Paradise Almanac

Paradise Digest (Early Mid-October)

What I've been reading and listening to, what I've been ingesting these past few weeks.

Oct 11 • 

Matthew Spencer

3

On the Marionette Theater by Heinrich von Kleist

A translation from the Berliner Abendblätter

Oct 1 • 

Matthew Spencer

18

September 2025

Why Publish a Bad Translation?

Because it's better than having no translation at all

Sep 23 • 

Matthew Spencer

18

13

How can you read a haiku?

On the difficulties of typesetting small poetic forms from other languages

Sep 13 • 

Matthew Spencer

15

Coming Soon: One More Round on the LLM Treadmill

A short dispatch in place of a longer report.

Sep 5 • 

Matthew Spencer

3

August 2025

Scourged and Sweet

On the baroque symbolism of native wildflowers

Aug 29 • 

Matthew Spencer

6

The Beautiful Dinkus

Some undisciplined thoughts about personal health, Lafcadio Hearn, and obscure typographical marks

Aug 22 • 

Matthew Spencer

7

Emergency Books, Emergency Movies

Sometimes it's alright to just schlep things around like a big security blanket.

Aug 15 • 

Matthew Spencer

12

5

I Came as I Was

Some Dispatches from the Pacific Northwest

Aug 8 • 

Matthew Spencer

8

Strange Tales from the Ancient Capital: Biloquism, or a Spurious Footnote to Early American Literature (1793)

From an ongoing series of historical weird fiction

Aug 1 • 

Matthew Spencer

9

July 2025

Did I Exist?

On Kiyoshi Kurosawa's License to Live

Jul 25 • 

Matthew Spencer

10

Translators Shouldn't Use AI

A limited refutation of something I just wrote

Jul 18 • 

Matthew Spencer

8