Christopher Yates

Done with grading so I’m going to treat myself to an hour of looking up whatever is going on with lily allen

Future anthropologists will note that, in the early decades of the 21st century, elite families demonstrated their wealth and prestige through the scale, variety, and tastefulness of their decorative gourd arrangements

those were hypothetical examples but I do recall a "neoliberalism" costume that included Neo's trench-coat from The Matrix and an "I'm with her" Hilary Clinton mug

grad school Halloween parties really were a mixed bag because on one hand nobody would just go to party city and pick up a no-effort costume-in-a-bag but on the other hand you have to tolerate costumes like “reification” and “the specter haunting Europe” (etc.)

See also "A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare’s Ass Play" by Richard Rambuss (disclosure: he was on my diss committee and is presently my boss)

I feel an extraordinary paper-title-envy when I remember the late Jonathan Goldberg's "The Anus in Coriolanus"

something that I only realized recently when thinking about these Victorian paintings that exceed what can be represented onstage is that, when I read Shakespeare's plays, I imagine a stage production in my mind's eye, rather than a kind of diegetic "scene" as in a movie

(The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, 1849)

kind of obsessed with Oberon's slutty tunic and butterfly hair-clips here

I do understand the "bo'oh o' wa'er" jokes about (certain types of) British accents but I also believe that we should all think a bit more about what happens when we pronounce, say, the word "at," or (and this one is really uncomfortable) "uh-oh"

New London, Connecticut honestly shot way too high with that name

I’m the only person who was raptured because I got up here first and told them what’s been going on down there, like what you’ve all been up to in general. My bad.

My “it’s safe to eat out in Florida” pamphlet has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my pamphlet

Here in Rhode Island we’re just catching up to the summer 1999 news cycle

I love this 19th century depiction of Hotspur and the unnamed fop from Henry IV Part I for many reasons but chiefly because this is how I picture every interaction I have with my father

None of this seems very coherent to me!

Or to reframe this slightly: the liberal Israeli position is that Zionism is a righteous and anti-colonial repatriation effort that inexplicably enjoys the unconditional financial and military support of the biggest and most powerful empire in the world today

So if I understand correctly the official liberal-Zionist position of the Democratic Party is: Donald Trump, America’s Hitler, is wrong about everything except (randomly!) his hard-line support of Israel, which is both fully correct and completely unrelated to his broader political project

Her gender essentialism can be so flexible; the murder (says the inspector) was committed by a woman, a category which can also accommodate a man with a “female streak” (here, a sinister and effeminate unmarried antique-collector, one of Christie’s favorite Types)

Very funny moment in this Agatha Christie novel (“The Moving Finger”); she’s a great plot-writer but also deeply incurious about the world around her and so her novels just pass on huge globs of raw ideology, undigested (this makes her interesting to read imo)

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted Jimmy Kimmel, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York

sometimes I recall with limitless horror the period when I was applying to grad school and, on the dubious recommendation of my advisors, cold-emailed every single early modernist working at any college with an English grad program in the entire anglophone world

you have to sort of feel for Giovanni Donato da Montorfano, the perfectly accomplished late 15th century Italian painter whose Crucifixion has been mogged by Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper (on the opposite wall) for 5 centuries

Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and Podcast.

assigned LeGuin's "Omelas" short story in my intro to lit course and found this morbidly funny fictional "response" from last year:

clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

posing as a somdomite (sic) @molochofficial 'Taxi Driver' is a movie about how New Yorkers will descend into homicidal mania before even considering just leaving New York

DEI office for those with few family members and fewer marriage prospects

like I'm sorry but can I get some loner freak representation here

the two unskippable security questions for setting up a password at [redacted university] are "what is the name of your oldest nephew/niece" and "what is the date of your wedding anniversary"

So…extortion.

Barber: so what is it you teach again

Me (trying so hard to be butch, lowering my voice into a kind of Batman impersonation): Uh, well. Renaissance poetry and drama mostly