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Jessica Smith

@thedaybooks.bsky.social

7.6K followers 6.9K following 17K posts

Mom + poet in AL Instructor of English + Gender Studies MFA, MA, MAE, MLS PhD’ing in Comms/Library Science Posts don’t reflect my institutions

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Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 7d

Basic mental state of 🫠💔🚮 continues… which I think is a reasonable response to the situation.

Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 14h

I mean, also for other reasons perhaps, it’s just hard to imagine how much spitting there was.

Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 14h

I’d like to travel back in time just to really understand how much spitting in public there was (seems like a lot)

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Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 14h

And the tote bags!

This is fun at poetry conferences too, which have a lot of aesthetic overlap with librarian conferences

Reposted by Jessica Smith

David Rosenthal @davidrosenthalpoet.bsky.social · 15h

Dude, that’s you. You’re the government.

John Collins @logicallyjc.bsky.social · 16h

Speaker Johnson: "People’s faith in the government is at an all time low.”

Gee, I wonder why?

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Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 16h

Aw 🥹

Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 16h

If congress got emails about shutting down the gov as often as I get emails about why a student’s paper isn’t graded yet, we wouldn’t have a shutdown.

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Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 17h

Take notes, Newsom.

Reposted by Jessica Smith

Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 18h

"The man with the most power has expended enormous energy targeting those with the least... In a time of darkness, New York must be the light."

Katelyn Boo-urns @katelynburns.com · 1d

I wrote a little about some of the little details you might have missed in this video and why it hit me so hard as a trans person this morning:

www.burnsnotice.com/you-have-to-...

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Reposted by Jessica Smith

Daniel Williams @dbenjw.bsky.social · 19h

“Crystal Forms: A Victorian Aesthetics of Accident” is out in JVC!

I read James/Cecilia Glaisher’s snow-crystal images as a case study in accidental aesthetics—unsettling familiar stories about representation, mechanical objectivity, and lookalike forms in science + art ❄️❄️❄️

doi.org/10.1093/jvcu...

Screenshot of article abstract. Text:

Abstract. This essay uses the snow-crystal studies of the meteorologist James Glaisher and his wife, the illustrator-photographer Cecilia Glaisher, as a case study to describe a nineteenth-century aesthetics of accident, to assess its limits, and to draw wider lessons for the history of scientific and artistic representation. The argument is in two parts. The first examines the Glaishers’ accounts and images of snow-crystal morphology across a range of print media, from scientific periodicals to art journals. I argue that they pivoted from an empirical and taxonomic inquiry toward an aesthetics of design, developing representational strategies that emphasized symmetry. The latter part of the argument identifies two lessons we can draw from this case study. First, I complicate a narrative in the history of science that takes snow-crystals as exemplary of a nineteenth-century epistemic shift in styles of representation, from ‘truth to nature’ in hand-drawn images to ‘mechanical objectivity’ in photomicrography. The Glaishers’ case, I suggest, confounds this narrative of the ascendancy of mechanical reproductive techniques. Second, I contend that these images have an aesthetic kinship with projects of iterative representation in twentieth-century art, and anticipate conundrums about ‘pseudomorphism’. The Glaishers’ snow-crystals offer a compelling way to talk about quasi-identical forms in science and art, not so much by discriminating among them than by accommodating, even celebrating, the variety of causal stories and contexts that surround them. Their project reveals a nascent aesthetics of accident in the Victorian era whose legacy can be traced in, and help us understand, later representational forms.

Woodcut engraving of a snow-crystal with symmetrical laminae, in white lines on a solid ox-blood red background.

Woodcut engraving of two identical snow-crystals superimposed, in white on a solid dark green background, with a smaller cross-section showing the structure of the double crystal at lower left.

Woodcut engraving of a snow-crystal with complex symmetrical needles and short laminae, in white lines on a solid Prussian blue background.

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Reposted by Jessica Smith

Kristy Baxter @kbax.bsky.social · 1d

"That the average Massachusetts girl is not impressionable has long been asserted. This proves it."

The Longton Gleaner
September 29, 1911

A Massachusetts girl in a fall
wrecked five glass floors in a public
library building, landed on a marble
floor in the basement and then walked
away. That the average Massachu-
setts girl is not impressionable has
long been asserted. This proves it.

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Reposted by Jessica Smith

Chantal James @chantalalive.blacksky.app · 1d

No Nazis don't get to have frogs anymore. Awkward cool people who stand for justice get to have frogs!

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Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 1d

This is extra funny b/c paper is sized

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sizing

Sizing - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 1d

If a musician’s medium is time, and a visual artist’s medium is space, then whatever is between those two

Or I could say “ink on paper” or “voice” maybe

Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 1d

B/c the art festival gives the same ID badge to everyone (music, writers, all visual/material artists), someone asked me what my medium was, and I was like?

Words?
Air?
Paper?
Ink?

How does one answer this?

I said words b/c I didn’t want to explain “air” but I think it’s air

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Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 1d

Lolz… I was a HS Debater and was asked to judge recently and I don’t think l can go back there 😆 whew

Reposted by Jessica Smith

Thalia [tə'lɪə] @letsaskyourmom.com · 1d

Portland Frog and friends have got the Disarm part down.

Meme cartoon showing four different responses to armed and masked agents in black. In the Face of Power: Appeal, Disarm, Record, Reflect

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Reposted by Jessica Smith

Stephanie King @stephstephking.bsky.social · 1d

LOOK AT THIS CUTE LIL GUY

LOOK AT HIM

A binary typewriter with keys for just zero and one

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Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 1d

Art festival poetry reading evidence

A white woman dressed in black with black sunglasses holds up an ID badge that says “Kentuck Performer / Pure Products.” Pure products is a reading series that features UA faculty and grad students and basically gives us a chance to read locally.

A crowd of people wanders under green trees, down a row of white Art festival tents

Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 1d

It’s the “amen!” of poetry church

Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 1d

Have you been to a poetry reading recently? Go. Listen. You will hear it.

Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 1d

“Here” being Tuscaloosa

I will say this has been a very solid lineup of readers

Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 1d

There’s a strange culture here of snapping after poems you like, which seems like a spoof of a poetry reading, but there’s less “poetry grunt” so that’s something

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Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 1d

I haven’t seen that one, but the Clooney interpretation which is pretty recent, is pretty accurate to the book. It captured the tension of horror and comedy. It didn’t quite capture the Marx Bros aesthetic, but Clooney isn’t Jewish, so I feel like he didn’t tap into that heritage.

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Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 1d

I enjoyed the poems of the person pictured here, Maggie Nipps.

maggienipps.com/poems

Poems — Maggie Nipps

cargo.site

maggienipps.com

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Jessica Smith @thedaybooks.bsky.social · 1d

The recent George Clooney mini series (Netflix? Hulu?) was great

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