Joe Williams
@lifeisnotanovel
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writer and critic @Lit_Review @theTLS @spectator @tribunemagazine / finishing a PhD @uealdc on the university & literary culture / reviews editor @CritQuarterly
Joined June 2023
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And here is my short piece on Sunjeev Sahota’s The Spoiled Heart, now available on the Literary Review website. Buy the full mag if you can, available at all good newsagents (and probably some bad ones too)
Pleased to have contributed to this month’s banging issue of Literary Review alongside Deborah Levy and Richard Williams (no relation)
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Remarkable letter published in the Times today… signed by two Booker Prize winners and a Communard…
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The savings that Arts and Humanities have been asked to make are just shy of £1.7m. A £100k salary cap for the 60-odd highest-paid employees would save that overnight, even before pension and NI contributions are taken into account! UEA is still a very rich university... for some
To clarify on previous statement. Not one academic should be sacrificed on the altar of mismanagement. Not one. Salary caps at £100k could save many. This is the least they can do.
@UEA_UCU
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If any editors would like a piece on Malcolm Bradbury, the history of Creative Writing at UEA, the importance of the wider humanities and interdisciplinarity to Creative Writing at UEA, Bradbury's fictional portrayals of university (mis)managers... get in touch. My PhD is on it
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For a few months I worked at a motorway services making sandwiches. My PB was 96 tuna & cucumber in 1 hour. I was shocked to learn that premade sandwiches are stacked 2-high then sliced in half, so your two halves are never from the same sandwich. I fear I may be killed for writ—
Triple sandwiches are a mad concept. Someone, somewheres got the other half of your sandwich
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The proposed cuts at UEA do not have to happen. The Arts and Humanities faculty does not have to be targeted in this way. UEA is still a very rich university ...for some. UEA writers: please sign & share our open letter to UEA's (mis)managers: Thank you!
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Very few journalists are producing the kind of thoughtful and thought-through work that
@Ffranciscodgf
regularly offers us. And he makes it look so easy! Phenomenal piece
When I heard that a boy from my primary school had been convicted of people trafficking, I had to find out what had happened to make him fall so far
by
@Ffranciscodgf
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@jonathancoe
Dear Jonathan, we can still stop the redundancies at UEA (there are other ways of saving this money, including a £100k salary cap) - we are putting together an open letter and hope to gather signatures from notable writers. Please could I DM you? Thanks!
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UEA Vice Chancellor David Maguire examines closely the evidence of a shipwreck. He then leaves the meeting with the UEA Executive Team and checks out the Gloucester exhibition
A huge pleasure to fly the flag for
@HUM_ResearchUEA
&
@gloucesterwreck
by showing
@uniofeastanglia
Vice Chancellor Prof Maguire round the blockbuster exhibition
@NorwichCastle
The Last Voyage of the Gloucester co-curated with
@NorfolkMuseums
@BenjaminRedding
& moi!
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Very pleased to announce that the excellent
@_rob_scott
will be joining us for our next
@uealdc
Modern and Contemporary Research Seminar with a paper on Gillian Rose and the 'anxiety of the beginning'. Wednesday 14th Feb, 5pm, all welcome... what better way to spend Valentines?
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@alexxr97_
Really sorry to read this thread… those comments are completely unprofessional and totally inappropriate for a peer-review, and the journal editors should never have passed them on. Definitely worth putting a complaint in to the journal, if you feel you can
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Those interested in the authoritative take on this issue must wait for the completion of my PhD thesis, ‘The Writer, the Critic, and the University, 1955-2000’, a work of not insignificant scholarly heft which has already been lauded as ‘a piece of writing’ and ‘there’
i don’t understand why people look down on those who teach writing at all. did she not ever — not once — have a single person edit her work lmao like. give me a break
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A real honour to be published in Key Words, the journal of the Raymond Williams Society. My article, ‘“Literature is for Everyman”? Critical Quarterly’s democratic literary culture’ was first given as a paper at the Raymond Williams @ 100 conference in Manchester in April 2022
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My first academic publication was a book review written for Key Words when I was still working as a barista. I then published two more in the next two issues. The support of the Raymond Williams Society, especially Liane Tanguay & Phil O’Brien, has been a massive help. Join now!
