Sonja Drimmer
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sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Sonja Drimmer
@sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
12K followers 930 following 5K posts
Associate Professor, History of Art & Architecture, UMass Amherst. http://sonjadrimmer.com/about-forte (She/her)
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sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Get a load of Faulkner over here. Using that one period like she MEANS it!
We were primed to participate in the farcical parable in which the son of a businessman dreams of making movies, goes to Hollywood, comes home, becomes a businessman who thinks, still, of the screen, thinks of Hollywood, who makes himself a star as consolation, becomes the skilled practitioner of a screen art that perverts notions of truth and make-believe, who like many stars succumbs to tyrannical impulses and authoritarian fantasies because the compromise of his life feels like a loss of control, an expression of weakness, because it is, and whose fantasies, in a pretty good twist, are not his alone but are instead woven into a mass delirium that splits us into a Gemini nation under a Gemini ruler.
November 18, 2025 at 2:36 AM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
I am Howling.
Like all men but more so, he was a hunter. In a literal sense, he used not a bullet but a bird. It was not about a chase but about a puzzle of logic and skill that amounted to a test of his self-mastery. He was the mouse and the architect of his maze. The giver of his own pleasure and torment. He desired. He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself. I understood this just as I came to understand the range of his kinks and complexes and how they fit within what I thought I understood of his soul.
November 18, 2025 at 2:16 AM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
HOW DOES A BULLET CUT A BOUGH, OLIVIA?

WHAT MAGICAL AMMUNITION CAN DO THAT *AND* CUT A TRACK THROUGH AN ABSTRACTION. OLIVIA.
Or the armed man who broke into his home. Or the armed men he paid to guard him from armed men who sought to harm him while the federal government denied his pleas for protection from the security agency whose modern protocols were carved by the same bullets that cut boughs from his family tree and cut the track of the American experiment.
November 18, 2025 at 2:03 AM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
<<whisper shouting in his ear>>

I LOVE YOU MORE THAN LIFE ITSELF
A large fluffy labradoodle lying on his back on a couch with his head on a pillow.
November 18, 2025 at 1:01 AM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
As Langdon Winner put so well 40 years ago, don't fall into the trap of accepting "RISK" as a good framework for these conversations. Business interests love framing their violence in terms of "risks & rewards" bc as a society, we love to heroize & reward risk-takers. Talk instead about "HAZARD."
But from the point of view I've described here, the risk debate is one that certain kinds of social interests can expect to lose by the very act of entering. In our times, under most circumstances in which the matter is likely to come up, deliberations about risk are bound to have a strongly conservative drift. The conservatism to which I refer is one that upholds the status quo of production and consumption in our industrial, market-oriented society, a status quo supported by a long history of economic development in which countless new technological applications were introduced with scant regard to the possibility that they might cause harm. Thus, decades of haphazard use of industrial chemicals provide a background of expectations for today's deliberations on the safety of such chemicals. Pollution of the air, land, and water are not the exception in much of
November 17, 2025 at 12:55 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
The "Get in Loser" Meme from Mean Girls edited to say "Get in Loser / WE'RE RUINING OUR EYES BY GOING THROUGH 1000 FRAMES OF CP40 BC THERE IS MONEY FOR DIGITIZATION BUT NOT INDEXING"
November 15, 2025 at 7:54 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
UGH WEIRD-ASS LITTLE LATIN WORDS ARE THE BEST.

journal.thewalters.org/volume/76/es...
Both passages are envoys that seem to derive from the same formula, a humility topos excusing excessive length.[37] In the first, schedula crevit in pellem is part of a series of three parallel clauses in which the first term connotes concision and the second verbosity: brevity…vast; small note [or draft or scrap or parchment offcut]…skin; epistle…book. However, in the second instance, the same formula, cedula crevit in pellem,” is part of an escalating construction in which the skin is one degree lengthier or less finished than a brief note [or draft or scrap or parchment offcut], a degree briefer or less finished than numerous skins, and briefer or less finished still than a roll and a book. Generally, the term schedula is taken to mean a brief note, but it is possible that it could refer to offcuts, the scraps of parchment that were the byproduct of cutting rectangles from the stretched animal skin, and which were used in the production of cheap manuscripts, students’ personal notes, and drafts. Often, as Erik Kwakkel has pointed out, it can be difficult to discern whether the material object or genre of composition is meant in a given occurrence of the term.[38] And while the word “skin” is used differently in these two instances, they share an intermediary position (whether as the middle clause of three parallel constructions, or as a middle item in an ascending list) between spontaneous, perhaps short, jottings on the byproducts of the parchment-making process and a completed textual work.
