In the best yet things-my-nephews-have-done, the 7 year old ordered a burger today, and was asked if he wanted it medium. "Could you please make it very large?" he asked. Told that the choice was between medium or well done, he asked if the chef could do the best he could. Yes.
Overheard in Chicago Institute of Art:
Small child, reading description of painting: Grandma, what's a brothel?
Grandma, after enormous pause: it's the place where they make soup
THIS IS BOTH THE BEST AND ALSO THE MOST RUIN-YOUR-LIFE-FOREVER ANSWER POSSIBLE
Meanwhile the 5 year old discovered they have new neighbours, found a step-ladder that nobody knew about, marched to the top of it and introduced himself with the words 'Hello we have one dog three fish and lots of dinosaurs upstairs'
The hill I am willing to die on, possibly under a car, is that motorists need to indicate for pedestrians and not just other drivers. Also the indicator is for indicating, yes, in advance, which way you are going, not just some merry theatre of light to accompany your turning.
Today has been a day of bereavement, Covid, distance from the ones we love and then homophobia in a hospice car park as hubby and I try to comfort each other. Even my idiotic optimism is a bit dented. Look after yourselves good people.
Weird how 'We need to learn to live with Covid' has become the go-to phrase from people who just want to ignore it. Like if I was going to live with a tiger, I would be extremely very focused on that tiger, taking steps to mitigate my deliciousness to tigers.
In a research library, everyone minding their own business, and my phone suddenly starts playing Bloody Motherfucking Asshole by Martha Wainwright, yes, that's right, the bit in the middle where she just sings the title over and over.
I have now left the library.
Attention people who work on the “long” eighteenth century: I have just been through the century year by year, and I have my suspicions that this century may in fact be exactly the same length as other centuries, mathematically speaking.
Everyone is sharing REF stories, so I think I am going to share mine. It’s pretty emotional and I’ve never spoken publicly about it. Going to try to pick my words with care. Solidarity to all colleagues who have been damaged by the REF.
For centuries, the early history of British theatre has been assumed to be male: men running all-male stages. Thanks to
@B4Shakes
, we now know around half of those running or owning the early theatres were female.
@callanjd
shares some of their stories.
12 years of hostile government mismanagement continue to come to fruition under Covid. Very sorry to say that we at Roehampton are once again joining the many institutions, mostly post-92, where huge numbers of jobs and even departments are under threat.
"Top or bottom?", my husband asked me this morning, because these are the kind of difficult binary choices one has to make when there is only one hot cross bun left in the flat.
We've been told to wait for Sue Gray for so long I feel like the only reasonable thing to happen next is for her to disappear whilst in a mountain then return one book later as Sue White
Ooh thanks for asking, well basically I became an academic because I thought it would be a good way to take advantage of my ability to stick to clear and simple writing guidelines
It's a little-known fact that dragons are so named because they absolutely love to get their drag on. This explains their tireless obsession with jewels, knights in only very shining armour and, of course, damsels in this dress.
@JudithFlanders
@SocialHistoryOx
My extremely swanky grandmother had a history of accidentally standing at corners in red light districts and wondering why she was getting so much attention. Inadvertently sex-themed grandparents are the best.
Well, I am usually quite good at reading quietly in the morning and not waking the husband, but unfortunately this deeply elliptical and unvegan four-word sentence in an account of early book history has just made me roar with laughter, so good morning to South-East London.
At first I was afraid of methodology
Kept thinking I could never live with bibliography
But then I spent so many nights thinking footnotes or endnotes
And I grew strong, I learned my word count was too long
Language changes, and it is usually important to be cool with that, but this is such a bizarre new meaning for the word 'stay'. If you told a dog to stay, and it went off for a two week holiday in Cornwall, you would withhold the biscuit.
If you are away on holiday in the UK, it is not a staycation. It’s a holiday. A staycation is where you stay at your house and do day trips from there, as though you were away but without staying somewhere else overnight. This is the hill...
Ok so this morning, on the tube platform, a very nice woman came up to me and said, 'Young man, do you like fruit? Can I recommend apples? They are delicious and nutritious and they literally grow on tree. I don't know why I am telling you this but have a nice day'.
It is 15 years to the day since my husband and I did not meet. We clocked each other across a party, but neither of us went over to say hi. Five months later, we were introduced.
Do say hi to each other, people, especially in this unpeopled times.
Many years ago, a senior colleague I barely knew asked me how my man was. I didn’t know he knew I had a man, or even that I was a man sort of a man, but I gave him a long and probably very dull update on my husband. ‘Oh’, he said, confused, ‘I thought he was a C16th playwright?’