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I try to spend as little time as possible thinking about ‘booktube’/‘booktok’ but every video by this guy is really a thirty minute advert for whichever product is ‘sponsoring’ his latest video. (This one is ‘brought to you by squarespace’.) There’s a lot of money in this game
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Standout conference, tip-top. Thank you to Rebecca and Daniel for organising! Third pic is taken just as I was doing my prizewinning Alan Bennett impression
NWiMS! What a fabulous day we had at Liverpool, with so many wonderful papers. I have given myself another one of those impossible post-conference reading lists and am immersed in a modernist textual atmosphere 💨
@modernistudies
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No way - Bakhtin shows us that the novel is _the_ democratic literary form, the one which tends the most toward the multivalent, ambiguous, polyphonic, dialogic. David Lodge's magisterial book After Bakhtin (1990), particularly his essay on Middlemarch, lays it all out for us
The novel—in its historical origins, ownership structure, subject matter, notions of psychology, individuated production and reception—is definitely a bourgeois form. It just does not follow that bourgeois forms cannot be radical or radicalized.
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Incredible scenes in the catering car of the Norwich-London train as a young guy in mullet and socks asks the staff member dishing out filter coffee if he can have an oat latte LOL
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Well it doesn’t exactly honk like the nose of a circus clown, but surely the ending lines of ‘The Trees’ — ‘Last year is dead, they seem to say, / Begin afresh, afresh, afresh’ — are as much a celebration of life and a reason to be cheerful as any ‘happy’ poem?
‘Unsurprisingly, there’s no place for Philip Larkin in the anthology but then again the old curmudgeon did concede that “my poems aren’t very cheerful”’: Larkin fails to make it into 100 Happy Poems.
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A university built on the back of its Arts and Humanities faculty. What a disgrace
At UEA, 31 out of the university's 36 academic staff redundancies will be coming from arts and humanities.
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My essay ‘“Literature is for Everyman”? Critical Quarterly’s Democratic Literary Culture’, coming soon in Key Words 21, has been described as ‘zany’, ‘cute’, and ‘an essay so perfect that it completely retires the genre’. By me. Just now
Featuring essays by
@KatherineLucyG
, Merlin Gable, Graham MacPhee,
@lifeisnotanovel
, Robin Harriott, and
@NickSte79053218
, this year's issue of Key Words is out soon. Read the introduction on our blog and join the society to get your copy...
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I am appalled to hear that students living in family accommodation
@uniofeastanglia
, many with young children, will see their rent rise from £207.20/week to £310.10 from 1st September. That's an increase of 50%, far above inflation and local rent prices. Appalling and disgraceful
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I remember at Goldsmiths Chris Baldick gave a lecture on Swann’s Way where he said ‘I wouldn’t bother with the other 5 volumes unless you have an especially long prison sentence coming up’. Never realised it was just 9pp a day, and you could finish Proust after a simple tax dodge
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Pleased to have contributed to this month’s banging issue of Literary Review alongside Deborah Levy and Richard Williams (no relation)
The April issue of Literary Review is out now:
@rwilliams1947
on Miles Davis
Deborah Levy on David Bowie
@JonSavage1966
on Pulp
@DrBlacklock
on doomsday lit
@mirandajseymour
on Byron
and much, much more
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Looking forward to the UEA UCU strike action tomorrow as part of our dispute with the VC and ET over the ASRP. But tonight I will relax by reading the TLS and LRB while I listen to REM and AC/DC on my MP3... I may even watch the OC on ITV
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Anyone remember the last time a pair of cockapoos went on a 22-sheep killing spree?
