Barbara

I don't know what it is about Anne Carson, but she has this way of writing poetry/sentences that make me want to cry. The latest, from "H of H Playbook":

"I'm not saying move back towards life, I'm saying the future isn't elsewhere."

Picture of Beyonce's Cowboy Carter tour. Beyonce is suspended in the air in a red car as she sings.

Picture of the crowd at Beyonce's Cowboy Carter tour. The screen shots two images of Beyonce singing in a cowboy hat.

Also, this was my first time watching Beyoncé live and what a show she puts on. At one point she was flying around in a car and got so close to us. I get the album a lot better after seeing how she presented it.

I will get be over the guy in front of me at the Cowboy Carter tour who spent the entirety of the show watching the Nicks game while his wife danced next to him 🥲

This picture shows two books about Taylor Swift: a picture book with Taylor Swift in a pink suit and guitar on the cover which is a biography in pictures. And a coloring activity book, tour edition, with Taylor Swift sitting at a piano in a maroon dress.

When your academic twin knows you all too well and gives you the best (early) birthday gifts to keep you from losing your marbles during exam season @bofosusomuah.bsky.social

There has got to be a direct line between forcing high school students to found initiatives (non profits to help send food to "third world countries" etc) and all these single-uses business I see popping up on Instagram ads (cold brew, slime, overnight oats)

Being on a college campus is so funny cause you can see TikTok (or social media in general) change consumer habits in real time. When I got here two years ago, everyone had a Stanley which are now being transformed into Owalas.

Oh any chance i could have a copy of Sad Tiger in English? It's made such a splash in France, I'm hoping it will do the same here! (there is a whole panel on her at this big French studies conference I'm going to in March lol)

my dinner wasn't that good either, so you're probably right

wow, i was just making dinner

Picture of a cat (grey, with a white tummy) sitting on a desk by a window. The windowsill has books lined up against it. There is a laptop on the picture, as well as some books and a pink backpack.

"All these books and not a single snack for me" - Jonah, probably

cat person was one of yours??????

Picture of a movie theater ticket for David's Lynch's "Blue Velvet" against the backdrop of a movie theater where people are leaving.

Picture of the Carolina Theater in Durham in the evening, covered by snow.

Went to a free screening of Blue Velvet but then @bofosusomuah.bsky.social had to rescue me because it started snowing out of the blue and I got stranded.

Full Stop Quarterly: Literary Dis(-)appearances in (Post)colonial Cities Full Stop focuses on debuts, works in translation, and books published by small presses.

The essay is currently under a paywall, but for $5 you support the wonderful work of Full Stop, and get to read some amazing essays on the topic. www.full-stop.net/full-stop-qu...

For a special issue of Full Stop on "Postcolonial Cities," I have an essay about growing up in Tirana and seeing the city of my childhood disappear because of an unfettered construction boom - and the literature that helped me make sense of it all.

A picture of two books: Edwin Frank's "Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the twentieth century novel" and Damion Searl's "The Philosophy of Translation." Frank's book has a black cover with a thick rectangular line running through it, while the title (which takes the whole front page) is is blue and white. Searls' book is white with a black ribbon in the front where the title is placed in white.

Found out about a summer fellowship decision right as I was passing my favorite bookstore, so I had to celebrate. I will say that buying two hardbacks is not easy on a grad student's wallet, but everything to support the profession

I cackled at the Hentai, but I agree!

🥺 this is the sweetest story

Had the first Fed fries + bemoaning session of the year/semester with @bofosusomuah.bsky.social. We are officially back!

I have a friend who runs a shelter in Albania and I helped her bring a blind dog to the US where she will have a forever family. I have known this dog for 24 hours and I cried when I said goodbye at JFK. Never beating the Pisces allegations.

The way air travel has become such a lottery even with supposedly respectable airlines. I don't even travel that often but over the past three years I have had four inter-continental flights cancelled out of the blue, and on one occasion Turkish refused to rebook me.

I have been obsessed with The Leftovers for years and I cannot believe this exists. Will be reading every single essay.

Picture of the Japanese planner Hobonichi. It has a plain, off-white cover with the title "Hobonichi Techo 2025 - Cousin." I have also put a sticker from the bookstore Albertine which has a celestial blue pattern with golden accents.

Favorite part about starting a new year: new Hobonichi planner to set up.

I would love to have your "Year in Reading" the way The Millions does it. Substack maybe?

Long shot but I have a travel-related question. Anyone traveled with Austrian and done a layover in Vienna where they needed to check out a dog and then check in again? (Because layover is too long)

Picture of three books: Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping," Janet Malcom's "In the Freud Archives", and Toni Morrison's "Playing the Dark."

Stealing this from my Twitter account but the three best books I read (or re-read) this year

I haven't seen the show, and I really liked the book. But I agree with this criticism of "Say Nothing" and its failure to contextualize The Troubles within a larger history of British colonial violence, among other things.

Codes of Silence | Jack Sheehan Patrick Radden Keefe’s bestselling 2019 book “Say Nothing” has been adapted into a miniseries. It repeats the sins of its source material.

"This is a central problem...with liberal historiography of the Troubles: the failure to reckon with the reality of state violence, and the implicit insistence that the state has a more legitimate right to kill than a paramilitary." thebaffler.com/latest/codes...

Been doing some freelance editing work in the UK (not in the humanities) and I'm sorry but who teaches British people to write so much in the passive voice? Maybe I've become too Americanized, but it's such a grating reading experience.

International flight home got cancelled. Booked a new one which got delayed multiple times. Took me 24 hours to get home, and immediately got sick. Happy holidays to me! But least, I did get approved for an early copy of Madeleine Thien's new book 🤷‍♀️

Pls Anton, I just finished writing 40 pages on the rise of translated fiction, and you drop another great, quotable source when I'm 24 hours away from submitting this paper I've been dragging for a year