‘You have a personal shopper, you have a butler, you have a personal assistant, you have your home manager.’ Surveillance and mental offloading aside, why are these people so obsessed with servants? Oh right.

Wow, okay

Never say never but … cycling over the Rocky Mountains (I now live in the Netherlands)

Surveillance 👀

TRAM! TRAM!! TRAM!! 🚃

Fellow academics, please appreciate the t-shirt the culture studies students at my Dutch uni made 🫶🦋🤘 (My new favourite tee)

Polished the yellow stairs till they were restored to their former glory🌟

Still on my feet! Losing my voice. Hybrid teaching is a killer 💀 but luckily my students are great 💚

Narrowly avoided a bike collision in the dark fog this morning (did a bmx slide on my heavy fiets). Late train, quick coffee, now 16 presentations in the first of three classes today #coffee #coffee #coffee

Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order, Charlie Brown

Riotous discussion of Intermediality in my Intimacy, Privacy & Authenticity seminar today (clips, lots of clips!) 💥 @annakornbluh.bsky.social

This one pretty much shaped my high school experience. After a couple of listens we all had the hair and the drab thrift store jackets and overcoats, and spent all our time walking around the cemetery in the rain.

There’s holiday decorations, and then there’s Rotterdam’s festive buttplugs 👌

The last few concerts I’ve seen have been plagued by phone use. Tonight Swans began by simply saying ‘NO FUCKING PHONES’ and there was nary a one for the two and a half hour show 🤌🫶

Reading and being read

For Remembrance Sunday, thinking of my grandfather’s brother Robert who emigrated from Ireland to Canada only to be sent back to die at Vimy Ridge in 1917

Back in Utrechtopia for Le Guess Who?

Pizza by Jacques Cousteau / Steve Zissou

Voting at the Anne Frank House, talk about lessons of history 👀

Found an old bookmark 👀

I somehow missed the first Cocteau Twins album Garlands lo these 40 years - but I found a cheap copy of the 1982 4AD pressing and it’s lovely: gothic and bass heavy and brooding and raw (the first song is ‘blood bitch’) #nowplaying

Amen. Crap futures

Listening to the new season of Round About Town by @kevinboniface.bsky.social while I bake a cake for my kid’s 21st (?!) birthday. More humour and brilliant insights, with an even sharper edge. Highly recommended if you like good things.

Last night in Italy. I’m sad, but I also know that one more day of consuming twelve plates of antipasti and a bottle of negroamaro before the primi piatti arrive and I will surely die

I want a Maserati hearse 💀

I have located my future Italian compound

Pomegranates, grapes, citrus, olives, palms, cacti - how I missed you!

Midnight delirium

Love it when the coffee machine at work asks me depressing questions first thing in the morning

Today in angry cat on my lap news

If you want a real challenge let’s redeem ambrosia salad 🍒

I’m teaching a new seminar on … DIFFICULTY. (Curious how many students will sign up.) Favourite books / essays on difficulty in literature & art, in defence of, etc?

Three Days of the Condor on MUBI!

Impromptu Rorschach tests at the Rijksmuseum today (describing them for the Alt a bit tricky)

What a marvellous snub from Gertrude Stein to Ezra Pound, who tried to invite himself over: ‘I am so sorry, answered Gertrude Stein, but Miss Toklas has a bad tooth and beside we are busy picking wild flowers.’

ISLAND is a year old today!! 🏝️ To celebrate here’s a recent photo of the author taken by his kid on an old East German Praktica. If you’ve read ISLAND, thanks for reading! (If not, there’s still time!) @bloomsburylit.bsky.social @bloomsburyacad.bsky.social

Train stations beat parking garages every time

pls RT, modernists - CFP now out for 'Weird Modernisms', the collaborative conference between @modernistudies.bsky.social and @moderniststudies.bsky.social ! July 2026, Loughborough University. www.moderniststudies.org/conference/M...

Angry masked man

Beach cars 🏖️

ISLAND’s first summer continues! Take it to the island, the beach, the lake, the sofa! Anywhere you can revel in glorious isolation! 🏝️ 📖 @bloomsburylit.bsky.social @bloomsburyacad.bsky.social

It’s ISLAND’s first summer! Started on Madeira, finished on Crete. Fits nicely into a pocket for the beach ;) 🏝️ @bloomsburylit.bsky.social @bloomsburyacad.bsky.social

We had fun making this one but sadly it’s evergreen (& much worse than 2017)

Ten years on I think it might be time to bring back Crap Futures (rip twitter, tumblr) #manifesto @wired.com

‘One writes with one’s desire, and I am not through desiring.’ Reminder to start writing another book if I ever get out from under this pile of marking.

It’s called Bluesky and this is one big department meeting

Good morning to the Jean-Luc Godard-looking gentleman cruising the station in long shorts and a ‘FUTURE BUILDING’ shirt

Furniture Manifesto! 🪑 by Satie, discovered in Ian Penman’s new book @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social

Not just the UK. Canadian Gen X specialises in folk horror

Amazing #FLUID13 #design week in Cetinje, Montenegro - super engaging & meaningful talks, great workshop students AND we managed to write, translate, layout, perform & silkscreen (!) a collective manifesto by the closing night ✊