Two XL bully dogs kill 22 sheep in savage attack after escaping from their home
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You’re in the queue for the British Library. I’m breakfasting at a McDonald’s in Archway. We’ll both arrive at our desks at the same time. We are not the same
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Always open to pitches for CQ's reviews section. Unfortunately as an academic journal we cannot pay, but do consider us if you want to publish 2000+ words on books/film/arts. CQ has published Sylvia Plath, Fredric Jameson, Zizek, Jacqueline Rose, Paul Gilroy, & others. DMs open
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The UEA values are, according to the website (note, for ease of use, that handy acronym): 'Ambition, Collaboration, Empowerment, and Respect (ACER)'. A 50% rent increase is certainly ambitious, no doubt the product of collaboration. But who does it empower? Who does it respect?
I am appalled to hear that students living in family accommodation
@uniofeastanglia
, many with young children, will see their rent rise from £207.20/week to £310.10 from 1st September. That's an increase of 50%, far above inflation and local rent prices. Appalling and disgraceful
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Brilliant, nuanced piece on Everett’s fiction and the film American Fiction, which ‘makes the viewer complicit in a game of gotcha against woke cultural gatekeepers.’ Really very good
For
@ArtReview_
, I wrote about the differences between Cord Jefferson's American Fiction and its source material, Erasure as well Percival Everett's latest novel James
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Rooney is always trotted out as the example of a bad/bland writer. But actually read her novels and you’ll find they ask important questions about our social world and how to live alongside each other - just like every other major European novelist. So why is Rooney called ‘bad’?
Thursday night. Campus has been closed for hours due to storms. The two English lecturers with least home life meet in the corridor of an otherwise deserted building and proceed to argue for half an hour about whether or not Sally Rooney can be 'proved' to be a bad writer.
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Reading aloud from Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. What an opening: ‘The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.’ It almost ruins reading… by comparison most other work is so low-voltage
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Fabulous gift from my crime fiction class. We met each week in a village hall in rural Norfolk to discuss crime fiction, including some of the greats: Christie, Chandler, Highsmith, etc. Always lively, occasionally combative, it was an absolute pleasure
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I’m a graduate of Goldsmiths English. Very pleased to have studied there with such brilliant writers and critics. I remember them all - and I can’t remember the name of a single university manager. The idea that 50% of the department could face compulsory redundancy is disgusting
The Goldsmiths crisis: how cuts and culture wars sent universities into a death spiral
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CQ 66.1, a special for Terence Davies and Christopher Hitchens titled 'Distant Voices, Still Lives' is published today, featuring excellent lifewriting from Colin MacCabe and banging pieces by Yohann Koshy, Stephen Smith, Ash Caton, Roseanna Webster & more
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This will be tiptop
Just a few weeks to go until our Forms of Criticism symposium at
@UCL_IAS
featuring
@JKramnick
, Ross Wilson,
@irinibus
, Jenny Davidson,
@_ryanruby_
, Lucy Newlyn,
@TheChronotope
, and Thomas Karshan.
Register at:
@modernistudies
@BACLS_official
@uealdc
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Just looking at Infinite Jest on amazon (don't ask) and it's listed under 'Health, Family & Lifestyle › Men's Health & Lifestyle › Hair Loss' hahahaha
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My first snort of the day comes courtesy of this line from Nabokov's afterword to Lolita: 'those hopelessly banal and enormous novels which are typed out by the thumbs of tense mediocrities and called "powerful" and "stark" by the reviewing hack.' So true
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Very much enjoyed listening to this as I tidied my small yet bijou flat. As wide ranging and serious (in a good way) as I expected it to be
I really enjoyed talking to
@leorobsonwriter
and
@_josiemitchell
for the
@GrantaMag
podcast. A very sprawling, thoughtful, and possibly intense conversation!
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Just registered an account to read a single article on Times Higher Ed website. All you need to give them is your email address, full name, password, job title, mobile number, mother's maiden name, name of your favourite teacher, concise details of your last disturbing dream, PIN
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2. Turn one side of your body to the wall, offer your femoral artery, one of the most largest and most important blood vessels in the body, to be bitten
Superb cut out and keep guide to fighting off an XL Bully in today’s Mail
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If I had a pound for every Booker Prize winning novelist who has signed this letter, I would have £2.
Anne Enright joins Ian McEwan in signing this letter against the job cuts proposed by UEA’s (mis)managers! Sign and share before Thursday!
