I agree! So much emotion leading up to the end too — his recognition he has never really known love and the “generous tears” that fill his eyes. I always think about the word choice of “generous” at that moment.
Honestly feels like a still from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Morricone score as background music.
Word nerds unite. Lost words, abstruse words, key words— it’s all good!
A student writes of Wordsworth’s line, “a poet could not but be gay,” that “this is equivalent to today’s saying that “you can’t make this stuff up.” In our Grammarly did it for me age, it is so refreshing and wonderful when students write like their wonderfully insightful selves.
Gotta love the students who request umpteen extensions and fail to meet even those deadlines and then email you roughly 15 minutes after finally submitting the overdue work to ask about their grade.
Can we put “golfing” in scare quotes please to signal that his caddy moves the ball to make it easier for him to “win.” Cheaters gonna cheat. Loser.
I felt overwhelmed with gratitude for Amanda Anderson’s contributions to this discussion. So tired of broad brush stroke, cartoonish depictions of what happens in English Depts and our classrooms. Hooray for her for calling out the strawman nonsense. #highered. www.chronicle.com/article/four...
Prepping for one of tomorrow’s classes and stumbled on a wonderful line line from Kafka: “A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.” So many books and stories have done that for me yet much more ice to go. #booksky #teaching
I’ve begun counting the weeks til the semester is over and it hasn’t begun.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man with large fortune in want of a “bounty wife” will … remain single. Can You Optimize Love? www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/s...
I am too.
Why yes, I do have papers to grade! Why do you ask?
I’ll take Door Number Two, please.
Never enough #JaneAusten, at least for me, and esp in these countdown days to her 250th birthday! www.bloomsbury.com/us/discover/...
I hope I’ve made Paul Hollywood proud with first ever cherry Bakewell frangipane tart. Pictured above my Jane Austen tea towel to affirm my Anglophilia. #GBBO #Thanksgiving
Immediate brought to mind Gerard Manly Hopkins’ “Inversnaid,” with the lines, What would the world be, once bereft/ Of wet and wildness? Let them be left”
Hard pass, I’m afraid.
“Lunches became a practice in patience, a different way of being in the world.” Lovely story, and I was reminded of your teaching assignment related to reading and attention!
I would love that — two fave flavors and with the semester winding down I am in a Mood to Bake! I’m at mfrawley@gwu.edu. I’ll owe you!
I’m such a GBBO addict that I think this year my wild card pie will be something with the words “frangipane” and “cherry” and Bakewell” in it! Haven’t had time to go recipe hunting yet.
I find it so delightfully ironic when Dickens has a character preface any remark with “in short.” Um, no, nothing at all short to follow. Many, many words. Reading #BleakHouse. #booksky #Dickens
So Jane Austen! @newyorker.com cartoon by Eric Clausen.
The joy of finally holding my new book! Unboxed at the Jane Austen Society of North America annual AGM — I am all gratitude, as Austen might say! #booksky #JaneAusten
Such a fabulous talk on Jane Austen’s genius and the joys and challenges of literary detective work by the always inspiring Juliette Wells. Perfect keynote choice! #JASNAAGM #JaneAusten
Excited about the first talk I’ll give after my book is published next month. At a lovely vineyard in Virginia, where guests can sip the wine while I delight them with gems of wisdom about Jane Austen’s way with words! What could go wrong? #JaneAusten #booksky
And of all this I might have been mistress (if everything in my life had been completely different) #JaneAusten www.facebook.com/share/r/1BQL...
“…the art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle …”. Another day, another bit of Jane Austen wisdom, this from Persuasion. #booksky #JaneAusten
Can we work “fiery antidote” into the marketing scheme please?
“Worn by Earring Magic Ken” — officially my last straw with NYTimes Connections.
The best part of a summer highjacked by a broken arm has been a slow reread of Bleak House — first time in years. I want another cat so I can name him Mr. Snagsby. Dickens would have had a heyday with public figures like the odious Caroline Leavett. #booksky #books #amreading #Dickens
