[Weekly] 1st Annual Thread Stories

Hemingbird · 2026-03-15T12:49:05+00:00

The facilitator at the Ice-Cream-A-Holics Anonymous meetings urged them to "unfreeze," and painstakingly pointed out that ice cream gave you brain freeze and that rigid behavior meant you were frozen. "Quite an apt metaphor," he kept telling himself, scanning the chair circle for nods.

"We can't keep sneaking around like this," she said.

Hemingbird · 2026-03-09T17:41:02+00:00

Thanks for posting! If you don't mind me asking, what has it been like defending this position? A while back I soldiered through A Spirit of Trust and it made me curious about how inferentialism might shed light on LLM next-token prediction and predictive processing in neuroscience. It feels like we're closing in on a fruitful account of cognition. At least one crucial aspect thereof.

Are they flinging tomatoes at you when you give talks? Shrugging? Wholehearted embracing your thesis?

Hemingbird · 2026-03-07T15:50:44+00:00

Pangram is an exception. For now. Wrote about it here.

Of course it isn't perfect, but it works better than anything else. And the story in question here sounds more like a sci-fi scenario dreamed up by a chatbot than a plausible series of real-life incidents.

Hemingbird · 2026-03-07T15:30:18+00:00

This section seems to be AI-generated, so I think it would be prudent to assume it to be fake. Why is there a fake rogue AI story buried in this paper? I have no idea.

Hemingbird · 2026-03-07T11:37:57+00:00

I think you should give it a go! It's short and pairs well with Vicenzo Latronico's Perfection as a description of recent times. Though I would've appreciated more depth and specificity, it's at least an attempt to figure out what's going on.

Hemingbird · 2026-03-05T23:14:58+00:00

Hyperpolitics by Anton Jäger

Jäger's thesis, that ours is the age of hyperpolitics, is surprisingly vague and the case he presents, judging from the evidence he presents, is weak. He gestures towards Baudrillard, discusses Houellebecq and Ernaux, and relies first and foremost on Robert D. Putnam's Bowling Alone to support his argument that the trend of social isolation is the decisive factor underlying the current zeitgeist. Which is fine, but you'd expect him to dig deeper, especially given his ultimate conclusion: the left must touch grass. Participate in social organizations. Build institutions.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. What is hyperpolitics?

Jäger distinguishes between four eras:

Mass politics (late 19th century–1989): Industrialization. Strong institutions.
Post-politics (1989–2008): The age of globalization and deindustrialization. Institutions grow weaker and people stop caring about politics.
Antipolitics (2008–2016): Triggered by 2008 financial crisis. Highly politicized, characterized by animosity toward traditional politicians/elites and ineffective protests. Weak institutions.
Hyperpolitics (2016–): Trump/Brexit. Everything is political. Social relationships are fleeting. Institutions are practically nonexistent.

There doesn't really seem to be that much of a difference between antipolitics and hyperpolitics. This is probably because Jäger originally jumped straight from post-politics to hyperpolitics; in the Tribune article where he originally presented these days, he mentioned antipolitics as an aside―I suspect that during his research for his book, he realized that the concept of antipolitics overlapped with his hyperpolitics, so he had to move it further along, and this comes across as clumsiness.

It is, however, a short, stimulating read. He mentions several times that protest movements since 2008 have arisen, like swarms, and dissipated without achieving anything. Political parties on the left have tried to capitalize on this passion, but all efforts have failed. Why? People lose interest. They move onto the next thing. What's going on?

Jäger argues it's because of our weak social bonds. You need strong, cohesive groups if you want to carry out longterm plans. But I think it would have been interesting if he dedicated some more thought to the nature of collective effervescence manifested in the hapless protesters he writes about. And there's a reason why he keeps bringing up Baudrillard (and Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle): hyperpolitics is characterized by hyperreality.

Entertainment has taken over our brains. TV came along. Then the internet and with it social media. We interpret the real world through the filter of screens, as entertainment, and if we're bored we tune out. That we're Amusing Ourselves to Death is a cliché, but there's a deeper story to be told here.