The proposed cuts at UEA do not have to happen. The Arts and Humanities faculty does not have to be targeted in this way. UEA is still a very rich university ...for some. UEA writers: please sign & share our open letter to UEA's (mis)managers: Thank you!
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Far be it from me to weigh in on any matter concerning the Swifties, but ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ is perfectly fine. It’s a department of Tortured Poets, not necessarily a department belonging to one or more Tortured Poet. Cf. Police Dept vs Police’s Dept. Next!
I ruined this album release for my students by making it a lesson on apostrophe usage.
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Fair play to TLS social media intern for sneaking in the “Margaret Thatcher wasn’t a philistine!” piece in a hushed tweet at half ten on a Saturday night in the hope that nobody sees it
'Anthony Burgess once claimed that Thatcher was “a notorious philistine”, and that there was “no poetry in her, as there was in Disraeli and Churchill”. Burgess was quite wrong.'
Ian Sansom: From Margaret Thatcher to Umberto Eco
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Really enjoyed this brilliant brilliant piece on Joyce's mouth by Annie Williams
@annieakaannie
, published in
@modernistudies
last year. Especially love the opening one liner, pithy (in a good way): 'Modernism was an experiment in what the mouth could do.'
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Wowwee this looks class
Coming soon! A special criticism issue, featuring essays by
@mervatim
,
@briangdillon
,
@namwalien
, Christine Smallwood, and many others. Subscribe by May 13 to read the print issue before it arrives online. Use code CRITICISM for 20% off all subscriptions!
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In 2020 when I wasn’t staring at a wall I would begin my day with the Guardian quick crossword. I had to stop after a few weeks because this one guy would comment every day at 00:09, ‘Peasy’. Here was a man beyond my fair to middling powers of empathy. Even now I hate him still
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Beautiful beautiful beautiful piece
"My brother had a lot of loud parts, like his laughter and big gestures of annoyance." An essay on Philip Seymour Hoffman, by his sister, Emily Barr.
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Fun piece on Bankman-Fried, the last billionaire slob
'SBF represents both the culmination and the demise of a particular era of anti-haute couture: the age of the elite slob.'
Wrote a quick one on SBF and the end of slovenly Silicon Valley for
@unherd
:
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@simon_schama
Dear Simon, we can still stop the redundancies at UEA (there are other ways of saving this money) - we are putting together an open letter and hope to gather signatures from public intellectuals and alumni of the UEA writing programme. Please could I DM you? Thanks!
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In 1997 two novels by Amis and McEwan, both Granta 83ers who had their debuts in that decade of fading corduroy and lank mullets, Night Train and Enduring Love, contain a number of weirdly certain asides about astronomy of the Brian Cox kind (big bang etc). Feels historical now
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Big up the staff
#SaveBrightonUni
Instead of working with the branch to resolve the situation
@uniofbrighton
has doubled down & announced the final 25 people they want to make redundant. Let us be clear, these people are not going anywhere! We will shut down the uni until their jobs are safe!
#savebrightonuni
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Yesterday was week 1 of my W. E. A. course 'Crime through Time', which looks at crime fiction from 1890-present, thinking about the genre's innovations alongside the historical context of modernism. At the end, one learner (a retired teacher) told me I was 'a born teacher'. Bosh
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It seems tactless to say ‘I’m really looking forward to Rushdie’s memoir about the attack on him, titled Knife’, but I really am. He describes it as ‘a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art’. What courage
‘So it’s you. Here you are’: Salman Rushdie describes moment he was stabbed
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Apparently some kid has received upwards of £60k of taxpayer money via the AHRC to write a thesis on Malcolm Bradbury, Lorna Sage, David Lodge, and Critical Quarterly. Outrageous!
If you’re shocked by the £800k taxpayer-funded Shakespeare study, then I’ve got more bad news (although knowledge is power 💪) 🧵
Here are other examples the Arts and Humanities Research Council has funded (with our money):
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Can't emphasise strongly enough how important Rushdie is to literary culture. Who else could say, 'When somebody wounds you 15 times that definitely feels very first person.'
