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Levi Stahl

@levistahl.bsky.social

4.5K followers 1.2K following 11K posts

Editor of The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany and The Daily Sherlock Holmes. Marketing Director at the University of Chicago Press. Board member of the Uptown People’s Law Center.

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Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · Aug 25

I started a newsletter, friends.

this-not-that.ghost.io

This, Not That

Reccomending some good books, movies, music, and more

this-not-that.ghost.io

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Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 2h

There is a certain bleakness in finding hope where one expected certainty.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore

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Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 3h

Joey Ortiz is trying for José Valentín, but he’s not quite there.

Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 5h

A Baseball Clix figure of José Valentín.

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Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 12h

Oh, no. No, that’s awful. Good lord, what a loss. That’s so young.

Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 13h

Thinking w/admiration* of the guy working the counter at a U-Haul in 1998 whom I saw, as he dealt with customers in the shop, repeatedly pick up the ringing phone &, without answering it, set it back on its hook.

*Of a sort. I was always a go-getter as a retail employee. But there are other ways.

Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 17h

Never gets old.

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Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 18h

Good morning, friends!

A panel from a 1989 Peanuts comic strip showing Lucy in the outfield, cap on her head and glove on her hand, wearing a little black bandit mask and letting a fly ball hit her on the head.

Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 1d

Brilliant tactics: Lulled Roberts into a false sense of security re: Treinen. Gonna make him pay the rest of the series.

Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 1d

Same.

Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 1d

That play just broke my brain.

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Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 1d

Front row Amy not only keeps score, she tracks every pitch.

Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 1d

Because I am now a daily subscriber to the print Sun-Times, I am also now a daily Love Is . . . reader, ama.

Today’s Love Is . . . strip, a single panel showing two small people with enormous heads kissing on a tennis court, discarded rackets at their sides. The caption reads “ . . . game, set and match.” It’s not a joke, but Love Is . . . isn’t a gag strip. It’s not a clever aphorism, because it doesn’t have meaning. It’s not cute because it’s not cute. It makes Ziggy look profound. And somehow it’s been running nationally for 55 years.

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Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 1d

Everybody has that one friend who they think might be a notary, right?

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Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 1d

She’s so good.

Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 1d

“Wearing a blazer that was half Brideshead Revisited and 10% Miami Vice”

This is a good tribute to a genuine original.

The Tell-Tale Brian Phillips @brianphillips.bsky.social · 1d

I wrote about Diane Keaton

Diane Keaton Was Effortlessly Original

The beloved actor was simultaneously the coolest person in Hollywood and also the person least aware of what anyone else thought was cool

www.theringer.com

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Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 1d

Our cat Kaiju, a brown striped cat, sticking her head out from under a wooden stool, on the bars of which she’s perched.

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Reposted by Levi Stahl

Kirkdale Bookshop @kirkdalebooks.bsky.social · 1d

Zbigniew Herbert wrote a poem on chess, referencing Deep Blue...

so this is how
a kingly game
passes into the hands of automatons

we must break it out of
the prison camp at night

when mind drowses
machines are roused

the quest for the imagination
must be begun all over again

tr. Alissa Valles

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Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 1d

From one page (different articles) of this week’s New Yorker.

Text:

there." She, Proust, and Joyce each intended to make meaning in a new way— that stream of consciousness in which, as T. S. Eliot puts it in "Burnt Norton":
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.

Text:

King's book is broken into three parts: in the first, the two fall in love and travel; in the second, Jordan is married to someone else; in the last, they navigate grief and illness. As the novel encompasses their relationship, from start to fin-ish, it questions whether a person can inhabit any moment other than the present. Jordan thinks, at one point, "Maybe

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Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 1d

Boredom is a deficiency of receptiveness, not of sensation.

—Judith Thurman, New Yorker

Reposted by Levi Stahl

Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 2d

“He admitted that he was ‘unprepared for this specific situation, or for any situation at all.’”

We know the feeling, T. S. Eliot.

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Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 1d

An Esso advertisement in 1948 had had as its message “Time future contained in time past.”

—Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot

Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 1d

Brought to you by the Department of I Had Forgotten How Having Three Cats Is an Exponential, Rather Than Linear, Increase Over Having Two Cats.

A poem:

Time works differently for cats.
It skitters sideways,
Doubles back.
They have more of it than we know.
They waste extravagantly,
Purring show
Disdain for our cheeseparing ways,
Our care for minutes, even hours,
When one should barely notice days,
But rather, mid a languid fog
Rise only to disdain the dog.

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Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 1d

Good morning, friends!

A panel from a Peanuts comic strip showing Sally. She is saying, “Don’t push me!”

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Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 2d

He hits me that way all the time, too. AND I love the poetry. It’s tough.

Levi Stahl @levistahl.bsky.social · 2d

“He admitted that he was ‘unprepared for this specific situation, or for any situation at all.’”

We know the feeling, T. S. Eliot.

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