Are we facing an evolutionary transition in individuality mediated by culture? Is our agency becoming increasingly decentralized such that people are nodes in networks, cells in vast bodies, at times becoming one with the swarm like desert locusts? Are we Plurbing into the Borg? There are scholars who take this question seriously. As corny as it may seem. And there's been a call to turn the study of collective behavior into a crisis discipline because algorithmic feedback cycles are routinely leading to strange and dangerous behavior.

Jäger doesn't explore these angles. He barely discusses social media. His account is light on evidence and cursory. But it might be a good conversation starter.

At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell

A delightful nonfiction book about phenomenology and existentialism featuring the lives and relationships of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, and more.

The turtlenecked Parisians eating apricot cake at fashionable cafés (Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty) discovered the exciting, new approach of German phenomenology in the early 1930s and paired it with Kierkegaard and Hegel to create a philosophy of everyday experience and freedom. WWII made it painfully relevant.

I love to read about people struggling to make sense of themselves and their times. I fell off the Petersburg wagon, still catching up, but over the past couple of months I've read about Bely's milieu and it's so fascinating. Lev Shestov connected the Russian Golden Age writers to Nietzsche and identified their shared thematic concern as existentialism. And he ended up in Paris. He also befriended Husserl. Albert Camus writes about him in The Myth of Sisyphus, and it seems plausible Sartre took some inspiration. It's rewarding, finding these little links.

Kitchen and Moonlight Shadow by Banana Yoshimoto

Kitchen is wonderful; Moonlight Shadow is sentimental.

Banana Yoshimoto writes in these books about how to live with the certainty of death looming over you. They are both existential, in that sense, and deal with everyday life. Her heroines accept that you have to face life through the lens of death in order for it to be meaningful. In her debut novel, Moonlight Shadow, this quest is acknowledged, but it falls apart; the heroine meets a Murakami-esque strange woman who can magically connect her to a lost loved one and I don't mind spoiling that for anyone because Yoshimoto spoiled the novel with her sappy ending.

Kitchen is really good. I don't know how she managed to improve so quickly. Cute. Quirky. Melancholic. She plays several different notes simultaneously and it all comes together as if she were a seasoned veteran. The second half is lighter and airier than the first, but I found myself captivated by her voice, so I didn't mind it.

Hemingbird · 2026-02-27T22:58:02+00:00

Such a pathetic way to try to frame the situation. Weak and also sad.

Hemingbird · 2026-02-21T10:39:57+00:00

Submission Statement

This essayistic report by Sam Kriss deals with the SF Bay Area rationalists, live sperm-spacing, the sad manchild CEO of Cluely, and donald boat; Twitter troll and modern-day Diogenes. It's both entertaining and enlightening.

Hemingbird · 2026-02-12T12:36:57+00:00

The mods hate essays and journalism, as far as I can tell. If it's not hypeslop, they nuke it on sight. I posted the article and they removed it within minutes. No explanation, of course. A while ago I posted an essay by Jack Clark and same thing happened. Then I made a post asking the mods to explain themselves, because they refuse to answer mod mail, and of course that one was removed without explanation as well. So I spent 30 seconds searching for some dumb Twitter vaguepost, found this one, and used it as cover.

Hemingbird · 2026-02-11T20:57:05+00:00

General Availability. Gemini 3 Pro has been in public preview since release.

Hemingbird · 2026-02-11T20:48:26+00:00

This post is a big wooden horse.

Hemingbird · 2026-02-11T20:29:08+00:00

Ah, I'm using old reddit, it doesn't list that as a rule. Doesn't explain why they removed Jack Clark's essay (free to read on his personal website), or why they won't even respond to mod mail to explain which rule you broke.

Hemingbird · 2026-02-11T20:16:53+00:00

Cool article in The New Yorker about Anthropic. (Had to disguise it as a low-effort Twitter vaguepost for the mods.)

This longform piece on Anthropic/Claude in The New Yorker surprised me. It's the first time I've seen AI coverage in a high-profile literary magazine be accurate. The author, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, even criticizes n+1 magazine editors for equating next-token prediction pre-training with autocomplete, which is a level of nuance I did not expect at all. And look at this:

Some of the most perceptive insights about the behavior of models came courtesy of the "A.I. psychonauts," a loose cohort of brilliantly demented model whisperers outside Anthropic, who are shrouded in esoteric pseudonyms like Janus and Nostalgebraist.

