My department at West Texas A&M is hiring a creative writer (with a Ph. D. required).
Please encourage anyone you know who might be interested to apply. I'm also glad to answer any questions that anyone might have.
Job listing here: tamus.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/WTAMU_Extern...
If you’re as incensed as everyone at DePaul is about the closing of the university art museum, consider signing this letter. Thanks for the support! openletter.earth/letter-oppos...
new poem, "Altogether Elsewhere," in new issue of The Sewanee Review thesewaneereview.com/articles/alt...
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celebrate valentine's day by reading this thing i wrote last year about geoffrey chaucer: shooktownreview.substack.com/p/parliament...
This will warm any annotator’s heart
Thank you!
Last semester, I got very excited about one endnote, then ALL the endnotes, in Wilson’s Iliad. Then @bookpostusa.bsky.social gave me the chance to write about them: books.substack.com/p/diary-laur...
New Post → Laura Kolb on the joy of great annotations hitting their mark and the stellar marksmanship in a translation of The Iliad.
books.substack.com/p/diary-laur...
@wwnorton.com @laurakolb.bsky.social
Question re: accreditation site visits for departments. Are your institutions doing these online now? In person again? Curious what these are looking like these days. (Also welcoming answers from those who serve on eval teams.)
I definitely do. Weird!
Update - as several people have suggested, this was very likely a fortune-telling game. Kicking myself for not opening at random & finding out my true calling
It was used as a fortune-book. It was custom to write the professions of their future possible husbands in the margins, and then 'flip the pages' and then see what came out.
This from Meadowlands, which uses the Odyssey as a conceit to tell the story of deteriorating marriage. There are 3 broken hearts
There is the detachment of not taking sides, but also the detachment of time – the speaker looking back as an adult and seeing things differently
#poetry
#poemoftheday
Fortune teller game? Open the book to a random page to play? (I’m thinking of how we’d play MASH with types of houses and occupations of husbands)
Oh I love this idea!
There does not seem to be - none I could puzzle out!
“A drawer at an inn”
“A toy shop merchant”
“A drummer”
But I loved spending time with her, and all her people!
…but that’s a guess. As to what she was up to—imagining different jobs and lives? peopling a world?—all I have there are guesses, too
The annotations have nothing to do with the text, which offers lessons in manners for young French noblemen, useful (perhaps) for all. I think maybe it was given to Mary because she was a young person, and young people are supposed to learn manners…
On the book‘s last page she signs her name: Mary McDonald
“Admirall of the Red” written in the margins
This job, “Admirall of the Red” gives us a clue as to when the annotator lived: this position (wikipedia tells me) came into being in 1805
… another runs “a midwife,“ “a messenger,” “a chimney sweeper”; later, we get “an insurance master, a poet, a professor of Greek”
There is no real ordering principle; one sequence runs ”a wheel wright,” “an emperor,” “a silk-weaver”…
… and on subsequent pages, always on the right-hand margins, the same hand has written other professions: “a chaise-maker,” “a whale fisher” -
Title page of The Rules of Civility, printed in London in 1685. In the right-hand margin, “a tanner” has been written in ink
Yesterday, nearing the end of a magical library fellowship, I called up The Rules of Civility, a conduct book written originally in French but very popular in Restoration England. Curiously someone has written “A Tanner” in the right-hand margin…
I wrote a B-Side at Public Books, about Lydia Millet's great Oh Pure and Radiant Heart--enjoy!
A map is shown, with the logo of the Historic Towns Trust in the top left corner. The words "Mapping our Past, Shaping our Future" are written in the centre.
Join us next week to learn about how an Atlas of London in 1666 has been researched!
This webinar is in collaboration with the Historic Towns Trust @historictownstrust.bsky.social
Find out more: www.balh.org.uk/event-balh-r...
#WeAreLocalHistory #LocalHistoryForAll
I was so happy to be in Reps that I forgot to brag about it here. The book trade, their catalogs, and how they made literature. First stab at something that is part of a bigger project. Abstract below, dm for pdf if you don’t have access.
“Graham Granger, a student in the school’s film and performing arts program, came upon some AI-generated art by MFA student Nick Dwyer and promptly ate it in protest.”
Deadline approaching!
Pls RT!
CALL FOR PAPERS
“Embodied Knowledge Practices in the Early Modern World”
Conference at the University of Amsterdam ~ Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies
Monday, 15 June 2026
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@asecsoffice.bsky.social @bsecs.bsky.social @thebsls.bsky.social
