Season 2 of Severance comes out today (finally!). Here's a piece I wrote for @therambling.bsky.social about how the show reflects how attitudes about corporate work have evolved (and have not) since the 1950s and 1960s. the-rambling.com/2022/10/21/i...

Three years ago this week, my first public-facing piece on TTRPG Actual Play appeared in @therambling.bsky.social — on the end of @criticalrole.bsky.social Campaign 1 but more the stories AP tells about friendship. I had no idea where this work would take me, personally or professionally.

"The buds of spring seemed to defy the season of death that was spreading across the world." Robert Lublin on rereading The Lord of the Rings during the pandemic.

"Why is it that so many reality dating shows use formats that recall the courtship rituals of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels?" Miranda Hoegberg compares forms old and new.

"Where the Sidewalk Ends proceeds relentlessly to poke fun at routine interactions and needless, exhaustive productivity in a world swarming with the detritus of accumulating waste." @tyholter.bsky.social revisits the Shel Silverstein classic on its 50th anniversary.

“The notion of living with actual illness is anathema to our self-directed, time-prizing society.” Julia Kendal on the intersection of illness and beauty trends, historically and now.

"I’ve spent many years searching for some version of my story, yet what seems a simple premise—'daughter carries on without father'—is not so simple to find in children’s literature." Abigail Spencer on the Amber Brown series

"By then, I knew that what I had always wanted from a story was what I had wanted from life: to make it mean something despite what seemed like utter chaos." Samantha Colicchio on her journey with the hit TV show Lost. the-rambling.com/2024/11/23/i...

Turkey trot your way over to @therambling.bsky.social straight away, because our latest issue is out—from Lost to Lord of the Rings, reality TV to “succubus chic,” you will not lack for conversation at the dinner table after reading the essays at the-rambling.com. 🐌🦃

Give thanks—The Rambling is out! From Lost to Lord of the Rings, reality TV to “succubus chic,” you will not lack for conversation at the dinner table after reading our latest issue, now live at the-rambling.com.

If you aren’t following @therambling.bsky.social yet, you might wanna do that before next week. #teaser

"Sometimes it’s easier to stay home, to embrace what was, than to face a present you don’t recognize." Jillian Caddell on the adult complexities of the children's classic The Wind in the Willows. 💙📚 #booksky

“It’s easy to treat language as something in our minds, as something other than the stuff of the world that it signifies. But Enlightenment philosophy of language started from an insistence that words are a kind of thing." @cweiss-smith.bsky.social's best reads on the origins of language. #c18th

Wow. #C18L

"On Our Flag Means Death, the spirit of foppery, especially its gentler masculinity, is celebrated."

"What are we looking for when we constantly bring the past into the present? Or try to make visible what kinds of pasts are always already stitched into a given present?" @tonyweiling.bsky.social

I loved writing this. It is all true. My thanks to @crystal-b-lake.bsky.social and Sarah, as always, for the amazing @therambling.bsky.social 🥰🥰

“The moral panic produced by the fallacy of misplaced scale obscures the fact that trans children are nothing new.” @jttremblay.bsky.social

“Not all digression is literary, although it is perhaps the case that all literature is digressive. Not because it wanders or strays aimlessly, but because it does so with style, that is to say, with curious restraint.”

“What is it about keeping up that is so endemic to the life of a writer, to the career of an academic?” #AcademicSky @titachico.bsky.social

"This is what, in the end, I find so engaging about the film: this promise of the luxury to imagine and realize wilder, queerer nights for Dickinson, who otherwise is torn from her social and aesthetic worlds and, as Jackson suggests, made miserable for consumption."

"I muster a few self-deprecating mantras: 'Fool! Look in thy heart and write!'"

Lovely ugly words from @marymullen.bsky.social ❤️

“Figuring out just what words are doing is hard work. Are they acting? Preventing action? Are they distracting us from the actions that matter?” @marymullen.bsky.social

This is an excellent exploration of precisely the process I've gone through with Eddings. A re-listen last year found the Belgariad / Mallorca just about tolerable, and the Elenium utterly beyond the pale, even for nostalgia.

