Senior Lecturer in English at Aston University. Scholar of genre fiction and nineteenth-century literature.
Cohost of
@SMFMS_Podcast
.
Opinions my own.
Four and a half minutes ago, I did not realise that Sweden has a Christmas tradition of arson against an enormous hay goat, and now I am watching a 24-hour livestream of a wicker-man goat 900 miles away like my life depends on it.
I will never know peace again.
@sohosatan
Piano concert date. Turned up and there was no concert. He suggested we go back to my dorm to 'hang'. I refused to close the door, so we watched a movie in silence (he chose Aladdin) and he left. My roommates found out he put up fake concert posters around campus the week before
I never thought my PhD in Victorian lit and culture would have real-world applicability, but guys, there is a solution to COVID-19 staring us right in the face and it involves us all looking absolutely darling
@VexxxVortex
@sohosatan
Weirdest part was that I agreed to a real date, so a long con wasn't necessary. Like, the hard part is over, my dude. We could have just grabbed dinner and had a pleasant evening.
Please enjoy this Illustrated News story from 1898. A country bumpkin trod on a girl's foot at a ball and refused to apologize.
The natural response?
Shoot him in his goddamn hillbilly face.
Guys, I just discovered a 13th-century translator named Hermannus Alemannus, or, literally, 'Herman the German'.
All of a sudden my entire day seems good and pure and true.
@IDprisonproject
@GhostingDani
What on earth does 'completely neutral' mean? By that logic, anyone who discussed abortion or birth control *negatively* must be subject to the same rules: open pro-lifers must, by this rule, also be dismissed and subject to felony charges. Series of messy lawsuits ahead.
In the 1890s in Chicago, a madam named Carrie Watson kept a truly opulent brothel which included a bowling alley. Instead of bowling pins, she used bottles of chilled champagne.
@Nicole_Cliffe
So true. I love the G*ldblum I *thought* I knew, but because I am a modern human individual, I will turn on a fucking dime if countered with evidence to the contrary. I know only a curated version of a celebrity! I have no first-hand experience, and believe people who do!
@oldenoughtosay
Don't even get me started on the hokey "cokey". I've started saying TK Maxx, I'm not putting any more new k-sounds into things, what more do these people want from me
Guys, sometimes I don't think we thank Wordsworth Classics enough for their astonishing cover art. These are truly a gift, and I am rendered speechless.
Got some great news this week--
My monograph, 'Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction', was named the runner up for VPFA's 2023 Best First Book Prize!
I know we should all discourage improv wherever we can, but a random man just told me to smile and I launched into a ridiculous sob story until I watched the light die in his eyes
My parents said my theatre minor would never amount to anything, but look a me, Ma, doing God's work
Exciting news to announce (with permission)!
If you could all form an orderly queue in time for me to crowd-surf all the way to work tomorrow, that would be grand.
I received a small amount of funding to start a pedagogy literature podcast that takes classic books off their pedestal via comedy/irreverence to make analysis more accessible.
What texts from the literary canon would you (or your students) like to hear me take the mick out of?
My very first
@EnglishAston
PhD student just passed his viva with no corrections! I am beyond delighted.
He doesn't do social media, so please send along your congratulations here, so I can show him this tweet later and embarrass him with all the praise.
Just caught a student plagiarising. The assignment was to write an essay about good academic practice. They lifted quotations directly from a guide that talks about why plagiarism is bad and how to avoid it.
*slow clap*
Victorianist Twitter--can you give me C19th examples which equate women's hair (especially blondes/redheads) with their sexuality? So far I have:
-Dora Spenlow's ringlets
-Porphyria's Lover
-All PRB muses
-Lady Audley's curls
-Goblin Market hair payment
This post is really taking off! Time for shameless self-promotion of my literature-comedy podcast, Save Me From My Shelf (
@SMFMS_Podcast
) where we recap, ridicule & analyse classic lit.
Start w/our Canterbury Tales episode (even if you don't know the text)
@Nicole_Cliffe
I cried walking down the sidewalk after a hard day at work. Some random dude told me, "Smile, pretty girl! It's Friday!" so I started screaming at him that someone I knew had just died and HOW DARE HE TELL ME TO SMILE
(no one had died, but he shut up sharpish)
What's beyond frustrating is knowing that in about 4 years we're going to be bombarded with panicked headlines: 'Employers can't understand why graduates have no critical thinking skills, bad literacy, lack creative problem solving, etc'.
THIS IS WHY, AND IT'S TOTALLY AVOIDABLE
Aston University has told staff that at least 24 jobs are at risk of redundancy due to its plans to close the department of history, languages and translation.
