Ben O'Dell

Screenshot of a website. The text reads: Routledge - Taylor & Francis Group Submit a Manuscript to the Journal Brontë Studies For a Special Issue on To Be Forever Known: The Brontës and Poetry Abstract deadline 01 April 2026 Manuscript deadline 15 December 2026

Call for Contributions: 'To Be Forever Known: The Brontës and Poetry', a special issue of Brontë Studies, edited by @drbeard79.bsky.social

500-word abstracts due by 1st April. More details on the blog: www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=6317

Tales from the research desk: sure, we live in a technological dystopia, but on the flip side, it's never been easier to look up TV listings from the 1970s.

Nine bedrooms, seven untimely deaths: can ‘cursed’ Venice palace finally attract a buyer? Palazzo Ca’ Dario, empty for years, has failed to find a new owner, with local legends suggesting it is jinxed

I was skeptical, but after reading the article, I think this palazzo might actually be cursed.

Me when my book finally comes out but I mentally moved on two years ago.

Does He-Man: Masters of the Universe count? Whiplash?

I didn't do a lot of reading over break, but I did manage to reread Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello and read DeLillo's Cosmopolis.

Just discovered Michael Caine's birth name is Maurice Micklewhite. Are we sure he isn't a Dickens character?

This weekend, Wrecktangle Pizza in Lynlake, Minneapolis donated huge amounts of food to volunteers, immigrants, educators, and so on.

Today ICE rolled up and fired tear gas outside their door.

One Battle After Another is the first new movie I've felt the need to rewatch in a long time.

“The billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30-an-hour that their enemies are those earning $20-an-hour. They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long, broken system.”

-Zohran Mamdani

I moved off Canvas this fall, and have set up spring using Box folders with some refinements from my students: organizing everything in weekly folders, & adding a shared calendar they can subscribe to in order to give them the deadline alerts they miss from Canvas.

Apparently, Gen Z is romanticizing "millenial optimism" on social media. I'm struggling to think of a worse mischaracterization.

Me: tying to finally watch One Battle After Another this week.

My kids: refusing to go to bed before 10 pm.

Just finished listening to Jordan Castro's Muscle Man on Audible while doing some projects around the house this week. It's an absolutely devastating satire of English Departments, told from the perspective of a neurotic Dostoevsky scholar. Definitely one of the best books I've encountered in 2025.

Zadie Smith's heads up to young people: 'You are absolutely going to become old' Smith was 25 in 2000 when she published her critically acclaimed first novel. Now 50, her latest collection of essays, Dead and Alive, reflects on middle age, climate change and generational gaps.

It is always a pleasure to listen to Zadie Smith. This interview is a rare glimpse of light in an otherwise dark and bizarre week.

It shows an illustration of a Victorian era brakeman applying a brake on a train car.

Did you know?

In the Victorian era, railways employed men whose sole job was to manually apply brakes on moving trains.

Before automatic braking systems, each rail car had its own hand brake, and there was no way for the engineer to stop the entire train at once.

#Victorian #history

Time person of the year cover for 2025

I guess it's fitting that it's a reimagined, worse version of someone else's artwork

I'm halfway through watching The Lobster for the first time, and I'm wondering if we need to raise our standards for what constitutes a dystopia.

The fabricated/hallucinated source issue has really become the worst part of teaching English composition in the era of generative AI. I'm toying with the idea of a hardcopy "research packet" of annotated articles for the spring in an effort to curb bad behavior. Has anyone tried this?

I had no idea that Linklater had put out Nouvelle Vague, a film about the making of Breathless, roughly in the style of Godard and the French New Wave. It's surprisingly good at capturing the moment, but Zoey Deutch is a little rough as Jean Seberg (which, I guess, is intentional).

How long until we find out Mad Men used AI for the 4k restoration?

I'm going to start using the phrase "the thin tweed line" to describe professors as the last line of defense between knowledge and AI slop.

I'm just thankful Ari Aster was still in college.

Im pretty sure I saw Videodrome, Blue Velvet, and Rules of Attraction in a six month span at the start of grad school.

Looks like LLMs are *very* vulnerable to attack via poetic allusion: "curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90% ..."

https://arxiv.org/html/2511.15304v1

I feel like we don't really appreciate AI's erasure of various archives. Search Google with questions about a cover song on an obscure indie record or what's sampled in a rap song. You will likely get radio silence or misinformation, even if that information exists in some corner of the web.

Henry Rollins's transformation from angry punk to cheery public radio host needs to be studied.

I read On Beauty recently and loved it, in part because of how stilted her young characters seemed in their dialogue and mannerisms. I feel like part of this comes from the fact that she's so disconnected from pop culture and truly writes as an outsider.