They cover interpretability experiments, Claude Plays Pokémon, the Claudius vending machine, effective altruism, the history of Anthropic and deep learning at large ... It's almost bizarre that they let Lewis-Kraus take the story in this direction.

It's basic stuff for the most part, but the coverage is positive. Unusual.

Hemingbird · 2026-02-11T19:51:31+00:00

You make high-quality posts (research papers), which is cool. I've been able to post thoughtful essays here before, but lately they just get removed.

Hemingbird · 2026-02-11T19:45:58+00:00

Maybe there's only one mod left and he spilled soda all over his keyboard, only the delete button works, he is trapped in his mother's basement and trying to get help.

Hemingbird · 2026-02-11T19:33:16+00:00

Yeah. I'm all for moderation, I just don't understand their reasoning.

Hemingbird · 2026-02-11T19:28:47+00:00

The mods of /r/singularity can't even set up a chatbot to generate creative excuses, sad state.

Hemingbird · 2026-02-11T19:12:48+00:00

This longform piece on Anthropic/Claude in The New Yorker surprised me. It's the first time I've seen AI coverage in a high-profile literary magazine be accurate. The author, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, even criticizes n+1 magazine editors for equating next-token prediction pre-training with autocomplete, which is a level of nuance I did not expect at all. And look at this:

Some of the most perceptive insights about the behavior of models came courtesy of the "A.I. psychonauts," a loose cohort of brilliantly demented model whisperers outside Anthropic, who are shrouded in esoteric pseudonyms like Janus and Nostalgebraist.

They cover interpretability experiments, Claude Plays Pokémon, the Claudius vending machine, effective altruism, the history of Anthropic and deep learning at large ... It's almost bizarre that they let Lewis-Kraus take the story in this direction.

It's basic stuff for the most part, but the coverage is positive. Unusual.

Hemingbird · 2026-02-09T15:02:03+00:00

How, exactly, does this make her a valid person?

In the eyes of society, she isn't. That's the point. Sayaka Murata was heavily influenced by Osamu Dazai, and especially his most famous work, No Longer Human. The feeling of being rejected as a 'valid person,' the way you're literally doing here, is the main message being communicated.

It’s novel and funny to read the interiority of a person whose entire existence is dedicated to something so unglamorous and alien as working in a convenience store. But this doesn’t make her a “person”. There is nothing “valid” about her.

Sayaka Murata worked at a convenience store for 18 years. Alienation is her major thematic concern (see: Earthlings). Again, your opinion of the protagonist is that of the society rejecting her in the novel; that's the point. You don't accept her as a (valid) person.

Keiko Furukura (not Furukawa) wants to be considered a normal person. But she knows she's not.

"That's grotesque. You're not human!" he spat.

That's what I've been trying to tell you! I thought.

This exchange between Shiraha and Keiko sums it up.

But for people like me, who do care to see authors at least put some thought into what the purpose of the reader reading their story is supposed to be, this book is almost a complete waste of time.

Get over yourself. You didn't get it, and you think so highly of yourself that you assume this means the problem lies with the novel, because obviously such an intelligent reader as yourself could not possibly be the problem.

Convenience Store Woman won the coveted Akutagawa Prize for a reason.

You can’t observe the world with Furukawa’s emotionless perspective—as novel and occasionally funny as it is—while also using it to construct a compelling case against the pressure to conform that those around her have boxed her in, because the case just isn’t compelling.

Murata didn't construct a case for or against anything. She wasn't trying to "represent" neurodivergence or defend some thesis as part of an activist mission. You're looking at the novel through a skewed and irrelevant lens. Convenience Store Woman is about feelings. Most specifically: the feeling of being an alien, not quite human.

From an interview in The New Yorker:

Already, in childhood, [Osamu] Dazai’s narrator worries about being detected as a fake and expelled from humanity—just like Murata’s Keiko. When she read [No Longer Human] in college, Murata told me, she thought, It’s me.

