Loved this. I'd read a William Basinski autobiography in a heartbeat

A part of Akinola Davies Jr's speech the BBC decided not to air

Great essay by Heather Perry on "********* *******" open.substack.com/pub/heatherp...

"How will a student who is learning to write well know when to transform an automated output or how to infuse it with A-worthy value? Which of a chatbot's always confident ideas or texts do or do not meet the bar?" Really brilliant piece on AI infiltrating the university.

Interested nonfiction writers! Do you have a book project you'd like to get off the ground but aren't sure where to start? I'll be offering one-on-one consultations from February! DM me here or contact me through my website to discuss if it could be right for you

Thought this was very good on the Hamnet Mass Delusion letterboxd.com/miseryminist... 'significations of significance itself'; 'the actual image counts less than its conspicuous aura of prestige'. All correct!

Obsessed with Knausgård not only blurbing every single Significant Literary Novel of the past 12 months but doing so as "Karl Ove Knausgård - author of Recent Non-Autofictional Novel I'm Desperate for People to Read Instead of the Autofictional Stuff". Genuinely humanising grifting

Still plenty of time to submit an abstract for the BACLS New Work in Contemporary Literary Studies graduate conference at The University of Leeds on May 20th for PGRs and ECRs! Please share widely call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/11/... @bacls.bsky.social @maxrshirley.bsky.social

Still plenty of time to submit an abstract for the BACLS New Work in Contemporary Literary Studies graduate conference at The University of Leeds on May 20th for PGRs and ECRs! Please share widely call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/11/... @bacls.bsky.social @maxrshirley.bsky.social

Time to speak truth to power: not only is it a banger but also it's effectively the first Animal Collective song ever

In my experience, Iris Murdoch is the only novelist who allows their characters to say "Oh goodie!"

Best thing I've read so far on the new Pynchon (imo a good-not-great, astonishingly addictive novel, which to be fair is a lot more than I expect to contribute to society at age 88) + just an extremely lucid career retrospective

I went to pay homage at Thomas Bernhard's grave in Vienna. A few minutes later, I was locked in the cemetery and had to try to flag down the caretaker to let me out. It was pitch black aside from the many candles guttering on the graves. I was unnerved, but I expect TB thought it hilarious.

New Rafael Toral is beautiful and strange AND a perfect cosy season album rafaeltoral.bandcamp.com/album/travel...

Thrilled to share that Killing Children in British Fiction has been jointly awarded the @bacls.bsky.social Monograph Prize 2025. Thanks to judges; huge congratulations fellow winner @dremmaparker.bsky.social and shortlisted @olihaslam.bsky.social @gabriele-lazzari.bsky.social. bacls.org/news/187/

The MHRA has transitioned from Twitter/X and will now use Bluesky to communicate our work. We are excited to contribute to establishing Bluesky as a dynamic, inclusive, and engaging platform for academic exchange and collaboration. To celebrate this new chapter, we are hosting a book giveaway! 👇

Then there was the famous exchange between Bill Gates and Terry Pratchett in 1996(?) when clearly only one of them understood where human nature would take the Internet, and it wasn't Mr. Microsoft.

Been thinking a lot about Raymond Williams’s “Culture & Technology” essay where he critiques the liberal account of technological disruption: organic progress, rather than conscious choices by capital. Just imagine if the money we are flushing into data centers went to railways or solar panels.

This is great. 'A refusal of AI in creative work begins with a refusal of that product’s ideological packaging'

Post-feudalism 🤝 neo-feudalism

I’m very proud to be running to be elected to the Management Committee of the Society of Authors. You can read my full statement here: jencalleja.com/writing/

Love this album so much

People keep doing things in order to demonstrate to the UK's government that their repressive law against protest is absolute authoritarian lunacy and the UK government just responds with a "Yes, and your point is?"

Sally Rooney putting her money where her mouth is (figuratively of course). Bravo. www.irishtimes.com/culture/book...

Thirty-seven years after the fact, the drum machine, doom-klezmer moves of Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows" remain an astonishingly radical gesture. From the crypt-keeper vocals to the reverse-Sermon-On-The-Mount-sentiment, it's the sound of Satan trying out his stand-up act and absolutely killing.

