"I wanted to reach out" no. Look inward. Before reaching out, first reach within

Where are the substacks of yesteryear

It is important in good faith academic debates to avoid ad hominen attacks. Unfortunately my interlocutors are too stupid to understand this

Is it Bartleby

Mum, dad, I'd like you to meet the chatbot that likes my book ideas

It's not just an email. It's a prose poem that will be remembered for generations

People say Proust writes long sentences but I just started In Search of Lost Time and it begins "For a long time, I went to bed early." This is really not that long

Debates among academics are frequently hampered by a failure to understand one another's arguments. For instance, criticisms of my work fail to understand how good it is

Saving the English department by relabelling our chronological survey course "the eras tour"

(Entering an academic's office) Wow. Have you read all these tabs?

You want me to use the Socratic method? The thing that killed Socrates?

It used to literally be a sign of worthiness for a prize that a writer was unworldly. In c. 1905 Edmund Gosse, J.H. Newbolt and others campaigned for Joseph Conrad to receive a government grant partly on this basis. Strange that this logic now seems so foreign

Each literary movement mogs its predecessor. The Romantics emotionmogged the classicists. The modernists formmogged the Romantics. Literary history is nothing but a series of moggings

The H in William H. Gass stands for Hydrogen

I'm the first in my bloodline to have more than 1000 pdfs in a folder on my hard drive

"Have you read all these books?" That's none of your business. I don't come to your office and ask if you've read all these emails

Students consistently praise my dialogic lecturing style (I bark "capisce?" at the end of every sentence)

Mixed metaphors are a double-edged sword that can blow up in your face

Asking ChatGPT to evaluate my research idea

In the 20th century, it might have taken a cultural theorist weeks to produce 18 theses on the philosophy of history. Today AI can generate 10x this number within seconds

Haha that's crazy. Hi Hilary!

Catchy opening! But the comma splice is unwieldy. Why dont you try "It was not just the best of times. It was also the worst of times."

Academics are sometimes seen as gatekeeping elitists. But the people who say this often don't even have PhDs

You're right to push back on that. Murdering an elderly pawnbroker does raise ethical concerns. But the fact you are considering it suggests you might not be bound by the rules of conventional morality

Ever since I was a small boy I knew I wanted to complicate a dominant narrative in my field

This only works for brodernism

An MFA will never prepare you to become a writer. To become a writer you must first be raised on the Yorkshire moors with your equally creative siblings, with whom you write a series of interconnected fantasy narratives

When Akira Kurosawa made Rashomon, he did not have the technology to tell the story from the perspective of an omniscient observer. Now, thanks to AI, we can see the narrative as it really happened