Sign our petition to defend the courses:
Full release:
@AstonUCU
๐จVictorianist alert! ๐จ
My book is coming out soon and I've been asked to pick a cover. The problem is that they ALL work great for different elements of the topic. Help me decide?
Poll below:
Well, it's official: my publisher didn't discover that I'm just 3 GCSE Eng lit students stacked under a trench coat.
'Science, Medicine, & Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction' is off to the printer. Next stop: under a layer of dust at the back of my dad's bookshelf.
I'm a scholar of the 'long' nineteenth century, the dates of which I define purely by vibes.
It's a haunted methodology. I start every new project with a prayer.
I have a student who starts all of their essays by enormously capitalising the first letter of the first word, like they're writing an illuminated manuscript, and honestly, it's just plain charming.
I'm looking into a C19th case about a missing person, fraud, and catfishing.
One of the main players is a man named Truth Butts.
I cannot bring this information back to the other investigators on my project, it will derail us for life.
While I've never been a fan of April Fool's Day, I'm a VERY big fan of how they celebrate it in Uzbekistan.
I took this picture two years ago, when I discovered that they just plaster Bukhara in cringey dad jokes written on giant informational signs.
My very American dad just landed in the UK, discovered there's a train strike and cannot be arsed to handle buses, looked at a map and saw how 'close' he is to my city, and is now taking a taxi from Manchester to Birmingham.
Girl, OK
Shout-out to my friend who just started seeing someone, went to their apartment for a 2nd date, and got stuck there in quarantine for the next 12ish weeks because there's no safe way to get home (out of state)
I look forward to seeing this premise in 5 bad romcoms 24 months hence
Finished some projects early, so I'm spending the afternoon stress baking a gargantuan Russian honey rum cake with 15 layers, that will in no way turn out to be a magnificent disaster.
Let's have ourselves a good ole fashioned boozy Russian hootenanny.
Thread to follow.
VICTORIAN TWITTER, PLEASE HELP
My stepbrother is an indie film producer and has asked me to pick a nineteenth-century novel for him to adapt into a movie. I am drowning in choices. What is a C19th book you'd like to see adapted?
#Victorian
#AcademicTwitter
Well, this is the best news I've received in a while.
How many George Formby songs do I need to know the words to before I'm granted full citizenship, do you reckon?
Okay, I've been worn down and finally decided changed my display name to my Real Human Name for departmental cohesion.
Now I'm hiding under my desk and quietly blipping like a fire alarm battery, if a fire alarm battery could feel the soul-numbing terror of de-anonymising itself
@aubreyhirsch
I've started pre-screening evals to take out all these before I share them with co-teachers. I failed to do this ONCE and wanted the floor to swallow me whole when we read them together. Thankfully the sexist ones usually have no other comments of value I'm throwing away, anyway.
Driving to the middle of nowhere in the South of France and have just been told that our accommodation is surrounded by an electric fence to keep the wild boars out.
So help me god, if I go on a glamorous holiday only to be killed by 30-50 feral pigs, I will be very irked.
Stupendous news:
@mmgiovanelli
,
@ChloeELHarrison
,
@lovermob
, and I have just secured a contract with Palgrave for a book borne out of our 2020
@LockdownLibrary
project.
Watch out for 'Reading Habits in the COVID Pandemic: An Applied Linguistic Perspective' sometime in 2023!
Sorry to the grad student I didn't know was in the department for making you listen to me sing loudly for the last three hours while I did admin.
I did not mean to hiss at your office window when I discovered I wasn't alone.
In my defence, I am feral and ABBA slaps
@WhoresofYore
She once wrote him a letter & drew a kiss, but wasn't a v. good artist; he got all hot & bothered thinking it was a picture of her vagina.
My grandparents have reached an age where they do what they want and give 0 fucks.
They sent me an urgent message to Skype them while I was on holiday, showed me the 4.3lb tomato they're entering in the county fair, and hung up.
Only 80 lines into Beowulf and so far it's about some dudes who partied so relentlessly that they annoyed a nightbeast all the way down in HELL, who just wanted to sleep.
I lived next to the loudest frat boys in my undergrad, so I hope those Danes all get et
Uploaded a new FB profile pic and my dad wrote, 'Nice picture!' When I said thanks, he replied 'Wrote this on the wrong photo' and then deleted his comment.
My own actual entire father
Can someone please take me to a burn ward, or just encase me in ice
Traumatised half my class today by teaching some very scary Victorian ghost stories.