November 15, 2025 at 7:38 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
cedula / scedula / sedula is a weird-ass little Latin word, and I spent way too much time pondering its meaning when I was researching this article

journal.thewalters.org/volume/76/es...
Less technically, two sources afford greater insight into the significance of the term pellis in the context of textual composition in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The first comes from the conclusion to letter 102 of Peter of Blois’s Epistles, in which the author writes I had shortened this brief exhortation of mine, written down with a pruned pen, but love, if it does not know the end (indeed, charity never ebbs) was scarcely able to reach the end of writing. Thus brevity turns out vast, a small note [or draft or scrap or parchment offcut] grew into a skin (schedula crevit in pellem), and an epistle transformed into a book. Farewell.[34] In a similar formulation, and deriving from a treatise that resembles Peter’s Genealogia in its contents, Girard of Auvergne’s (or Anvers) Abbreviatio historiae figuralis,[35] originally composed in 1272 for Pope Gregory X and revised for Abbot Yvo of Cluny, apologizes at its conclusion for its length in the following terms Certainly, father, I had undertaken to write a short thing, but a short thing grew into a long thing. Indeed, an unrestrained pen has strayed into vastness owing to the material that surged up to be composed. A brief note [or draft or scrap or parchment offcut] grew into a skin (cedula crevit in pellem). A skin grew into skins, skins into a roll and a roll transformed into a book.[36]
November 15, 2025 at 7:34 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
I love these notes left by civic scribes on legal records because they often include terms for different kinds of written documents. Here, at the bottom of a record of a common pleas court case, the scribe wrote, "more on the little note sewed to this roll" ["plus in cedula huic rotulo consuta"]
In brown ink, in a secretary hand from 1421 "plus in cedula huic rotulo consuta"
November 15, 2025 at 7:32 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
<> www.unesco.org/en/articles/...
A screenshot of the top of an article from the Unesco website The screencapped portion reads as follows: "AI and the future of education: disruptions, dilemmas and directions This long read article is based on a talk delivered by Stefania Giannini, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education, at Digital Learning Week on 2 September 2025 in Paris, France. 24 September 2025 Last update:26 September 2025 The history of education is a history of disruption. Five thousand years ago, writing transformed memory into text. Six hundred years ago, Gutenberg’s printing press democratized knowledge. Three years ago, ChatGPT put generative AI in the hands of hundreds of millions."
November 15, 2025 at 5:02 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Please believe me when I say that this meaningless, historically suspect slogan is being used to sell "AI." Here it is in the just-released November 2025 report on AI by Microsoft. www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...
The history of human progress is, in many ways, the history of technology's diffusion. Among these advances, a few-what economists call general-purpose technologies-have had the greatest impact on humanity. The printing press democratized knowledge. The steam engine powered industry. Electricity transformed daily life and enabled computing. And the internet connected the world, accelerating the exchange of ideas, trade, and collaboration across borders.
November 15, 2025 at 4:56 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
This bit from a review marking the 20-year anniversary of Cowan's _More Work for Mother_ struck me. www.jstor.org/stable/40060...
The text of MWFM is replete with teachable moments in those mundane and indispensable elements of the historian's craft, reflexes it takes years adequately to embody yet which when merely described in words seem to many students too trivial to merit concentrated attention.
November 13, 2025 at 12:34 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Exciting day in our house: a new apple! The Red Kissable. Slightly mellow tart, pleasant crisp, stunning ombré. Still can't compete with my all-time love, the Golden Delicious (I am sorry for what I am).
Two apple wedges. The center is a creamy color, which morphs gradually into a blushy pink towards the skin. A red book with a label on which I've written, "Apples we have eaten."
