Today I defend my dissertation! Thank you to everyone on here who helped me get to this point! If you’re in Chicago, come to Jimmy’s at some point after 5pm to celebrate!

Two important updates: 1) I’ve started The Rehearsal season two 2) I’ve finished my dissertation

Getting a PhD has prepared me for a job, but the problem is that job is nineteenth-century law clerk.

just now learning that my university has announced the end of the university

This week I used my favorite dissertation productivity tool: telling someone you’re going to meet a deadline they didn’t ask for and that might be impossible

Rereading Moby-Dick for the first time in a few years, and it is so wild that anyone ever thought Middlemarch was better than this

The other dumbest part is I know that quakers are basically just like other people but they say “thee” and “thou”

Forever in awe of the work produced by my colleagues

Dumbest part of studying the nineteenth century is that I know how to spell “daguerreotype”

Can’t believe I am expected to sit here and write, the thing I have wanted to spend my life doing

👀

this is the last week you can make "2024 hours to go" jokes

Happy Holidays / RIP Jesus and Joe Flaherty

Posting an indefensible and niche take shortly before hitting my screentime limit on this app: we’re so back

Rereading the greatest novel of the twentieth century (Marrow of Tradition)

BREAKING: 8 MLA past presidents--incl Judith Butler and Chris Newfield--publicly call on the MLA Executive Council NOT to block a vote on a BDS Resolution. Please read and share their letter today in LitHub. Members deserve to debate and VOTE. lithub.com/8-former-mod...

The one-two punch of the Brian Jordan Alvarez piece and the Know Your Enemy courts under Trump 2.0 episode is doing bad things to my mental health

Moving from aesthetic judgment to interpretation is vital for scholars. But it is not vital for the critic. The move is a move because these activities are not the same kind of thing. The role of criticism is not that it interprets but that it alerts us to what we should be interpreting. V J Adams

Important reminder this holiday season:

Finally a good Amazon suggestion a.co/d/cFCpGeQ

“All Things Are Too Small…tries to pass off general moral-aesthetic judgments of taste as precise acts of historically specific evaluation, of diagnosing a sick culture…. We learn nothing from this.” Mitch! Mitch!! Mitch!!!! www.clereviewofbooks.com/writing/becc...

First interview in just under 30 minutes, wish me luck (my phone is on do not disturb and I will not see it)

More Christmas ideas if someone has $1600 to burn

FYI: open.substack.com/pub/allvisib...

This holiday season, the first one in which Detroiters is easily available on Netflix, you all have a duty to show it to all your families

I am about to finish Giovanni’s Room for the first time and honestly I feel like my entire life has been a waste before reading this book

Yea, I’m “into whales”

I made a starter pack, please enjoy go.bsky.app/K9YykGT

first pie done

What should I have on in the background while I bake two (2) pies and a batch of cookies today? Music, movies, tv shows…podcasts?

While biking across Hyde Park this morning I had two separate cars blow through intersections that I was already biking through, both times nearly hitting me, and now I’m back on my soapbox about how car ownership is antisocial behavior Anyway, I’m back, @damfales.bsky.social

People may be interested to learn that the Moby Dick anime is streaming in the US on prime video!

I wrote about Chris Marker for @clereviewbooks.bsky.social! It’s about news that’s not real but isn’t fake news: www.clereviewofbooks.com/writing/make...

Continuing to watch all the Schrader movies on Criterion (Light Sleeper tonight)

For Parapraxis I wrote about what you’ve all been thinking about—the campus www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the...

Woke up still mad about how garbage Civil War is

Just biked past a car blasting “Paul Revere” by the Beastie Boys in the year of our lord 2024

G o l d e n C h i c k e n

having the same accelerated heart rate while reading the real estate investment section of the new Melinda Cooper book as I had when I first read the student debt section of her first book

Chicago! Join Interccect for a reading session on Melinda Cooper's new @princetonupress.bsky.social book Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance. interccect.com/2024/04/13/g...

It must be so great to be a nineteenth-century orphan, knowing that someday you’re going to inherit a vast estate

In any given social context, no matter how professional, I am at most three minutes away from trying to get people I have just met to listen to me do a rendition of “The Aristocrats”

Met one of the greats

Happy Confidence Man day to all who celebrate, especially this guy:

Everyone needs to pause talking about advances & Amazon & new ventures in publishing & start talking about distribution. I am happy to help explain what distribution is, what it means, & why it’s maybe the most important publishing issue

This is…not good

Hearing that there’s a new essay in The Cut

Parents are cleaning out a storage unit and I just got sent this (from like high school ?)