Also, like, there’s a lot of sublimating of Sub-Sp!ked patter that the cause of the Brexit vote or Trump or Reform polling was due to the attitudes of sneering of metropolitan liberals and guys it really wasn’t, it’s nearly always about - sorry to say, because I find it depressing - immigration

Bring Her Back surely the greatest exponent of A24 slop so far? Toothless, with the whiff of the focus group hanging over it, as aesthetically bland and derivative as you can get -- the image not language but merely an empty husk

Sure

#ALL50RTS #22 David Bowie - A New Career In A New Town (1977) The overwhelming yearning of this song is beyond words, instead we have these Saxophone phrases ripped straight from the heart, and later echoed on Blackstar. youtu.be/kZssy0IiyMA

Such a great, underrated album -- Live Lid is one of my fave Stars of the Lid pieces

A little tale about Dorothy Richardson and her use of ellipses in Pilgrimage. asterismbooks.com/product/pilg...

you see this basic dynamic all over, where the right identifies a real issue and exploits it in bad faith, and then dupes in media and politics take them at their word, as if they are sincerely concerned about the problem and offering solutions.

Thank you for sharing this @equintero.bsky.social! ‪And thank you to @carlhendrick.substack.com for the thought-provoking essay:‬ "Deep reading..trains us in the moral dispositions that public life requires: attention, imagination, restraint." substack.com/home/post/p-...

Truly awful news for people whose death drive manifests itself as the urge to watch terrible television and enjoy the discourse around it aka me

It's indefensible, says man who repeatedly defended it.

Policing people's responses to art isn't cool etc etc BUT surely we can all agree that the world would be a better place if the people* who chuckle at every single scene in a David Lynch film like they're watching an episode of rick & morty were shunned from society

Iris Murdoch doesn’t get enough credit for being funny. Under the Net is quite funny, and also as effervescent and wild as anything she wrote. It’s the work of a young person who is in love with London and language. It’s a real treat.

Abro un substack de una sola entrada para decir cuatro de las mil y una cosas que me gustaría poder decir sobre el finado David Lynch. El obituario que nadie pidió sobre el cineasta que más lo merece. antonvarela.substack.com/p/room-to-da...

The most depressing AI pieces are always going to be the thoughtful, nuanced, open-minded considerations by respected writers who are transparently responding to the publicity incentive created by editors whose owners want this kind of content

One thing we’re going to see a *lot* of: Pieces that appear to explore an intellectually provocative question inspired by AI, but that assume a premise (in this case “friendship with a chatbot is possible”) that’s a) nonsensical and b) perfectly aligned with the aims of AI marketing

Absolutely dystopian juxtaposition from the Guardian front page. Difficult to understand how anyone of decency and conscience can defend this government at this point. Just sheer moral degeneracy to arm a state that does this and arrest people for objecting. Wtf are we doing as a country?

Shaimaa has a scholarship to do a PhD on Palestinian literature with me at @uoe-llc.bsky.social, but she's stuck in Gaza because the foreign office won't help. Please share. www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2...

I enjoyed this review of Tulathimutte's 'Rejection', which is a gross, unnerving, and at times unreadable book that is somehow a success overall. The Internet is full of narrative possibilities -- if only writers explored them like Tulathimutte does instead of just paraphrasing tweets

With all the AI hype, it's easy to forget last season's big one. But I agree that cryptocurrency donations in politics are a grave threat. It's even worse than Byrne says, because Monero hides payer, amount, destination, source. Totally anon. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Whenever someone—and it’s usually an agèd, agèd man—asks where all the great writers are today, I usually think two things. First, it’s a sign they don’t read much contemporary work: they don’t know who the important writers are now, and they mistake their knowledge gap for a gap in the real world.

If you want to read deeply researched accounts of what happened to novels in the last fifty or so years, may I recommend Novel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy, 1965–1999 by Evan Brier uipress.uiowa.edu/books/novel-...

Como estoy leyendo auténticas brutalidades y artículos tremendamente banales sobre las declaraciones de Skarsgård con respecto al hipotético "nazismo" de Bergman, me voy a permitir el lujo de plantear un hilo dando contexto y tomando posición. 🧵

De acuerdo con casi todo lo bueno que se ha escrito sobre Los Escorpiones de Sara Barquinero, pero empieza a ser urgente que las editoriales españolas implementen una ley de tolerancia cero con los calcos innecesarios del inglés.