Noctambulate
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- Last night, finished Le Carré’s seriocomic THE MISSION SONG, on an Anglo-American military coup in mineral-rich central Africa structured like an IPO, complete with an opaque contract drafted by a French notary: “The contract is no name, it is a contract of unspecified hypothetical eventualities.”
- “Wallace’s novel remains underread by overtalkers”
- “You’ll be mixing with others who are living lies. You understand that, don’t you? They are not like us, these people. The truth is not an absolute to them.” A spymaster’s avuncular warning in John Le Carré’s THE MISSION SONG
- Writing on the brink of World War II, C. V. Wedgewood deems the 1618-1654 THIRTY YEARS WAR “the outstanding example in European history of meaningless war.” Of the dynastic combatants, she concludes “they did not learn then, and have not since, that war breeds only war.”
- In C. V. Wedgewood’s unsparing account of the brutal, devastating THIRTY YEARS WAR, it is only the powerless, the voiceless who desire peace: “The peasant had only one means of making his sufferings known — by revolt.”
- “There was, and had been from the beginning a deep desire for peace [from] those unable to express their wrongs, that class from whom the war drew its sustenance, both men and food and money, and had no means to control or prevent it.” Wedgewood, THE THIRTY YEARS WAR
- “The armies like creeping parasites devoured the Empire. . . . Hard as was a soldier’s life, it was the only livelihood open to a great section of the population. The problem of disbanding these great masses of humanity when peace came grew more terrifying.” C. V. Wedgewood, THE THIRTY YEARS WAR
- “On paper, imperial authority might be paramount in Germany; in fact, the soldiers alone ruled. The soldiers, not the generals,” assesses C. V. Wedgewood in THE THIRTY YEARS WAR. One Swedish General “frankly admitted he had not the slightest control over his men.”
- Wonderful verb choice by C. V. Wedgewood in THE THIRTY YEARS WAR. Turning to diplomacy, the devious military leader Wallenstein is said to ”be anxious to caress Saxony into peace by careful treatment.”
- A lament from the Alsatian town of Hagenau, three times occupied in eighteen months: “We have blue-coats and red-coats and now come the yellow-coats. God have pity on us.” C. V. Wedgewood, THE THIRTY YEARS WAR
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- “He thinks the ship cannot sink that carries him.” An English diplomat on the bold self-confidence of Sweden’s King Gustavus Adolphus. Throughout THE THIRTY YEARS WAR, C. V. Wedgewood skewers the fecklessness and cruelty of European nobles, but when it comes to Gustavus she absolutely swoons.
- Reposted by NoctambulateOMG. "DHS said the episode began after a man approached Border Patrol agents with a handgun and they tried to disarm him. But footage from the scene shows the man was holding a phone in his hand, not a gun, when federal agents took him to the ground and shot him." www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...
- Reposted by NoctambulateGov. Tim Walz: "Thank God we have video, because according to DHS, these seven heroic guys took an onslaught of a battalion against them or something. It's nonsense, people. It's nonsense and it is lies."
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- "The virulent hatred between soldiers and civilians, rising almost to frenzy, increased the horrors of war, with daily killings, burning, raids, answering attacks" documents Wedgwood in THE THIRTY YEARS WAR. "This may not have seemed expensive to the princes, for it was not they who paid the price."
- Gray blue winter morning, 11 degrees, reading C. V. Wedgewood’s sanguinary THE THIRTY YEARS WAR, written in 1938 as if flinching from the looming next war. An English mercenary: “we entered killing man, woman, and child; the execution continued for the space of two hours, the pillaging two days.”
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- “A great state in decline may yet be more powerful than a small state not yet arrived at greatness” — C. V. Wedgewood
- “God help those where Mansfeld comes!” In C. V. Wedgewood’s THE THIRTY YEARS WAR, a freebooting general and his mercenary army bring typhus and plague wherever they march, plundering villages, burning farms, wrenching Christ figures from church crucifixes and gibbeting them along the roadside.
- “At Vienna, the emperor Matthias tottered toward his grave. Dreadful things would happen when he was gone, he gloomily predicted. . . . [He] has only one ambition — to postpone the crisis until he should be safely in his grave.” C. V. Wedgewood, THE THIRTY YEARS WAR
- “Never had the Churches seemed stronger than in the opening decades of the 17th Century. . . . Men wanted certainties, not more causes for doubt, and the discoveries of science perplexed them with strange theories about the earth on which they walked and the bodies they inhabited.” C. V. Wedgewood
- Frigid morning in a tense city. Starting C. V. Wedgewood’s stark history THE THIRTY YEARS WAR (1938), itself written on the brink of social cataclysm.
