Christian TeBordo @xtebordo Twitter profile

Last Seen Profiles

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

9 months

this looks like a yearbook for a school where all the students are kafka.

Martin Shaw

@thebooksdesk

9 months

Kafka from age 18 to 40

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

4 months

in a healthy literary culture we'd just admit he's kind of corny and move on.

Kristine Ong Muslim

@kristinemuslim

4 months

Ocean Vuong is the model Asian diasporic poet from the genocidal imperialist's assembly line. Vain and self-centered. Ahistorical, incurious, opportunistic. The empire's clerks type furiously, hoping the clicking sounds will drown the screams from their beloved atrocity machine

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

10 months

career advice from don dellilo (author of 'end zone')

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

once, on a non-smoking overnight train from malmo to berlin, i noticed we'd been stopped for a while, so i decided i'd hop off and have a cigarette, only to find that the whole train was on a ferry on the baltic. that was a beautiful night, a genuine surprise.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

5 months

jesus christ. i assumed this poster was mistaking YA for literary fiction, but i looked it up and this author was longlisted for the booker prize, or as her website has it, the booker price.

barry pierce

@BarryPierce

5 months

take the beginning of this chapter: this is entirely just description, as if someone were recollecting a scene from a film in an overly detailed way. this type of writing used to relegated to the fringes of genre, now it's all over literary fiction. this is not creative writing.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

6 months

yes, everybody knows the broad strokes of melville's biography, but summarized this way it is the perfect career arc.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 months

i know you guys are against sex scenes these days, but i just read this one in 'suttree' and thought it was very funny.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

literally gasped when i saw this. rip to the best sentence writer since bellow if not nabokov. damn.

Martin Amis, Acclaimed Author of Bleakly Comic Novels, Dies at 73 (Published 2023)

In books like “Money” and “The Information,” he created “a high style to describe low things,” as he put it. He found more renown as a critic, and a measure of unease as his famous father’s son.

www.nytimes.com

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

6 months

'catcher in the rye' hate has changed in my lifetime. when i was younger, it came from people who thought it was childish, and now it comes from people who think all books should have pictures and characters with magical powers.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

5 months

it's more than 280 characters, but this paragraph from sam kriss could stand in for every post i've ever sent.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

the plagiarism is less interesting to me than how the impulse to be considered a writer overtakes the actual desire to write, which is apparent throughout the essay.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

would be funny if you talked about literature on here in the way you talk about politics, eg, 'realism is a deathcult,' or, 'metafiction is disinformation.' would also achieve similar results (none).

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

10 months

the age of breathless hyperbole?

Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

10 months

do we have a name for the relentlessly shitty period of history we're going through yet?

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

3 years

this is what my novel, 'the apology,' will look like. it'll be out 11/1/2021. as the cover makes clear, it's set in the office and at chili's. here are things that some writers i admire very much said about it:

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

if i'm about to blow my life up to keep writing, then let me post this writing advice denis johnson had pasted to his printer. (the only good writing advice ever)

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

@ebruenig fondly remember when i opened the family bible to find that my then-4-yr-old, wesley, had inscribed it: 'wes batman.'

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 months

if you want to be a billionaire you need to go into early modern literature.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

5 months

was gonna call this '2665,' but that seemed a little misleading for a story about 'this day and age.' thanks ee/ @hobartpulp for publishing it.

2667 by Christian TeBordo

It was not yet this day and age. A writer sent a proposal to his literary agent. The proposal concerned a major trauma. The agent submitted the proposal to a select few editors who made it the...

www.hobartpulp.com

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

the only people i find it hard to love are the joyless, but then i remind myself how difficult it is to commit to joylessness and i love them for that. i love almost everybody.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

the little guy i'm holding in this picture turned 13 today. he'll probably be taller than me by the end of the year. he's going to rome tomorrow because he really needs to see the colosseum. just a rad person — couldn't be more proud of him.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

89 years is a nice long life, but the fact that he was still capable of writing books as good as 'the passenger' and 'stella maris' makes me wish he had another decade or so.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

3 years

just found out i got a sabbatical for next fall, which will allow me to post full-time. watch this space in september 22.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

my son made me a father's day card that also pastiches my first short story collection.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

@nate_knapp24 i knew there was water between sweden and germany, but i just assumed the train would go the long way around while i slept. my brother and i grabbed chocolate and beer from the duty free and went up to the top deck all night. one of my favorite memories.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

whenever i see simic's name i think of this one, which i love.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

nabokov's 'picnic, lightning' is probably still the best parenthetical ever, but saul bellow really gave it everything he had in 'mr. sammler's planet.'

