Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” (1936)

Back in York for the first time in over 5 years and am reminded of just how it feels to be in love with a place.

The university death spiral is everywhere, and for everyone: they're all just on a convoy into the same black hole. Oxbridge, LSE and Imperial excepted, they must all *necessarily and inevitably* end up crushed to the size of an Oxo cube if we go on like this. www.bristol247.com/opinion/your...

Sorry but this wins best architecture pun

Brought students to the @ashmoleanmuseum.bsky.social a couple of weeks ago, and had a great time talking to students about how poisonous and toxic everything was in nineteenth century art. At least they didn’t have to worry about microplastics?

Today is print day at the Bristol Common Press, and Jamie and I have settled for a chaotic Pre-Raphaelites at the Oxford Union type energy.

I hadn't know that in 1920 E.M. Forster wrote (in a review of Wallis Budge's memoir) such a concise and magnificent f*ck you to colonial collecting in general and the British Museum in particular: archive.org/details/p1at... (attn @alexanderchee.bsky.social!)

Max Beerbohm, Spring Cottage, Hampstead, 1860, 1917 https://botfrens.com/collections/14375/contents/1077727

I’m catsitting and forgot to make the bed after a nap, and Morty is so cute in his ammonite form so I guess I’ll just freeze. @pamplemoussepam.bsky.social

I have taken the resources that were in the budget and which you were probably saving for higher education Forgive me they were needed to feed the AI bubble and to dismantle the humanities

This is why Romantic literature exists and you can’t convince me otherwise.

‘Come on friendly quokkas and fall on Slough’ has now replaced ‘Not with a bang but a whimper’ as the best way the world ends.

Actual photo of me in Edinburgh, fuelling my obsession with smoked fish

I just want to teach them to write...

When you have to be crucified but a banger just came on –

That’s the Wordsworthian lyric for you

Did Elizabeth Bishop write this

Last year for Christmas, I asked for a head torch. This year I’m asking for a toolbox. They say most boys grow up and date someone like their mum, but my boyfriend is dating his dad.

Today, I got taught what a womble is by English staff and postgrads, and I wonder now why wombles aren’t in the Life in the UK test as they seem much more culturally salient than Wordsworth.

“Who can say how little we should know of many periods, but for their art? History (so called) has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; Art has remembered the people, because they created.”

To get in on the fun that @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social seems to be having posting William Morris designs, here are some doodles that Edward Burne-Jones made of Morris 1/4

God is dead, Ruskin is rolling in his grave.

proud to say that I am and will always be a deeply unserious person

Can’t stop thinking about how ‘il contrapasso’ in Dante’s Commedia refers to the laws of punishment in ‘Inferno’ that corresponds to the sin (‘opposite suffering’) – but this is the bum version, the opposite posterior.

Another delightful discovery from today's foray into cat #poems that influenced Christina #Rossetti: William #Blake's water colour illustrations to Thomas Gray's 'Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat'. #Romanticism #cats

“I’m sorry I couldn’t make the EDI meeting, I was too busy being overworked while being casualised and precariously-employed.”

This is how blood gets spilled and wars get started.

This is how Ruskin would react to recent events @lettersofnote.bsky.social

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: my 19th century starts in 1739. No, you don’t want to know when I think the 18th century starts.