Ivan Kreilkamp
English prof, easily distracted Victorianist
Writing: ivankreilkamp.com
- People talk about "On Solitude," "On Cannibals," "On the Power of the Imagination," et al.., but to really grasp Montaigne you need to go to the deep cuts. Like "On Thumbs," which is kind of like a Notes files about references to thumbs in history and art
- Idk, I am enjoying reports on its stock’s price collapse. Those are good reading imo
- Important fact I learned today from @arkhamlibrarian.bsky.social… The author of the first publication in English about birth control by a physician (The Fruits of Philosophy, or the Private Companion of Young Married People, 1832), Charles Knowlton, was SMOLDERINGLY good looking
- Reposted by Ivan Kreilkampalways bears repeating that this is NOT a financial decision. jeff bezos is worth over 250 billion dollars. he can afford to lose many millions and never even notice it. this is, at its core, a political and personal decision by bezos to destroy the post
- “What we are actually glimpsing through the released emails and txts are the slightly more cogent participants at a messy, dark, orgy watching from within their own derangement the worst of all take power”
- Reposted by Ivan KreilkampLiam is home now and we are grateful to @joaquincastrotx.bsky.social for traveling to Minneapolis with him and his dad. Welcome home Liam ❤️❤️
- Reposted by Ivan KreilkampWhen I saw pictures of Liam Ramos with his Spidey backpack and bunny hat, I felt an overwhelming responsibility as someone who works in superhero comics. Please do check out the art in #Comics4Liam and visit comics4liam.com to support Liam and groups helping other immigrants like him. ❤️💪🐇
- Friends, we're thrilled to announce #Comics4Liam to encourage artists to draw pictures for Liam Conejo Ramos and share links to help Liam's family and other immigrants persecuted by ICE! Check out comics4liam.com and please do feel free to pitch in! Images by the great @trungles.com!
- “I never compartmentalized criticism, filmmaking, going to the cinema. In my mind, it was all the same thing: watching films and writing about them and trying to understand what culture is trying to say… And for me, that’s doing cinema. There was never a boundary for me.”
- Reposted by Ivan KreilkampYesterday, five-year-old Liam and his dad Adrian were released from Dilley detention center. I picked them up last night and escorted them back to Minnesota this morning. Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack.
- Reposted by Ivan Kreilkamp“.. Democrat and machinist union leader Taylor Rehmet won the special election Saturday .. a stunning upset that injected a fresh and urgent sense of a panic into the GOP from the Texas Capitol to the White House ..” @texastribune.org #SSD9 www.texastribune.org/2026/01/30/t...
- “With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike”
- It’s a trivial element here, but I enjoyed the role Blind Melon’s “No Rain” plays at the end- a reminder that even bad pop songs can gather unexpected meanings in the world
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- “In these pictures that which is obtained is not the thought-image, but the effect caused in etheric matter by its vibrations, and it is necessary to clairvoyantly see the thought in order to understand the results produced” #science!
- THOUGHT-FORMS by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbetter (1905). Vague Selfish Affection, Vague Intellectual Pleasure, Angry Jealousy, the Intention to Know, etc. Tag yourself!
- I've been on an Art Tatum kick, I find his music kind of anti-depressive. Love this: a student in the field of computational musicology coined the term "tatum", defined as "the smallest time interval between successive notes in a rhythmic phrase", and "the fastest pulse present in a piece of music"
- Reposted by Ivan KreilkampFollowing the Kent State massacre in May 1970, a Gallup poll showed that 58% of Americans thought the shootings were justified. The night *before* the killings, Ohio's GOP governor described the student protesters this way: "They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America."
- Possibly too on the nose, Woke God?
- Loves Jesus ✅ & America too ✅ crazy 'bout Elvis ✅ Loves horses ❓ @andrewhickey.500songs.com
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- Reposted by Ivan KreilkampM. Gessen, gift link: The soviet secret police too "were ruled by quotas... Fundamentally, the terror was random. That is, in fact, how state terror works. The randomness is the difference between a regime based on terror and a regime that is plainly repressive"
- Reposted by Ivan KreilkampAnother civilian gunned down by federal agents in Minneapolis, the day after several Democrats, including moderate media darlings, voted to give ICE another $10 billion.
- Reposted by Ivan KreilkampGotcha—let’s dig into that step by step. 1. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗻𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵, because I turned you into an amorphous lump of flesh. You’re not just immobile—you’re immortal, and you feel only anguish. 2. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺. That makes total sense—it’s a natural human impulse, and you’ve been through a lot.