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

4 years

unfortunately i cannot recommend that you spend a penny over $1,007 on my novel toughlahoma, which was published on january 1, 1700.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

crazy to me that there's not an industry-wide rule that helen dewitt can publish whatever she wants with whomever she wants. (i mean this sincerely)

Helen DeWitt

@helendewitt

1 year

Cormac McCarthy is dead. Martin Amis is dead. People are making nice noises about their dedication to style. None of it makes any difference to authors who imagine they can choose their influences, as McCarthy and Amis did.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

whenever i'm writing a book, i hit a point where i know it'll be unacceptable by mainstream standards. anyway, hit that point on the book i'm working on today. you can decide for yourself when it comes out on a micropress in ten years.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

4 years

i took a couple of workshops with john ashbery in college and i don't remember there being any craft talk. he would just say 'this is good' or 'i don't get it' and then tell funny stories or give us good poems to read. i miss that.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

7 months

usually people are kind of horny on my birthday, but this year they are both horny and penitent. anyway i am 46 and i had a nice day.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

i love watching the slow acceptance that ellis is one of the best writers or our time. (one of the few positions i staked out unironically from the beginning, a hill i knew they couldn't kill me on)

Bret Easton Ellis Has All the Answers

To mark the release of his upcoming novel, the great American bomb thrower takes questions from friends and luminaries about video games, sincerity, and the death of art.

www.interviewmagazine.com

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

6 months

possible epitaph.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

10 months

fortunately my advisor, garielle lutz, and i both left academia, and garielle's mentor, gordon lish, was not an academic in the first place, tho of course, lish edited ol' ray carver, who taught at the program i attended, but that was long before i went to work with george sau

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

@llassabe

10 months

The most pretentious (and insecure) thing you can do as an academic is drop your advisor genealogy when it isn’t relevant to the conversation

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

this is pretty much how i think about things too.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

3 years

k and i have been married 19 years today, which means our marriage is older than we were the day we met.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

11 months

20 years into our marriage, my wife just used the phrase 'if you're looking for something to do,' and i had to explain to her that i am never, ever looking for something to do.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

i'm all for self-promotion on here, but i saw somebody call his own forthcoming book 'powerful, devastating and heartrending' and i don't think that's how you do it.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

you can still party all you want if you just write your fiction during the time you would have spent dispensing unsolicited writing advice.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

3 years

i simply do not maintain friendships with people who are bad at art. my friends are either good at art or they don't make it. (goes without saying that they are all funny and attractive)

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

during today's 'humanities are dying or not' discourse, i met with an engineer about semiconductor policy, and when i pointed out that there's an ethical component to all aspects of chip design, production, and distribution, he said, confidently, 'not materials.'

Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

i know it's cool and romantic to say the humanities serve no purpose, but it was actually very dumb of us to leave the big decisions to STEM and social 'science.'

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

11 months

this novel of mine, published in 2007, went out of print almost immediately (because it was too good) (this is true, but a long story) and is now available for preorder.

We Go Liquid by Christian TeBordo | Long Day Press | Books & Stuff

Christian TeBordo's novel, back in print. A boy receives an email. It may be a message from his mother beyond the grave or it may be spam offering free movie tickets.

longdaypress.square.site

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

3 years

it should go without saying, but as review copies of my new novel make their way into the world, i'll remind you that the narrator is my mouthpiece, and i endorse everything he says and does. the other characters are also me.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

in all the panic about how ai will ruin education, i haven't seen anybody point out that the humanities are best when a bunch of people read a book and then sit around a table talking.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

My waterfall is roaring today. Wish you could hear what it sounds like in my living room. Extremely soothing.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

a reader should not survive the first line. if you get to the second sentence you are pathetic, a nonreader. i have always said this.

Jon Winokur

@AdviceToWriters

2 years

A first line should open up your rib cage. It should reach in and twist your heart backward. It should suggest that the world will never be the same again. COLUM McCANN #amwriting #writing #writetip

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

3 years

my brother just texted to tell me i got my first ever mention in the times. and i'm in real good company. thanks, @GabrielJBump !

