Martin Peterson's creative response to being banned from teaching Plato (shared with his permission).

Literally insane

Just applied for editorial assistant gig. It pays more than my teaching gig. The automated reply assures me that my application "is at the top of the company's reading list."

Remembering when the T-Rex was placed in my kid's Easter basket.

My New Year's Resolution is not to keep my New Year's Resolution.

meanwhile.... medicine has taken INSANE leaps and bounds in the last 2 years. we're out here curing HIV and leukemia and creating 100% efficacy vaccines against all sorts of cancers, and now this?? between this and renewable energy outstripping fossil fuels in efficiency, the future is bright

Easter and Valentine's Day are upon us.

Are our clothes saying things about us that we don’t realize we’re saying, like slips of the tongue? newyorkermag.visitlink.me/MtyDRs

Very pleased that New York City will have an inaugural poet and such a fine one in the great Cornelius Eady. Poet Elizabeth Alexander of the Mamdani arts and culture transition committee doing good work: “Poets and artists…can say things that politicians can’t say.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/n...

Trump said releasing Epstein names would hurt "my friends." He doesn't protect friends he protects leverage. Those men know what HE did. Keep them safe, they stay silent. Expose them, they flip. This isn't loyalty. It's mutually assured destruction with Trump holding the detonator.

Just heard Duke Ellington use a magnificent phrase in a 1974 BBC interview with Stanley Dance. Asked whether he regrets never having received a grant to sit at a university somewhere and compose in peace, he says he has no interest in such a stretch of “ornamental stagnation.”

Would an Esquire-type magazine do this today?

Christmas time at my house:

My wife's Christmas gift, available a full week before the day.

I have to start Christmas Shopping, but I have prep to do and classes to teach.

We got the laurel leaf wreath for the holiday.

Loving this blazon for the Ghost of Lucrece by Thomas Middleton. "death that shrimpe of spirits" 🦐 , "Her haire which in Arachnes finest loome, / Was kist with siluer shickles [shuttles?]" 🕷️"Her eies the curious fabricke of her world" 🌍

Vince Passaro reviews Gerald Howard's The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature, concluding that the synoptic view of American literature exemplified by a critic like Cowley has simply "disappeared" from literary-critical culture: harpers.org/archive/2026...

If you are advising a graduate student in Irish Studies at a North American institution, please encourage them to apply for the Larkin Interdisciplinary Fellowship for research support from the American Conference for Irish Studies acisweb.org/larkin-inter...

Fox News’ Chief National Security Correspondent. We are about to go to war for oil, while citing a lie as justification. Again.

Exciting news! My Element, Teaching Shakespeare's Theatre of the World, has been released in a digital edition (paperback coming soon!) by Cambridge UP. Even better, it's FREE to download until 15 December 2025! So many thanks to all who helped along the way! <3 www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Found the tie!

Really hate The Tempest's "work the peace of the present," preferring "work the peace of the presence" (Arden but not Folio) because it seems a sarcastic jab at the power of the royal presence, a trope James I seem to favor.

Thaler's post (click it for graph showing striking decreases in science spending) immediately under yet another repost of this fantastic letter to London Times. And I'd just like to say: can we PLEASE have a Democratic candidate who knows we need a massive reinvestment in US arts & humanities too?

“Anybody seen Benny?”

I got a matching mug. (Used the filter to clean the old shoes.)

Found this in the Dollar Store yesterday and thought the youth are ok. We may have a chance.

Anyone else think Laurel wreath?

My two surprise books for December: Stephen Murphy's The Gift of Immortality: Myths of Power and Humanist Poetics and Graham Greene's Lord Rochester's Monkey. ("Surprise" means not on my radar before this month.)

It. Is. Murder.

The map to Hodge

A sentence from something I'm trying to finish up.

"Art ... had served as a sort of immortal-like realm in a terrestrial setting since at least Horace, the poet who provided himself with a linguistic hedge against Ozymandias’s fate, achieving 'A monument … more strong than brass,/ Soaring kings’ pyramids to overpass.'"

Two new buds today. Late November in NYC.

I did the Current Biography article about him (actually CB International).

a great essay on life, music, relationships

Insurance tnext year $1,000 per month. Guess it's time to get a gig with benefits.

The first book in my series, Late Tudor and Stuart Drama: Readings in Feminist Theories and Histories, is out! Please, friends, spread the word about the book (ask your libraries to buy it) but also about the series. I'd love to read your manuscript! More info in my pinned post. #EarlyModern

Someone really ought to buy me this house and sponsor my move to Canada. I mean the house announces that I belong in it. www.bonavistaliving.com/albert-rolls

@sublunary.bsky.social Are you going to publish Tobias Ryan's Glantz here in the US?

I mean jesus christ, it was not that long ago that "papers please" was damn near universally accepted as a 2-word shorthand for the kind of oppressive society that we beat our chests over being better than

My wife is planning for International Pynchon Week.

Reminder that 2025's Twelth Night from Central Park is showing tomorrow, 11/14, on PBS! www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/t...

This piece by @freeburian.bsky.social is the first article from the forthcoming special issue on Shakespeare and Middleton, which I am guest editing. So pleased to see it live 🙂

I am about to oblige myself to write (not for publication) about Pale King. I haven't written more than a long endnote on DFW, one I would write differently if I had first read Stephen Guy-Bray's Loving in Verse. (By the way, can someone do a reprint of Loving in Verse?)