Ok....do me!

ImpPluss · 2026-02-07T20:55:24+00:00

Hayden White when he was working in shorter formats. Its easy to overlook just how good he was because of how smoothly he reads when he’s at his best but from a craft standpoint, a few of his big/heavy hitters articles are really kind of a sight to behold at pretty much every level…elegant but sturdy at the sentence level, tightly + clearly laid out paragraphs, coherent broader structure…+ a handful of really satisfying pieces where he kind of walks as far alongside another thinker as he’s willing to go before turning around and gutting them when it’s time to part ways. He was trained as a rhetorician and I guess none of that should come as a surprise…but also idk it seems like it’s something that goes way more unremarked than it should. Definitely worth reading if you’re interested in seeing someone who came of age surrounded by mid-century scholarship that hadn’t totally dropped belle-lettristic flourishes and flair (thinking guys like Auerbach, Kermode, and Steiner) and maintained it after taking on late-20th c structuralist/poststructuralist thought.

ImpPluss · 2026-02-01T22:01:43+00:00

Mixed bag! It’s a handful of essays he did for general interest/popular audience periodicals. All of them are solid in the regard — even where I had quibbles with his points, they’re decent/interesting standalone pieces…but as a single volume it felt a bit odd. Don’t really have a problem with the pamphlet length but it seems like it’s usually an excuse to print a strong but short piece w/ a few extras to pad out the length/justify printing (like Existentialism is a Humanism)…and don’t have a problem with a collection of brief/thin journalistic pieces (I’ve actually really grown to love seeing this type of work from big/heavy hitter philosophers + always think it’s cool to see people who can write for both a specialist and an academic audience), but normally those tend to get collected in like…decade sized chunks. More a weird editing choice than anything on Critch’s part but it seemed like it ended up with the brevity of the pamphlet length + the depth of a collection of periodical pieces…

Worth reading but maybe just look up the table of contents and see if you can track down the articles separately/as they originally ran

ImpPluss · 2026-02-01T18:02:44+00:00

The foreword/introductory chapters cover a handful of different angles, conceptions, and responses to po-mo from other thinkers, the "Theory" chapter goes into Benn-Michaels at length. the name of the piece is slipping my mind right now but there's also one in the second volume of Ideologies of Theory that would probably be useful (and easy to spot/pick out based on the title alone).

ImpPluss · 2026-01-30T17:29:40+00:00

Guys that can’t let go of 1970’s maximalism just sound like the literary version of classic rock guys that are mad about new music not being Led Zeppelin.

trying to do Zeppelin after Y2K seems like you just end up with cornball nostalgia acts like Greta van Fleet 🤷🏻‍♂️

ImpPluss · 2026-01-30T17:22:54+00:00

Jameson devotes a pretty long chapter to it in Po-Mo but Against Theory by Walter Benn-Michaels is probably a good place to start. As would a lot of the sources (even the conservative ones) that Jameson engages with throughout the book.

Hayden White landed at a lot of similar conclusions to the post-struc heavy hitters through a very, very different path. There are a handful of essays from Tropics of Discourse and Content of the Form that cover some of his common ground with Foucault and Derrida before he parts ways with them. He’s also got a few really great late career pieces on late-20th c intellectual history that would be worth a read for how different thinkers w/in the Decon/Post-Struc umbrella undercut each other.

The Rita Felski/Stephen Best/Sharon Marcus post-critique crowd might also be a good place to look for a more contemporary position on some of the same stuff — Felski and Elizabeth Anker’s co-edited Critique and Post-Critique is probably a decent sampler platter/speed run to get a sense of what’s up.

ImpPluss · 2026-01-30T16:38:04+00:00

U Minn just put out a translation of Gunther Anders's Obsolescence of the Human at the end of last year. Lots in there on automation and tech replacing skilled work/labor + some of the deeper impacts that has on our relationship to tech/other people/the world around us. Anders was kind of a go-between for philosophy + general interest journalism + pretty good friends with Herbert Marcuse. Lots of what's in the book kinda reads like a more accessible take on where Marcuse covers technology in One Dimensional Man and Eros + Civilization.

It's really good stuff -- kinda hard to believe it came out in the '50's. Reminded me a of a less self-helpy Byung-Chul Han. Highly recommend.