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

5 months

all this barth talk on the timeline reminds me of when people in grad school would ask me why i still read the postmodernists, and all i could say was that they seemed like the only writers who were having any fun.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

i will be exactly halfway through my 40s tomorrow morning. tonight i am reading updike in the suburbs, where i live now.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

3 years

i'll be deleting 1000 words for for every 1000 words you write this summer so the world doesn't get too clogged up with language.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

3 years

i never met gian, but this is devastating. i know a handful of writers who are committed to doing their own thing, but as an editor/publisher, he might have been a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon. love to his friends and family.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

4 years

my son is handling this surprisingly well, but every now and then he stares off into space and says, in a kind of haunted voice: i wanna go on a train.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

3 years

i get psyched every time i remember that in june, the library of america is publishing barthelme's complete stories in one volume, in the order of the original collections, which is something i've wanted since i discovered him in high school.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

3 years

university syllabus template up to 14 pages now, every sentence a banger, gonna be so helpful to the children.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

it would be cool if the academy chose another outsider for the nobel this year. someone who specializes in short stories and hasn't published a book over 200 pgs. an american, recent transplant to the hudson valley, maybe. not a great dresser, hair a total mess, fun to drink wit

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

3 years

thinking of doing a bit where i just post this billboard whenever people are going after franzen on here.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

9 months

i always repost pictures of my books because i'm here to promote my work while i goof off with weirdos. but you need to know that i got my copies of 'we go liquid' yesterday and pictures can't do it justice — it's a really pretty object. @longdaypress did a great job!

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

it is charming for me to see the children posting about their feelings to richard siken — and siken responding so generously — because he gave me the most ruthless edits i've ever gotten, which was also generous (made me a better writer).

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

saw another writer say it's unprofessional to publicly call a bad book bad. happy to remain a dilettante.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

4 years

the point isn't that i write unlikeable characters. it's that i write unlikeable characters that i like.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

5 months

dead: nathaniel hawthorne, nikolai gogol, isaac babel, flannery o'connor, augusto monterroso, donald barthelme, barry hannah alive: rebecca curtis, padgett powell, garielle lutz, robert coover, camille bordas, myself

Vanessa Saunders

@postcardsfrmv

5 months

Who are the best short stories writers of all time?

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 months

the fucked up thing about my insistence that you can read and enjoy books by monstrous people is that when i die there are gonna be all kinds of articles saying, like, actually he was a good dude, fun to get beers with, dependable, set the dance floor on fire, tipped well, etc.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

3 years

first review is in. dmitry samarov says you've got to buy it.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

have now read both the dewitt and krasznahorkai, and if the other new directions storybooks are anywhere near as good, this will be the best publishing series ever.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

3 years

david foster wallace, jd salinger, f scott fitzgerald, charles bukowski, bret easton ellis

Alma Katsu - THE SPY WHO VANISHED is here!

@almakatsu

3 years

@Gwenda Men should tweet the names of the last 5 women authors they’ve read

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

saw the phrase 'part of your activism as a writer' and had a little epiphany about why so much of the writing is so bad.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

9 months

my motivation for finishing this novel is that i will never feel compelled to write another novel again. it will be short stories for the rest of my life. i say this every time.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

glad this works for her. i prefer to get it right the first time.

Caroline Hagood

@CarolineHagood

1 year

Lauren Groff's writing process: "she writes it out longhand in large spiral notebooks. After she completes a first draft, she puts it in a bankers box — and never reads it again. Then she’ll start the book over...working from memory...only the best, most vital bits survive."

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

i like this line from lorentzen's piece on amis, and, without having actually formulated it this way before, i've applied it to every book i've ever read.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

'guys! i found a website that's more like doing homework. and the best thing is, nobody there is making jokes!' -my timeline for the past several days

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

9 months

my son is 13, and he grew up in a cramped apartment in chicago, but i was still not ready for how stoked he'd be to pick out a huge christmas tree and set it up in our spacious living room today. he was so happy.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

this is a disaster. on the same day penguin decides to re-uncensor roald dahl, all of my publishers have banded together to announce that they are removing references to chili's and applebee's in my books and replacing them with the cheesecake factory.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