I’m having a lot of ridiculous photos of me taken with dogs lately. This dog literally just said HELLO YOU WILL BE MY MAT OF CHOICE FOR THE EVENING WHY YES YOU MAY HOLD MY PROSECCO FOR ME THANKS
It is my wedding anniversary today, and in an example of the sort of unity and synchronicity that has kept us together all these years, it is the husband's wedding anniversary also. We are going out now for curry and may be gone sometime.
Love the idea of making Shakespeare more relatable
Titus Andronicus: in this play Shakespeare offers advice on what to do if you have people coming over for dinner but not much in the way of protein to offer them
So there’s this TV show called Vera which I’ve never really watched, but appears to be about a women who solves crimes by standing next to very very handsome men. This is 10 out of 10 how I would solve a crime.
Not a lot of people know that the word ‘fortitude’ comes from the words ‘forty’ and ‘chewed’, because once you’ve reached one you stand a reasonable chance of having been gnawed on a little by life.
This is completely true and has not at all been made up.
Tonight I am going to Cornwall on the sleeper train and this is literally the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me. I fully expect a murder, a moustache and a breakdown in Yugoslavia.
This is something I was weirdly aware of as a kid, and it's exactly how the theatre of Shakespeare's time worked: repeated choreography and movement allows you to tell lots of different stories with little rehearsal.
Hey folks, so I have news. With recent upheavals in the sector, I've decided to go part-time. My work on
@B4Shakes
, Box Office Bears &
@a_bit_lit
continues, but I'll also be exploring other ways to make a living in these crazy times.
If you have any ideas, please do let me know!
In this strange new life of mine, I keep being asked for headshots, so I got these very nice photos done (if you ignore the model) with the brilliant
@ArthurWilson_
. At last, conclusive proof that I am able to look into all four corners of a room, just like an ace detective.
Being an academic is 25% reading emails, 25% answering emails and 50% documenting and justifying your work and your field, but it's ok because you can devote the rest of the time to teaching, research and collaboration.
Small child outside Shakespeare Birthplace Trust: Does he still live here?
Mother: No darling, he's dead.
Small child: *so much weeping*
As I keep telling you, Shakespeare is bad for your mental well being.
I’m reading Philip Pullman’s new book, and I’m sorry but it is very unbelievable. I can deal with fairies, furies & daemons, but the protagonist is a student who checks the references in her final essay whilst in the middle of a murder investigation. Very unrelatable content.
So yesterday I gave a talk and got propositioned by an anonymous attendee *whilst giving the talk*, and today I have been asked if I would like to pose for a magazine dedicated to bears and daddies. Is this post-lockdown giddiness or a whole new stage of life for me?
Have just seen a sprightly young man, in his underwear, pushing a shopping trolley down the street with a huge ornate mirror in it, so if that doesn’t mean we’re all living inside of Philip Spenser’s The Fairie Queene, I don’t know what does.
So one slightly odd thing I'm encountering at the moment is academic colleagues complaining to me about research which is published online instead of being tucked away inside reassuringly expensive academic monographs. 'I don't want to read a blog post', I keep being told.
Academic books need to be cheaper, whenever possible; but my goodness, we could all do with rethinking the methodology/ disciplinary-facing introductions which open so many of our books. They immediately shut the book off to most readers.
The government does not want higher education to be offered to those traditionally excluded from it. It does not like free thinking, genuinely open debate, imagination, historical inquiry. Don't let them get their way. Solidarity to colleagues and to our students.
Last week someone began a very very very big Zoom meeting with the words ‘Have you come? I think you’ve all come. You look like you’ve all come’, and it is a marker of my extreme professionalism that I did not immediately bring this to your attention.
Husband has just come home very upset about his ‘boys’ who are apparently ‘very nice’ and ‘very handsome’ and don’t deserve their fate. This is the first I have heard of them and it’s taken me a very long time to discover he got Denmark in his work World Cup sweepstake.
It really makes me mad when scholars talk anxiously about self-promotion. We are, surely, most of us promoting the primary materials, methods and scholarly fields that we love. There is no shame in seeking readers for those things.
I don't have much to add to the brilliant tweets on
#SaveUoRAH
except to say that I am fiercely proud to work at a post-92 university. The government is finally getting its way in closing off higher education to students from non-affluent backgrounds. We cannot let this happen.