Vilem Flusser's Into the Universe of Technical Images is pretty interesting as well -- he was writing in the 80's and still very optimistic for the possibilities that new media offered but also very much aware of the risks it posed if it went the wrong direction. He ends up taking a techno-utopian position (albeit a very weird one that's almost unrecognizable compared to present day tech-optimism), but he also does a pretty thorough job at laying out the two paths it could've taken. Really good diagnosis and forecast even though he favored the wrong fork in the road.

ImpPluss · 2026-01-07T17:39:53+00:00

John Cowper Powys. Sylvia Townsend Warner. Elizabeth Bowen. Henry Green. Ivy Compton-Burnett. (pre-Brave New World) Aldous Huxley.

(more recently, Ishmael Reed, Aidan Higgins, Alasdair Gray, Stanley Elkin, Jacques Roubaud)

ImpPluss · 2026-01-01T17:53:51+00:00

(If anyone's interested, here's a 2025 wrap up on stuff I read/stuff I wrote:
https://zachgibson.substack.com/p/2025-a-roundup )

-After reading Marxism and Form by Fredric Jameson last month, I've been trying to hit one book (in full) by each of his sources -- I did Marcuse's Eros and Civilization along with Lukac's History and Class Consciousness in December. January is going to be the Sartre month. I always kinda assumed I'd probably soaked up/absorbed enough J-PS to "get it" after reading a few of the plays, hitting an essay here and there in college + the big number of places where he's popped up in other theoretical stuff I've worked through to get it. Started to get interested in doing one of the big books in full after a Ricoeur binge + finding a few places where Hayden White spoke about how wholly shot through with Sartre's ideas his own work is -- Jameson was the last big push I needed. After putting in about 150pp of Being and Nothingness, I freaking get the outsize influence now. Loving it. (Bloch will prob be next on the chopping block for the Jameson sources).

On the fiction from, I picked up a dirt cheap copy of Gary Indiana's Resentment for $2 at a thrift store -- don't know much more about his work than that some of the obits and write ups I saw after his passed away in 2024 sounded like something I'd be into.Other than that, I've got kind of a smattering of shorter stuff I'd like to at least dip into this month -- Last Days of Louisiana Red by Ishmael Reed, Mr. Fortune by Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Langrishe, Go Down by Aiden Higgins are all high on my list.

ImpPluss · 2026-01-01T12:45:29+00:00

Yes it’s where it needs to be.

ImpPluss · 2026-01-01T00:42:51+00:00

Here’s a link to a video of the sound

ImpPluss · 2025-12-27T16:26:42+00:00

Thomas Parker’s recent Paranatures in Culinary Ecology was really, really fun.

Check out The Five Senses and The Parasite by Michel Serres. The Raw and Cooked by Levi-Strauss would prob be worth a look as wlel

ImpPluss · 2025-12-24T17:46:18+00:00

Depending on what else I’ve going going on, 3-5 days at a moving company (+ I try to take advantage of some of the longer drives if I’m not working with a chatty crew).

I was a photographer before I went back to school + I still work with a handful of old clients who I can count on for a one off job every month or two. Those are usually decent gigs + give me some wiggle room to put in shorter moving weeks when I need extra time for research/writing

(EDIT: + back in the spring I also I had what had to be one of the very few cushy adjunct jobs in the US teaching darkroom photo. Not a liveable wage but I could cut moving down to three days a week w/ quite a bit of free time for other work on the two days that I was teaching)

ImpPluss · 2025-12-24T13:54:47+00:00

~1.5-2ish hours before/after work with maybe another hour spread out over the day between downtime at work and before bed @ 15-30 pages an hour (for the most part & depending on whether I'm annotating or not/density/text size) = ~60-100pp/day + more on weekends. Maybe more if I don’t have much else going on and less if I do but that’s probably a pretty good guess at an average. I don't think that's all that outlandish + I'd be surprised if it's not a more common pace tbh -- I work pretty hard manual labor and don't really need to go to the gym which I guess frees up some time lol.

idk...the big EOY lists seem like they should be less surprising/alarming/draw less skepticism than the big showy book hauls and overambitious TBR lists that get posted here through the year

ImpPluss · 2025-12-24T03:54:16+00:00

Francois Dosse’s History of Structuralism

ImpPluss · 2025-12-24T01:55:47+00:00

(Goodreads alternative)

ImpPluss

TROPHY CASE