- Of the improbability of human existence in Solvej Balle’s ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME: “Each of us has come into being as only one of untold possibilities. . . . Anyone would think this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable, but the opposite appears to be the case.”
- “My time is not a circle and it is not a line. It is a life with no drama, with no poverty or disease or natural disasters. I am safe, I have nothing to fear, none of the things one has learned to fear.” Of “life” in stopped time in Solvej Balle’s ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME II
- “I was traveling on an open ticket, with no itinerary. I journeyed through the minutiae of the streets, in a universe replete with minor incidents, a host of objects and occurrences and sensations all crowded together in my memory.” Solvej Balle, ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME I
- Reposted by NoctambulateSocial media monitoring systems, cellphone location tracking, facial recognition, remote hacking tools — now being turned on Americans by ICE to target protesters. bit.ly/3Kq348R
- "Today, the aim is to prevent the world from turning into a den of thieves, where the most unscrupulous take what they want" — German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier
- "But this rough magic I here abjure . . . I'll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I'll drown my book" The Tempest (Act 5, Scene 1)
- 2025 Reading Log: Finished multiyear reading projects of all the Hardy, Scott, Turgenev,and Zola novels. Other highlights: Caroline Blackwood, Leonard Gardner, Han Kang, Walter Kempowski, Benjamin Labatut, Curzio Malaparte, Hilary Mantel, Anthony Trollope. www.tumblr.com/noctambulate...
- “Who cares? Who cares what it even means?” The ruthless app creator Tindra Bergstrand in THE BOOK OF LAMPS AND BANNERS on being told she is misconstruing Jean-Paul Sartre. “Everything is code. No more words.”
- In Elizabeth Hand’s THE BOOK OF LAMPS AND BANNERS, digital apps have a lobotimizing effect, burning holes in memory and volition. The Ludis Mentis — “mind-game” —app’s developer is a wealthy doppelgänger for punk photographer Cass Neary, but has digitally excised her own trauma.
- “She thrust the mobile at me again and now it’s screen reflected my own face. ‘You see how it all ties in? The way we’re all sucked in by this? We can’t look away, none of us, no matter how hard we try . . . ’” — the centripetal force of the digital in THE BOOK OF LAMPS AND BANNERS
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- Whiteout conditions up north, with 40mph wind gusts driving the 6” of new snow that has fallen since noon. Reading the last (for now) of Elizabeth Hand’s Cass Neary novels, THE BOOK OF LAMPS AND BANNERS which leaves behind gritty analog realism for digital necromancy.
- “History’s what people are trying to hide from you, not what they’re trying to show you. You search for it in the same way you sift through a landfill: for evidence of what people want to bury.” Hilary Mantel, GIVING UP THE GHOST
- “For I imagine the devil, when he goes to walk in the world, spruces himself in his dressing room . . . I imagine how he sleeks his rough fur with baby fat, polishes his teeth with ground bones, and swills his mouth with blood.” Hilary Mantel, GIVING UP THE GHOST
- The amorphously tangible presence of the devil in Hilary Mantel’s GIVING UP THE GHOST: “I cannot wrench my gaze away. . . . I beg it, stay away, stay away. Within the space of a thought it is inside me, and has set up a sick resonance within my bones and in all the cavities of my body.”
- “Words are a blur to me; a moth’s wing, flirting about the lamp of meaning. My own thoughts go at a different speed from that of human conversation, about two and a half times as fast, so I am always scrambling backwards.” Hilary Mantel, GIVING UP THE GHOST
- “One of my difficulties was that I had not understood that school was compulsory. I thought you could just give it a try and that if you didn’t like it you were free to revert to your former habits” — the precocious Hilary Mantel reaches school age in her memoir GIVING UP THE GHOST
- Reposted by NoctambulatePhysical copies of our Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities book (newest volume in Debates in DH series) arrived today just in time for the holidays! www.upress.umn.edu/978151791608... @uminnpress.bsky.social
- In C.H.B. Kitchin’s THE SENSITIVE ONE, the dour spinster aunt Margaret observes a gloomy family funeral with quiet satisfaction, even longing, silently intoning to herself: “One funeral makes many.”
- “One by one, the bees fly from the old hive.” Reading C.H.B. Kitchin’s THE SENSITIVE ONE (1931), in which a multitudinous family dwindles as its iron-willed patriarch loses his grip on life, even as he possessively tallies his current brood’s combined lifespans at 597 years.
