[to the tune of Farewell Transmission] wine dark bluuuuuues

football commentator 🤝 crew of the HMS Terror "there are fresh legs on the table"

Listening to an album which sounds like the 00s referencing the 80s referencing the 60s. A pop mille-feuille.

The sheer depravity of this — whatever has been or will be done to the statues of Lachlan Macquarie — it will never be enough. From Barry Corr's Surveying the Wild Abyss (2026)

Started as a joke, now I’m doing the reading

It’s weird that “krautrock” is still called “krautrock”

This skyline of rooftops crowded with chimneys set against clouds, 1856–59 (photo by Franck-François-Genès Chauvassaignes, The Met) 🗃️

Job-Ready Graduates joins multiple other barriers to entry for poor and disadvantaged students to tertiary education at a time when inequalities of wealth and access are accelerating rapidly. This is the opposite of what the party of organised labour should stand for — it's a travesty.

In case you didn’t know, Exeter uni, where I work, has announced a plan to make 25% of staff in my English department redundant. Left-over staff will do double the teaching while their research time will be shrunk to 1%. Meanwhile admissions for English at Exeter are HIGH, and on the rise this year

Got giddy at the record store

I want to be the guy who describes the music in the subtitles

What's the theory equivalent of vibe coding

Rest in Power, maestro Abdullah Ibrahim. Here is a fine NPR Music obit by Martin Johnson.

Any thoughts/recommendations on translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses?

TUSA - the Tasmanian University Student Association are doing great work to try to help students with food insecurity. When will society value education so students are supported properly?

Thinking about creating a literary theory class where you read Moby-Dick over the length of the semester, with theory readings attached to particular chapters. Except there’s too many options to pair with “A Squeeze of the Hand”.

Finally got some reading glasses in my 40s

True dat

Handing someone a copy of Moby-Dick hidden in my big overcoat

I reviewed Amanda Lohrey's Capture theconversation.com/amanda-lohre...

A Hegelian reading of “Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad” 🧵 1/x

I reviewed Amanda Lohrey's Capture theconversation.com/amanda-lohre...

I'm delighted to have a chapter in this wonderful new book with Edinburgh University Press Telepoetics: Writing the Phone in Literature, Culture and Theory (Eds Sarah Jackson, Philip Leonard, Annabel Williams) edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-telepoe... Open access: www.jstor.org/content/oa_c...

Professor Cath Ellis, pro vice-chancellor, quality and integrity... www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

the word coward and the word coda have the same etymological root in the word “coe” or tail, and it’s for this reason that if your book has a coda instead of a proper ending then you’re a big wimp and you’ve bottled it

The Backrooms film has done more in a week to popularise “liminality” than three generations of literature professors

I ranked movie corridors! (and didn't once write the word "liminal") This was a lot of fun.

Going goblin market mode

Big musical acts usually bypass Tasmania, so when the likes of Aldous Harding come to town you smash the Buy button with both fists

somewhere amongst the 100 or so browser tabs I have open is a livestream of some birds & I can just hear their disembodied chirping through the headphones that I am not currently wearing

Happy World Dracula Day to Tony Blair

Happy World Dracula Day to Tony Blair

Sonny Rollins has left us at 95. Can you believe how hard this album cover goes

Born 100 years ago today, Miles Davis.

Beauty in the everyday – 'The Great Piece of Turf' (Albertina) painted in watercolour and gouache in 1503 by Albrecht Dürer, who was born on this day (21 May) in Nuremberg in 1471 🗃️

Granta AI scandal has me speechless. She had. The Kind. Of Walking. That Made. Benches Become. Men.

Staff at UTAS are on strike this afternoon, in part to gain protections against AI betterworkplaces.nteu.au/priorities/a...

By a long margin, the best wax cylinder recording is Robert Browning reciting "How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix", forgetting how it goes, and then shouting his name. www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYot...

Dracula (1897)

The Rise of the Novel Dawn of the Rise of the Novel War for the Rise of the Novel Kingdom of the Rise of the Novel

Raymond Williams in 2026 would be like "this is a WHOLE structure of feeling"

What I wish for everybody to remember when Canvas comes back online: The reason OUR data can be held for ransom is because Instructure, their owners (KKR private equity & Dragoneer venture capital), & our own employers (see ASU Atomic) monetize it. It's Canvas that hacked education & stole our IP.

A Bayesian analysis concludes that Lucy in Dracula likely had Type A blood. Thank you, Science! imj.ie/bayesian-ana...

Love how Darwin in the final sentence of his second last book is like "btw plants have brains". Lived for the drama.

Oh, I almost forgot about this one! New review out from yours truly of Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward's The Rise of Pacific Literature: Decolonization, Radical Campuses, and Modernism for Affirmations: of the modern doi.org/10.31646/am....

Why offer a unique place-based module when you can give students … nothing 🫠

I went on This Guy Sucked to talk about a guy who sucked: Ezra Pound. 20 minute preview; full thing subscriber only; I hope you haters enjoy @ceaubin.com . @thisguysucked.com podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...

I found it: the nastiest historical slang for sexual intercourse

Greek Chorus REACTS To The Homecoming of Agamemnon, King of Mycenae