Olivia Smith
@OliveFSmith
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Natural history, experiments, life writing. Teacher of literature & editor of bees.
Oxford
Joined July 2014
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The woman in the cheese shop told me she had a cheese from 2019 that she suspects is so delicious because ‘it didn’t know about any of this’
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I always love it when people say 'baby steps!' to imply they're being tentative, when actually baby steps are a great unbalanced, wholehearted, enthusiastic lurch into the unknown.
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Deeply fascinated by the idea of young scholars being told it isn't scholarly to tweet in a personal capacity when the entire history of scholarship is men investigating their own dreams, their legs, microscopic pieces of their beard, their broken heart, their
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I’ve noticed M&S are doing a sarcastic grey congratulations card for bitter academics to give their colleagues
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Wish people would stop calling Trump a 'toddler'. Toddlers are clever, funny, loyal, creative and have a strong sense of social justice.
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If I was as rich as Rishi Sunak I don't think I'd bother having a job at all. Maybe just set up a little poetry press or something, but that'd be it.
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Just found this poster I made to cheer up my colleagues when there was too much LOUD DRILLING.
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Robert Fludd's image of nothingness, Utriusque Cosmi (1617)
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At least Joni Mitchell was sitting in a park in Paris, France when she read the news and it sure looked bad
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UUK hun?
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Has Will Self been talking about the death of the novel coronavirus
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Cheers to this woman who sees off Samuel Pepys on 18 August 1667
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Most simply, you don't just tell people at 7pm on Sunday to go back to work the next morning.
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Sometimes I look resentfully at Sisyphus and think that actually looks fairly easy -- fun, even. No emails, outdoor job, nothing else wrong apart from the one problem.
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It's a strike day in my sector (universities), and also international day for the elimination of violence against women, and I just wanted to make the point that the salaries in this sector are not high enough to leave a bad relationship, and that's one of many damning metrics.
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Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Sweaty and unbearable
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penny mordaunt sounds like something the dead cycle around on
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A bibliography of the chunky books you rested your computer on for meetings/chats in 2020. Mine are Vols 1&2 of the Oxford Shakespeare critical reference edition. What are yours?
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They've used VE day to open up a general feeling of 'the war is over', which they've encouraged to seep onto ideas of the virus, giving the sense that all the wars/any war is over, to nudge/suggest that the government have done a good job.
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Thinking about the symbolic meaning of the royal Colin the Caterpillar cake, trapping the King in his larval stage even as he attempts metamorphosis. Freudian kick in the shins from M&S.
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How you think you look going to the pub this weekend VS how everyone else thinks you look
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Trying to find out more about these: beehives in the form of miniature buildings.
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'Let’s be clear: Without a coronavirus vaccine, we will never be able to live normally again.'
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very hungry caterpillar Mary Oliver
🤝
joy is not made to be a crumb
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Rishi Sunak saying people are 'addicted' to furlough is completely unethical. It uses metaphorical slippage to cast people as ill & unhealthy, in the middle of a pandemic, for wanting to eat and live. It tries to turn the world upside down. Language matters.
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I wrote a little story and excited it is in here
📣💫 The White Review's 2020 Short Story Prize shortlist, unveiled! You can access all the stories here: . Many thanks to all our entrants (over 600!), and big congratulations to all the shortlisted writers.
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Re. Johnson's Shakespeare book in the news, I think every arts journalist should turn up on his doorstop with the earnest questions: What is the point of studying literature? Why do we have the arts?
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I love hearing what people say to the cat when she sits in the street-facing window. 99% of people say ‘hello, cat!’ but I just heard one woman say ‘do YOU think he fancies me?’
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Someone should write about how, if you’re in the posh/rich nexus, ‘being sacked’ is actually a kind of career amplifier
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I love the idea of choosing 'The' as a title (at the bottom)!
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Insecurity steals attention: how can you truly concentrate on e.g. close reading when you are caught in an anxiety loop about the rest of your life/money/future/home? It's impossible to think straight in precarious conditions. Solidarity with those striking
#UCUstrikes
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Saw a man looking very unhappy on his way back from the Christmas market with a huge wooden owl
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On Wishing//
During the pandemic I did an experiment about wishes, and I can now reveal which methods work.
Cake candles: doesn't work
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It should be possible to put your laptop into 'early modern mode' which automatically blocks all spelling/grammar checks and maybe other things too
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Writing a Richard E, which is my invented slang for grant proposal.
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I want to put together a bibliography of women historians of science. Who are your faves?
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Earlier I saw a man say to a woman applying makeup ‘ahem, this is the quiet zone’
? ?
? ???
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For years whenever anyone's asked me what the best university to work at would be I've said Birkbeck and that's now doubled by watching the calm, safe, clever way they planned to be fully online. Chapeau x
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In case this distracts anyone for a minute: one of David Hockney's preparatory photos for his swimming pool painting. Peter Schlesinger will become the figure watching the swimmer from the edge of the pool. I love the to-be-pool space at his feet.
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Sorting through some old books in my office. They don't make author's notes like this any more do they?
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Five or six men at Newcastle station are describing some girls they met and their inaccuracies make them sound like Iliad-ish warriors: ‘she had silver shoulders, a big belt, and golden hair to about [gestures to waist] here’
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Their owl in their garden, their family history, their kidney stone, their mother, their tights
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Very excited to have been awarded a
@TORCHOxford
visiting fellowship to
@FondazioneGCini
on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice! I'll be looking at body parts and disaggregate bodies in drawing and sculpture.
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I am starting work this month on a fantastic project at Newcastle about bees and emotions! Very excited. More updates to come.
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I want to watch a programme where five writers are put on the daily routines of other writers from the past. For a month. And then we can read what they wrote.
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Reading a Guardian article on long covid and was struck by this photo (with Vermeer)
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While everyone is talking about the Ghent altarpiece: I love the bit Ernst Gombrich talks about in Art and Illusion, where you can just glimpse the hair and clothes of the angel working the bellows behind the organ (far left).
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Reading the news. I wonder if people mistakenly think we all actually live in the PM's body, like Hobbes' Leviathan frontispiece.
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@TabitaSurge
‘the labourers in my parish always greet me in the briefest possible way. because they hate me’
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Got into a macabre cul-de-sac of thought over what arrow cupid uses. I suppose it varies.
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The map detail of S. Michele, the island that is all cemetery, is quite striking.
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Look at this cute little sketch by Edvard Munch (of The Scream fame)
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please make sure you take all your personal longings with you when leaving the train
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Just accidentally saw a bit of the press conf and it reminds me of a confected research group punting for a big academic grant. 'We all do different things but our interests coalesce around the general theme of ears.'
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Interested in the cause of this new non-personal turn in scholarship.
In his diary the C17th natural philosopher Robert Hooke recorded all of his ejaculations using the Pisces symbol (because of its associations with Venus and Cupid). Here we encounter it on Friday 31 May 1672 after one of his frequent visits to the coffeehouse. ♓️
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I'm not a scientist but I am a researcher and I've been reading what I can of the new papers & news. I think all conferences should be cancelled & the universities and schools closed.
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What’s some advice you’ve had from an academic mentor that was not academic? Mine are ‘soak figs in tea’ and ‘thinking about boys will rot your brain’
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If the clothes moths could just eat one whole jumper between them I could tolerate it but their one-bite-of-everything very hungry caterpillar praxis is really getting to me.
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Thinking about the sketch John Everett Millais made for his famous Ophelia painting.
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Strong argument for the arts and humanities
Robert Pattinson is the world’s most beautiful man according to science
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This is William Gilbert's Angler's Delight or Method of fishing the Hackney River (1676)
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Please scream inside your heart
Japan’s theme parks have banned screaming on roller coasters because it spreads coronavirus. “Please scream inside your heart.”
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Loved this bit in David Attenborough's Wild Isles. The honey buzzards who have gone on holiday by mistake.
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Enjoying this magazine pic of someone demotivated at work. The chicest burnout
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Several of you have known that woodpeckers' tongues wrap all the way around their brains and yet not mentioned it once. How extraordinary of you.
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I’m with Kate. If you’re not allowed to give your kids a few extra hands in a photo then what even is the point
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Happy Dorothea Tanning's birthday (this one is actually called 'Birthday')
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Memory foam but it starts remembering everything you dream about
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In addition to what everyone else has said, cutting Eng Lit programmes is just deeply unchic.
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Birds inside the text of Paul Nash's early letters to Margaret Odeh/Nash.
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RIP Judith Kerr, creator of the best tights in fiction and whose family escaped Nazi Germany, coming to London in 1936.
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The PM looks like a manager trying to reassure you that the B&B isn't haunted at the exact moment you realise he *is* the ghost
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Does anyone in New York want to do an archive swap? You take 25 pics of the documents I want in New York Public Library archives & I'll do the same for anything you need from Oxford.
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Just remembered the time my friend had a terrible breakup and ate a whole box of Maldon salt
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Has anyone written about the way English speakers use 'what's the German word for...' as a way of talking about complex situations/feelings?
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running back to Garamond with tears and apologies after Baskerville has brought me nothing but misery and strife, misery and strife
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A lot on my timeline about historical smell but do you all think about our own biographies of smell? As a child for many years my favourite smell was petrol forecourt.
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Just reading about Isabel Allende’s routine in the Guardian
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