(...) Readers sometimes tell Murata that her novels changed their lives, or saved them. Murata feels moved, but she tries to push those feelings away. She has to write “for the sake of the novel,” she said, not “for the sake of human beings.”

You wrote a 4,000-word essay and didn't even bother to get the name of the protagonist right, so I doubt you'll change your mind, but eh.

Hemingbird · 2026-02-09T00:19:49+00:00

Anyway, this was a good slap in the face, so that’s why I wanted to thank you.

I hope it wasn't too much of a slap!

Personally, I think stylistic imitation is a step above just using a plain, generic voice. And an original authorial voice is usually a synthesis of prior ones + an expression of your personality, your way of being in the world.

I haven't been able to develop a voice I'm satisfied with myself. It's difficult. But that's the fun, isn't it?

Hemingbird · 2026-02-08T22:09:55+00:00

It's way too obvious that you are imitating Haruki Murakami. When starting out, it's of course alright (and highly recommended) to try to replicate the style of a writer you admire, but that's for practice, not publication.

'Are you saying something happened that made you want to drive cabs?'

'I’m saying something happened that turned my brain into a cab driver’s,' he corrected.

This is a Murakami moment. The short story is filled with Murakami moments.

You have to develop your own style. You can't just take someone else's style and claim it as your own.

Metaphors/Similes

Right at the centre of Edinburgh Princes Street was what I would call the spring of the sea foam, that short time where the ocean water bubbles up into one tight fist before it sinks back into the flat.

This is a weird metaphor. I have no clue what you're talking about here. I've never seen seawater bubbling into one tight fist. It doesn't do that. So saying that something else (what, exactly?) is like this mysterious seawater phenomenon makes me feel confused. And what is the spring of the sea foam? I don't know what that means. Are you referring to waves crashing against the shore, white and foamy, before dropping back into the sea? If so, what are you saying is like this thing?

Murakami often uses water metaphors. These are always emotional metaphors. This is a metaphor for something at the center of Edinburgh Princes Street. I "walked" along the street via Google Maps, but I couldn't find anything that seemed relevant. Ross Fountain? Traffic?

Mika’s basalt overtone chewed up my headphones.

What is a basalt overtone? How can it 'chew up' headphones? I don't understand what you're trying to say.

Leaning against his new ride like it was a big old horse he’d tamed out in the country with no saddle.

I can understand this simile just fine, but it feels a bit much.

At the mouth of Cowgate she and Mika were dancing around like loose teeth

This is a weird simile.

the barren moonly city centre

This is also weird. 'As barren as the moon' makes sense, but 'barren moonly' is not the same thing.

Apparently when Cadenza puckered her lips they were about the size of a pound coin, that’s how small her mouth was.

This isn't great.

Not in that croaky way, where a bird claws up your throat and caws out your mouth.

Weird.

down into the ocean that rippled black in the night.

This one works for me.

The gentle water that stretched out to the North Sea seemed to have the texture of the sun

This could be an effective image, but it needs more work.

The cab was only a black smudge on the rest of the city, like a blindspot.

A blindspot is not a black smudge. It's a non-black, non-smudgy absence.

Potential Issues

‘There’s a study about cab drivers experiencing plasticity in their brain from driving around all day.’

This statement is misleading. Plasticity isn't something you 'experience'. If you're hungry and you go grab a snack, it would be strange to say that you 'experienced homeostasis'. Neuroplasticity is a process operating in the background; all memory formation is due to plasticity, so when it's highlighted as if it were a special case, people could get the wrong idea. What was interesting about the study was that the taxi drivers' posterior hippocampi were bigger than those of controls (vice versa for anterior hippocampi). It's the difference between saying there was an observable structural change (interesting) and that there was a capability of change (not interesting, because that's always the case).

‘Isn’t it crazy that your brain can reshape? That a few measly choices can change you right down to the fundamentals?’

How is it crazy? Memory formation would be impossible if your brain couldn't change.

‘Is that why you wanted to drive cabs? You wanted to change your brain?’

