Rebecca Anne Barr

"And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees."

Ever since Outlook added reactions to emails, my students have been giving me a thumbs up like they’re Fonzie. When did email become Facebook? Time to retire.

Forty years in the Siberian wilderness: the Old Believers who time forgot The long read: In 1978, Soviet scientists stumbled upon a family living in a remote part of Russia. They hadn’t interacted with outsiders for decades. Almost half a century later, one of them is still...

Beautiful and evocative story about Russia, isolation, the long and hard twentieth century—and forests, wolves, and god.

So while preparing slides was once again been reminded of this little mystery....Huge gender gaps in support for 2 parties - Reform and Greens. Both genders are more likely to support the Greens, and gender gap in Green support is larger. But all the discussion focuses on young men & Reform

They’re trying to keep on punishing her even after they’ve ruined her life.

The closing of Bucknell University Press is a tremendous loss for academic publishing in general and 18th-century studies in particular.

Universities have abandoned the academic mission. We’re the generation that will have to reinvent knowledge-work from the institutional ruins.

Screenshot of the murderer’s own footage just before he killed Good. She’s smiling at him, the subtitles reading: Renee Nicole Good: "That's fine, dude. I'm not mad at you.' *gunshots* ICE: "FUCKIN' BITCH."

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them”.

Shocking: The Untold History of Psychiatry and Homosexuality in Northern Ireland | NI Science Festival

LGBTQ+ conversion therapy was in the news recently, after a BBC report revealed many examples in English NHS hospitals in the 1960s/70s. On 16 Feb I’m giving a talk on the history of sexuality & psychiatry in Northern Ireland, as part of @niscifest.bsky.social.

nisciencefestival.com/event/shocki...

POEM FOR DAVID BOWIE There was a man who used to cut the grass. He used a scythe - the snaking shaft of it – the sned - just right for swivel and for sweep. A blade so sharp, they said, it would cut wool floating down a stream. And tonight I dreamed that man again. Corrigan or Kerrigan – I forget his name – but he cut a swathe. He cleared a path. I saw the frogs, the twitching leveret, the grasshoppers in splashes. Then the sudden tilt in everything – and everything collapses.

A poem by John Kelly as it first appeared in Poetry Ireland Review.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes – (372) BY EMILY DICKINSON After great pain, a formal feeling comes – The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs – The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’ And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’? The Feet, mechanical, go round – A Wooden way Of Ground, or Air, or Ought – Regardless grown, A Quartz contentment, like a stone – This is the Hour of Lead – Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow – First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

Snow scene, forest painting.

Winter, Edvard Munch, 1899.

12 common British trees shown with their winter silhouette to facilitate identification

Pictures that explain things.
Trees in Winter (back endpapers)
Artist: SR Badmin, 1963

Ben Affleck smoking

Day 3 of the New Year

What amazes me is how quickly people are losing either the confidence or the willingness to complete basic human tasks.

This, combined with "vice signaling" (taking pride in antisocial behavior) has given us the reign of the Stupid Asshole, something most people are against, but can only be remedied if we're not too polite to talk about it

Tonight you will be visited by the ghosts of three gender studies majors, each warning you that you’ll have to burn off in hell after death all the sins you accumulated in your futile effort to be a real man in life …

This individual had no right being in a *Muppets* movie.

Cardiff couple invited man in for Christmas, he stayed for 45 years An arrangement Rob and Dianne Parsons thought would last a few days ended up changing their lives.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Criticism Is Literature. Why Is It Vanishing?, by Adam Morgan What do the best book reviews do? What is the current state of the critical ecosystem? Chicago Review of Books founder Adam Morgan takes stock of book reviewing in the US.

“there are only 7 full-time book critics left in the US: three at NYT ( Jacobs, Garner, Szalai), 2 at WaPo(Rothfeld, Charles), 1 each at WSJ (Sacks), NY mag (Chu), Slate (Miller)

more people have walked on the moon than write book reviews for a living”

worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/septemb...

not that the present economic picture is rosy, but i do think that popular culture — and specifically nostalgia bait television — is a big part of the reason that our public memory of the 1970s, 1980s and even 1990s seems to miss the real economic pain that marked each of those decades.

For obvious reasons, I've been thinking today not just about Tristram Shandy but also about Holly Medgar's 2012 print-on-demand (&-btw-destroy-your-printer) artist's book "Black Friday."
apod.li/black-friday

JFK’s niece:

h/t @jamiegangel.bsky.social

Jane Austen used 'however' at the beginning of a sentence, and so can you.

L is for Lovelace, who Lost in a dueL.

a transcription thereof

I was asked yesterday if I thought that English might benefit from a governing academy, like French, and noted that a language that, to date, supports dreamed and dreamt, dove and dived, and pleaded and pled, is not a language you can govern.

(And I wouldn't want to.)

Writing words by hand on paper is so satisfying. We really fumbled the ball on changing culture to doing so much less of it 😩

I wasn't in the reading group but omfg these are fabulous! officially on tenterhooks til January.

indulging in some self-care tonight. #type1