John MacNeill Miller

YouTube video by Gravewave Witches Night Out 1978

Happy Halloween to everyone old enough to have watched reruns of the ‘70s cartoon Witch’s Night Out on TV! (We had a tape of it that my mom made once when it aired and we watched it every October in the ‘80s)

a group of people are dancing around a fire in the dark . ALT: a group of people are dancing around a fire in the dark .

Wishing a blessed #Samhain to all those celebrating today.

May the turning of the Wheel of the Year bring much needed rest and new beginnings to us all, and may the coming year be a damn sight better than the passing one.

Such a punch in the gut—that moment you realize Lucy Snowe has been teaching her students not to read thematically but to read closely. Poignant and devastating

This is the dawning of the Age of Ozymandias!
The Age of Ozymandiaaaa—
Shit. Nevermind. Nothing beside remains

Ozymandias
Time destroyed his statue
Yes
YES
The statue is just feet

Kind of depends what the NeoVictorian stuff is, and how long they have to read it! But my gut says Mary Barton for its view of industrial conditions, its insistence on social interdependence, its assorted tropes (country v city, the fallen woman, etc), and its relative brevity…

If you were teaching a module on NeoVictorian fiction what is the one Victorian novel you would want students to have read (if it had to be just one) as a useful/informing baseline of knowledge?

Yes, Lord of the Rings is about how you must trust the “hard men.” Just as Narnia is about an evil lion. And the New Testament tells a tale of a wimp who wouldn’t fight back. Next week on “fascists read classics,” we’ll meet tech visionary George Orwell…

The guy who wrote the 1961 children’s classic The Cricket in Times Square also wrote a queer pornographic novel about the underground sex scene in New York in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Just thought you all should know!

Look, the number of people who self-identify as postmodern decadents is booming. If you don’t cater to that audience they’re just going to go somewhere else to find the content they crave

Heck yeah! Do it!

I definitely need to read more of his stuff!

Strongly! It’s the only one of his I’ve read, but I love it. Used to kick off all my Brit Lit surveys with it and the students also found it fascinating

Increasingly I think that Tom McCarthy’s *Remainder* is a direct literary descendant of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s *A Rebours*

There’s a Literacy Crisis. One Classroom Solution Should Be Obvious. You can't get better at reading until you care about a text.

. @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I put CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY together to help connect what undergrads do in assignments with what we do as scholars

then we found ourselves talking to a lot of high school teachers

slate.com/life/2025/10...

A grey blue washed image of a bearded young ish white guy looking into the mirror all serious with his palm pressed against it. A serif font title reads: DID I JUST ARGUE WITH A JOKE? A semi opaque navy snoot near the bottom bears the bluesky logo and the text PART OF A BLUESKY EDUCATIONAL SERIES

So you’re finding middle age revolutionary…

“When people sense that power is beyond challenge, they redirect their energy into trivial disputes. And those trivialities, collectively, are enough to erode a society’s very foundations of justice.”

Especially given that the Platner tattoo scandal is tied to a shirtless video of him wailing along with that exact Miley track!

Thomas Carlyle is furious!!! But we must forgive him, because Thomas Carlyle was simply a product of the broader social, economic, cultural, and technological changes of the late Romantic and Victorian eras

Up now at the Los Angeles Review of Books, my review of Samanta Schweblin’s excellent Good and Evil and Other Stories! The affect of art-dread! Genre haunting literature! Hauntings without ghosts! Doublings without doppelgängers! lareviewofbooks.org/article/para...

Snickers bar and a metal whistle

Parents, please check your kids’ candy this Halloween. I’ve just found an ancient metal whistle with the inscription “QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT" inside a Snickers bar. I blew it and heard a note of infinite distance, and now I’m haunted by a figure in pale, fluttering draperies. Be safe.

I didn’t get the wording down precisely, so I won’t quote it, but one of the things that hit hard in the room:

Reactionaries waging culture wars against the humanities have a more accurate account of our power than we do. And our humility is not admirable, but an abdication of responsibility.

My current theory is poems cause crime

Look, maybe he also has a tattoo on his back that says “I hate anyone and everyone associated with this symbol” and then an arrow curved under his armpit that says “(flip over).” We can’t rule that out yet

Totally forgot about the episode in A Rebours when Des Esseintes realizes all the fancy dentists will be too overbooked to fix his toothache on short notice so he goes to a cheap one who lifts him in the air by the molar before it breaks out of his mouth and he falls to the floor
#DentalHumanities

Haven’t decided on this one yet—will let you know if I go!

I’m hoping to! Time will tell…

You are too kind! Alas, I will not be there. But to make up for it, I will graciously allow you to buy me a drink at a future conference

I can throw in a hyphen if it makes you more comfortable