Jacob Romanow

Was it something that somebody said....

I think it'd be silly not count the five Simon & Garfunkel albums!

Paul Simon Graceland

Justice Kavanaugh: “If the person is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully
in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter.”

Rooted cosmopolitanism vs rootless nationalism.

How Can We Live Together? - Boston Review Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential.

"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply."

me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually

www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

Northrop Frye: “Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads is a remarkable document, but as a piece of Wordsworthian criticism nobody would give it more than about a B plus.”

Jacques the Fatalist

Chuck, Mary, Bill

*Lamb-Shelley-Wordsworth

Northrop Frye: “Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads is a remarkable document, but as a piece of Wordsworthian criticism nobody would give it more than about a B plus.”

A prominent right-wing truism holds that there is something ‘Victorian’ about the aesthetic judgment of rising generations of the left; that, in the words of Coddling of the American Mind co-author Greg Lukianoff, campus activists echo ‘the thinking of the old Victorian censors.’ Without accepting these terms, I suggest that resistance to this discourse should spur Victorianists to reconsider certain habitual scholarly dismissals made on uncomfortably parallel grounds. For those of us who take seriously contemporary activists’ critiques, what might it mean to take seriously the Victorian moral criticism to which those critiques are persistently compared? In a cultural moment of hyper-alertness to what’s problematic about art, might we be able to better appreciate the conceptual work of certain much-maligned nineteenth-century strategies of aesthetic evaluation? Through presentist, methodologically-oriented readings of Lady Eastlake’s 1848 infamous attack on Jane Eyre in the Quarterly Review and F.R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition, I argue that a “moralist” method links nineteenth-century critics, scholarly Victorianists, and cultural activists, and that scholarly repression of this moralism opens the field up to right-wing cooptation and reactionary thought.

Victorian Network's special issue "Victorian Pedagogy" is out today, including my article "The Moralist Critic and the Student Activist: A Reconsideration"!

www.victoriannetwork.org/index.php/vn...

Shelley drove Byron nuts trying to "convert" him to Wordsworth! And then it (temporarily) worked! 😂

Exceptionally clear-eyed about the stakes and future of literary studies as a practical shared enterprise—as the BWWA so often has been. Worth a read.

muse.jhu.edu/pub/30/artic...

Hi, I'm Robert Frost, and you're listening to "The Golden Treasury" on W-ORD FM

"The indigenization of language and culture…is irreducibly a colonial process, a radical innovation in the name of return to the origin." (Aamir Mufti)

The Washington Post Fired Me — But My Voice Will Not Be Silenced. I spoke out against hatred and violence in America — and it cost me my job.

Some personal news:

I've been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting.

Thread incoming.

substack.com/@karenattiah...

Their waists and hands were tied together, forcing them to bend down and lick water to drink. The unscreened bathrooms contained only a single sheet to cover their lower bodies. Sunlight barely penetrated through a fist-sized hole, and they were only allowed access to the small yard for two hours. Detained by US immigration authorities for eight days, the workers and their families expressed shock, describing human rights violations and absurdities they could not have imagined as ordinary Koreans living in 2025.

korean reporting is nightmarish on the conditions Korean workers were contained in

Every time I read it I think it might go differently somehow

The Baileys of course!

Don't see yet mentioned either Gwendolyn Brooks or T.S. Eliot

BBC News headline: Frankenstein is monster success at Venice film festival

Actually, Frankenstein is a doctor success at the Venice film festival

I think in general, it's a mistake to think reception-side functionalism calls for production-side functionalism. Sure, you might want the piece of writing, or the dinner, or the car to just "do its job." But the more that's the attitude of the people making it, the less likely it actually will

(But to answer seriously, I think his combo of aestheticism and hypersensitivity would've make him more susceptible to obscurantism than to wisdom-peddling!)

The question of how Keats might've been negatively polarized by Tennysonian Keatsianism is one of the most interesting parts of the question for me, although I suppose Tennyson may not have been Tennyson with a living Keats

You gotta throw salt over your shoulder before you make a suggestion like that! 😅

I imagine them as having something like the lines + mood of early Yeats but with forms straining towards Hopkins

digital humanities