Knife by Salman Rushdie review – a story of hatred defeated by love
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The word ‘woke’ is new enough, but this account of British academia remains unchanged since 1968. It’s practically lifted from Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975), but that was an exaggerated satire. Repeating an inherited idea without examining it is the real philistinism
But British “woke” academia is itself the product of anti intellectualism! Badly understood continental philosophy awkwardly crammed into midwit moralistic sociology. It’s philistinism all the way down, if you don’t like it, move to France 🤷♂️
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Curious final line about ‘the twilight of English fiction’. English fiction is a bit like Keith Richards - it’s been told it’s dying for 50+ years but still won’t go. The Goldsmiths Prize is a good indicator of serious fiction - not least Booker rejects like Ducks, Newburyport…
The judging panel for the Booker Prize hasn’t picked an exciting winner in years because there simply hasn’t been one, writes
@finn_mcredmond
.
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Writers, artists, intellectuals, alumni, friends of UEA: please sign and share our open letter against the proposed cuts!
UEA is still a very rich university… for some.
Please sign and share, and help us save the university!
The proposed cuts at UEA do not have to happen. The Arts and Humanities faculty does not have to be targeted in this way. UEA is still a very rich university ...for some. UEA writers: please sign & share our open letter to UEA's (mis)managers: Thank you!
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Small World by David Lodge was published 40 years ago and there’s been zero chat in the books pages so far this year (though we are just 34% into 2024). This is a shame as it’s an excellent novel of ideas and very funny. And it does indeed give errant knight
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When I was a boy we went to Cavan to find the derelict family farm. After an hour plus of confused driving round country lanes my dad pulled over to ask a very old man with a large stick. The bloke said “Well what do you want going there?” And that’s how we met my great uncle Leo
It Happened To Me: I asked an old man for directions in the Irish countryside and he said 'well, I wouldn't start from here'
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'I asked a series of idiotic questions to the tightly coiled middle-aged man next to me. How did he feel? Like he was going to explode. And did that feel good? Oh yes, it felt good.'
Great piece from the big FG
'Where does it all go, now the almost unthinkable has happened? And what’s next, once the dreamlike glow has worn off? Neapolitans might be romantic, but they aren’t naive.'
@Ffranciscodgf
meets London's Napoli fans.
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Booksellers predict hahahahaha got to hand it to those booksellers backing the outside there
.
@FaberBooks
has snapped up Intermezzo, the fourth novel by Normal People author Sally Rooney, which booksellers predict will be one of the biggest novels of the year 👇
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Just shifted in my seat… this BL digi-ransom is major
Following the recent cyber-attack on the British Library, the Eccles Centre has unfortunately decided to suspend the Visiting Fellowship programme for 2024-25.
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NEVER ever open an email with “hello”. It will be deleted immediately.
Only start your application with:
“While you mock me do not forget as you languish in your own effluence that I am a self-made man and I could buy you.”
In your application letter for
#PhD
/ postdoc, NEVER ever say:
"Hi prof"
"Hello"
"Dear Professor"
"Greetings of the day"
If you do, your email will be immediately deleted by 99% of professors.
▫️
Only start your applications with “Dear Prof. [second_name],”
And don’t…
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Really disappointed to read this from Tatchell. To defend rabid transphobia as a “belief” is an insult to belief. Imagine a failed comedian starts spouting homophobia all over twitter. Would they be a “gay critic” with a “belief” worth defending?
I disagree with trans critic
#GrahamLineham
but do not support him being cancelled at
#Edinburgh
It looks like discrimination based on belief, which is unlawful under
#EqualityAct
Best response to
#Lineham
is counter arguments & evidence, not by bans
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None of this is due to expansion of higher education… 1) graduate salaries haven’t been ‘meaningfully boosted’ because the economy is shit 2) the tuition fee isn’t adjusted for inflation, which starves universities of cash. The £9k fee is more like £6k now (again, economy shit)
Mass higher education has failed on two fronts - it no longer meaningfully boosts post-grad income, and the vast majority of degrees have little to no academic merit. University isn’t even ‘fun’ anymore, thanks to the move to remote learning.
