Morning walk

You gotta hand it to freshers' flu. When so much in life is uncertain, here it is, late September, and I've got the sniffles again.

Honestly, the best predictor of whether or not a novel moves from the Booker longlist to shortlist is if I haven't read it yet. (I've read the Miller, which is good! And own the Choi! But that's it.) (But anyway, Sarah Hall's Helm is the book that most should be there.)

I'm not going on a much longer rant, because I don't want to give them the outrage they desire, but I am in the UK because of the Indefinite Leave to Remain scheme and want to stress that it is a) really (and unnecessarily) arduous and expensive, and b) a very good thing to have.

I've put this as required reading for two different cohorts of students within ten minutes of reading it.

Simply astonishing. Maybe Lecturer A should not have to mark over 100 essays in a two-week window in the first place? Invest in qualified staff and reduce impossible workloads FFS www.kcl.ac.uk/about/strate...

This is my 19th autumn teaching in HE, and my start-of-term jitters are just as bad as they were in 2006.

I’ve never liked the phrase ‘giving it 110%’, but I’m watching Grand Hotel, and Greta Garbo just acts MORE than any other human.

It's been a while since I read a new novel that took so much sheer joy in language as Sarah Hall's Helm.

I'll quite happily maintain that if you don't like Eleanor Morton, there's something wrong with you.

Aberdeen's 60s are best represented by its cinemas: 1965: The Rolling Stones play the Capitol 1966: The Sound of Music plays at the Odeon for nine months, with coaches coming from Inverness 1967: Joseph Strick's Ulysses is one of the only films ever banned in the city. @belmontcinema.bsky.social

New favourite Aberdeen image, from 1932.

Reading a lot about UK cinema exhibition in the 1890s, and I think there's a genuine case to be made for Queen Victoria as the first British film star.

This is such a good statement, and ending it 'We regret that, sadly, unanimity is not possible on this issue and kinder ground eludes us' is definitely language I want to use in the future.

Much of Tokyo Sonata hit /way/ too close to home, and it did lose its way 3/4 of the way through, but my word, that is one of the all-time best final scenes.

Happy leafblowers on campus season to the no one who celebrates!

Ooh, this is going to be great!

University management preparing their start-of-term updates. (Still actually from the new music video by The Beths. But still.)

There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the blight gets in.

What’s the best way to train young vampire hunters? Garlic medium education.

I rarely get excited about architecture, but this is SO gorgeous.

Never too old to have an office breakdown because Fake Plastic Trees comes on the radio.

So pleased about this news!!

Me: I’m doing a marathon next month You: Running?? Swimming?? You?? Me: no I’m watching really long movies You: oh Which is to say: I am spending the first weekend of August watching movies that are three hours plus and raising money for my friend Oday in Gaza! Please share and donate!

New Neko Case!! www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLwe...

Glorious shade cast by Nan Shepherd in a 1960 issue of the Aberdeen University Review, where after a series of remembrances of the former Professors of English we find this:

Aberdeen Queer Arts Festival coming in the autumn! www.aberdeenperformingarts.com/aberdeen-que...

Never will I see a Vertigo-style film with a crucial double-casting and think the two characters look anything alike. Tonight's example was Lou Ye's Suzhou River, which is quite a lovely portrait of a very scuzzy Shanghai. Very 2000, but worth checking out.

Every day is a good day to celebrate the writing of Sylvia Townsend Warner!

I couldn't stand Saltburn (I know I'm late, but it just hit iPlayer) - except the last scene - but it's a fascinating exploration about how if you took the Catholicism out of Brideshead it really wouldn't work at all. (But why would you watch this when you could watch Brideshead?!)

A MASSIVE WIN AT NEWCASTLE UNI ICU

For no reason at all other than that I found a copy in Oxfam recently, I'm reading Rosamond Lehmann's The Swan in the Evening, and everything folks say about contemporary memoirs and fragmentation could be said about this book from 1967.

If you live in Aberdeen and want to talk about Neil M. Gunn's The Silver Darlings, there's a book group for you! (Wed 16 July, 18:00-19:00) aberdeencity.spydus.co.uk/cgi-bin/spyd...

It's horrible to discover you may in fact be a film bro.

What's a poster you had in your room growing up? (The clues, it seems, were there if you looked hard enough)

The Perceptionists' Memorial Day, from 2005, is alarmingly timely, and has been stuck in my head for days now. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy3C...

Absolutely infuriating that this is the end point of vastly inflated salaries for Vice Chancellors and other top admin whose obsence pay raises at a time of pension cuts were always justified on the grounds that only they could manage the new era of competitive marketized higher education.

"It's foggy. There's gaslight. Maybe also a dinosaur idk."

Finally read My Name is Lucy Barton, long after everyone else, and, like, maybe The Great American Novel? I guess I have to read everything Strout’s written now (I’ve read Olive Kitteredge, and seen the adaptation, but nothing else).

For those of you who are too hot today, Aberdeen is 17 and looks like this.

This is such an excellent film.

I had no idea there were any plans to release the Heir of the Cursed album after Beldina's death - just the news of this brings my to tears. (And if you don't know her music, please do check it out.) www.heirofthecursed.co.uk/event-tickets

many are already saying it is the perfect book

Today's fun is reading old post office directories to find female English lecturers at the University of Aberdeen - Augusta E. Rudmose Brown (wife/sister of a polar explorer?) in 1913, Kathleen Horner in 1917...

I'm doing a number of deep dives into Aberdeen literary/university culture in the 1910s-30s, and I'm sorry to report that while Agnes Mure Mackenzie is an absolutely fascinating person, and a really interesting critic and letter writer, her novels themselves are simply not very good.

Pondering cheese mites today, and what kind of lives they lived before the invention of cheese.

Exactly this. What’s striking across the HE-bonfire-board is the meanness, the triviality, the TINY amounts saved in these cuts. Lives ruined through job loss at worst, fear/burnout/disengagement at best. And for truly trivial savings compared to the cost of one yachted-in management consultant

Just watched New York, New York for the first time and have SO many thoughts, most importantly a) how dare Scorsese make a film that painful for two hours and then transcendent for 40 minutes, and b) why isn't But the World Goes 'Round as well-known as the title song?!

'A review into how the situation has been handled, commissioned by the university, found decision-making was unstructured and dominated by finances. The university said it accepted there had been "missteps".' Not the only university to harry in haste and repent at leisure.