The older I get, the less New Year's celebrations annoy me. the idea of wanting a fresh start seems less and less contemptible and more and more like something everyone wants, sometimes.

When you're in a cosy pub and you see people coming round looking for a table and they can't get one, it feels even cosier

The word post-coital was actually coined to describe the vocal cadences of Radio 3 announcers on December 26th

And a happy grey rocksmas to all parents about to encounter an avalanche of family judgement about how you've raised your children.

Only plausible read of Disney's moves, which are never stupid, is that they have a solid assurance from someone that the US Copyright Ruling will be overturned, and that AI products will be copyrightable.

Striking tic of LLM prose: compulsive micro-free-indirect-discourse. Even just on the scale of an adjective or two; imparts a weightless, vertiginous feeling because the affect -- or, to be old fashioned, the ethos -- is completely unstable. Er, non-existent.

I think the most glamorous thing about being an academic is when you can go to the tip on a monday afternoon instead of sunday like everyone else.

Root is out. After four days of play from a possible total of 25, I can tell you: the Ashes are staying in Australia.

So a key professional skill for me turns out to be "go to bed", then, "review that email in about 15 hours, and send at 15% of current length"

It is deeply dispiriting to watch the march of TERFism through British institutions.

When you look at England's cricketing performance today, you really have to take Root out of the picture, as a world-historical talent in the game. Then what have you got? Same old England, underperforming and prone to choke.

Juat remembering when Batya Ungar Sargon gave what was at the time one of the most interesting, if unhinged, papers about narration in Henry Fielding I had ever heard, and chuckling away to myself.

Excitingly, @stanfordpress.bsky.social has a Cyber week sale with 40% off my book LITERARY AUTHORITY and others-- it's excellent press and there's lots of good stuff to pick up! www.sup.org/about-our-cy...

Amazing; pre-capitulation!

Tfw you have an academic idea so silly you dont even research to see if anyone's done it

Hershey has really buggered up Smarties. The chocolate is appallingly tempered and the oranges have only the very faintest tang.

Striking to hear republican politicians who are planning to split on Epstein deploying the "evil counsellors" trope from the advice to princes genre

I got my wish and moved back to the UK; now I'm drying my socks on my office radiator.

If Pasqua Rosée and partner took in £400, in ~1657 @ 1d per entrant, can that REALLY mean he had 96,000 patrons? Is that possible?

New frontier for me today where the intransigence of the timetabling office of the university, plus an extremely hierarchical culture, forces curricular reform. Mania for standardisation and efficiency, plus widespread redundancies =/= a good degree programme

I'm going to do, i'm a professional eighteenth-centuryist and i'm going to stand up there and say to a roomful of undergrads on a module i convene, "coffeehouse culture", i've become what i hated

AI and "mind" a short thread. Recently, I've been working on writing children's stories, for my own pleasure. I have children and they love stories and like writing them, so. I dictated one over the course of a couple of commutes. The app is designed for meeting and came up with "action items"

Eating lunch at 1021 am, the absolute latest I could push it

Thank you for this much more accurate plug! Hope to see you there!

I'm giving what might be the "biggest" talk of my life tomorrow, at Cambridge, and I seem to have written my most certifiably bonkers talk yet for it, about Jacobite poetics and Sean Bonney via Charles Le Brun, called "Non-Literary Beauty?". If you're in Cambridge, come see me in the Eng Dept @ 5pm!

Read the new Pullman. Delighted, mostly. Went to talk about it online. Found readers concerned principally with casting an ethical field of their own contrivance over the actually existing artwork. Exhausted and depressed.

Whenever I teach something multiple times, the best teaching comments I make are always the ones I forget to make again.

My 6yo is absolutely Rumplestiltskin-pilled and is on his way to harder ideologies like alchemy. This is the alt natural philosophy pipeline

The unironically-named recording suite we have, "Panopto" (!) didn't like having to transcribe me telling students about Rochester's use of rude words. I checked the recording; it is very much audible. Anyone else encountered censorship in their institution's tools?

I am co-convenor of Durham English's module on Restoration and eighteenth-century literature. I have put so much Dryden on this year's syllabus that in the Dryden-only lecture I am about to give, I will not even mention MacFlecknoe or Absalom and Achitophel.

Picked up Steve Zwicker's "Dryden's Political Poetry" for £6 (!) at Oxfam. It's so clear, such a service to the reader, and totally informs my reading of Dryden. Kind of an epochal book and a rare one that is both true AND still rewards careful reading.

"What does quite mean dad" "Quite means a bit, but not a lot" thinks "Dad, you're 'quite' important to this family"

"With the advent of artificial intelligence, the internet transformed from a collaborative space into an extraction zone." Worth reading this even if you don't know what robots.txt is.

After fifteen years I can finally say that the pleasure of Girl Talk was the tension between criticism and belle-lettrism

"The protocol taught us that technology can be based on human values like ethics and morality. It showed that voluntary compliance works when all parties benefit." On robots.txt. www.heise.de/en/backgroun...

And that is how you use a chiasmus.

My 6 yo just asked me, dad, are you "FOMO MAN" So Id like to report a murder

"Being a grownup is you have to work all night and all day until someone answers your double computer"

Thinking about the man -- long dead, now -- who taught me The Dead in his sitting room in Hale Barns. He was old, but the story's preoccupation with youth and old he taught quite unselfishly. He wanted me, a 17-yo boy, maybe Michael Furey's age, to think about my youth and my age. What a gift.

RIP Jilly Cooper, the writer who best understood the inflections of a smirk.

Almost all good undergrad teaching tramples on someone else's historicity.

Can't wait to read another week's news justifying torture and genocide.

Final Boss of Both-Sides-ing

Remember "close reading is extractive"?

This is a terrific analysis. And from the point of view of my own expertise, some really impressive, sensible use of data viz to make an argt.

I'm sorry we weren't ready when you were, Jonathan Swift

Giving students thoughtful, personalized feedback and instruction is not a problem that originates from the difficulty for an instructor to generate feedback, it is a problem that originates from institutions pivoting to student:instructor ratios where that dynamic is not logistically feasible.

Growing up in England means that when I see Basel spelled like this I immediately hear in my mind someone shrieking "BA-SIL!"

Not that I had great or wild hopes for Ezra Klein, but what the fuck happened

I have even more trouble with Tan Lin and Tao Lin than I do with Nick Royle and Nick Royle