Max Shirley

Night Tales’s loft — only on a Wednesday.

Cover of Living On After Failure: Affective Structures of Modern Life by Irving Goh. The title and subtitle appear in a pink box on the top third of the cover. The bottom third is cream and features the painting "Vortex I" (2022) by Lesley Oldaker, an image of 4 black human figures walking into a swirling pink vortex.

Rather than understanding failure as something to overcome, in "Living On After Failure," Irving Goh dwells with failure and all of its negative affects to consider new ways of living beyond the failure/success binary. Read the intro for free now: buff.ly/IG8shfa

Happy Monday to anyone who wants a PDF copy of Stanley Cavell's Tanner Lecture, "On the Uncanniness of the Ordinary".

drive.google.com/file/d/1dfhb...

CFP - Material Poetics: Drafting, Duration, Form
(London, 5 November 2025)

The symposium takes up poetic practice today, including embodied mark-makings, archival poetics, manuscript and archival practice, form and experiment.

See here for more: call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/07/...

we don't need AI. really what we need are better word processors, more accessible reference materials, a more literate culture, more resources for education, more time in the day to read and write and think, fewer useless documents and emails, fewer distractions.

With the rise of AI, I've begun to wonder if future graders of expository essays will even be able to grasp the sheer brilliance of Mandy Berry's famous Student Essay Unplugged? We many never see this kind of essay again, folks.

I posted this earlier, but came back to it again. It's just unbelievable. Warwick's consultants telling people how to write terribly so they are "on brand". It's Beyond ridiculous. Or rather "Beyond is ridiculous".

brand.warwick.ac.uk/en/brand-gui...

‘Student-led’ AHRC PhD places ‘to fall by at least 60 per cent’ Internal modelling released under Freedom of Information enquiry reveals extent of PhD scholarship cuts, with academics fearing impact could be greater still

'The number of student-initiated PhD scholarships funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is set to fall by 60 per cent when new doctoral training arrangements come into effect next year, new figures show.' 1/3

we need a philanthropist to pay a bunch of people to log off and move to a village away from AI slop before they've been contaminated. it'll be like the global seed vault but for protecting cognitive diversity from brainrot.

“[G]enerative AI's imperial nature is concealed and expanded by the norms of frictionlessness and immediacy on which its vision of a good life of everyday aesthetic production is built.”

Reeves to say cuts to City red tape will bring trickle-down benefits to households Chancellor to announce raft of deregulation changes as City regulators move to pare back transparency rules

Labour confirm themselves as the party of finance capital. The last remaining neoliberal true-believer, dead-enders.

www.theguardian.com/business/202...

It’s underway! A photo I took this morning before our presenters and attendees arrive. The morning sessions of the American Dream / American Nightmare conference have been fantastic. Excited to see what the afternoon has in store.

A MASSIVE WIN AT NEWCASTLE UNI ICU

Today I’m presenting a paper on network infrastructures and confessional literature for the Auto / Bio / Fiction Symposium. Keynote features Rachel Cusk - exciting programme ahead!

sites.gold.ac.uk/comparative-...

Less than 3 weeks to go until the hybrid American Dream / American Nightmare conference I’ve been co-organising!

The programme has been finalised and is looking great. The conference is free to attend both online & in-person, find out more here: newvoicespocostudies.wordpress.com/american-dre...

Enjoyed spending three days in Stirling for @bacls.bsky.social conference - lots of new people to meet and research to hear about, a fantastic time!

Ed Kiely · Short Cuts: University Finances Universities’ reliance on international students is only the most recent attempt to solve a broader problem, one that...

‘If higher education was as committed to “woke indoctrination” as the Tory peer Nat Wei claims, I imagine I would spend a lot less time on administrative emails.’

Ed Kiely on UK university finances: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

We at the Review mourn the loss of Alice Notley (1945-2025). In celebration of her life and work, we’ve unlocked her Art of Poetry interview, along with her poems, from our archive.

buff.ly/qiSx3j8

THE COMPLETE DRAFTS by Rachel Blau Duplessis arrives tomorrow in all its glory! Thirty years in the making, it's a major work, an urgent contemporary long poem of hope, critique, and resistance. #poetry

Open Letter from CRMEP Students - Notes - e-flux Students oppose the closure of Kingston University’s Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP).

‘Humanities departments in particular are vulnerable to a pincer move from neoliberal and reactionary-populist actors, in which the discourse of “value-for-money” coincides with a crusade against “woke culture.”’

www.e-flux.com/notes/658933...

Kingston axes philosophy centre in humanities department shutdown Staff and students fight to save famed unit, transferred from Middlesex University in 2010

Kingston University’s acclaimed philosophy centre is set to close under plans to shut the institution’s humanities department – a move that would also end English literature and modern languages courses. @jgro-the.bsky.social reports

From Marx to Spinoza: Affect, Ideology, Materiality An online seminar series led by Jason Read, Andrew Goffey and Jeremy GilbertAt least since the 1960s, a particular strain of radical thought has explored the relationships – potential and act…

Free online seminar with Brian Massumi!
The Personality of Power: A theory of Fascism for non-Fascist Life.
March 1st, 17:00-19:00 GMT. culturepowerpolitics.org/from-marx-to...
@jasonread.bsky.social

SUBTEXTS PRESENTS: Readings by Isabel Waidner and D Mortimer SUBTEXTS PRESENTS: READINGS from Isabel Waidner and D Mortimer from their new work COREY FAH DOES SOCIAL MOBILITY and SPEED GLUM HERO

EAST LDN: free, all welcome x www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/subtexts-p...

The higher education funding crisis made the Guardian front page this weekend 👇

“If vice-chancellors do not step back from the brink and work with us to protect jobs, serious industrial unrest cannot be ruled out” @drjogrady.bsky.social

Read here 👉 theguardian.com/education/20...

Cover of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century: cream lettering in color rectangles against a cream backdrop.

[clearing throat]

Most scholars I know--affiliated or not--just want access to resources behind paywalls--subscription journals, databases, books. No one I know is going "gee I wish I had AI tools to mine those resources for pithy, questionable syntheses." They can't even GET TO the resources. THAT is what they want.

Matt’s Gallery – Thirty-one years of Piece of Paper Press: artists’ books, artworks and ephemera, 1994–2025 Private View: Sunday 26th January 2–5pm Exhibition Continues: 29 January-23 March 2025 Wed-Sun 12–6pm Matt’s Gallery is pleased to present an archival display of artists’ books, artworks and ephemera...

opening tomorrow at Matt's gallery, London, thirty-one years of @tonywhite.bsky.social's Piece of Paper Press: artists’ books, artworks and ephemera, 1994–2025 including my elusive, very non-virtual Shklovsky's Zoo!

exhibition runs from 29 Jan-23 Mar 2025

www.mattsgallery.org/exhibitions/...

Minor Literature[s] | Substack minor literatures ; stuttering cultures. Click to read Minor Literature[s], a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

Monthly Dispatch #20 — ft. @vikshirley.bsky.social @cclarklewes.bsky.social Lee Sumyeong (tr. Colin Leemarshall), Maria Zoccola, Daniel Holmes, Gabriel de Foigny (tr. Dana J. Lupo), Selen Ozturk, David C. Porter Jérémie Wenger & more ... — goes out Friday ...

sign up here

minorlits.substack.com