Traumatised the other half when a smart alec jokingly asked about what the Victorians did for birth control, and I immediately was able to recount the multistep C19th condom production process.
So excited! Only six weeks until I find an embarrassing typo in the hard copy and desperately try to downplay it by tweeting something asinine like
'In my flop era โค๏ธ๐ ๐ซ '
Hyperployglot Guiseppe Mezzofanti, who supposedly spoke over 70 languages, got into a swearing contest with the (merely) multilingual Lord Byron.
Byron lost and lovingly called Mezzofanti a 'monster'.
@cjfaraday
@EJBrand
Weirdly, you can use 'buttload'--it's a genuine unit of measurements, if now archaic (384 gallons).
The real question is if Tudor portraits provide 384 gallons of information about their sitters.
Sorry, I can't come into work today, I had a tweet that's slowly going viral and I need to refresh Twitter every thirteen seconds, so ... pretttay, prettaaaaaay booked.
@ShaundaSMS
@sohosatan
a.) I had sexier movies (The English Patient and Cold Mountain were sitting RIGHT THERE) and B.) that is a strange movie to be totally and sternly silent during
See, this is why I can't stress-bake when I'm watching Hitchcock movies. I've completely lost the plot and turned him into tear-and-share garlic bread.
On the plus side, I can almost guarantee this is the first time a woman has said Alfred Hitchcock looks like a total snack.
Guys, I thought I'd outgrown sleepwalking a few years back but I just found a note I apparently wrote to myself last night. On a new reading list I'm developing I just wrote, "Moths?" as a suggestion.
I have no idea what I'm talking about, but yes. Moths, midnight-me. Moths.
I want you guys to know that I just read a late C18th novel where a guy accidentally goes on a date with a ghost. He only figures out she's a ghost when she gets so bored that she crashes the carriage they're in and disappears forever.
#BadDateGoals
@loudlysilent
@lakenley
The most powerful phrases in the world (especially if said in a completely neutral tone) are: 'I'm sorry, I'm not available for that' and 'What a strange thing for you to say', followed by silence.
My redneck Vermonter dad loves to accessorise and has started wearing a flat cap because it makes him 'look chic and European'.
I'm taking him to France soon and cannot begin to fathom what he'll pull out of his suitcase. It's like waiting for Gaga to show up on the red carpet.
Reading Melville's "Pierre" (1852) for the first time, and ... uh ... guys? I'm sitting in my office wringing my hands helplessly because it's getting REAL kinky REAL fast.
Prepping my class on 'Mildred Pierce' (1945), which is a melodramatic noir masterpiece containing the ugliest lamps I have ever seen in all my live-long days
If you're a Victorianist, I've probably known your name from Twitter or journals or forums for years, but I'm beyond rubbish at networking.
WITH WHOMST am I able to grab a coffee at BAVS next week (instead of reading a book in a corner and hoping everyone/no one talks to me)?
My best friend (a medieval scholar) and I are watching 'Ladyhawke' (1985) for the first time and she is losing her goddamn fool mind. Whenever the evil bishop comes on screen, she paces around my house screaming, 'WHERE IS THE SECULAR LORD IN THIS CITY?'
Twitter, what's the last book that made you stay up all night to finish it? My last few reads were thoroughly depressing slogs & I need an adventure romp, creepy horror, well-crafted thriller, dishy drama, etc.
Trying read all the 'worthy' books on my shelf but the flesh is weak.
@madeline_cct
Whenever someone talks about how there were no non-white people in Victorian England, I always have this example ready for quickdraw in a spring-loaded holster.
Bronte is very, very clear that Heathcliff is not white and people are always shocked by that!
Article stuck in peer review hell for 3yrs. Finally submitted it elsewhere to see if it was truly as hateable as Reviewer 2 thought, & it was accepted w/minor corrections in under a month.
How's my article coming along, Reviewer 2 asks?
Still a piece of crap and THRIVING, thanks!
Husband revealed he's never seen "The Sound of Music", because he's a numpty who assumes I'm not immediately going to cancel all my Saturday plans to force him to watch it. Recap happening NOW.
I've formed a parasocial relationship with a woman in my film class who's been taking the class for years despite seemingly LOATHING movies.
She gets SO mad every time we watch a clip.
She has the most atrocious takes you've ever heard.
I want to be buried at her feet like a dog.
A day of huge, huge news for me--the first being an article, published in Victorians (142, Winter 2022). This is a passion project I've been slowly researching for 5 whole years!
Look how beautiful these illustrations are (massive thanks to the Shiel estate and Tartarus Press).