The right would like to extend rights, privileges and protection to the statues of people who did not extend them to real people in their lifetimes.
Very coincidentally, the right would like to not extend rights, privileges and protection to real people in our lifetimes.
I don't see much value in recirculating transphobia, but people who think Shakespeare lived in some sort of hetero cis-land might want to consider reading some of his - and his contempories' - work.
People seem to think 2020 will be very unChristmassy but is there anything more nativity than being forced back to your place of birth by centralised authority, kept in lockdown in unsuitable conditions and then having a bunch of random strangers trying to drop in and say hi?
I am spending this morning documenting the fact that there is nobody in London, nobody at all. Full details on Instagram, but here I am dialling around Seven Dials which would normally involve several tourist collisions.
FAO people saying how much they miss the gym, let me assure you that the gym is as available to you as it’s ever been, that it is delicious mixed with tonic and also that is not how you spell gym
I'm delighted to say that Sandra Nelson,
@elbfrankland
,
@marlboroughprod
,
@WILD_WORKS
and I have won funding to stage John Lyly's mega queer, super trans play Galatea. Please share this advert for a full-time, 30 month post-doc far and wide.
But freely accessible digital resources are a lifeline to readers of all kinds, in & out of universities, who are interested in these topics and unable to read about them in the paywalled journals, expensive books and geographically inaccessible libraries in which they often sit.
Oh hi there, Brexit was a mistake. Whatever your position on it over the last six years, it’s ok to admit that. The UK is in crisis, and it won’t come out of crisis until we recognise what caused it.
You guys, I am halfway through The Mirror and the Light and he, Cromwell, hasn’t even begun to take over parliament or chop off the king’s head or declare a republic. Three books in to Wolf Hall and I’m beginning to worry it’ll never happen.
One sixteenth-century way to spell 'wooing' is 'wowing', and I'd just like to put it on record that consensual wowing would really be a very lovely thing.
One thing twitter demonstrates is that being negative about academia is a lot more popular than being positive.
So here's an evergreen plea that whilst we hold the sector to account, we also remember to share, promote and celebrate each other's work, and indeed our own.
Books are so weird. They don’t ask for your password all the time like some sort of needy henchman, they don’t want to update or reset or restart and they almost never run out of batteries. Books are weird.
So I won't be responding directly to laughably inaccurate stories, and I encourage others to stop doing so too. On this website, direct response simply escalates the damage you are trying to oppose.
Have just discovered I am the proud owner of two Word files, both with the same name, to which I have been merrily adding research work as I go in the belief that there is only one such master file. Everything is fine and everything is calm, please send help.
Delighted to announce the debut, just a few moments ago, on campus and in full view of a library full of students and colleagues, of my latest dance, Andy Has a Bee on His Jumper and Neither of Us Are At All Happy About Any of That.
There are many things I love about Kate Bush but quite high on the list is the fact that early on her first album she wrote a song about the sexiness of the saxophone, and even impersonated a saxophone, and then spent four decades entirely ignoring the instrument.
The one good thing about being laid up in bed with Covid is it given me lots of time to hear from journalists and politicians, over and over again, that the pandemic is definitely over
Amongst all the stories of colleagues going back to their offices, my absolute favourite is the person who returned after a year and a half to find ‘Back in 5 mins’ on their door.
It's a brilliant name for a podcast, but there is something alarming about
@greg_jenner
posting something new and your iPad turns around and tells you, 'Notification: You're Dead To Me'.
Was Shakespeare friends with bears? What was the Globe doing next to a Bear Garden? How do you exit pursued by a bear?
Delighted to have my first blog post up on the Box Office Bears website.
I was told, by PhD supervisors no less, that working on John Lyly was a ‘1950s Oxford’ thing to do, and that no one would want to publish a book on him so perhaps I might create an online annotated bibliography instead. So, you know, boom.
#Shax2019
A journalist has just explained that Westminster Hall is very historical 'because it's where Guy Fawkes, Charles I, everything else happened', so it's nice to start the day off with some facts.
I have lots more to say about this, but I don’t want to tread on people’s toes or say things that should probably best remain private. But I am damaged by those years and furious about them. And on a boring professional level, I ended up publishing work before it was ready.
You know, given how hyped the Government and press are for very fictional cancel culture in universities, they seem remarkably zen about whole programmes, subjects of study, academic careers and student opportunities being actually irl cancelled.
The government is allowing universities to fail at a time when public safety and well-being depends on university labour, from scientific advice and research to tech innovation and the tv, books and other arts allowing our imaginations to thrive.