Forced my students to admire this sentence in Araby: 'Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds.'

This is what they took from you

Lot of creative deaths in the tales of the elders of ireland, but the one I enjoy at this point in time is 'He put his face to the earth and did not raise it again, and thus died from shame'

Whoever wrote in the blurb for this edition of Edward Said’s Out of Place that the book reveals “an unimaginably rich world of colorful characters and exotic eastern landscapes” desperately needs to read some Edward Said

I collect inspirational footnotes and share them from time to time:

found a good one

My internet's been down since Friday, but in the meantime apparently I've had a paper published! Check out “The Letter of the Law: Joyce, Martyrdom, and Wildean Litigation”, Open Library of Humanities, vol. 11, no. 2, 2025. olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/2...

“If human beings would learn to stop insisting on their distinction from animals, perhaps they would no longer need to humble themselves so before the angels.” —Adorno (1944)

Nietzsche on realism

Didn’t realize this about Rhodes & CS Parnell. Bew refers to the £10,000 as a donation, but the emphasis on payment for payment of services rendered seems the point!

london review of books' classifieds section remains undefeated (there's also someone looking to buy a london flat upfront, budget £600,000)

Origami crane incense holder and incense i got for my birthday (this is a brag). Looks like a liver bird in that colour

I do wonder how much the outlook of our prominent journalists comes from 1. Being in a profession with a v high barrier to entry, 2. Therefore selecting for those w private school upbringing, 3. Not being paid well (so downwardly mobile), 4. Pressure to build personal brand on hostile social media

‘Whether they're most concerned about restoring inequality of men over women, of global cultures, of races or religions, or of economic orders and hierarchies, there's a push back against that principle of equality.’ Alan Finlayson on the online right, on the pod: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

'The British Library...has taken years to recover from a major cyberattack that disrupted its services and restricted access to its collections. The walkout is set to take from 27 October to 9 November, coinciding with the two-year anniversary of the cyberattack.'

I really hope the D'Angelo news isn't true. 51 is far too early. I remember the excitement seeing Black Messiah drop early in 2014, because of protests around Michael Brown's killing. It felt prophetic. He was excellent, people recognised it to an extent, but maybe he was even huger

RIP Roland McHugh

László the legend, ledge for short, that's what he's known as here in cardiff... all the local children ask him to do impressions of Irimias from Satantango, and he obliges...

Three rules for the arctic by william t. vollmann

I appreciate that under clickhole posts on Facebook, you get an intervening voice from 'oaf's corner'

Re last repost: that opening of Howards End is so good isn't it

Is there anything more tantalising than the promise of an early 19th-century letter with the postscript "Burn this immediately"?

Blair's post-genocide plans for a new Mandatory Palestine should be a delegitimising project for an entire faction of Labour. In terms of scandal by association this is far worse than anything Mandleson has done. A generation of British politicians should be haunted by the words "Gaza Trump Riviera"

When literally nobody is trying to censor you:

Announcing New Welsh Voices in English Literature - a new research series at Swansea! I wanted to devote some of my @leverhulme.ac.uk trust fellowship to promoting work by other ECRs in Wales. I'm really looking forward to these two talks this semester, with Bridget Bartlett and Beth Pyner.

The campus is absolutely fabulous, but I think I might get bored with it after a time - there seems to be nothing but water here & there are never many people around.

Deliberately misreading 'speculation' so that I can hold German philosophers responsible for the great depression

Words, hopefully, not to have lived by (fr Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel, Vineland)

Liverpool

wrote an absurdly long review of this to put off other work i need to do: www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Just landed: Congrong Dai’s complete translation of Finnegans Wake

Paradise peninsula going to the dogs

Wirral to scrap 90-year-old ban on carpet beating and ‘wanton singing’

UK journalists really do just get a lot of yank content in their algorithms and relay it to us don't they.

One must imagine Sisyphus pushing a big rock up a hill

Frankly astounded to have attended my first(?) ever Shakespeare production to take the bold step of using semi period appropriate dress

I'm in the funniest situation ever, which is that a 17 years old math genius got obsessed with Barthes and wants to learn everything about structuralism. Help me make a list of the best works of structuralism, excluding ones that will embarrass us in front of the mathematicians?

The cycle of book criticism really sucks. There's almost no place in crit spaces for writing about something that isn't just out. This hurts authors, it hurts reviews (who have to form takes on books in order to pitch them months before a book comes out), and it hurts criticism generally.

Happy to announce I am the new presenter of 'in our time', supplanting, no, usurping Big Melv

hmm u know it's interesting that Marina Hyde dismisses creatives 'using their platforms' to make statements. bc I remember her outrage about creatives organising through FFB to hit genocidaires in the pocket instead of turning up at festivals and making statements www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

If I were united I would simply not lose to a league two side in as exhausting and demoralising a fashion as possible

Yes but I don't see you mentioning all the laws I didn't break, your 'honour'

I actually discovered a medieval manuscript once full of people saying "Ayrnt Theyse Ayges Dayrk, Eh?", but Big Medievalism is suppressing it.

Hello from the revolving Corleck head exhibit at Cavan County Museum 🥰

ㅤ La mer aux oiseaux — Max Ernst, 1926 [The Sea of Birds] ㅤ

Keir Starmer's spokesman asked about author Sally Rooney's plans to donate her royalties to Palestine Action, says that supporting the group is a terrorist offence and "obviously the police will implement the law"