messed up that the only part of the Chee we eat is the toes.

There's also a longish epistolary poem about platonic love in imitation of The Earl of Rochester's great poem Artemisa To Chloe. Has references to Skyrim and oxcontin and getting assaulted by a minor YBA (not tracy emin) You can read an earlier version of this one here if you want a taster

New Cat Fitzpatrick book dropping!

new mountain goats track.

i read this as Kings of Leon and it still checks out

when you die, all the tabs you have open run before your eyes

We ate out, and I was so tired that I ate my fortune cookie in a single bite without thinking. Tasted like paper.

at least once a day, there's a post on here that is so vague and so ominous that i have to google "what is happening"

I have survived the 5.5 hours of department meetings today.

Thoreau, 1854

Just discovered the Justseeds Open Type project, of potential interest to the zine crowd, embroidery folks, letterpress people, laser cutter friends, and anyone else who works with text. #DHmakes

Did anyone here go to library school as an international student from the US? I have a student who is thinking about going to a grad program in Scotland...

So excited! One of my mentees came to talk about their capstone, and they're doing the early AIDS crisis, the government response, and the response to that. NOW...where did all those government websites that were, uh, 'redacted' get housed? Anyone know?

I love cheese

chuffed to announce that tonight our comically giant tub of legos fell over, piling up such a pile of legos that i could not even open the door to the room they were in

Annie has been raising the alarm about mandatory high school book lists for awhile, but it's time for higher ed folks to be paying attention. Look at this bonkers set of linked texts from the Texas list:

love this one!

very carefully writing a note for my syllabus that indicates that i intend to use metaphors and examples in my lecture, as i face the automated censorship regime.

Today is Plough Monday, the first Monday after Epiphany, when agricultural labourers would start to plough the fields in preparation for sowing and planting crops. Hopefully the end result would be as beautiful as these fields, from a manuscript map of Hunsdon House, Herts, c1820 @bodleian.ox.ac.uk

Very taken by this c. 1530 painting of the cloth market in s'Hertogenbosch. The (anonymous) artist seems to have heard of perspective, but not quite to have got the hang of it. Apparently it was commissioned by the cloth-sellers guild, and Hieronymus Bosch lives in the 7th house from the right.

you can also just run the blender for 20 or so minutes (with the bags in) and the motor will heat everything up

not sure why everyone insists on using a microwave to make tea. i just warm up the water in my oven for a couple of hours and it's perfectly fine

Another exodus from the other site, from the sounds of it? If you're looking for the #EarlyModern gang, we've got three starter packs that compile a bunch of them. I can keep adding to the third, just poke. Here's the OG: go.bsky.app/VQeQbbF 1/3

love being sick right before syllabi are due. taking a sick day, an hour or so at a time, distributed over the course of a week.

countercounterpoint: LAST ONE TO FIND LEONARDO'S DNA IS A ROTTEN EGG

Loooooooooooooooong Book #NewberryLibrary (Vault Case MS minus VM 1619 M98) #shelfie

this slaps.

TAMU was the first place I took a feminist theory class and read Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Umberto Eco, and Cherrie Moraga. I learned to print on a common press, collate a print book, code in SQL and Python, and read French. Because each professor determined their own content.

The new Norfolk Iron Age carnyx find featured on #DiggingForBritain with @profaliceroberts.bsky.social is beyond spectacular, dating to that crucial period for the Iceni between Caesar’s expeditions & Boudica’s rebellion. Already my find of the decade, today is a day to worship the carnyx… 1/…

No homosexuality allowed in the core at A&M.

Also useful, perhaps, for understanding the automated censorship project: on the insistence of Roman slavers that the skills they depended on didn’t matter.

Kids’ movies gave me the impression that there would be a lot more opportunity for comical misunderstanding as an adult. More room for bumbling in general.

Laura and I have been talking about Shakespeare for two decades, so I'm biased, but I honestly believe that this is one of the best essays ever written on Measure for Measure.

Was driving North on I-5 a couple days ago and someone had painted Audre Lorde’s YOUR SILENCE WILL NOT PROTECT YOU in huge black spray painted letters on the highway wall.

every now and then, an academic makes me really look forward to the death of the humanities

Thinking through the rhetoric and shape of a syllabus in the era of automated censorship.

More background on Texas A&M's restriction on Plato in a philosophy class: leiterreports.com/2026/01/06/t...

From an email to one of our faculty members.... Not even Plato can escape censorship at Texas A&M!

as i head towards the first day of classes, i'm reminded that last year i played hide-and-seek on the first day of my Lit and Video Games class and accidentally lost a student.

oh my goodness, the emails have returned.

My son asked me tonight (after her appearance in bedtime stories for a year or two) whether @laurakolb.bsky.social really studies Shakespeare (yes) and whether she really trains seagulls to perform the plays (i think no).

ambivalent about trampoline parks: they have their ups and downs

new year’s resolution to only post about THE ANTS

They’re swearing me into office on my copy of “The Ants” (ps if anyone is looking for a review of the reissue of this, the best book of poems of all time, let me know)

Seems mean to make Diana Ross stay up this late.

shout out to everyone who has already started listening to "This Year" on repeat

been thinking a lot about 17th c trail blazes and dendroglyphs for something I'm writing, and looking into the literature on rock/tree carving in Eastern North America. Really struck by this arresting early 17th c Penobscot petroglyph in Maine, of a European ship.

writing would be easier if i weren't so impossibly stupid

meet me at the inflatable grinch in fifteen minutes if u wanna fight

Hope everyone hanging out with multiple families of kids is enjoying the constant chorus of 6-7.