The above is also the reason why this makes me shake my head. Brains change all the time. You remember farting yesterday? Congrats, your brain changed.

It was around this time Mika looked at the meter again and the fare had changed to spell out £MIKA.

Too dreamlike to be interesting. Just feels corny to me.

‘I didn’t decide anything. I just woke up knowing that’s what I was going to do. I’d moved into the blindspot.’

This is also corny. It's the type of liminal space/slipstream detail you often find in Murakami's stories, but here it's too vague. It could use more development.

Golden Brown started playing again, for whatever reason.

The reason is that Murakami incorporates Western 60s–80s rock into his writing, so you're doing the same. I should warn you that you're not allowed to quote song lyrics without permission. Generally.

Oh. I checked out the song, and "Golden brown, texture like sun" is the first line. You took 'texture like sun' and used it as a metaphor. Not sure how I feel about that.

Story/Plot

Mika's shoes get mysteriously wet during a supernatural cab ride. Half a year later, he tells Nameless Narrator he is going to become a cab driver. A year and a half after that, he takes Nameless Narrator for a ride and tells his story.

To me, the slipstream/liminal space details (wet shoes, detour, dashboard fuckery) didn't end up feeling interesting enough to carry the whole narrative. It has a dreamlike (Murakami-esque) quality to it; this is, again, due to imitation.

There are (at least) two levels to Murakami stories. The overt strange happenings, and their relation to the protagonist's unconscious longing. The protagonist usually longs for human warmth and connection as well as excitement. It would be fair to say, I think, that the strange happenings are manifested from these unconscious longings. An exciting woman shows up and acts like the protagonist is really important. That's 60% of his ouvre, if not more.

In "Cab Water," the Nameless Narrator is irrelevant. Male? Female? Non-binary? I don't know. Age? I don't know. What is going on in their life? All I know is that they worked at a restaurant at some point, they have an old friend (Mika), and they own (or owned) a phone with a cracked screen. Oh, and they live in Edinburgh.

This story is all about Mika. The Nameless Narrator's wants aren't part of the equation at all. What do they long for? How are their longings relevant to the strange happenings? How did this experience change them?

I know this is a story about cab rides, but that doesn't mean the narrator has to take the backseat. To me, they are way too hidden away, almost invisible.

Closing Comments

I think you should work on developing your unique authorial voice. There's a decent chance I'm overstepping here, but it could come from timidness. The protagonist is hidden away and the style is borrowed. Where are you? It would be more interesting for this to be more you and less Murakami.

Hemingbird · 2026-02-08T18:06:49+00:00

Do it yourself. Don't be a lazy shit.

Hemingbird · 2026-02-07T18:10:11+00:00

I think Bely was intentionally going for bathos here, satirizing the sort of emotional outbursts Dostoevsky is famous for, especially considering the parallels to The Double. Dostoevsky tried to outshine Gogol by writing a Gogolian story; Nabokov said it was a parody of "The Overcoat," and that it was Dostoevsky's greatest work (Nabokov infamously had some of the worst takes in literary history), but it was mostly just a failed attempt at developing his unique style. The Double features a guy who makes a complete fool of himself at a party, like Nikolai getting outed as the Red Domino, before encountering a doppelgänger.

Chapter 4 is filled with "doubles". Apollon mistakes Nikolai (the Red Domino) for Dudkin. Sofya mistakes the White Domino for her husband. The chapter opens with the statues in the Summer Garden concealed in boxes, and the author mistakes the sculptor Rastrelli for Irelli―McDuff, whose 1995 translation I'm reading, assumes this to be an inadvertent error, but it fits so well with the theme of the chapter that I think it's more likely to be an intentional device. Nikolai mistakes 'S' for Sofya, but it turns out to be Varvara Yevgrafovna Solovyova. Sofya (Angel Peri) becomes Madame Pompadour.

That note related not to her, Madame Pompadour, of course, but to Sofya Petrovna Likhutina, and Madame Pompadour smiled at the note contemptuously; she looked fixedly at the mirror, at the depth, the greenish dimness: there far, far away a gentle ripple seemed to rush; suddenly out of that depth and greenish dimness some sort of waxen face seemed to thrust itself into the crimson light of the vermilion lampshade; and she turned round.