November 11, 2025 at 10:23 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
That last line. Fintan O’Toole doth not play. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
What it also created-and more importantly continues to create— is the sense of a Democratic Party that is struggling to articulate any coherent vision of America's place in the world after its defeat by the Taliban. The US stands, in theory, for a global order based on respect for the universality of human rights and the imperatives of international law. Apart from all moral considerations, its inability to stand up for those principles makes it look merely ineffectual. Against Trump's rampaging amorality, the Democrats offered a bleeding-heart sympathy. ("The scale of suffering," Harris said of Gaza in her acceptance speech at the convention, "is heartbreaking.") Being the party that feels the world's pain is not a good answer to a president who invites his supporters to share the unalloyed joy of being able to inflict it.
November 9, 2025 at 8:57 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Does not matter how hungry I am. I live here until he decides to move.
Selfie on the couch with my big labradoodle lying on my lap for naptime
November 9, 2025 at 8:51 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
This is why this is a problem for democracy. See my full piece on this here www.artnews.com/art-in-ameri...
= Art in America But the problem is not skepticism. Nor is it only that anyone can create and widely distribute a faked image. It's that this ability has given everyone a permission structure to doubt. Everyone, in other words, has been granted license to choose which images they will and will not believe, and they can elect to unsee an image simply because it doesn't confirm their priors: the mere possibility of its algorithmic generation opens it to suspicion.
November 8, 2025 at 7:01 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
What’s up fellow kids.
A photo of Chris Willman, the gray bearded man in dad glasses who wrote this piece for variety.
November 8, 2025 at 1:35 AM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Explicit, explicit
scriptor una manu scripsit
quia canis in gremium eius dormit.
Selfie of my husband on a couch with our dog flat out on his back half sprawled on top of his while he (my husband, not the dog) has a laptop on his lap
November 7, 2025 at 1:43 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Explicit, explicit
scriptrix una manum scripsit
quia canis in gremium eium dormit.
[someone else can fix my Latin]
Selfie on a couch with a big labradoodle in my lap
November 6, 2025 at 8:08 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
hyperallergic.com/604897/how-s...
With the advent of the photographic portrait, European intellectuals took these pseudo-scientific endeavors further, leveraging this latest technology to lend credibility to the emerging field of psychology. The polymathic eugenicist Francis Galton, for example, believed that criminality manifested in the face. Associating facial features with behavioral tendencies, he invented “pictorial statistics” to fabricate composite portraits of the “criminal type.” Using software to seek out signs of a valued personality trait in paintings may not exactly be phrenology, but its intellectual forebears are. Operating with complete ignorance of this history is just one area where such scientific studies can go horribly wrong.
November 6, 2025 at 7:55 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Look, I know it's fun to be ranking on Douthat but true feminist praxis in 2025 means ridiculing the faux intellectual women he interviews. Because this is all very ridiculous.
So I think I will restrict myself to the judgment on which I am confident, which is that the pathology in our institutions known as wokeness is distinctively feminine and feminized. And that, in a very literal sense, our institutions have gone woke because there are more women in them than there used to be.
November 6, 2025 at 2:28 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Screenshot of Merriam Webster entry for "Cope."
November 6, 2025 at 1:28 AM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
This pupstanding citizen did a big vote!
A labradoodle sitting with an “I voted sticker” on his chest. Don’t worry! It wasn’t really stuck on him.
November 4, 2025 at 10:14 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
I love what a weirdo my dog is.
Me on the couch. My dog is lying down next to me and his head is hanging off the couch while his front legs are sprawled out in front of him.
November 1, 2025 at 11:38 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
It's almost as if these issues are so routine now that to bet the entire future of higher education on digital technology seems untethered to the realities of the stability of that technology's infrastructure.
October 29, 2025 Starting at approximately 12:00 p.m. on October 29, 2025, Microsoft is investigating issues with Azure. This is a widespread outage on a global scale affecting services beyond UMass Amherst. Campus community members may experience issues logging in to IT services with single sign-on (SSO), such as SPIRE, Canvas, and OneDrive, or with other services that are dependent on Azure.
October 29, 2025 at 6:44 PM