Hester Blum

The multimedia, interdisciplinary, creative meditations featured here are drawn from our experience of Arctic flora and fauna; anthropogenic climate change; resource extraction histories; the Northern Lights; and Svalbard’s geological outlandishness.
www.regeneration-journal.org/issue/1298/i...

The twenty-three contributors to this special issue of @regenerationeac.bsky.social are artists, writers, and researchers who sailed around the high Arctic archipelago Svalbard on a tall ship with the expeditionary residency program The Arctic Circle. www.regeneration-journal.org/issue/1298/i...

Image of Arctic expedition leader listening to infrasound recordings of a glacier via Brian House's macrophone, with a Svalbard glacier and mountains in the background

Thrilled to present a special journal issue--a glorious, monumental issue--on Arctic environment, art, & culture in @regenerationeac.bsky.social: “On the Cold Edge: Creative Meditations on Svalbard,” eds. Hester Blum, Candace Jensen, and Jacinda Russell

www.regeneration-journal.org/issue/1298/i...

(even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy)

I love it. This town is nuts

The weirdest medical waiting room you’ve ever seen, with ornate theater seating, multiple framed late 19th century family portraits, and three giant teeth

My new St Louis dentist’s office is literally McTeague’s Dental Parlors #C19 #ThatOldWeirdAmerica

I'm bummed not to be in Philly today talking about polar ephemera in the blizzard; see you next year. Here's a tooth:

Next year! I'm super bummed but hope things are stable in Little Canada

My awesome new colleague Rachael DeWitt convened this roundtable on "An Ecosystem View of 1776" for @early-am-lit.bsky.social; a great conversation with Scotti Parrish, Matthew Sivils, Timothy Sweet, Annie Persons, Michael Ziser, and yr correspondent: muse.jhu.edu/pub/12/artic...

It will be excellent to see you IRL!

Monday!

Philly phriends, Monday I’ll be at the Workshop in the History of Material Texts: pennmaterialtexts.org

I’ve been writing an essay on Heated Rivalry and Moby-Dick in my head for weeks and need to get it on the page

🙌🙌🙌

Reading your grandfather too!

Teaching Moby-Dick is always such a towering joy and I can’t believe I get to do this for a living; my students this semester are so searingly smart I can’t even take it. They spent such a gratifying 10 minutes on Ishmael’s hands being down in the pelvis of the world!

Must-read:

New Jersey:

Two gentoo penguins I saw in Antarctica, seemingly holding flippers, with a guano-splashed foreground and a background of ice and snow

🐧 ❤️

Mountainish:

From NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/magazine/operation-mincemeat-obsession-broadway.html?unlocked_article_code=1.JFA.02ZQ.WwS19a5DWevo&smid=url-share On Halloween, I sat with my notebook open and tried to be a professional one more time. “B,” I said, “what is it? Why do we love this? Why are we still here?” And B said again, with some annoyance at my badgering, “Because the songs are really good and exciting.” I asked for still more, and B said: “It makes me so happy. I love the quick changes. I just love the songs.” I wrote it down again, but this time I wondered if maybe it really was that simple. Maybe the answer is that B is 8 and I am 50, and what B doesn’t know is that as they get older, there will be fewer things to love like this. That it will come along when it does, if it does, but it will feel more and more muted every time, so that by the time you find yourself feeling it again, by the time you realize that it is great to mellow with age but that before the process is complete you will panic, because you can feel what you’re missing and know that one day missing it won’t even bother you anymore. And right now I am in the gloaming of all that — in the perimenopause of all my passions, a time when I still remember what it is to want, but from the shoreline. This might never happen again to me, I want to tell B. It’s a surprise it happened at all. Hasn’t anyone told you yet, B? It becomes rarer and rarer to be struck in the heart by something that consumes you, and one day you forget that it used to happen at all.

Recently @taffyakner.bsky.social tried to make sense of her outsized obsession with Operation Mincemeat. Here, in the marvelous thud of her kicker, is the explanatory key for my obsession with Heated Rivalry (maybe yours too?)--yrs in resistance to mellowing with age www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/m...

I taught it last week and my students immediately connected him to Luigi

🐋

"Stay free"

I was skeptical but here I am, lightly shaking. Thank you for the names, Bruce.

Print this and paper your communities

Is it even a writing day if you haven’t lightly wept over Melville’s letters to Hawthorne even though that’s not actually what you’re writing about

Generative A.I. This class helps you to be a better writer and thinker. Generative AI (ChatGPT, Copilot, and other platforms) is neither writing nor thinking. Any use of Al in this class (whether to write, brainstorm, outline, or summarize) will be considered a violation of academic integrity. It undermines your intellectual development, for one: AI content is often inaccurate or hallucinatory and is always boring, banal, and average. This is by design, as generative Al works by predicting the most obvious or basic sequencing of words. Good writingwriting that is persuasive, powerful, lively, funny, surprising, rousing, insightful, transformative, provocative-requires human work. Human creativity is weird and variable and uneven, but it holds the capacity for growth, revelation, empathy, and brilliance. We urge you not to abandon the glorious experiential potential of human messiness and transformation for the tedium of robot sentences. One further reason to abjure generative Al, especially in a class on environmental literature: in addition to its counterproductivity to your work as a writer and thinker, Al is enormously environmentally destructive.

Yes in thunder. My syllabus statement:

Wood type letter press proof print that reads Kalaallit Nunaat, Kalaallit pigaat 🇬🇱

Wood type letter press proof print that reads Kalaallit Nunaat, Kalaallit pigaat 🇬🇱

Wood type letter press proof print that reads Kalaallit Nunaat, Kalaallit pigaat 🇬🇱

Wood type letter press proof print that reads Kalaallit Nunaat, Kalaallit pigaat 🇬🇱

Week two of letterpress class: wood type, ink mixing: Greenland is for the Greenlandic people/ Kalaallit Nunaat, Kalaallit pigaat 🇬🇱

A crowd in the rain in the Grove neighborhood of St. Louis, protesting 🧊

A crowd on the march in torrential rain in the Grove neighborhood of St. Louis, protesting 🧊

St Louis standing up, in thunder