‘Wordsworth‘s matter/water are full rhymes’ yes

Sad to hear Tony Harrison has died. In The early days of the Indy I suggested we print all of V in the paper, so that people could read what they were being told to be outraged about. Didn't reach the end of the sentence before Andreas Whittam-Smith said yes. Never proof read anything so carefully.

Starting at 7pm and finishing at 3am…! 🦉

“By extension, you are also casting their country as a baddie” — not the point but this is a direct quotation from a parent’s letter objecting to The Hate U Give being made available for students in Year 10! They are fifteen years old! ‘Baddie’?

Book banning hits Dorset, UK: "The award-winning novel is about a 16-year-old black American girl who lives in a poor and predominantly black neighbourhood and attends a wealthy mostly white school. She witnesses a fatal police shooting of an unarmed black friend" www.theguardian.com/education/20...

anyone else feel mildly insane when confronted with the fact that the very people obsessed with ‘paedophile rings going all the way to the top’ are in fact the biggest fans and cheerleaders of those in an actual paedophile ring which indeed seems to go all the way to the top

Assata Shakur exchanged letters with Audre Lorde from prison, and Lorde wrote for her the poem "For Assata": I dream of your freedom as my victory and the victory of all dark women who forego the vanities of silence 👇Here's the whole poem

3. ⁠this is not the moment for an incredibly expensive increase in state surveillance infrastructure to be run for profit by private tech firms just before Labour ushers in an (even more) authoritarian right wing government. FIX THE GODDAMN COST OF LIVING INSTEAD YOU FREAKS.

2. Countries that have ID cards - like the whole of Europe - still have the same irregular migration problem (you may have heard!!!) & in fact the UK has the lowest share of its economy estimated as irregular economy in Europe so if it fixes the issue WHY DIDNT IT FIX IT THERE?

Ok. They’ve pissed me off. I’m back to tell you 3 things about ID cards: 1. Migrants ALREADY HAVE biometric ID cards & govts have been trying to digitise them for years w repeated fuckups & failures causing complete chaos - they don’t work, you do not want that system for you.

I so enjoyed reading this in @nplusonemag.com: @lilyscherlis.bsky.social thinking about groups, group relations, Bion, the left as she moves between experiences in a Palestine encampment and in the annual Tavistock Institute of Human Relations group conference www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/ess...

my daughter really captured my essence in this portrait of me “at work”

STICK TO THE BOAT, is your true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when LEAP FROM THE BOAT, is still better.

Anyway, it is shaping up to be a really exciting three days. Online, free and open to all. More details about the programme and registration coming soonish!

(Which is to say, please don't be disheartened if we couldn't make space for you this time. We had some very hard decisions to make and still had to turn down more than half of the submitted abstracts)

Yesterday @jenniegouck.bsky.social and I sent out outcome emails for this upcoming conference & spent a happy afternoon arranging abstracts into possible panels (old-school, with bits of paper on the rug). We were ✨completely overwhelmed✨ by the response - so much so that we've added an extra day! -

*snigger*

Yesterday @jenniegouck.bsky.social and I sent out outcome emails for this upcoming conference & spent a happy afternoon arranging abstracts into possible panels (old-school, with bits of paper on the rug). We were ✨completely overwhelmed✨ by the response - so much so that we've added an extra day! -

the Milly-Molly-Mandy-to-Mrs Miniver pipeline

Other work by the Ladybird artists ‘September’ Shell Nature Studies, 1956 Artist: Rowland Hilder and Maurice Wilson

Delighted that the new @stephencollins.bsky.social cartoon for the Guardian pays tribute to the great autumn hymn of British school assemblies, with its jewelled grass and refuelling jet planes. I did a deep dive into its history here: someflowerssoon.substack.com/p/jet-planes...

It is no small thing to find yourself represented in the pages of books or in the lives of their authors, especially when your identity is marginalised. (1/3)

🎓✨ Apply Now: PhD Scholarships in Literature ✨🎓 Fully funded 3-year PhD scholarships at the Graduate School Practices of Literature @uni-muenster.de in Germany, with the possibility of a 4th-year extension. Apply by December 31, 2025! #PhD #Scholarship #LiteraryStudies 👉 More info: uni.ms/gssp

I thought I'd do a grim little thread on a cursed bird. Here it is. It doesn't know it's cursed, and it isn't it's fault, but it is.