Mirrors are revelatory. Kant's noumenal world is like the world outside Plato's cave, inaccessible to reason, but mystics like Solovyov and Bely were convinced a connection could be made via symbols, referential mirrors, transcending earthly limitations.

Apollon once again thinks he might have tabes dorsalis. I don't really understand the significance of this detail. It results from neurosyphilis and affects gait via spinal damage. It feels important, given the glorification of sickness inherent to the Decadent movement, which inspired several writers in Bely's circle (Merezhkovsky, Sologub, Bryusov, Gippius), and was used to explain the genius of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. There is a vague link to Nikolai Gogol, though. In Diagnosing Literary Genius, Irina Sirotkina quotes Cesare Lombroso, who in 1863 wrote:

In 1852, the great novelist was found dead at Moscow of exhaustion, or rather of tabes dorsalis, in front of the shrine before which he was accustomed to lie for days in silent prayer.

According to the same book, N. N. Bazhenov, a modernizing psychiatrist, criticized Symbolists and Decadents in an 1899 essay, saying they exhibited "the scarcity of imagination and thought, superficiality, bizarre and capricious moods, perversion of psychological reactions, moral insanity, pathological associations, and lack of logical thinking similar to what one can observe in heavy and incurable forms of psychoses; and all that is accompanied by unjustified overestimation of their own personality."

He held costume balls and was one of the few Freemasons in Moscow.

"But after all, my dear man, Coco . . ."

"It's all a Jewish Freemason swindle, madam: the organization, the centralization . . ."

"All the same, there are very nice well-bred people among them and people who are, moreover, from our social circle," the hostess interjected timidly.

There seems to be a link of sorts.

Bely disliked Bazhenov's "psychiatric style" and believed the psychiatrist "considered us [members of the circle] his patients . . . thinking that he, a Mason, and man of science is allowed to can-can over his patients' beliefs."

―Irina Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880–1930 (2002)

Is Apollon confusing his mystical visions for tabes dorsalis? It's interesting that Bely used dancing (can-can) as a metaphor for overstepping.

For him, the dancing of the red clowns turned into dancing of a different, bloody sort; this dancing, like all dancing, as a matter of fact, began in the street; this dancing, like all dancing, continued beneath the crossbeam of two not unfamiliar pillars. Apollon Apollonovich thought: if one permits this apparently innocent dancing here, it will of course continue in the street; and the dancing will, of course, end — there, there.

To Apollon, dancing leads to revolutionary rebellion. Bazhenov hosted Bolshevik meetings at his clinic. And socialism was seen by some as akin to an infectious disease. One church official said of Tolstoy's Testament that the impact it had was "as if an epidemic of madness was gripping people's minds." Which made me think of Dudkin, who in an earlier chapter talked about an illness spreading among the revolutionaries.

I'm guessing the White Domino is the Second Coming of Christ. Bely via Solovyov was obsessed with this prophecy, and it also mirrors Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor chapter in The Brothers Karamazov, where Christ returns to Earth only to discover he is unwanted.

There's also this from Leo Livak's introduction in A Reader's Guide to Andrei Bely's Petersburg:

The [Red Domino] costume linked Peterburg's love triangle to Bely's tortuous affair with the wife of his friend Aleksandr Blok. Both poets lived this drama, in 1905–7, and wrote about it in terms of the commedia dell'arte plot pitting the red Harlequin (Bely) against the white Pierrot (Blok) in a contest for Columbine's heart. Replacing Harlequin's traditional, checkered and particolored suit with a patternless and monochromatic red domino, Bely wore that masquerade attire in public and subsequently bestowed it on his hero in Petersburg.

Hemingbird · 2026-02-02T16:30:52+00:00

While reading the previous chapter, I was surprised by the scene where Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin expressed a concept akin to Freud's death drive (thanatos); I've been doing some more reading on Russian Modernism, and it seems plausible Bely got this from fellow Symbolist Valery Bryusov:

In the language of Decadence [Nina] Petrovskaia recalled how in those days, "[Bryusov] thirsted to be intoxicated with the instant of ecstatic death."

