If you’re at @navsa2025.bsky.social please join us for the 🍃VCOLOGIES HAPPY HOUR🍃from 7-8 this evening!!! We’ll be in the Marquee Bar and Lounge: complimentary beer/wine for grad students, first come, first served!

Look at my little one, sitting coyly in the back row!!! Wish I could be there…

Dr Seuss: In my book The Lorax I invented the Thneed as a cautionary tale. Apple: At long last, we have created the Thneed from the classic picture book The Lorax.

Ghosts Behind Glass has been officially published by @uchicagopress.bsky.social! If you are looking for an absolutely gorgeous book that tackles a deeply serious topic, this is a perfect choice. Would make a really thoughtful Christmas gift. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

I do! And wait until you see the blurbs. I'm overwhelmed. www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

Holy shit, just learned about the typewriter art of Montserrat Alberich Escardívol, a Catalan typist. Using an extra wide typewriter and 180 color ribbons, she built up elaborate images from simple characters like 'm' and '.' and ';'. Here is her typewritten painting of the Cathedral of Barcelona.

Oh hey I'm quoted in the History Channel talking about Stephen King! www.history.com/articles/ste...

The James Bond franchise faces a big problem: me, the viewer, has been shot at the start of the movie through the barrel of my gun, and I'm dripping blood over my own eye balls (they're in the gun)

Ironically, pretending to be knowledgeable about books he hasn’t read is the most relatable thing Elon Musk has ever done

James Bond exploded into pieces and you don’t know how to keep the series going? Just stitch the dude together using whatever parts you can find. Have you never read Frankenstein?! Have you never read Dog Man?!?!

If we lose Shelley, we lose a foundational text for modern thought and a major influence in genres ranging from horror to melodrama to science fiction. But if we lose Austen, we never get the classic 90s film Clueless. In other words, it’s a toss-up

I like that JCO was like “this man doesn’t read books; he has never experienced love or even fellow-feeling; not even the smallest joys are available to him; he has never even bonded with a pet” and Musk’s reply was “Not true!!!! I’ve read several books!!”

I got this useful bon mot from a middle school teacher recently. In response to, “I DONT UNDERSTAND,” he calmly said, “okay what steps have you taken to understand?” And that’s when I realized that a lot of folks have no steps.

Okay, here are some first reflections on Watson. Watson's life is a tragedy, really of Shakespearean proportions. He did not, as most bios will tell you, do one great thing when he was young and then collect laurels for it for the next 60 years. His career arc was unlike any in science.

Stochastic Book Fair

Bookplate illustration for @cadaverformosus.bsky.social with a special thanks to @colindickey.com.

you hear about how Ithaca is gorges, but less about all the _caves_ at Cornell.

Thrilled to learn about this review in Choice! “The Ecological Plot serves as a model for interdisciplinary writing. Miller's prose is clear and highly engaging…This book (Miller's first) represents a highly important contribution to the environmental humanities. Summing Up: Highly recommended.”

An ongoing thread of short story collections coming in 2026, of work weird/surreal/dark/uncanny/unsettling/ghostly/ghastly, across genres, so that they're all in one place that I can refer back to when I inevitably forget what books I was meaning to request review copies of:

I’m trying to write and suffering a terrible case of essayist incontinence (“we”-ing all over the place)

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Now I understand 67. This morning the clock said 6 and my body knew it was 7.

[stomp stomp clap stomp stomp clap stomp stomp clap stomp stomp clap] Ozy you're a boy, makin' big works Visage in the sand, gonna be a big MANdias A cold sneer on your face shattered remains Nothin' but sand all 'round the decay singin' LEGS OF LEGS OF ROCK HEWN LEGS OF LEGS OF ROCK HEWN

Happy Halloween to everyone old enough to have watched reruns of the ‘70s cartoon Witch’s Night Out on TV! (We had a tape of it that my mom made once when it aired and we watched it every October in the ‘80s)

Wishing a blessed #Samhain to all those celebrating today. May the turning of the Wheel of the Year bring much needed rest and new beginnings to us all, and may the coming year be a damn sight better than the passing one.

This is the dawning of the Age of Ozymandias! The Age of Ozymandiaaaa— Shit. Nevermind. Nothing beside remains

Ozymandias Time destroyed his statue Yes YES The statue is just feet

If you were teaching a module on NeoVictorian fiction what is the one Victorian novel you would want students to have read (if it had to be just one) as a useful/informing baseline of knowledge?

Yes, Lord of the Rings is about how you must trust the “hard men.” Just as Narnia is about an evil lion. And the New Testament tells a tale of a wimp who wouldn’t fight back. Next week on “fascists read classics,” we’ll meet tech visionary George Orwell…

The guy who wrote the 1961 children’s classic The Cricket in Times Square also wrote a queer pornographic novel about the underground sex scene in New York in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Just thought you all should know!

Increasingly I think that Tom McCarthy’s *Remainder* is a direct literary descendant of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s *A Rebours*

. @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I put CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY together to help connect what undergrads do in assignments with what we do as scholars then we found ourselves talking to a lot of high school teachers slate.com/life/2025/10...

“When people sense that power is beyond challenge, they redirect their energy into trivial disputes. And those trivialities, collectively, are enough to erode a society’s very foundations of justice.”

Thomas Carlyle is furious!!! But we must forgive him, because Thomas Carlyle was simply a product of the broader social, economic, cultural, and technological changes of the late Romantic and Victorian eras

Up now at the Los Angeles Review of Books, my review of Samanta Schweblin’s excellent Good and Evil and Other Stories! The affect of art-dread! Genre haunting literature! Hauntings without ghosts! Doublings without doppelgängers! lareviewofbooks.org/article/para...

Parents, please check your kids’ candy this Halloween. I’ve just found an ancient metal whistle with the inscription “QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT" inside a Snickers bar. I blew it and heard a note of infinite distance, and now I’m haunted by a figure in pale, fluttering draperies. Be safe.

I didn’t get the wording down precisely, so I won’t quote it, but one of the things that hit hard in the room: Reactionaries waging culture wars against the humanities have a more accurate account of our power than we do. And our humility is not admirable, but an abdication of responsibility.

My current theory is poems cause crime

Look, maybe he also has a tattoo on his back that says “I hate anyone and everyone associated with this symbol” and then an arrow curved under his armpit that says “(flip over).” We can’t rule that out yet

Totally forgot about the episode in A Rebours when Des Esseintes realizes all the fancy dentists will be too overbooked to fix his toothache on short notice so he goes to a cheap one who lifts him in the air by the molar before it breaks out of his mouth and he falls to the floor #DentalHumanities

absolute workhorse of a reaction image from over 100 years ago

the relief you feel when you realise the loud noise in the middle of the night is just an evil demon and not your child waking up

opposite of no nut november is poundhogs day

Acoustic analysis aided by community science shows how many birds burst into a dawn chorus in the aftermath of the 2024 total solar eclipse- very cool! #birds #birding #nature #elipse #animalcommunication #animalbehavior 🧪

TBH, I went into this profession believing there would be a lot more overlap between "reading books" and "being an English professor" than there actually is. Sending emails, managing spreadsheets, handing tissues to weeping people: yes. Reading books, or substantial portions thereof, not so much.