A Black man and a homeless man were found hanging from trees in Mississippi yesterday, for those who haven’t seen yet because it’s barely made it out of local news.

Let's fund some classrooms. I am specifically going to seek out funding classrooms that are looking to add frequently banned books to their collections. My goal? Let's see if we can hit $10,000 in classroom fundraising by the end of September.

So here's the deal. My birthday is in 10 days, and every year, I try to do something meaningful in the lead up. But to say I've been less inspired this year would be an understatement. Not doing anything would feel bad, though, so I'm going to do something and I'd love your help.

'From the point of view of government policy, however, he was a relatively unproductive professor, publishing sparingly and without external funding. But everything he did see through to press was stylistically elegant and intellectually precise.' yes increasingly I think that nothing matters more

Re-reposting as I think this would be of interest to some of you!

Gesicht (face), Geschichte (history), Gedichte (poems), Geschlecht (gender)…so viele ähnliche Wörter für eine Deutschlernerin…

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025... I don’t have words

Girls, don't burn Žižek books, use the paper recycling container.

Can we claim to have a functional Constitution (or Congress) if a public university instructor who teaches that gender and sexuality are spectrums can be fired simply because a student says that "according to our president, there’s only two genders"? www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

beware of people who want to "protect" the children but are vehemently opposed to empowering children, giving them information so they can have agency, teaching them about consent, and actually listening to them

Neither “course description is inaccurate“ nor “instructor or student says something beyond scope of course description“ is a *fireable offense*. More importantly, “student films themself in class and then instructor is fired along with their report chain” is not a process.

Nineteenth and early twentieth-century Anglo-American children's books invented ideas about what girls and boys should and could be in order to a) make money and b) uphold the heteropatriarchal imperialist project. Gender could hardly be more relevant than in a children's literature course

The complaint is that the course content doesn't match the course description. Here's the official description on Texas A&M's catalog: "ENGL 360 Literature for Children: Representative writers, genres, texts and movements." Teaching "how do kids' books represent gender?" seems legit if not required.

I want to note, because the initial article doesn't make this clear, that the professor being taped in the video is calm, clear, and patient with the student. Furthermore, the professor appears to be teaching absolutely basic medically accepted science & history of gender expression.

nothing like trying to write a 150 word abstract of an 8000 word article several months after finishing said article ow my brain

Headed home from Madrid thinking of this little sitting-on-a-box detail seen in a Dutch painting in the wonderful Thyssen-Bornemisza, and eager to settle back into my own domestic interior

Also came across this innocuous on the outside looking book where the artists had tried to give a name or identity to every leaf on a specific tree in Leeds in 1966, taking prints from each leaf

It's 2 weeks until the joint launch of @wsperrazza.bsky.social's ANATOMICAL FORMS, Jonathan P. Lamb's HOW THE WORLD BECAME A BOOK IN SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND and my PAPER AND THE MAKING OF EARLY MODERN LITERATURE! All welcome - join us 6-7pm BST on Thursday 18th Sep. (Message me for Zoom details)

In a remarkable coincidence, Frank Sinatra’s rider for his dressing rooms is precisely what I require in every classroom I’m going to teach in.

Kelli Anderson's made some custom paper hand gadgets for the Cooper Hewitt event next Wednesday! (See the hand flick through index cards below! 👇)

Delivered of a child with the head of a cat ...

1st September 2025 Will this be my last year in UKHEI ? The odds are high 👇

Like a landscape of gently rolling hills – the breathing patterns (inhalations, exhalations) of Émile Zola, recorded in 1896

Oh no

‘She saved everything, including, she told Smithsonian magazine, a letter she received from a woman scientist after the publication of Volume One. “I greatly enjoyed your work,” the woman wrote. “I have spent a lot of money on psychotherapy because people kept telling me I was maladjusted.”’