Amazing: a call with an appointment for an ultrasound of my shoulder that I've been waiting for for a year.

The Paris Express is fine, but once again I find myself wishing Emma Donoghue would write fewer novels. Maybe then we'd finally get a really great one from her.

I was looking at some of my own undergrad essays and it is really amazing how little feedback I got compared to what I have come to think I owe my students. A few corrections here and there, maybe a checkmark or two, a sentence or two at the end, an A- or whatever.

“I want GenAI off my corner.”

The Paris Express is fine, but once again I find myself wishing Emma Donoghue would write fewer novels. Maybe then we'd finally get a really great one from her.

No, MS Word, I do NOT want you to summarize the document I AM LITERALLY WRITING MYSELF. Why would I need that? God, I hate how intrusive this s--t is. I just want to make it go away and it appears that our institutional version of the software does not have any of the off switches for it.

I just finished Emma Donoghue’s The Paris Express and I cannot believe the ending is such an anticlimax! (Sorry if that’s a spoiler for anyone.) Overall for me the novel was just OK. She’s a very competent writer but I’m surprised this book is a Giller nominee.

I went to the gym so I was allowed to have Doritos. I don't make the rules! 😆

Red Poppies Molly Lamb Bobak 1977

I continue to be so impressed with Mattea Roach. Here she is interviewing Ian McEwan about his new novel. podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/b...

Looks like it will be a dreary rainy week - perfect for trying this lentil and coconut milk soup.

"If no one wants it, you might as well make whatever is in your heart": I appreciated this post on "making art anyway" from @shawnalemay.bsky.social and wish I could convince myself to do exactly that.

Fred's Sunday morning routine is going great. ❤️🐈‍⬛

All I really have to get done today is one. last. sentence. to really firm up my point of view on and elegantly conclude my review of this novel. How hard can that be, right? Sigh.

Oh dear somehow my old "is Cormac McCarthy a terrible writer" post is getting noticed again. (Spoiler alert: the answer for me was no! but what interested me at the time was how easily I could imagine answering yes instead, on the same evidence.)

I have one episode left in my rewatch of Happy Valley S2 and BRITBOX IS DOWN - this is not the thrilling Saturday night I had planned. 😠

Bill Nighy's podcast is ridiculously charming. I mean who could resist an episode headlined "You are not a weirdo' that makes you feel better about strugggling to socialize?

Today in 'adventures in student evaluations' I find that someone last year thought I had "very poor media literacy" and while that may or may not be true (I honestly don't know?), I'm curious what it was about my class on 19thC fiction-or maybe detective fiction-that made it a conspicuous issue. 🤨

I guess I think it would be better to put cacophonous new music into its own program instead of insisting on putting some of it into every program. Then people who like that sort of thing can enjoy it and the rest of us can enjoy our Beethoven without a medicinal dose of modernity. 🙃

Wait, you mean Symphony NS plays at night? Like, when it's dark? I have to go out *after dinner* if I want to go to the concert? Inconceivable. 😂 (I'm going!)

Help Fred is mewing SO piteously because she just does not understand about the time change so my attempts to get her stomach clock to adjust by holding off on feeding her may fail . . . (Tbf, it's my own fault that before the change she already had pestered me into fairly early "evening" meals.)

Women Writing: Tove and Toews

I regret to inform you that going to the gym (or otherwise moving your sad, tired body around) will in fact make you feel better.

we're still shipping all over Canada for only $5 and we now have a tugboat to help us spread the word! how do we do it? that's really none of your business

What.

When did we agree that the “holiday season” would be two full months? We used to at least wait until after Remembrance Day and now it’s already all over Christmas. It’s oppressive. You can’t escape it - which is especially grim for those of us made sad, not merry, by it all.

Ok, what? Miriam Toews comes to your class and this is your idea of what to say to her?

A recent M.I.T. study found that 95% of companies that had invested in A.I. tools were seeing zero return.

Angel Clare. Next question?

I decided to re-watch the first 2 seasons of Happy Valley before watching S3. I started S1 last night and damn, it is so good, so so much better than pretty much any of the stuff currently being churned out for streaming.

"This is human life: this is the infinitely precious stuff issued ... to us now, and then withdrawn forever; & we spend it thus. Days without definite sensation are the worst of all. Days when one compells oneself to undergo this or that for some reason - but what reason?" VW, Diary, 22 July 1926

Somebody needs to explain to cats about daylight savings because mine is extremely offended by how late her dinner is. 😂

Relieved that we can now return to nobody liking Toronto except Torontonians. 🙃

Well at least I'd already made tea when the power went out. But seriously, NS Power, how has it failed already?

Fred now routinely joins me for stretches when I get back from the gym and it's too funny.

I have been having conferences with my 19thC fiction students about the essays they are working on and they are all so keen and bright and genuine: it's such a tonic.

On a Very Special Episode of @onebrightbook.bsky.social I’m joined by @rohanmaitzen.bsky.social to talk about William Makepeace Thackeray’s wonderful VANITY FAIR onebrightbook.com/2025/10/28/b...

Would it be so bad if my bsky feed became all-David-Copperfield-all-the-time, just for the next few weeks? 😉

"The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms, was myself, as I had once been, hushed for ever on her bosom." - David Copperfield 😢

Recent reading: not quite a slump, but slump-ish.

"This was my only and my constant comfort. When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life." It's Copperfield time!

Don't look now but a special BONUS episode of the pod is coming your way! Featuring @rohanmaitzen.bsky.social and this bad boy

It seems odd that they can't manage the emergency alerts better by proximity to the emergency.

I am reminded that in 1998 I taught a full-year honours seminar on the 19th-century British novel for which we read twelve. twelve! yes, twelve! novels, including *both* Vanity Fair and Middlemarch. (Looks wistfully at the scant list of four books assigned for her current one-term class.)

"I read in my poetry album while the night wanders past the window - and, unawares, my childhood falls silently to the bottom of my memory, that library of the soul from which I will draw knowledge and experience for the rest of my life." Tove Ditlevsen, Childhood

I've never seen this dried up before.

It's like negotiating with a toddler. How anyone looks at this Cheeto-faced egomaniac and sees a great leader or deal maker is completely baffling to me.

Me, pointlessly, every single day: "But can he/they just DO that?"

Desk copies have arrived for next term's George Eliot seminar. Very exciting! My selections were shaped by my having assigned both Adam Bede and Middlemarch in other courses some of the students will already have taken. And we are also going to read "Janet's Repentance."

After the 250th is past there’s a moratorium on all things Austen for the next 250 years, right? 🙃