Kitamura report: found *Audition*’s Goffmanian thriller vibe more exciting than its ending, but in *Intimacies,* the end made the novel. Further research (the first one) required…

I doubt I’ll beat Silksong (1/3 through Act 2), but awed by Team Cherry’s vision of gracefulness and fluidity, where boss fights and platforming sequences are explicitly *dancing*…

U of Arizona says NO to the Compact: president.arizona.edu/sites/defaul...

AAUP holds a day of action this Friday Oct 17 nationwide teach in against the loyalty oaths us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi... the original 9 persecuted campuses have in-person events find your chapter www.aaup.org/chapters/fin...

How W. E. B. Du Bois responded to government policing of "anti-American" sentiment during the 1910s: "I took great satisfaction in being able to sit back in my chair and answer blandly, 'We are seeking to have the Constitution of the United States thoroughly and completely enforced.' ”

crafting an administrative turducken: reporting on the reports to be reported inside a larger, meatier report

ACLS statement against White House “compact”: THIS IS SOVIET SHIT

Excellent analyses that go beyond a lot of the media coverage of the Compact I’ve seen. Esp good on the glaring absence of a carrot here, and on the significance of the range of medium-to-soft targets…

this great point about the social character of knowledge —how knowing real things relies on others signaling when you’re wrong—is another way of highlighting the political importance of social shame. It also clarifies the fundamental nihilism of the AI-industrial complex

“This is extortion, plain and simple. It is not hyperbole to say that the future of higher education.. requires that every university reject it…The only solution is solidarity and collective action against this effort at federal control over higher education.” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/o...

Recent reading: Marlen Haushofer, The Wall: amazing experience of reading thinking it was from ~2015, finding out midway it’s from 1963. Evergreen Robinsonade Mood Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud: Another first-rate encounter study Martha Wells, Murderbot: my students’ comfort reading, I so get it.

Recent reading: Mick Herron’s Slow Horses books, smack between Dickens and Le Carré, silly at times but still a sustained meditation on failure, hopelessness, dysfunction, delusion, incompetent leadership, corruption, decline etc for These Times. The short *spy novellas* are lovely studies in mood.

The thing regular people don’t often grasp about ‘academic freedom’ is that if you don’t allow experts to research & teach in their fields of expertise, guided by their professional judgment & decades of training, you have effectively given up on the concept of knowledge & shut down your university

I genuinely think so much of our present pass is crystallized in the idea/hope that big data is the "end of theory." Similarly, Cass Sunstein on "infotopia" (and really his whole deal). Such a thirst for circumventing the social and politics as such. www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-t...

Still thinking about this, the idea of bespoke, custom, single-use text or code as the source of LLM appeal… McConaughey’s weird fantasy of his own LLM seems right in line with it…

Big essay out by @sdileonardi.bsky.social in @publicbooks.bsky.social today, drawing on 100 years of translations and bestseller data to show that the US has seen three waves of translation: European; Latin American Boom; Nordic Noir. And what this means for us. www.publicbooks.org/how-translat...

submitted revised book manuscript, joined AAUP (already proud UCW local), purchased vocoder, an excellent labor day.

This mighty book has arrived and I’m eager for it to be in your hands! It can orient us term by term to past struggles in higher education and the ones ahead. www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

Background on the “Prompt Engineering” certificates my institution has begun to offer…

“It’s not that traditional liberal arts is out of step with student demand. Instead, it’s out of step with the priorities values desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, an administrative class.” www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/o...

100 Years Appreciation Post. The University of Minnesota Press was made official at a Board of Regents meeting on July 16, 1925. We have marked this milestone with an exhibit at the U's Andersen Library and content that can be viewed at z.umn.edu/ump100. Thank you for following us. 💯

Breaking: Humbert Humbert *and* Clare Quilty put out statements endorsing Cuomo.

Timely work of interest with notable subtitle excellence: “BANNING BOOKS IN AMERICA: Not a How-To”

I wrote about mid-20th century speed reading and its surprising interest in novel reading. Come for descriptions of how to move your hand down the page to increase your eye span, stay for an argument about speed reading, like close reading, as a defense of human reading in an age of reading machines

Ishiguro, saying the kind of thing I’d hoped he’d say: “Aside from its simple elegance, what struck me about this title was the sheer impossibility of what was being requested. “Please hold me for a long time” would be reasonable.”

