Went with option 1. It left me with more questions than thoughts—and my main one is: why does the Linton house look like it was interior designed by Dr Frank-n-Furter? Also, LEECHES ??!!

Partner is out of town. Tonight should I— 1) go see Wuthering Heights by myself at my local movie theater 2) stay home with cat and listen to new-to-me harpsichord music on vinyl while finishing a novel I’m hating (so I can start a new one ASAP)

👿

I’m cataloging a poem which involves a letter to Dante, heliocentric musing, and a weeping personification of the Florentine Academy who wears a dress made of books (she is sad because people are mean to Dante and Boccaccio).

Edward Gorey #illustration #EdwardGorey #books

Personally, I like it here. I like all you guys.

Bookbinders and restorers in the 1930s and ’40s helped the Nazi regime create a database that was used to persecute and kill Jews and others who were deemed racially impure, a British researcher has found.

I’m still on the email list of my former local plant nursery guy, from Tarrytown, and he just sent out a newsletter about how good snow is for all the plants growing under the earth and it is curing my SAD

I get asked a lot what I'm giving up for Lent, and this year the answer is nothing. this is what I'm doing instead, and I'll tell you why, and you're invited to join in with me however it fits into your own spiritual or contemplative practices. drive.google.com/file/d/15NhY...

Partner is on a team that designs and builds supercomputers for research purposes (think, making the vaccine, sequencing genomes, weather computing) and they are having huge problems buying hardware due to AI bs.

"My cat and I will _not_ be going out."

There is something I find very heartwarming about walking through the neighborhood and seeing everyone out in the streets shoveling, playing with their kids, etc. Especially when my sainted neighbor used his snow blower on our sidewalk so we don’t have to shovel!!

The surprise at the end is Dean Cain works for Interpol and is doing a recovery operation of Iraqi artifacts.

This is my front yard

Grapefruit is not edible

I don’t understand how I’m supposed to go anywhere today

old library catalogues: here are the results of your precisely formulated search library catalogues since ai:

Ancient linden tree (Tilia) in the Czech Republic is estimated to be over 800 years old. These resilient trees have the ability to resprout and continue growing even after suffering significant damage or disease.

The most positively I ever feel about America is when I am listening to the Decemberists’ Benjamin Franklin Song

me when i want my gentle puck to come hither

My local library system does not have any of Gabriele D'Annunzio’s novels!

This was an incredible treat: a visit to one of Diego Rivera's rarely seen murals, "The People's Demand for Better Health," located in a Mexico City public hospital and thus difficult to access. Completed in 1953, the mural is a sweeping visualization of forms of ancient & modern medicine (thread)

It’s so common to come across the assertion that books were luxury objects exclusively for the elite in the Middle Ages that I want to guest curate a massive exhibition called “Meh-nuscripts: Books for the Many,” which features just workaday or unremarkable objects.

5 authors by whom I've read at least 5 books: Umberto Eco Iris Murdoch Mary McCarthy Vladimir Nabokov Jeanette Winterson

Doing some much needed clothing pile management and laundry today, I’ve realized I’ve reached terminal t-shirt. I don’t think I will ever need to acquire another t-shirt for the rest of my life.

It’s 46 degrees here and the snow has finally started to melt…

‘The nightingales are sobbing in The orchards of our mothers, And hearts that we broke long ago Have long been breaking others; Tears are round, the sea is deep: Roll them overboard and sleep.’ 📚W.H.Auden, Song Of The Master And Boatswain 🖼️ H. Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy #BookWormSat #poetry20thC

"and some, i assume, are good people" is definitely part of my speech. so is "open the schools."

Sometimes, when the interpersonal aspects of my job feel particularly fraught, I have to pull up Frank Cadogan Cooper's Lucretia Borgia Reigns in the Vatican in the Absence of Pope Alexander VI and stare at it for a few minutes until I am capable of continuing onward

put a Welsh folk back on the throne

The humanities cannot simultaneously be useless and moribund and also so dangerous that they are worth legally restricting.

I recently got a bunch of Slightly Foxed editions of cozy British literature and I have to say, I feel extremely cute reading them on the train, at the table waiting for friends, curled up on my couch… 💁🏼‍♀️ they are really the perfect size. This must be how people felt when Aldine octavos came out.

Don’t have evidence? Channel your inner Iolo Morganwg and 👏🏻 make 👏🏻 shit 👏🏻 up 👏🏻

A room strangely full of staircases to demonstrate the marvelous art of perspective in 1604. By Hans Vredeman de Vries of everywhere. Today is his day.

The term "language nest" is a calque of the Māori phrase kōhanga reo. In a language nest, older speakers of the language help teach children through intergenerational language transference, placing focus on local Indigenous cultural practices and perspectives. Free: archive.ph/2024.07.02-1... …

The Hang is a “jazz opera Passion Play” adaptation of Plato’s Phaedo, which I saw in a weird basement in early 2022. It is one of the best things I saw in my NYC time and I’ve just learned the original cast album is on bandcamp! Check it ouuuuuuttt taylormacandmattray.bandcamp.com/album/the-ha...

In small world news, a yoga teacher at my studio is a member of @bibsocamer.bsky.social and told me she read and liked my article 😅

In terms of quotidian professional tasks, is there anything more execrable than having to write your own bio?

I want to see someone get excommunicated

these have been good years for medievalists, first wondering if the pope will excommunicate the emperor and now watching the king have his brother locked up

One of my favorite things about Kathryn Rudy's manuscripts scholarship is the candor with which she describes her method and her advocacy of the value of slow, intensive scholarship that combines access to digital materials with first-hand examination. Here she is on the Bolton/Blackburn Hours. +

I haven’t seen Wuthering Heights yet but I did listen to the soundtrack. The vibes… are off.

I wonder how long it will take my colleagues to notice that I’m just slowly cataloging all the Italian books in the office and trying my best to ignore everything else. When I say I’m a basic bibliographic bitch this is one of the things I mean. I just like Italian books better.

If you don’t read old stuff you’ll never discover that people in the olden days had the same thoughts and feelings and dreams and anxieties you do, sometimes articulated differently, sometimes exactly the same way. You are never truly alone in anything and old writings are a neon sign telling you so

Every couple of years the same article comes about about an ambitious information storage mechanism. Like 7 years ago it was etched nickel plates getting shot onto the moon: "the civilizational backup disk". There's no reason to debase ourselves thinking through moronic ideas

You hire a person to acquire, maintain, make sense of, and make meaning from, original texts. A person comes and does it

Okay I am reading up on the circumstances of the writing and publication of Bembo’s history of Venice and it is unexpectedly hilarious. My man did not want to be a historian. And the Venetian senate didn’t really want a history!

One might be forgiven for thinking that the undermining of trust in previously-irrefutable, material historical evidence was an actual aim of the swivel-eyed billionaire loons foisting "AI" upon us all.