Eric Selinger

Romance and/or Erotica This Research & Knowledge Exchange Doctoral Project brief summarises our priority areas of research interest under the heading of: Romance and/or Erotica

Come and study with me! Call for doctoral proposals in the field of Romance and/or Erotica at Falmouth University: www.falmouth.ac.uk/research/phd...

They're so cute! I had no idea!

Philip Larkin’s this be the verse mangled into Ozymandias, the text reads They Oz you up, your mandyias. They may not mean to, but they do. They give you vast and trunkless legs A sunken shattered visage too. But they were Ozzed up in their turn By Mandyias upon the sand Who half the time had wrinkled lips And half in sneering cold command. Oz hands on mandyias to man. Like mighty works atop a shelf Look on them early as you can Ye mighty and despair yourself

Men seldom make passes
At Ozymandiasses

final project guidelines for both grad and undergrad seminars:

1. pick a topic you care about
2. don’t use ai
3. get smarter

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.

what else can we do? what do we want to do? what feels good? (thinking. making, making ideas....) how can I help you know you want to do this stuff? EDUCATION IS THE NONCOERCIVE REARRANGEMENT OF DESIRE and that includes the teacher's (thanks, Spivak)

There's a lovely passage in Akwaeke Emezi's novel "Bitter" about this, centered on a line she quotes from Mariame Kaba: "Hope is a discipline." I've been thinking about that a lot recently.

As I considered Hegel’s remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice, I couldn’t help but think that he forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

It will live a short and brilliant life, and then die and be forgotten. For when the originality becomes familiarized, there will not be truth enough to sustain it. The public will not acknowledge its men and women to have the true immortal vitality. Poor Cathy's ghost will not walk the earth forever; and the insane Heathcliff will soon rest quietly in his coveted repose.

Well, I bet this 1848 Wuthering Heights reviewer feels like a wally now

Romance 'sky, a question for you! My students are loving Bolu Babalola's "Honey & Spice" in part because it's a university-set student romance, and I'd love any recommendations you might have for other recent books with that setting & cast of characters. Might be a fun course focus.

Robert Hayden's "Frederick Douglass": 3 Versions My senior capstone seminar this quarter is spending 10 weeks on Robert Hayden's sonnet "Frederick Douglass."  Among the pleasures of the cou...

In fairness, there's a whole phrase that's different--see below--but since Hayden's first version dates to 1945, I think it's much more a poem of the WW2 era (remember the "Four Freedoms"?) than of 1966. saysomethingwonderful.blogspot.com/2014/10/robe...

Poem: Frederick Douglass A poem by Robert Hayden, published in The Atlantic in 1947

Here's a link you can see without a subscription: www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

Listening to a podcast about Robert Hayden's "Frederick Douglass" and the first thing the podcaster says about the poem is that it was written in the '60s and reflects the Civil Rights movement. It was, in fact, published in The Atlantic in February 1947: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

An Academic Affair From the “masterly” (The New York Times) Jodi McAlister, a charming new romance about two English professors who embark on a fake relationship…only...

I am an academic - hello from the Vice-President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance! - so if you want a book that shows what it's really like out there in universities (while still having a HEA!!): An Academic Affair is for you.

But according to a person who socialized with Platner when he was living in Washington, D.C., more than a decade ago, Platner had specifically acknowledged that the tattoo was a Totenkopf, the “death’s head” symbol adopted by an infamous Nazi SS unit that guarded concentration camps in World War II. “He said, ‘Oh, this is my Totenkopf,’” the former acquaintance told Jewish Insider recently, speaking on the condition of anonymity to address a sensitive issue. “He said it in a cutesy little way.” The exchange occurred in 2012 at Tune Inn, a popular dive on Capitol Hill where Platner later worked as a bartender and was a frequent patron while he attended The George Washington University on the G.I. bill, according to the former acquaintance. He would often take his shirt off drinking with friends late at night at the bar, and on at least one occasion had stated he knew what the tattoo represented, the former acquaintance recalled.

The Platner defenders can't even get their story straight. He doesn't claim growth; he claims he didn't know what it was until a few weeks ago.

And that's apparently a lie, because people heard him calling it "my Totenkopf" like 15 years ago, and lying shows the opposite of growth.

Drip, drip, drip...

[Evil laugh...]

Off to teach the end of Hadestown and the start of Katrina Jackson's Back in the Day. Summer me made some good choices for this syllabus. Thanks, summer me!

YouTube video by The Candy Wrapper Museum Almond Joy & Mounds – “Sometimes You Feel Like A Nut, Sometimes You Don't”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih3u...

Congratulations Vajra!
ICYMI: here is our deep dive together into RAKESFALL, the winner of the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction
Audio: tinhouse.com/podcast/vajr...
@ursulakleguin.com @vajra.me

In a reading slump, I was rereading Le Guin last night--taking this prize as a sign to start rereading Chandrasekera instead.

Today is pub day for my third book: Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century. It is a handbook on how to read. It argues for the foundational importance of *caring* to thought. It offers an anatomy of close reading's five steps so we can hone the skills to perform them. It argues for why to read

One clicked when you said “caring.” The missing link for most of my students, and they’re often surprised to have it named as such.

ICYMI

📣 Important update regarding this CfP: the submission deadline for our Special Issue "Romancing the Posthuman" has been extended until 30 November 2025!

🔗 Find all the relevant information through the JPRS website: www.jprstudies.org/submissions/...

#RomanceResearch

You can easily block the official MAGA government accounts here. Do not engage them. Do not give them what they want.

I don't know if she counts as "newer" but I've really liked Pamela Sanderson's books.

People always take whatever they want from art. (Part of the reason it is silly so many people fret over whether the "right" messages are in novels and movies.) Musk names spaceships after anarchist space operas. Paul Ryan works out to RATM. Better art isn't going to save a right-wing brain.

quotes from cybertruck owners

We wanted to know what it was like to own a Cybertruck. So @zoeschiffer.bsky.social went to the desert got this absolutely amazing quotes (and Michelle Groskopf took the pictures!) www.wired.com/story/owning...