En route a day early to Society for Novel Studies. Talking about cultural appropriation w/ a social-networks angle, via Zadie Smith. I’m still building up endurance, tolerance for busy places after my brain interlude—will be pacing myself but am so excited to see so many folks whose work I admire.

Just for fun, marked the end of an unusually challenging academic year by laying down some liquid drum n bass compositions on the sampler, “Winds in the nighttime carry light vapors athwart the sky, and the constellations seem then to glide against the clouds”-Lucretius youtu.be/Si8eaBxocLI?...

Recent reading Benjamin Labatut MANIAC- if you break enough rules writing a von Neumann biography … it’s a novel. Into it. Katie Kitamura - Intimacies, yes, gotta read the others Helen Macdonald H is for Hawk and TH White the Goshawk: the Dark Souls of pet

Full program for SNS 2025: Novel Languages now available! So happy to see this event come together and to have so many good people descend on Durham, NC! Come for the terrific panels and seminars and stay for signature novel-inspired cocktails and bookish swag!

Excited to see my ARC essay on Tolkien and the Silicon Valley right is live. I learned a lot from @roberttally.bsky.social and @gerrycanavan.bsky.social while researching this.

Sharing Something Good (jazz): Floating Points, "Silhouettes II" (2015). Here's wishing y'all an ascendant one... youtu.be/BG0XBnMyXcQ?...

Also celebrating the *Gatsby* centennial by mercilessly dragging someone who fears that the “white race” will be “submerged” by immigration.

Celebrating the *Gatsby* centennial by having an affair, changing into dresses of crêpe-de-chine, muslin, and chiffon … and purchasing a “little dog” “for the apartment” that I don’t live in.

Neighborhood beauties:

The thing I thought Ted Chiang was especially strong on re AI and novels is that it’s a mistake to divide the labor of writing between the premise and the execution—at least for the writing where sentences are worth reading.

Hey look here it is guys...

I'm finding this in-memoriam writing practice (for an admired former colleague) to be an unexpectedly joyful meditation on making time to do the things we love. Here's to Aurelie, and to April, with thanks to Ander.

Recent reading: Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay: as @tedunderwood.me promised, it’s an imaginative take on the Area X beat. But it’s also a campus novel about unionization against austerity, love to see it. Kishimi/Koga, The Courage to Be Disliked: Adlerian psychoanalysis as a way of life, cool.

I want to take the optimistic view, based on my experience of ChatGPT papers generally being terrible and obvious: What if this promo is OpenAI signaling that their paying customer base has plateaued based on the finite set of tasks ChatGPT is well-suited to?

Not Nabokov making sure his French translators know the different connotations of "spurt" and "squirt" while claiming it's Kinbote--Kinbote!--who in another passage "allows himself the sad luxury of an obscene metaphor" (from Brian Boyd's spectacular Pale Fire book...)

*Wolf Hall* hits a little different in 2025, but the new season is streaming on PBS, and the first episodes suggest Mark Rylance will keep up his superb performance through my favorite of Mantel's novels...

@nathankhensley.bsky.social @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social Just finished Judt, found the closing essay—& belatedness of Holocaust reckoning itself—surprising. Portraits of Greece and Romania’s worst leaders were also—timely!—news to me. And: Thatcher? Sexy?!? Whyy? Still, what a ride thx for rec!!

Enjoyed, recommend Jed Esty’s 2022 *Future of Decline*, a short-book-length comparison of US present with UK post-WWII—political and cultural nostalgia, class formations, frontiers, limits. Recalls that era UK also gave us Birmingham cultural studies, their analyses of “moral panic” , and more

New giant mural in progress in downtown Tucson, I’d heard it’d be a saguaro, but the flowers are a welcome surprise

Ending the week by finding the opening of an essay I already admired (by @thisblue.bsky.social ) in a book on writing I’m finding very useful, William Germano’s *On Revision*.

Mark Greif with the piece of writing I’d been hoping someone could write: clear-eyed analysis, historical comparison, practical advice www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

I spent a long time wrapping my head around Karen Te Yamashita’s marvel of a novel *I Hotel.* For *Novel*, I wrote about how Yamashita shows readers the generative power of small-scale institutions (the topic of my current project). doi.org/10.1215/0029...

this letter in the LRB on Karl Polanyi is a useful quick explainer of the present moment—helpful framing for talking to relatives etc @londonreview.bsky.social

Outstanding public service here in opposition to Ohio SB1, one of a long line of right-wing extremist bills on education. The second paragraph's dismantling of the "intellectual diversity" canard will be worth repeating at every opportunity: