The best #ValentinesDay

Call for papers! INSCRIPTION 7 (out 2027) will be all about BLANKS. It will be (as ever) a BEAUTIFUL and MAXIMAL object. Send us your ideas! Historical / theoretical / creative / creative-critical -- or some strange blend. First step: 400-word proposal + brief CV by 1 April 2026. CFP attached.

Happy Valentine’s ♥️

reread this morning to prepare for class & teared up at “harm / will not fall, his perfect hand”

closes TONIGHT

really wasn‘t expecting this to get attention — a tiny bit of my faith in humanity has been restored. Consultation closes at 11.59pm UK time tonight, so THERE IS STILL TIME to respond and/or share

"Sharma said that he now hoped to pursue a poetry degree." www.thetimes.com/article/5062...

A reminder that next week I'll be speaking alongside @heggledepeg.bsky.social at @keelrowbooks.bsky.social. There will be wine and hand-press era books in ample supply. RSVP: www.tixtree.com/e/seminar-in...

filled out the horrible settlement consultation and I’m sorry, the question that is framed as a negative so that you have to ‘strongly disagree’ with something not happening?? This has enraged me

Please take the time to read what the children detained in Dilley wrote me in their own words: www.propublica.org/article/ice-... 10/

CALL FOR PITCHES @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not. Details below!

last day of our winter semester and I'm thinking about this again: here's to rest, space, sleep, care and hot dinners for all

Childhood forever, childhood for all ✊

Photograph of Mên-an-Tol, formation of standing stones, in Cornwall by John Piper

been thinking so much recently of Muriel Rukeyser’s Ballad of Orange and Grape www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57158/...

how can you organise if you don’t mourn?

“If I am killed doing this, throw my body at the White House, martyr the shit out of me & raise hell. Do not be sad. Do not think I would do anything differently. I would do it over & over again — this is too important to sit down & shut up and not do anything.” www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

a student told me yesterday that she liked my office 'because there are so many books in it" 🥹

This is how enjambment can work in a poem. Bridge 77 on the Macclesfield Canal allows a horse to cross the canal without having to untie it from the canal boat.

Btw, my gorgeous cover star is a gynandromorph gypsy moth, female on its left side, male on the right. It was caught in Berlin in July 1864 and pictured by German entomologist Ernst Ludwig Taschenberg in 1877. It makes more than one appearance in my book! #booksky #histsci #sts #queerhistory 🦋🌈📚🗃️

if circumstances were different I would 100% be applying for this gorgeous job — maybe you should?

Milton tangent complete, I am returning to my work on erased/struck out/obliterated inscriptions. For many reasons they aren't the easiest things to locate in online catalogues. So if you come across any fun ones (esp. in books published prior to ~1750), here is a public request to think of me.

riding into the last week of the winter semester like

Heute in den USA (links). Vor 100 Jahren in Deutschland (rechts).

I love this photo of photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston in her studio (1896). Look at all the posters for periodicals & little magazines! www.loc.gov/pictures/res...

ty to the person in my mentions having the argument I do not have time to get into

Outside the Level 2 Reading Room in @bodleian.ox.ac.uk there is a wellbeing display. Here are some it's little zines that genuinely made me smile.

we use an accession number system for rare book shelving instead of LC numbers (pros and cons, tbh) which means you can find our 1607 Orlando Furioso & 1609 Faerie Queene next to queer pulps like Sucked into Success, Weekend Homo, and Young, Hard Hitch-Hiker

Me, increasingly wild-eyed, to my students:

We are observers, not protestors. We show up to document and film the atrocities ICE is committing. Using 5 year olds as bait. Kidnapping senior citizens. Breaking down doors without warrants. Murdering poets and nurses. Media has all of that information because *observers* were there to document it

Minneapolis friend: "I am safe but I am not okay... the reality is so much worse here at ground zero and so much more violently cruel and morally repugnant than what is being reported via the media just due to the sheer scale of ICE flooding the zone. This is so so so much worse than 2020...

He was a nurse.

Singing

National media should really be covering the fact thay every major school, museum, and arts institution in the Twin Cities, and hundreds of local businesses are closed tomorrow to protest federal occupation. Nothing like this at this scale has happened anywhere in America anytime in living memory.

More anti-ICE print history in Minneapolis! 💪🏻

would you just look at this sleeve artwork i mean

‘a massive statewide economic strike’ — this is the way — keep going Minnesotans 🤍

Woman selling herrings at Garstang market, Lancashire, 1891: “They’ve backs like farmers’ sons, & bellies like landlords, & shine like cats’ eyes under a bed.” [Hewitson diaries, 5 Nov 1891, available at Lancashire Archives, DP512/1/12.]

Italian voice actor Carlo Bononi was the voice of all of the characters on Pingu. A trained clown by trade, he used a theater technique called grammelot, which consists of "speaking" in a mix of babbled gibberish noises. He improvised all the voices live and unscripted.

brilliant article about dispersed, displaced, lost and destroyed collections and the strange combination of emotional, affective, technical and administrative language used to describe them

a list for this most Mondayish of Mondays, attributed to Sydney Smith (1771-1845), writer and clergyman

one thing I like is: in winter when my cat comes back inside out of the cold, she lifts up her head to be stroked and there’s a snap of static electricity when I touch her fur ⚡️⚡️

I'll take this one, thanks.

my toxic trait is schedule-sending all my emails at 8am on Monday morning

Friendship http://www.moma.org/collection/works/79842

👀

The UK has declined a new Elbit Systems contract, leading Palestine Action prisoners to end the hunger strike that had three of them on the brink of death. The Tesco worker suspended for refusing to handle Israeli goods has been reinstated and will no longer have to handle them. We can and will win

👀

Penn AAUP sent this to all members back on Nov 19: The list of data the federal government requested — lists of + contact info for all Jewish faculty, staff, students; lists of ppl who attended listening sessions; lists of ppl who received a task force survey — is absurd