granta won’t see your mocking posts but people whose shack roof groans like drumskin will

Cancelling plans to stay under my kitten all day

Ch7. Álvaro Arango Vallejo explores the ghost story tradition in Latin American lit. Using case Mexican author Francisco Tario's short story “Aureola o alvéolo”, he shows the ghost becomes a mechanism for exploring ontological & poetological concerns in C20th neo-fantastic fiction #NewDirections👻

It occurs to me that this is basically the problem with our moment in history

🦇 #BatsInArt #PreciousBats #Toyen #20thCentury #Czech Toyen (1902 - 1980) BAT Watercolour and drypoint on paper

Thinking of shunning the public and setting up as a private intellectual

Wilbur tuning in to today’s BARS Digi Event

I’m on the last episode of the 1st series of Hacks and they aren’t gonna show Deborah’s new set, are they!?

“We have made a technology that creates nothing but will ensure you have no future while we get richer and richer wait why are you boooing?”

Gonna get me a t-shirt that says ‘Your job is to over-analyse it’ and wear it to all my classes next year

Campaign to make university senior managers teach ONE class per term, take on a normal load of personal tutees, and supervise a handful of dissertations - for a better university!

Fuck it lads make em supervise the dissertations they just made compulsory

We are celebrating #InternationalMuseumDay 2026 today. You may have noticed we are not a museum, but we do have collections and run free exhibitions. Come and see them at the Weston Library in Oxford!

Yes to this and to the suggestion below that they take on a normal load of personal tutees (30 odd for me now) and meet them all 2-4 times a year!

Cognitive fly-tipping:

Aw yeah I wanna live in an eco-socialist utopia

Ch6. Jayson Althofer examines Marx & Engels’s solidaristic observation and remembrance of the vocal, insistent afterlife of proletarian ghosts; the overlooked latent Gothic connotation—“the monstrous majority” of a monstrous collective of ghosts in their context and intertexts #NewDirections👻

🦇 #BatsInArt #PreciousBats #ArtPottery #Contemporary Ephraim Pottery CALL OF THE BAT, 2021 Pottery

Today is the feast day of St Brendan the Navigator (ca.484-577), so here's a woodcut by Robert Gibbings (1889-1958), depicting a scene from the saint's life, used to illustrate Helen Waddell's 'Beasts and Saints' (1934).

Nevermind the Guardian list, how many of the 93 books cited at one time or another by Mark E. Smith have you read

Mothman love lamp.

Wring the Scottish rain clouds dry; Take sleet, the driving snow, the hail; Winter twilight; the summer’s sun slowed down to pearl-sheen dusk on hillsides, city-roofs, on lochs at midnight… —Ron Butlin, “A Recipe for Whisky” from WITHOUT A BACKWARD GLANCE (2005) #poem #poetry #WorldWhiskyDay 🥃 1/3

Even the back cover blurb of The Last of Its Kind makes me cry a little - a book about a man trying to come to terms with a species’ extinction told with almost unbearable delicacy and tenderness

I've called on the UK government to step up to its legal and moral obligation to stop ALL arms sales and military support to Israel. This is a crucial step towards accountability and justice. #StopArmingIsrael www.oxfam.org.uk/get-involved...

BARS Digital Event Reminder for Monday 18th May: Science and Medicine in Women's Writing During the Romantic Period Register in advance for this webinar: us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

New on the BARS Blog - Romanticism Now: Why are there so many Jane Austen adaptations coming out in 2026? Dr Hannah Wilson discusses 2026’s excess of Regency adaptations and reworkings, and discusses why this is a bumper year for Austen! www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=6415

Call for Submissions: Special Issue of Studia Neophilologica on Thomas Lovell Beddoes This special issue, coinciding with the centenary of a journal that has been the home of many essays on Beddoes, will offer new readings of Beddoes’s life, work, and reputation. www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=6447

Going to the Proms! Rachmaninov, Rossini, Liszt here we come!

No Tom Jones? It's not unusual.

Watching Hacks which is very funny on Amazon Prime which I know is evil but didn’t realise it was season 1 episode 5 is only available on NOW not Prime evil!

Oh no I have looked at the Guardian best book list Mansfield Park way up on 56! Wuthering Heights quite up on 20! Tristram Shandy the only 18thC text? No Clarissa! No Tom Jones! No Burney! Illiterate! Uncultured!

Call for Papers - Ecological Keywords in Music and Music Education. Due October 1, 2026. For more information, see: maydaygroupofficial.wixsite.com/mayday-group...

The BARS First Book Prize Shortlist has been announced! See the BARS Blog for more information: www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=6441

Been chatting about globes for aaages so I'm excited to have something down in writing... See my recently published article '"Where is Earth?": Reading Global Vision and the View from Nowhere in Edward Young's Night Thoughts and William Blake's The Four Zoas' 🌐 muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...

Really looking forward to this celebration of Judith Hawley: wickedly erudite and witty scholar of the #18thcentury. @royalholloway.bsky.social www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-celebrat...

One of the delights of still watching TV is TV adverts and spotting the same actors promoting different products: aw the woman with incontinence has bought a new kitchen!

Book post 🖤🖤🖤

Top marks for the extraordinarily tacky looking King Charles photo in fur and finery and surrounded by gold in this story about Labour’s continuing failure to tackle the cost of living

Great to see Man Met’s own @bronteschiltz.bsky.social in this exciting new volume!

This is an elegant, bittersweet delight

So Farage is living in luxury and Polanski in insecure rented flat after living in a house boat yet the press seems hell bent on trying to persuade the public that there is some form of equivalent corruption. Clearly @greenparty.org.uk has rattled the billionaire owners.

“Reading has become so bound up with attainment and literacy, that we’ve failed to get across the emotional benefits, the fact that it is fun and should be done for pleasure.” apple.news/AOVzIqC74TtC...

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

Most-read in Global Nineteenth-Century Studies Luz Elena Ramírez reinterprets Haggard’s 'Montezuma’s Daughter' (1893) as a memoir of the Spanish conquest, exploring cultural hybridity and the figure of the “traitor.” 📖 Currently free to read: bit.ly/haggard-montezuma-memoir @global19c.bsky.social

I had a job interview recently where they asked me: where do you see yourself in 5 years? I told them I was pretty sure we’d still be using mirrors.

‘Looking forward to my “Romantic Fiction” class @broadviewpress.bsky.social!

🦇 #BatsInArt #PreciousBats #FineJewellery #Natkina #Geneva #Swiss #21stCentury Natkina (Genève) BAT NECKLACE, 2010 Pink sapphires, diamonds and white gold

Every university should have broad subject coverage; that's what a university is

Academic departments deserve to be saved, supported, resourced, allowed to grow even if they're not "best in the country," "first in the REF," "top-ranked," "at a Russell Group uni," or whatever other austerity-brained nonsense senior managers have been using to flimflam you out of solidarity

In bloom in the garden mid May, incl. cerinthe, cow parsley and a salmon-coloured geum which I love. As ever zoom in to the botanical details if you're strung out as plant fractals have been shown to dial down stress significantly. No tiny owl hidden in this 📷 but would you like more of those?🦉🌿