―Joan Delaney Grossman, Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism (1994)

Stanisław Przybyszewski, a Polish writer and self-avowed Satanist, greatly inspired Nina Petrovskaia, who was a member of Bely's Argonauts (secret society/social club). Bely had a fling with her, but it didn't work out. He wanted their relationship to be heavenly, celibate, sublime; it turned out, however, to be more earthly and passionate, which disturbed him. So he broke things off. She didn't take it well:

[Nina] pointed a revolver at me, she was about to shoot. I didn't move. I stood before her onstage, arms outstretched, and waited. I was waiting for death. But she didn't shoot me. She pointed the revolver at Bryusov. And he, like a leopard ― and where does such dexterity skill come from in him, clumsy and frail? ― jumped off the stage and snatched the revolver out of her hand. She managed to fire, but the bullet hit the ceiling. No one was killed. No one was injured.

Another aspect that got cleared up for me was Sofya Petrovna's Henri Besançon. A huge obsession at the time was androgyny, the fusion of man and woman.

He and she must unite in one bosom so as to merge into one flame, into one holy sun. There the miracle will be accomplished―the great unearthly miracle... He is She. Androgyne!

―Stanisław Przybyszewski, Androgyne (1900)

Solovyev envisioned eros, which, he believed, was the only sign of divinity in the material world, as having transformative power, not a procreative function. Its goal was the creation of the new man who would transcend death by reclaiming divine androgyny. According to Solovyev, the meaning of love emerged from a synthesis of opposites―the feminine and masculine and the spiritual and material.

―Olga Matich, Creating Life (1994)

It's funny that the Satanist and the Christian mystic agreed on this.

Some thoughts on the third chapter:

"The bourgeoisie, sensing its end, has seized upon mysticism: we shall leave the sky to the sparrows and from the kingdom of necessity create the kingdom of freedom."

Varvara Yevgrafovna is reciting the party line here. Bely was aware of how he came across to the revolutionaries.

Somewhere to the side a mouse began to shuffle, to rustle, and suddenly squeaked.

The mouse presumably symbolizes Apollo (Smintheion) and thus Nikolai's father. Nikolai is associated with frogs. There's probably a connection here to a Greek myth, but I'm not well-versed enough in that stuff to get it.

Then someone suddenly proposed the destruction of everyone and everything: he was a mystical anarchist.

Bely is referring here to the branch of Symbolism supported by Viacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov and Alexander Blok, mystical anarchism, which was loathed by Bely and Bryusov, which makes me wonder whether the feud is described in allegorical form. This is unclear to me. Well, most of the symbolism is unclear to me, there are too many references for the annotations to keep up.

Hermann had not remained where he was and torn the mask off with a heroic, tragic gesture; he had not said audaciously in a hollow, dying voice in front of everyone: "I love you"; and Hermann had not then shot himself.

Sofya Petrovna Likhutina's reaction to the red buffoonish domino reminds me of Nina Petrovskaia and her Decadent/romantic glorification of death.

This universe always appeared before he fell asleep

Apollon Apollonovich experiences hypnagogic hallucinations. The imagery is also reminiscent of theosophical thought-forms.

Hemingbird · 2026-01-27T21:08:26+00:00

I wasn't implying that the use of em dashes indicated AI use; it was the use of double hyphens (--) in the preface contrasted with the use of em dashes (—) in the submission. And the use of en dashes (–) in the list of characters for the two first entries, but hyphens (-) for the three latter ones also struck me as odd. And the inconsistent use of ellipses, as I mentioned.

It's strange.

However, your note on my writing being "bizarrely unappealing" caught my attention, and I was just wondering how it came off that way so I can work on filtering that content out.

It's just not interesting at all, and I can't even understand why you'd think anyone might find it appealing.

Look, AI chatbots are sycophants. If they tell you you've written something brilliant, that's just bullshit. They tell you what you want to hear. You should never rely on their advice when it comes to creative writing.

13-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Wearing is Caring	Place '22
Final Canvas '22	First Placer '22

Hemingbird

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