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Karl Steel

@karlsteel.bsky.social

4.2K followers 3K following 7.2K posts

Brooklyn College / Grad Center Medievalist. Posthumanism. How to Make a Human (Ohio State UP 2011); How Not to Make a Human (Minnesota UP 2019). Currently working on The Irrational Animal. website is medievalkarl.com

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Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · Dec 31

Last day 2024, signed an advance contract for Book 3, THE RATIONAL ANIMAL: ON HUMAN LIMITS IN THE MIDDLE AGES (U of Minnesota Press).

a picture of the first bit of the contract

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Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 2h

👼

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Reposted by Karl Steel

Tricia Lockwood @tricialockwood.bsky.social · 1d

left a hideous little malformed cub in the bookstore at o’hare

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Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 1d

Ha and my brain is wrecked from reading all day for teaching, so apologies if Im being an annoying lump !

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Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 1d

basically: if you're an adult who eats nothing but kids food -- cheese straws and chicken strips and soda pop -- you're cutting yourself off from, well, unparalleled joy and depth of experience and you're also discouraging a community of artists who have worked to craft fine, complicated stuff.

Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 1d

"most unhinged literary opinion"

but: it's good to want to be good at things and to try to get better at them.

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Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 1d

you can and should train your taste. if you're a grownup you should aim to get good at enjoying reading things that require decades of reading to understand and enjoy

Rachel Feder @rachelfeder.bsky.social · 1d

Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat

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Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 1d

yup! Lighthouse / Dalloway / Orlando, all in the Norton editions, which I'm having us read cover-to-cover. Norton Lighthouse is especially good. Very eager for Orlando!

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Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 1d

every use of "she thought" and other such signals in Mrs Dalloway feels like training wheels

then again, I haven't yet read The Waves, so let's not get too smug Karl

and it's arguably more ambitious to try her techniques in a city rather than w/ a small party at an isolated summer house

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Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 1d

supervising an undergrad Woolf independent study this semester, and now feeling I made a mistake having us do To the LIghthouse before the suffers-by-comparison Mrs Dalloway

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Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 1d

And the hors-texte, I learned (last year?), is also the name for the unnumbered pages of a book, end leafs and the like

Reposted by Karl Steel

m @keptsimple.bsky.social · 1d

the cool thing about the movie is actually that it features all the annoying kinds of people you find in left spaces without feeling like left bashing

Ghostin this Hell @hoovybaby.bsky.social · 1d

[guy who’s written a dozen versions of the exact same tedious book about the early 1980s]: this seems musty, to me

'One Battle After Another' Is a Hit with Critics Because It 'Aligns with a Leftist Sensibility, Says Bret Easton Ellis: 'There's a Liberal Mustiness to This Movie'

lmao

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Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 2d

Nicely played

Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 2d

*puts down his well-thumbed CCCM Joachim of Fiore and with a sigh fires up the GRR Martin machine again*

Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 2d

Like I can't tell if Thiel is using these examples because he has baby brain aesthetics or because he knows his audience has baby brain aesthetics so although he's secretly reading Gertrude Stein, he's gotta talk down to the techdolts. Prob #1.

Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 2d

thiel, man, what the fuck are you talking about

He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:

The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.

Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.

Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.

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Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 2d

As this was last night I'm impressed I got out at all

CUNTY Grad Center shirt singling with wax vampire teeth clenched in my mouth

Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 2d

Ran the gaza5k this morning (beat my soft goal!) changed from sweaty DSA singlet and then celebrated like an old fella. Wonderful medal tho ! Fabulous community event!

Your hero exalting in yoghurt and a lovely red floral Gaza5K medal

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Reposted by Karl Steel

Paperpills 💊🇵🇸❤️ @paperpills10.bsky.social · 3d

Ryan Ruby is MISSED! Here's a chance to reconnect with him again!!! newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

Ryan Ruby, Post-American Blues — Sidecar

On Thomas Pynchon.

newleftreview.org

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Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 3d

all 3 people in this published inspirational memoirs, and, like all such people, &c

Mother Jones @motherjones.com · 4d

Florida's surgeon general isn't just guided by science...his beliefs are shaped by a wife who says she can speak to spirits and levitate, and an energy healer guru.

Our latest on Joseph Ladapo:

From medicine to mysticism: the radicalization of Florida's top doc

Joseph Ladapo was a normie—until he met his wife and a guru into levitating and communicating with spirits.

www.motherjones.com

Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 3d

Indeed! And it's not Clarissa who gives her coffin that moniker: it's the letters' editor, whom we learn only the end of everything is Lovelace's sometime croney, the reforming Belford !

Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 3d

A second Clarissa mistake ! And I hope the last ! For both our sakes !

In Pencil. No ! No both underlined twice

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Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 3d

(whew reading an introduction to a thing that needs, incidentally, to explain an allusion like so, 'Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, [in which] a young woman ... makes a fatally poor choice of husband.' we all make howlers if we publish enough and I'm so glad that one's not mine)

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Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 3d

Like that

Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 3d

Anora 2

Mira of Kyiv 🇺🇦 @reshetz.bsky.social · 3d

Some kid is doing the standard “ur mom” voice chat trash talk and they got no idea they’re talking to bashar al assad

Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 3d

This is kinda my favorite tho? Your kid gets hit by a car? What you gonna do with a gun? Put him down?

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Karl Steel @karlsteel.bsky.social · 3d

What's this very short-range weapon tho. A sponge soaked with poison?