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Curious to note that in the history of the campus novel, apart from a brief stint in the 70s and 80s, they’re almost always set in Oxford and Cambridge (or Trinity College Dublin). Why? Why not, say Warwick, or Manchester Met? Do they lack the cachet? Or are they not twee enough?
Huge news for 2025,
@kuangrf
returns with a new novel, Katabasis, in which two academic rivals from Cambridge must travel to hell to rescue the soul of their advisor... Pre-order the SIGNED edition here:
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Knocked back by this wonderful present from one of my students on my WEA Ulysses course, a painting of the view of Howth, Dublin, near where Bloom proposed to Molly. Same Howth as Finnegans Wake’s ‘Howth Castle and Environs’. The head swims!
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I once used the word “metaphor” in an MA seminar and one of the other students rolled their eyes and said “Why can’t you just FEEL it?!” But it isn’t one or the other - you can use critical procedures to read a poem and get all west coast at the same time. That’s the fun of it
Tried to help my daughter annotate a poem per the requirements of her HS English class, and just about lost my $hit. Is this how you make a teenager fall in love with poetry? No. It's not. This kind of exercise makes poetry a chore.
#poetrytwitter
#WritingCommunity
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I dislike booksignings (mostly churlishness from me) but on Thursday I made a break with habit and tradition and got my copy of James signed by Percival Everett. When PE signs a book, he crosses out the printed “Percival Everett” then adds his signature below. An exceptional move
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Very good and precise piece on the ‘nakedly cruel’ reality TV of the noughties, including Big Brother, which seems now to be ‘some sort of Stanford prison experiment gone camp’
Ofcom's chairman said last week that TV is becoming more exploitative and cruel. I'm not sure that's true so I wrote about our collective amnesia about how grim early 2000s entertainment actually was, for
@Independent
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Imagine sitting down at the Dartington Ways with Words Festival in August 1992 to listen to Anthony Burgess give the Terence Kilmartin memorial lecture, titled 'Confessions of the Hack Trade', and he goes off on this tangent... (from The Ink Trade, published by Carcanet in 2018)
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WTF, reading a library copy of Lorna Sage's monograph on Angela Carter, and pages 23-36 have been ripped out. WTF??
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It must be exhausting to be so doggedly literal in life and language. Just thinking about it makes me yawn tepidly
My hot take: this isn't real. Nobody can actually "see" stuff that doesn't exist in the way implied here unless they're actively hallucinating. This is just an issue of these things being extremely hard to explain using language, and people using words in subtly different ways.
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I’ll be giving a paper on Critical Quarterly and provincial literary culture at the University of Chester’s ‘Place and the Periodical’ conference on the regional magazine on Weds 26th June. Full programme looks engaging and timely. Join us! More info at
@PlacePeriodical
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Really enjoyed reading Volume 15 of Cinema Year Zero, especially the editorial. This bit on Jeremy Cooper’s novel Brian made me LOL twice. Volume 16 is out early March. Check them out at
@yearzerocinema
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Tolka, most exciting journal for non-fiction (creative or otherwise), are open for submissions (creative or otherwise) till Sunday 5th May
Submissions for TOLKA Issue Eight are now open. We publish all kinds of non-fiction, including essays, biography, autofiction, and things that fall between. Submit by midnight, Sunday 5 May. Guidelines and link to submit here:
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The intellectual heft of a rizla paper
Critics are within their rights to dislike Taylor Swift's latest album. But any critique of her work that doesn’t consider her role as a prominent narrator of our time will fail to speak to even the most casual of her fans, Sinéad O’Sullivan writes.
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The ending is hilarious: 'Guillory's wrong. The strong arguments and evidence he needs—about the formation of the discipline, about the changed relation between great literature and the culture industry—are missing from his book, for the good reason that they don't exist.' ouch!
not sure i’ve ever seen the word “wrong” used this many times (12) in an academic book review
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More than a journal. Please check out this call for articles for Key Words 2024
Would you like to publish in 'Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism'? We've issued a call for articles for next year. Read more on our website...
