to dogs, Big brother to creeping, crawling things, Stretched full length on the long wet grass at the edge of the cornfields, Waiting, Here I lie through the day, waiting and waiting. > Come, tired little sister, run with me. See—I kiss your lips—soft—to entice you. In the still young night we begin our running, Stripping our clothes away. Skirting the towns, passing the lonely houses, Staying away from the sleeping cities, Running forever—on and on—into the empire of the corn. Come, tired little sister, run with me.
A rather terrifying golden statue shrouded in scaffolding
Big ol Cubs logo on the field of a Pilsen park
Screenshot of a post about the death of a looksmaxxing influencer from gold poisoning (?)
A dog contemplating a monolith
Jun Fujita's photo "Curves: Outer Drive"
The end of Pinsky's "Impossible to Tell"
As the main text saith
A fluorescent lit stairway with the word "EURYDICE" on the wall
Playground at the Obama Presidential Center
Map showing that Trump won 62 percent of the vote in Canaryville in 2024
It is now known that in the 1930s a small golf course was built at that part of the site, and some of these mounds may have been formed during the construction of the golf course, perhaps as tees or greens.
Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmanuel Ambroise Diggs
A dog wading in crystalline waters
- Man you really have no clue about any of this - Imagine if I did, though
The Philisophe: Diderot and d'Alembert, the Encyclopedie
Map of urban population as percentage of total population of US states
Tim Robinson: "I said he used to be a piece of shit. He's not anymore."
The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of possibilities it goes with. Let our common experiences be enveloped in an eternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortal significance; let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits; let faith and hope be the atmosphere which man breathes in;—and his days pass by with zest; they stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values. Place round them on the contrary the curdling cold and gloom and absence of all permanent meaning which for pure naturalism and the popular science evolutionism of our time are all that is visible ultimately, and the thrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling. For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature’s portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation. The early Greeks are continually held up to us in literary works as models of the healthy-minded joyousness which the religion of nature may engender. There was indeed much joyousness among the Greeks— Homer’s flow of enthusiasm for most things that the sun shines upon is steady. But even in Homer the reflective passages are cheerless,73 and the moment the Greeks grew systematically pensive and thought of ultimates, they became unmitigated pessimists.74 The jealousy of the gods, the nemesis that follows too much happiness, the all-encompassing death, fate’s dark opacity, the ultimate and unintelligible cruelty, were the fixed bac…
From Judge Khan: Brammer’s short story, Regionally-Specific Award-Winning Short Story, throbs with a quiet power and secretes a cultural authenticity we are reluctant to question. He casts a much needed light on a region of our country no one thinks about, the diaspora of which, we were shocked to discover, could read and write. It is our great pleasure to award it the Brammer Prize for Excellence in Landlocked Literature. Her name was Mallory Dowdy, and she had the kind of ass that made the menfolk go wowie. The menfolk around These Parts are hostile and crude and they spit a lot, which adds some texture I’m sure. The name of our town is These Parts. It’s probably in Oklahoma or maybe Kansas. Here in These Parts every rock remembers and every tree whispers stories in the sighing dialect of leaves, spoken overhead on breezy afternoons. Between the rocks remembering and the trees whispering, gossip is more or less impossible to keep occluded. It spreads quickly, like some fast-spreading thing. That’s how news of Mallory’s affair reached my ears. The rocks told the trees, and once the trees have a tale it’s game over for your secrets ‘round here. In These Parts.
Django Wexler: Reading a history where the king keeps what can only be described as a "court nerd", a learned scholar whose role at court is to be pranked and tormented by the king and his bros. Jesse Raber: Frederick William I of Prussia? Django Wexler: WOW that's a good guess!
Lifeguard rowboats awaiting their hour at 63rd St Beach
Cruisin' USA baby
Drake meme: "LLMs prove that language can be reduced to information" vs "LLMs are gematria"
Life magazine brow chart
Etymology of wage
Ceramic forms representing rooftops of flooded houses
The wordy part of the OPC
No thanks, I'd rather make out with my Monroebot
Have you made a sad mistake which has well nigh ruined your prospects in life? Throw yourself upon the mercy of God for this Is infinite and may contain a new plan or set of hopes for you as good or better than those you lost by your blunder. We do …
From "Passage to India"
Cascadilla Falls I went down by Cascadilla Falls this evening, the stream below the falls, and picked up a handsized stone kidney shaped, testicular, and thought all its motions into it, the 800 mph earth spin, the 190-million-mile yearly displacement around the sun, the overriding grand haul of the galaxy with the 30,000 mph of where the sun's going: thought all the interweaving motions into myself: dropped the stone to dead rest: the stream from other motions broke rushing over it: shelterless, I turned to the sky and stood still: Oh I do not know where I am going that I can live my life by this single creek.
Cherry blossoms
Yep
Grossman: One inspiration for that style of storytelling was in The Fellowship of the Ring, when they’re in Moria and Gandalf is reading out the record the dwarves have kept of their downfall. We knew we wanted exactly that: reading the words of this person who was trapped. The other place it comes from was a book of poetry called the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. It’s a series of monologues from people in a small town, and as you read all the monologues, you start to get a sense of the relationships and the history. That was what I cited when I originally pitched the system, because I had this naive idea that everyone would have read a book of poetry by a relatively obscure early 20th century American poet. I can’t believe that was taken seriously at the time.
What is a Pandemic? The World Health Organization (WHO)(link is external and opens in a new window) declares a pandemic when a disease’s growth is exponential. This means the growth rate skyrockets, and each day cases grow more than the day prior. In being declared a pandemic, the virus has nothing to do with virology, population immunity, or disease severity. It means a virus covers a wide area, affecting several countries and populations.
The city of Chicago, with whose development the personality of Frank Algernon Cowperwood was soon to be definitely linked! To whom may the laurels as laureate of this Florence of the West yet fall? This singing flame of a city, this all America, this poet in chaps and buckskin, this rude, raw Titan, this Burns of a city! By its shimmering lake it lay, a king of shreds and patches, a maundering yokel with an epic in its mouth, a tramp, a hobo among cities, with the grip of Caesar in its mind, the dramatic force of Euripides in its soul. A very bard of a city this, singing of high deeds and high hopes, its heavy brogans buried deep in the mire of circumstance. Take Athens, oh, Greece! Italy, do you keep Rome! This was the Babylon, the Troy, the Nineveh of a younger day. Here came the gaping West and the hopeful East to see. Here hungry men, raw from the shops and fields, idyls and romances in their minds, builded them an empire crying glory in the mud.
I am Minerva, the village poetess, Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street For my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk, And all the more when “Butch” Weldy Captured me after a brutal hunt. He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers; And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up, Like one stepping deeper and deeper into a stream of ice. Will some one go to the village newspaper, And gather into a book the verses I wrote?— I thirsted so for love I hungered so for life!
Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking
Warping: All By Yourself by Cay Garrett
Long Connecticut
Green river mit corncobs
a certain classic video game
hello from The Long Goodbye
an unfired porcelain lamp with incised giraffe decoration
a Chinese lion dancer does its thing in a toy store
"Contemporary lit fic" focuses on "a powerless character making an internal journey to come to terms with the world."
Moby-Dick chess
Cahokia Mounds: America's First City by William Iseminger
Out of Many, One: Portraits of America's Immigrants by George W. Bush
from *Meet Me in St. Louis* (1944)
63rd St beach in an intricate pattern of snow and mud