James Green

'The British Library...has taken years to recover from a major cyberattack that disrupted its services and restricted access to its collections. The walkout is set to take from 27 October to 9 November, coinciding with the two-year anniversary of the cyberattack.'

The final ninety seconds of Untitled are up there with like Bach. It's perfect

I really hope the D'Angelo news isn't true. 51 is far too early. I remember the excitement seeing Black Messiah drop early in 2014, because of protests around Michael Brown's killing. It felt prophetic. He was excellent, people recognised it to an extent, but maybe he was even huger

going for goals like two points and two questions from each session of x minutes. The nice thing there is that you're hopefully finding something interesting each time you read. But then again that is also explicitly a pedagogical technique and feels like homework, so it's up to you

I know what you mean. I've recently started being very arbitrary with my time, saying I'll read x number of minutes a day. Thinking in terms of time rather than pages has helped with the productivity demons. I also think setting myself tasks has helped find that middle: instead of close-reading,

The Wager - Machado de Assis

Norton edition of modern Irish drama ed. John p Harrington

John Bull's Other Island - George Bernard Shaw

Roland McHugh at the Finnegans Wake at 80 symposium, TCD, 2019

RIP Roland McHugh

László the legend, ledge for short, that's what he's known as here in cardiff... all the local children ask him to do impressions of Irimias from Satantango, and he obliges...

McNally press, 2024, yellow cover, Greek statuary, head fragment in green

Reminiscences of a Student's Life - Jane Ellen Harrison

Gitanjali - Rabindranath Tagore tr. William Radice

This is what being on the right means now and has meant for the better part of a decade. There isn't such a thing as centre right because there's no pressure on the right to compromise or dilute its proposals. Your assumption that there's a vacuum waiting to be filled is superstitious at best

Andre Deutsch cover - a map, some charts, green, some rifles, some blood

The Rifles - William T. Vollmann

1. Never wear an inner glove too thick to brush ice from eyelashes 2.keep crotch unzipped and put your hands down there in sleeping bag but don't masturbate 3. Wipe yourself with snow

Three rules for the arctic by william t. vollmann

Fake Julia garner quote saying she steals books. Meta ai suggests the questions: how does this affect authors? Is this legal?

I appreciate that under clickhole posts on Facebook, you get an intervening voice from 'oaf's corner'

Re last repost: that opening of Howards End is so good isn't it

Is there anything more tantalising than the promise of an early 19th-century letter with the postscript "Burn this immediately"?

Blair's post-genocide plans for a new Mandatory Palestine should be a delegitimising project for an entire faction of Labour. In terms of scandal by association this is far worse than anything Mandleson has done. A generation of British politicians should be haunted by the words "Gaza Trump Riviera"

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2025/09/28/john-banville-you-cannot-censor-me-they-would-try-it-now-with-all-this-wokeist-nonsense/

When literally nobody is trying to censor you:

Snow Country for cold men, is my review

Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata tr. Edward G. Seidensticker

Blue fitzcarraldo cover

The Empusium: a Health Resort Horror Story - Olga Tokarczuk tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Announcing New Welsh Voices in English Literature - a new research series at Swansea!

I wanted to devote some of my @leverhulme.ac.uk trust fellowship to promoting work by other ECRs in Wales.

I'm really looking forward to these two talks this semester, with Bridget Bartlett and Beth Pyner.

The campus is absolutely fabulous, but I think I might get bored with it after a time - there seems to be nothing but water here & there are never many people around.

Absolutely, and there are websites if you're curious about something like fweet.org. jjda.ie by rose and o'hanlon has a 'chicken's guide'. If it helps, there's no right/normal way of reading it, either you're too slow or too fast or not polyglot enough. Miraculously, it does cohere eventually

Pushy Donna wants an extremely large glass of ice water.

Deliberately misreading 'speculation' so that I can hold German philosophers responsible for the great depression

that much else. I needed to work with that light. Maybe it was some form of insanity, except that lets me off too easy. Then there was Wade, my 01' canasta partner and picket-line buddy, fighting shoulder to shoulder all those years, one day he went over, and we stayed friends, and finally you saw what'd it matter who'd be taking those dues off the paycheck, Al Speede's people, th' IATSE, whatever. It'd been over for a long time anyway, though we'd had to pretend otherwise, and what was it for, all those sets we lit, those exotic nightclub sets, the hotel rooms with the neon outside, the passenger coaches with the rain against the windows, all of it just shadows, even if it's on safety stock in some air-conditioned vault that's still all it is, I let the world slip away, made my shameful peace, joined the IA, retired soon's I could, sold off my only real fortune --— my precious anger — for a lot of got-damn shadows."

Words, hopefully, not to have lived by

(fr Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel, Vineland)

Liverpool