Amanda Watson

This month I've been trying to make myself notice something beautiful every day, as a way to keep going amid the horrors. This film was definitely yesterday's moment of beauty; the memory of it will probably provide a lot more.

Predictably, I was really struck by the way Mozart's Requiem comes in at unpredictable intervals, like punctuation. But I was also fascinated by the way that played against the unfolding of time -- in Hujar's narration of his day and the way the light changes from afternoon to dusk.

YouTube video by Janus Films PETER HUJAR'S DAY - Official Trailer

A friend and I caught Ira Sachs' new film PETER HUJAR'S DAY at the Film Forum yesterday and I haven't stopped thinking about it. It felt like an antidote to an an era of glossy optimized machine-made entertainment. Just incredibly intimate and sublime in its focus on the ordinary.

Speaking as a private citizen on a matter of public concern, yes leadership is apparently planning to cut 50% of the faculty at the New School for Social Research in order to eliminate social research and replace scholarship with a trendy MA degree mill For the 21st Century 1/

You are ABSOLUTELY NOT going to regret listening to this bird:

OMG Scott and Kip in episode 3 are basically lesbians. They U-Hauled after one date! 🤣

I think it would be fun if writers who love language started intentionally writing more strangely as AI flattens written "content" into a mono-voice. it would cool I think if writers responded by focusing their individual efforts on cultivating a really unique voice that's hard to copy

important update: I started watching the gay hockey romance show.

YouTube video by UC Faculty Behind the Scenes: How UC Faculty Beat Back Trump's Attacks

You may have heard that Trump’s extortion of University of California was defeated in court. But do you know who won this historic case? Spoiler: not a single UC administrator participated. It was all faculty members of the UC Faculty Associations and @aaup.org! Cc: @veenadubal.bsky.social

UNL professors march through campus in New Orleans-style 'funeral' to protest proposed budget cuts Students, alumni, faculty and community members came together to protest the $27.5 million in budget cuts.

art is for everybody, language is for everybody, ideas are for everybody, including nebraskans

www.klkntv.com/unl-professo...

Chapter 42: The Whiteness of The Whale | Moby Dick | Herman Melville | Lit2Go ETC

Melville has something to say about Pantone's color of the year.

etc.usf.edu/lit2go/42/mo...

Never believe the fuckers who say "why bother, they already won"

Shut up and take my money!

Why is "You: Human-in-the-loop" a little dismayed cartoon ghost?

I think this is exactly it!

the primary thing that TPUSA provides to young conservatives is a blueprint for weaponizing the abject cowardice of university administrators against individual teachers and instructors, and university admins should take a long look in the mirror and think about what that says about them

Your annual reminder that the most revealing difference between Irish and Scottish Gaelic is definitely in the words for December: Mí na Nollag (Month of Christmas) in Ireland, and An Dubhlachd (the Blackness) in Scotland. So once again may I wish you all a lovely Blackness.

every trans person i see post about the OU suspension knows that the suspended target is trans & a grad student, & has an innate awareness that this is about purging trans employees. every cis person i see thinks the target is a rando professor & that this is about giving conservatives good grades

Somewhere Lawrence Lefferts is rotating in his grave. Or raging over his cigars!

Oh no. RIP, Tom Stoppard. I should have realized what all the quotations in my timeline were referring to. 😢

The difference is that 50 (or 57) feels like a younger age now than it would have in the early 20th century. But Newland Archer's feeling of having "lost the habit of travel" still resonates, even though I've definitely been trying to change that in my own life in recent years.

Maybe it's because I last read this novel in my 20s and now I'm 50, so it's impossible to read this chapter without doing the same kind of life-assessment that Archer does, or to wonder what I missed out on in my youth.

This last chapter of The Age of Innocence, with the 25-year time jump: perfection. The world has changed and Archer's children have "a larger life" than he did, and he's *almost* resigned to it. "But I'm only fifty-seven" -- more heartbreaking than I expected. 🏹

Someday I will embroider this passage from Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and hang it on my wall. (Or maybe just the last sentence, I'm not quite that ambitious.) I love it so much.

The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome are both very good, if you don't mind extremely sad endings. Her short stories might be fun to dip into -- she wrote a lot of them, including some terrific ghost stories ("Afterward" is a personal fave). 🏹

k. "Sex," "female," "male," "women," and "men" are defined in Executive Order 14168, Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government (Jan. 20, 2025), and related executive orders.

It remains not only so shameful and such a profound betrayal but also just so EMBARRASSING that universities are signing things that are like:

"Men" and "Women" are defined the way President Buttface said in his Big Fancy Statement.

Signed,
The Leader of an Actual Institution of Higher Education

Very soft and fuzzy-looking! (But apparently their bite is mildly venomous so I did not pet)

Introduce yourself with 5 animals you've seen in the wild:

Coyote
Wild turkey
Northern short-tailed shrew
Humpback whale (probably)
Eurasian eagle owl (RIP Flaco, beloved Central Park resident)

LOL, this map is telling me I really do need to move to Brooklyn!

But also I would love something like this for historic census data for unrelated same-sex households -- both for academic research purposes and for "where should I set my historical novel" purposes.

Not a psychologist, teacher, or, for that matter university student.

But I think this is happening because the facade of normal daily life during all this is starting to get too heavy to hold up.