just found out from a student that Paul McCartney was at Brown yesterday for a screening of "Man on the Run" and I didn't attend because I didn't even know that it was happening. I feel SICK.

(I mean, it's still inaccurate to the book insofar as Bronte set it 50 years prior to her own day, but it still just gave me a sense of historical vertigo)

a title card in the 1939 Wuthering Heights announces that the story is set "100 years ago" and I thought to myself "wait, that can't be right" before realizing simultaneously that 1) the film came out 92 years after the book and 2) almost as much time has passed since the film came out

Like hopefully without the pederasty but still, I am the unsettling gay guy who rambles at them too enthusiastically about books that they didn’t read.

was standing up in front of a classroom teaching Pale Fire when I realized that my students probably perceive me as Kinbote, basically

Palantir are about six months away from ordering their employees to leave audio logs scattered around their offices

(Standing on a beach in the rain, water pouring directly into a pallid cup of clam chowder, my voice drowned out by the wind) I SAID, I’M HEARING THAT IT’S ACTUALLY MUCH MORE CHIC TO—

I’m hearing that it’s actually much more chic to visit Provincetown in the off-season, in mid April, for example. Many are saying this.

very hard to imagine any Protestant writing so sympathetically of Catholicism even ten years prior, but the ascendant Puritans really had the high-church Anglicans reaching for their rosaries (hidden away in some dusty, rose-scented box, I imagine)

What's striking here is that Corbett—himself a Protestant, and more specifically, an Anglican Bishop (!)—condemns the censorious Puritans and looks back with fond nostalgia upon Britain's Catholic past as a period of relative tolerance for folk-tradition

Chaucer jokes in the Wife of Bath's Tale that England's native fairies were all hiding from the Catholic monks; here, Corbett reverses this charge and makes the fairies Catholic (or, at least, the fairies went into hiding alongside the Catholics after the Protestant Reformation)

(the apostrophes of the original have been erroneously converted into question marks here due to transcription error)

a really interesting little poem ("The Fairies’ Farewell," Richard Corbett) from the early 17th century

reading outside always seems like such a nice idea until you actually try it

My ads across every platform since turning 30 have been: treatment for balding, mushroom coffee, treatment for balding, fertility-promoting underwear with a pouch for your balls, treatment for balding, nostalgic indie music festival feat. the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, treatment for baldi—

campus right now (first warm spring day!)

The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) is weak on crime

ok i give up. what is "taxes are due wednesday"

Stacy, your mother and I are in love

"you know, in Gaza they'd throw you off a roof for being gay"
--guy whose entire posting history is about how he really really wants to throw gay people off a roof but in a Christian way

America's Next Drag Superstar is weak on crime

the National Youth Poet Laureate is weak on crime

the Oracle of Delphi is weak on crime

oh and also: The Secret Mall Apartment documentary, which would give me a pedagogically-legitimate excuse for a field trip to the Providence Place Mall i.e. the Largest Carpeted Indoor Mall in America

something like -- Shop Till You Drop: The Mall in American Fiction

my dream is to teach a course just on malls (the arcades project, dawn of the dead, ling ma's severance, mallrats, basically every high school movie, simulacra and simulation, hauntology, "dead mall" tiktok videos, kingdome come, the cave, vaporwave aesthetics, etc.) but idk how to pitch it

No black and white photo filter was used in the making of this image! Really striking example of a grisaille (painting in gray or neutral monochrome) in the Harvard Art museum ("Apotheosis of Louis-Adolphe Thiers," 1878)

The mockery is pretty much therapeutic and self-defensive at this point ("this moron thought he could make a difference!") -- like yeah he was corny but we're clearly something worse than that

we make fun of Thoreau and his poll tax protest as if we're all doing more than him when the reality is that none of us are even doing that much, myself included.