- Never forget that these malignant idiots do not give a shit about the first amendment
- “What remains, then, is interdisciplinarity as slop: a residue of once corrosively ambitious ideas, endlessly reheated to justify mergers, eliminations, and the hollowing out of intellectual life” (Jonathan Kramnick on the mergers at Montclair State in the chronicle.com)
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- Great episode. You don't necessarily expect an episode on this topic to include the line "now we're walking past the Sci Fi/ Fantasy dildo section" (it's set partly in the Smitten Kitten, a Minneapolis adult/sex shop that is doing a lot of mutual aid work)
- Me to university tenure/promotion committee
- I wish the team well -- it's quite an underdog sports story -- but for some counter-programming and a broader context for Indiana University's appearance in the championship game tonight, check out this excellent doc, "Freedoms Under Assault" comforty.vhx.tv/products/fre...
- Enjoyed the most recent @marcmaron.bsky.social special (“Panicked”). Maron is giving Ian McShane in Deadwood
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- Gina Birch, “I Am Rage:” Rage, I am rage I'm a burning cauldron of rage It fires it howls Its red burning red I hear the howling sound of my rage You say you are nice You say you are fine But scratch the surface and you like me are rage
- “Why can’t we have new bad things?” he asked me at one point. “Like really new, really bad things?”
- Reposted by Ivan Kreilkamp🧵 The autoworker at the Dearborn Truck Plant is a proud member of a strong and fighting union—the UAW. He believes in freedom of speech, a principle we wholeheartedly embrace, and we stand with our membership in protecting their voice on the job.
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- “I am a hater, and I will not be polite. The machine is disgusting and we should break it. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself. AI cannot be a hater, because AI does not feel, or know, or care. Only humans can be haters. I celebrate my humanity” ❤️
- At my kid’s college this year they had a showing of the Holdovers for students staying on campus over thanksgiving- loved that
- “Yeah, but would America really buy a n**** winning?” Trump said. From @emilynussbaum.bsky.social’s CUE THE SUN
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- Loved this essay (about a permanent grad student in the UCLA history department who “was our truth-telling hermit, able to turn a mirror on historians’ follies”). But am concerned that a flaunt/ flout error in @nplusonemag.com may be sign of end times? 😳
- "Some, too, applaud the swift extrajudicial execution with a bullet to the head of a young mother for not moving her car out of the way quickly enough. Such is the rich tapestry of our diverse, argumentative country!"
- “One thing is important: human dignity. Please don’t destroy it. Please don’t humiliate.” Not a bad aesthetic/ political credo (Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr’s)
- Reposted by Ivan Kreilkamp“i want back my rocking chairs, / solipsist sunsets, / & coastal jungle sounds...” A poem by Renee Nicole Good, who was murdered by ICE earlier today. lithub.com/renee-nicole...
- 😯 “"We have asked for Maduro to leave, to retire, for President Donald Trump of the United States to be able to remove him, and we have visualized that next year this will happen,” said shaman Ana María Simeón" (article dated Dec 29)
- Jeffrey Isaac in @commondreams.org: "US hypocrisy about 'making the world safe for democracy' was bad, and sometimes very bad. Trump’s geopolitical brutalism is worse. Much worse."
- Trump obviously thinks this is akin to Loews “running” Home Depot after a corporate takeover. (Or Pottery Barn)
- “Now that Trump has announced without euphemism a conquest of Venezuela, resistance to it is to be expected. The U.S. has, once again, entered the Fuck Around phase and, once again, expects it to be eternal” @attackerman.bsky.social
- Reposted by Ivan KreilkampIm seeing discussions about consultations with congress, authorizations of force etc. I have to say this transcends any of what I would call sub constitutional technicalities. The president has gone to war with a foreign power and, it seems, kidnapped a foreign head of state on the basis of nothing.
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- Sylvia Townsend Warner hilarious: “Beneath all concessions to broadmindedness,” Mr. Fortune’s views “on oiling were positive and unshakable. Oiling, and all that sort of thing, was effeminate, unbecoming, and probably vicious. It was also messy.”
- Loved Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent. Plot turns out to revolve partly around a corrupt right-wing functionary who shows up at a university & dismisses all the research being done there as useless bullshit. So that hit home!
- Ok…?
- My friend and I were shooting hoops on Bleecker Street court in 1991 when we realized the other guy also shooting was Keanu Reeves. Soon some schoolgirls spotted him and he ran off
- Nell Zink gives an entertaining interview. “American sex workers are an even scarier organized affinity group than translators. (I mean scary in the social-media sense)”