4 years

people who live outside of chicago and don't have cornerstores: where do you go when you only have a couple dollars but you need to buy some ukranians

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

been married 20 years as of last wednesday and we celebrated this morning by opening our first ever joint checking account.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

3 years

blurbs definitely help small press writers and readers. but also, my first book had a blurb from george saunders, which led to many negative reviews that said, 'this dude is not like george saunders.' (i'm a calvinist not a buddhist)

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

a classmate in grad school did a whole presentation pronouncing goethe as go-eeth. one of the smartest people i know and my favorite living short story writer.

bailey meyers

@baileymeyers

2 years

hey kids who learned their vocab from reading, what word that you mispronounced still haunts you

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

analytic philosophers should try reading fiction. i just read about how derek parfit 'discovered' the 'non-identity problem' when it was basically the premise of 'tristram shandy' three centuries earlier.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

3 years

if you guys think 2/2/22 is something, you're gonna lose your mind on 2/22/22.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

i always thought it was corny when people said they wrote to comfort the uncomfortable, but that was infinitely preferable to an entire literary culture dedicated to comforting the comfortable.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

4 years

unlink short story collections. please no more themes anywhere.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

'In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.'

Kody Young / 💬 Your AI Interpreter

@heykody

1 year

1. Ever wonder what the rest of the Mona Lisa looks like? Got @Adobe Firefly to help fill out the background for me with the power of AI Here's what the backgrounds of the most famous paintings in the world look like with AI:

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

salman rushdie did a reading/talk at bard while he was still in hiding. it struck me as very courageous and was a formative experience for me. i'm praying for him.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

7 months

almost done with the first draft. looks like it will be more like five weeks. (spread out over two-plus years, due to late capitalism or whatever it is you guys are blaming things on these days)

Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

3 years

goddammit it looks like i'm gonna write another novel. (only gonna spend four weeks on it tho)

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

3 years

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

still reading 'the passenger,' still considering the responses, imagining people reading 'the trial'and being like, 'josef k. is clearly guilty of something, but kafka will not reveal why he is bad.'

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

people like to rhapsodize about maxwell perkins, but really the best editor of all time was whoever at the new yorker read a donald barthelme story and said 'let him cook.'

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

closed on a house today. gotta do some painting and flooring, but then you can come hang out and look at the waterfall.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

my son asked me to take him to the grocery store to buy spherical ice cubes, and when i asked what he wanted to do with them, he said, 'marvel at them, i guess.' (we will get them tomorrow)

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

3 years

last night i told a woman in her 30s that i didn't like star wars, and she said, 'then what fandom are you a part of?'

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

6 months

two views from my desk. i like working from home.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

i agree that a book should be as long as it needs to be, but somehow 350 pages is almost always exactly 150 pages shorter or longer than it needs to be.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

10 months

some of you have been reading propaganda instead of the library of america's 'collected stories' of donald barthelme, and it shows.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

my wife doesn't read my fiction, and there's usually no reason to show her what i write for my day job, but today i read her something i wrote about quantum computing and it made her laugh out loud, so my career's going ok.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

3 years

my theory? this guy just wanted to learn how to be a good person, and went straight to the source — contemporary novelists.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 years

probably also worth pointing out that 'satanic verses' is a good book. i haven't read it since i was in my teens, but it lit me up at the time. i remember the prose seemed so full of joy i wondered what his face looked like while he wrote.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

4 months

there was a group of blind people at my bus stop today, and one of them was like, 'who woulda thought there'd be 4 blind motherfuckers here at the same time!' and they all laughed because there were actually 5 of them.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

5 months

gotta be honest — i wasn't particularly interested in the eclipse, just wanted to see some friends and make my wife happy by taking her up to the adirondacks to be a hippie for a day. but the totality was eerie and stunning, one of the loveliest things i've ever seen.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

1 year

i know it's unfashionable to like auster, but tonight i was reading 'the music of chance,' and there's a very brief scene — set at a dinner table — that made me laugh out loud, which is rare, and not something i expected from auster at all.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

8 months

last year i predicted that i would move into a house on a waterfall and that happened. (i had already bought it.) this coming year i think i will finish writing a novel called 'anderson, awake.' i also hope you get to do some of the things you want to do.

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Christian TeBordo

@xtebordo

2 months

in case any of you were wondering how to emerge as a major american author👇

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