Very excited indeed to be speaking at this tomorrow. Do come by if you are in Cambridge at 5pm. I'll be rioting with Austen (and sure, obliquely with Dickens, too), at the English Faculty. @universitypress.cambridge.org, @cam.ac.uk, @bsecs.bsky.social

@drbibliomane.bsky.social More exciting than new Pynchon? Possibly?

So delighted that this long-gestated brain child is now out and in the real world. I'll be talking about it at the English Faculty in Cambridge, @cam.ac.uk on Thursday of next week at 5pm. Do please come along if you're in town!

Returning to The Prelude today, and finding there a lovely dismissal of AI and discovering too a new spot of time: a magical Roman restaurant with excellent isecs colleagues...

This sounds great! Did anyone out Smollett as Melopoyn in Roderick Random? Other than that, I think Aphra Behn has all the fun with the author as character... Behn and Rochester both...

Desperate to visit the new Byron museum in Ravenna, I read that: "one of the rooms contains tokens of love kept by the countess, including letters, jewellery, locks of the poet's curly hair and shards of his sunburned skin." Shards of what now? Shards of his burned skin? kept as tokens of ... love?!

Trust TJ Clark to immediately notice that Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, which he'd never read, begins with (another) fall of Icarus... ... ...

so vastly exciting to finally! see Jane Parminter's signature and sassy as heck seal on these docs pertaining to the purchase of A la Ronde. Almost everything with her name on it has disappeared from the archives.

Stuck, stuck, stuck on a piece of writing, I got out the really big paper and the best colouring pencils and lo! Progress! Can highly recommend to anyone else unable to see a blinking cursor as anything other than a blinkin' curse...

So sure that Locke is the most sensible old man of enlightenment letters, until you get to the bit about detachable body parts, walking off with a man's mind...

Day 6 of covid. The child has now come down with it and will not go to school therefore. Am increasingly irked by the universalising dicta of Adam Smith.

Am holed up with covid. Last time, I read The Man of Feeling and shed real tears, which was pretty rad. Am reading Theory of Moral Sentiments this time, to see what happens. Here, meanwhile is what my tea bag wld like you all to take into account, today
...

This here is a stone from the back of the house where captain beefheart and co dreamt up the trout mask replica album. And also a pack of cards that Shoenberg designed. They are unplayable, aptly.