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Why is the Netflix show Ripley in black and white? They had colour film in 1955, when the first book, the Talented Mr Ripley appeared. It’s a waste not to film Mongibello in colour… but then again I suppose the book was in black and white
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The Godfather has an epigraph attributed to Balzac, which reads: ‘Behind every great fortune, there is a crime.’ Huh
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The full letter, as delivered to the VC et al on Monday morning, is available here: . This version includes the full list of signatories, nearly 900 of them... and it would've gone higher: we had many more come in after we'd closed the online form
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Wow that’s so funny, that was my book of the year too actually haha. Did you like Saltburn? Oh haha no me neither. Haha yeah. Yeah she played Camilla I think. You’re right haha she does look like her. Haha. Music’s loud in here huh
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Reminds me of the time I used the Vitae RDF to complete my TNA for the AHRC at the start of my CHASE-funded PhD at UEA's School of LDC. Afterwards I listened to REM live at the BBC
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Great thread about 'the story of Zionism without Zion', including how the chump Joseph Chamberlain, who in thinking Kenya was Uganda, reminded Theodor Herzl 'of the manager of a junk shop, "unsure whether some unusual article is in the stock-room."' Incredible detail
My great-grandfather, David Jochelmann, helped those 10,000 Jews get to Texas. The story of Zionism without Zion – forgotten by my family and by the world – is in my book, Melting Point, which took me five years so please buy it
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Has there ever been a sentence in the history of the English language less melodious, less meaningful than “Writs galore incoming methinks”?
Haven’t even got to the lying bit yet and this is already topping Prince Andrew as the most misguided interview of recent years. What happens when you put media strategy over legal strategy. Dreadful error as was their documentary. Writs galore incoming methinks
@TheNewEuropean
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We're starting a Finnegans Wake reading group at UEA, meeting every Thursday, 12-1. We'll read 12 pages aloud followed by discussion. 12 pages per week, it'll take us a year. DM me for details. We can beam you in via Teams if you can't join us on campus. Here comes everybody!
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The question then is why would squarespace bring us this book discussion (he describes himself as a ‘book critic’) but not sponsor a literary magazine? It’s the ads… the ads are more easily delivered in an online video. All of ‘booktok’ is delivering ads to bored/unhappy people
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Ulysses
I would like to see even just one example of a marriage or relationship that has survived the woman’s career skyrocketing while the man’s career stagnates or declines, because the stories I am hearing from my paired-up friends are painting a very bleak picture!!
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Goalies’ names written by Bob Mortimer
Congratulations Son. We’re all so proud of you. Have a great week.⚽️❤️
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Terry Eagleton has to be the most interesting & lively literary critic of the past twenty years. The last of a certain generation, but rather than retiring to a tropical setting he’s continued to produce wellpaced introductory books to literature/criticism/theory/etc. A true boss
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Great to see my new course, Ulysses in 10 Weeks, is now open for enrolment on the WEA website. We’re going to look at 10ish pages each week, and I’ve recommended students listen to the RTÉ’s phenomenal 1982 adaptation as they go. Joyce was a professional singer! And it’s all song
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This is exactly why that “Jonny Bairstow dismissal was not in the spirit of the game” malarkey was so annoying and clearly the opinion of people who don’t actually like watching sport (like Sunak) - the rules are the rules but within that you play to win. Justice for Carey
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Martin Amis once said that instead of Finnegans Wake ‘we could’ve had two more Ulysses’. Imagine that
"Finnegans Wake—still largely unread and unreadable, left to the care of academic exegetes who may decipher the book for us, but cannot tell us why it should be read or what we can learn from it."
- Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
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This is very true. Too often the police perceive their job to be stopping/catching people committing crimes, or else actively criminalising members of the public. But actually they’re public servants & their job (even when preventing/stopping crime) is to facilitate public life
One aspect of policing that’s often not understood by outside commentators is that police are the public service of last resort, dealing with “something-that-ought-not-to-be-happening-and-about-which-somebody-had-better-do-something-[right]-now” as Egon Bittner put it.
…
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@kirstyy199
That’s ludicrous and completely out of proportion! It’s very reasonable to suppose that a cleaner will from time to time get a cleaning product on a towel. I don’t think you should pay it
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