How to Do Things with Condiments - JL Austin

It’s my birthday! My book has finally entered production! I severely hurt my hip at the gig! Not from the pit, just from bad posture! This morning a charity knocker apologised because she only wanted to speak to people over 30 and I did not correct her!

I joke that I’m becoming radicalised against digitisation for a number of reasons (AI scraping; false assumptions of some sort of innate accessibility; increased cyberattacks) but this is the main reason

Hoping this helps our colleagues across the industry

Am I… going to take my copy of John Milton’s prose to the Turnstile gig tonight?

congratulations New York on your hot mayor

We are delighted to announce a virtual winter lectures for exhibition 'A body of knowledge' is open to book 👉 history.rcp.ac.uk/event/body-k... 🗓️ 6pm GMT, 9 Dec, £5 😍 Featuring a virtual exhibition tour & fascinating lectures from @awickenden.bsky.social & @samuscript.bsky.social! #LibraryHistory

I think this is weirdly and quite aggressively wrong: people under 20 understand the value of physical media? Admittedly sometimes in horrifying ways (not over my brother's boyfriend telling me he collects CDs, as a novelty) www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

Mega excited that @awickenden.bsky.social and @samuscript.bsky.social are speaking on 9 December for @rcpmuseum.bsky.social winter lectures. Online, 6pm GMT, £5, book now: history.rcp.ac.uk/event/body-k... #LibraryHistory #GLAM📚

Really looking forward to this!

Have official confirmation it will be December. Ask your library to buy the most exciting Christmas present going!

My book is now available open access on project muse, with OAPen launch coming soon. Hard copies should start going out this week (if they have not already): you can get yours for 50% off with code SAR50.

As part of the Fredson Bowers award from @bibsoc.bsky.social (🙏) I’ll be giving a short talk on ‘The reassembly, analysis and appraisal of John Bellingham Inglis (1780-1870): #rarebooks collector; savant; scholar; slave owner’ November 18th, 5-7pm. In person / online bibsoc.org.uk/event/panel-...

Cordy is uncertain about her new best friend. Henry is eyeing up his next victim.

I enjoyed this article on aphantasia (and hyperphantasia). Unlike some of these interviewees I don't have any grief about not being able to visualise, but I share the weirdness of realising of how different other people's experience of being human is... www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Somewhat astonishingly, here it is, a book, a thing in the world... More, including acknowledgements, soon❤️

when will my book return from war (be published)... how am I meant to promote it when nobody can tell me and three different months are listed online... anyway, please ask your library to pre-order my book! it is good! www.cambridge.org/gb/universit...

i think if you ride public transit enough you learn that most weird behavior is not dangerous, and conversely i think driving a car teaches you that everyone is trying to kill you at all times

I see RSA acceptances are out! I’m speaking on a panel called Who’s Afraid of Areopagitica? and the answer is: I am

In a massive win for everyone the morning after pill is now free and without prescription in England. As we slide backwards to the darker times it’s nice to have some positive news. 🫶 www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

found a new favourite printer's mark today, that of Heinrich Petri:

A nice research day at the Plume Library in Maldon.

Watched Frankenstein. Not enough Paradise Lost

to be in a room with a band expressing their fear, loneliness, anger at the world — and to have it magnified back by an audience who have or continue to feel the same — and for that exchange to be joyful somehow, communal — it is not a cure but it is a hope. & it never ceases to be magical to me

six bands in & I am reflecting on the fact that a single non alcoholic beer should not cost me £5.50

Two bands in today & I am reflecting once again that live music won’t save us but it might be the closest thing we have

Of all the band names to have to say out loud, ‘Prince Daddy & The Hyena’ never gets less humiliating.

new and forthcoming 👀 allegedly will be out *this month*

If we put half as much resources into metadata and cataloging as we do into dumb AI stuff, we’d way better off in terms of the info/data ecosystem

the problem with playing scrabble with an American is that the Merriam-Webster dictionary is WRONG

evil!

"Parking is such sweet sorrow"

‘If Shakespeare was around today, he surely would have been down with wearing your heart on your hips (rather than your sleeve).’

I'm pro dicking around with the classics though. Writers like Austen and Emily Bronte are full of ambiguity and space for interpretation, so it's important we make contemporary versions that contain no ambiguity at all

This is Mycroft. I don’t know what he’s watching

All went well. The comfiest spot in the room has been located.

Microdosing the feeling of being famous (taking a cat on public transport)

As I sit surrounded by builders in my house, trying to find an emergency removal service who will come to me *tomorrow*, I find myself thinking… maybe I shouldn’t have left writing this paper until the last minute

It's on the website now, so: I'm Co-I on a new AHRC Curiosity Award, The Many Lives of Cardboard, with Antonia Thomas (Highlands and Islands) and Lucy Razzall (National Archives). Please consider this permission to send me any and all cardboard trivia gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref...

In need of academic copyediting and/or proofreading? Please consider me: allitteditorialservices.co.uk Please share! Strictly no AI is used! I love correcting spelling! #Editing #Spellcheck #Proofing

Orange plate from 1450 & a book by @joannapocock.bsky.social which is everything I’d hoped it would be

Storing my not-at-all-homoerotic fighting manual manuscript in my not-at-all-homoerotic Saint Sebastian book casket.

Performatively reading in the cafe, but wearing white gloves so I'm still venerating the Book As Object, with a t-shirt saying "I know archivists don't wear gloves" so people know the gloves are performative.

Have a day by myself tomorrow in Paris: what would you do? Thinking about maybe seeing the Gaza exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe, but very open to other suggestions.

John Burnside. ‘The only gift is knowing we belong / to nothing’

Just read Andrey Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin. Very enjoyable, more novels should have depressed pet penguins in them.

almost outdone by ‘My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove’

Fair play to Thiel, nothing funnier has ever been said than “I’m a libertarian, or a classical liberal, who deviates in one minor detail, where I’m worried about the antichrist”

over £7,500 raised so far! donate.biggive.org/campaign/a05...

All that fur proves useful in becoming the Cosiest Animal Ever.