“To maintain loyalty to old aesthetic allegiances can be a manifestation of kindness towards our younger selves, a form of self-focused compassion. Even works of the most dubious merit have as their grace the fact that we remember them, and have attached to that memory a collection of others...” 💙📚

"What is it about these figures that keep us coming back again and again, even long after many had dismissed their careers as the artistic equivalent of junk food?" #c18th #TaylorSwift

“Mary Shelley made Jane, Lady Shelley her death and Jane, Lady Shelley made Mary Shelley her life. You could call that love or you could say they made use of each other.” @rachelfeder.bsky.social #c18th 💙📚

“Find out what reviewers will say about YOUR novel … even if you haven’t written it yet!" #AmWriting

“There is a through-line running from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century when it comes to the relationships that exist between drug use and power.” #c18th

"Laughter can be a site at which power strengthens and finds its numbers, moving from the powered, aiming downwards. Laughter can show us who has power—and who doesn’t." @lillyluwrites.bsky.social #c18th

Love this by Aaron Santesso: 'Banning the Enlightenment' - The Rambling (the-rambling.com). @therambling.bsky.social

"Emily Brontë is the Harper Lee of British literature, but probably thanks to Charlotte, it’s unlikely anyone will discover an early draft of Wuthering Heights in which Heathcliff turns out to be a really nice guy." 💙📚 the-rambling.com/2018/07/16/h...

A smart essay, which I enjoyed reading. I wish the author only great things within (or without) academia.

I love this for making me feel less pathetic for the way losing an academic job opportunity last year sent me into a spiraling depression. I just wrote about it in my public-but-not-public blog but I don't know that I can share it because I still feel so embarrassed by my grief.

"I’ve been waiting for the neat resolution of my career romance for years now, only to recently discover, like so many other fools in love, that neatness and resolution are features of narrative that rarely make appearances in real life." @erinspampinato.bsky.social #c18th #AcademicSky

“While fans often praise Our Flag Means Death for how it normalizes queerness by featuring several queer relationships and very little homophobia, we might also praise it for the way it depicts men that society devalues and ridicules for being feminine.” #c18th

This was FASCINATING

I write fiction and I run the production department of an academic press. Writing fiction is MUCH, MUCH HARDER at the prose level. Academic writing with brilliant ideas, convincing arguments and evidence, and dull prose will still get published. Fiction has to achieve telepathy.

“Writing prose for experts is seen as harder than writing prose for non-experts, and I just don’t think that’s true. They’re both hard in different ways, and they’re both a practice.” @bethanysays.bsky.social @devoney.bsky.social #c18th #AcademicSky

A completely unexpected take on Little Women. Very thought provoking.

“Jo, Beth, Meg, and Amy constantly chose unexpected paths. Despite being separated from these four women by a little over a century and a half, by continents, and culture, I sought refuge in their company.” 💙📚 #lit

"Now, as a writer and precocious kid grown old, I reread I Capture the Castle with more awe than I had when I packed it in my suitcase and stole it from dear Nana. I’m better armed for awe now—by education and by experience." 💙📚 #lit

aaaaarghh oh my god Dear Mr Henshaw aaaaaarrrrghhhh so good and probably the book that caused me to marry* a writer *metaphorically speaking, we are unwed

“If Dear Mr. Henshaw succeeds as an unlikely junior example of the then-hip minimalist lower-middle-class fiction of the early eighties, it also works as the story of an emerging writer, and one that offered me a crucial window into the basic power of creativity.” 💙📚 #schoollibrarian

“Re-reading The Black Stallion alongside Robinson Crusoe today, I can see that, in addition to their carapace of imperial masculinity and all of its attendant violence, these novels create space for the girl I was and the woman I’ve become.” #c18th

“Never Let Me Go is bildungsroman that never gets to benefit from true experience.” #Educators #AcademicSky 💙📚

“As with the Dashwood sisters, death precipitated my own adolescent plot...” Grab a box of tissues and go read Shawn Lisa Maurer’s beautiful, personal tribute to Jane Austen in the latest issue of The Rambling! the-rambling.com/2024/01/21/i...

"Like Elinor Dashwood I stayed strong for those I believed needed my strength, subsuming my own loss within what I imagined was the even greater loss suffered by others." Read Shawn Lisa Maurer on Sense and Sensibility and her own experience of losing a parent. #c18th 💙📚