being from a place means knowing which disasters to dread

You couldn’t open a Love Shack these days.

english lit and culture studies people from the last 10 years, favorite standalone articles, or book intros/chapters, that open new ways of reading / new areas of study / new paradigms and thus usefully show new grads range in the field?

The snow cone place offers a “New Orleans-style Cream Cheese” flavor. Considering calling the cops.

Googling pseudonymous early modern tracts now often produces a hallucinated scholarly attribution. At first I would check the evidence, wondering if I'd missed something. Here's an example of how it makes up a scholarly consensus on attribution: Robert Parsons, Matthew Grove, Anthony Munday...

This might be one of the most insane scandals in game history When Pokemon Go players scan PokeStops, theyve been unknowingly building a detailed visual model of the world which is being sold to a military contractor to build a no-GPS positioning for the new generation of unmanned killing machines

FIFA has prohibited Haitian World Cup jerseys with a depiction of the Nov. 18, 1803, Bataille de Vertières aka the triumph of the Haitian Revolution against slavery. Depraved. amp.miamiherald.com/news/nation-...

Elaine Scarry has a fascinating chapter wondering why things like this don't work to resolve diplomatic disputes but war does. it is a question that seems obvious at first, but slowly opens out.

Is 1999 too late? The Express, Glasgow Sept 29, 1999.

if anyone sees the word "balductum" in an early modern source other than EEBO/ the OED, please let me know. working on a thing.

Aro find of the day in the Huntington Library: verses to be written on a bracelet to ward off marriage. 💚 #Aromanticism

haven't seen the production, but this sounds disastrous, and there's more than a decade of scholarship and performance warning about exactly this! Carla's initial article is 5 pages! It'd take a quarter hour to read. All the Bard in the Borderlands stuff is free and open-source.

Green Ibis 2

still wishing I could just tell my reader, "look, I know this is boring, but every time I tried to write it more charismatically, it was less true. this is the only way i've found through this material."

So much of what's happening is very insane

(To return to the original issue, It also seems entirely likely that teachers who've dealt with politicized school boards for decades may have experience that faculty losing control over their teaching and research to newly politicized governing bodies could learn from, one way or the other.)

happy pride month

The guy who wrote that "diner goth" essay is absolutely bitter about/hung up on his ex-girlfriend in a way that warps the piece as a whole, but he did accurately identify a real thing, or at least a real aesthetic. (I have just returned from the "Digital Circus" movie).

I don’t love Lin Manuel Miranda. Who else writes rap songs about the Federalist Papers?

L.O.A.F (Lesbians Over Fifty) at Houston Pride 1991, courtesy of JD Doyle and Houston LGBT History

hate to brag online, but i just got invited to a webinar

Obviously I love being a scholar because the work is infinite, just a literally endless amount of possible work one can do

Somehow procrastinating by researching more has made me have way too much stuff for this chapter.

george turberville invents the incel, 1567

Kiddo just pointed out that lasagna is a casserole, and my brain broke

i just read the worst parenthetical in all of literary criticism

I want an oral history of the falsetto part in Teenage Dirtbag.

This month, UCLA admin circulated two white papers that are so harrowing they’ve kept me awake at night. If you’re a UCLA person and haven’t seen these, you really must. In response, the Faculty Senate has scheduled a Town Hall on June 2. senate.ucla.edu/news/june-2-...

declined a meeting. it felt great!

I don't disagree with the anger about modernizing children's books, but i've also tried to read The Little Engine Who Could aloud...

in college, the dining hall didn't have enough spoons, so a roommate and i started stealing a few every time we went in, hoping to prompt them to reorder. at the end of the year we had to return bag after bag of spoons.

Mayakovsky's drawings for the production of "The Bath House".

spent the first half of this piece by @colindickey.com wondering why he was bothering to take these poems as seriously as he did, and then the turn! www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/180...

Something I would find useful would be an undergrad-friendly history of AI, from perceptron to transformer, explaining the rise of different ideas, the “AI winter,” etc. I know of encyclopedia articles that don’t quite do that and books that tell the story at length, but I need a v concise version.

gonna go find a weird poem just so i have something to talk to y'all about

having trouble writing today because the part of "Wake Me Up Inside" where they sing "wake me up inside (can't wake up) wake me up inside" is repeating in my head do you think this qualifies me for worker's comp

Out of 177 faculty respondents, close to half reported significant concern about being disciplined by the university for their public engagement. One-fifth indicated that they had been asked by an administrator to change language related to their courses, research, or website.

today's rabbithole: a year after the 1968 protests at Columbia, the student newspaper (The Spec) printed a boardgame, where you played as either Radicals or the Administration, called "Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker": boardgamegeek.com/image/221026... @illdottore.bsky.social had you seen this?

cannot believe the papal encyclical starts with "It's Britney, bitch!"

New idea: the MacArthur Idiot Grant, to encourage fuck-ups with bad ideas

“Five Hundred Words,” an essay on haiku and its season words that no longer align, by Marie Mutsuki Mockett emergencemagazine.org/essay/five-h...

@profchander.bsky.social @catacalypto.bsky.social Hey, not sure if you two have met, but I need the two of you to read /Taiwan Travelogue/ if you haven't already, so I have people to talk to about it. Was imagining both of your reactions as I read!

Can I introduce you to the immortal lyric of Edward Piers, from his song The Hunting of the Hare (1614): "Yeeble yabble gibble gabble yeeble yabble gibble gabble hey."

My next nomination for best line of poetry in English is John Grange's attempt to imitate the barking of hounds: "bowgh, bowgh, baugh, baugh, baugh, baugh."

On the one hand, this is so indicative of the humanities. On the other hand, I bet I know which senior scholar this was.

this is exactly how i read.

Great quip by Austin Anderson in the discussion of Danny Snelson's book, on the question of what the opposite of 'play' is (especially in the classroom): "Gamification is the Wario of play."

me, playing videogames: writing is so hard

really wishing i could just tell my reader "Hey look, I know this is an annoying way to organize this chapter. It's the only way my weird brain would let me do it, and I can only write the book I'm able to write. It's fine."