. @telltelte Twitter profile

Last Seen Profiles

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@occlusalplane

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@telltelte

7 months

There are few books that give me as much joy as this

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@telltelte

8 months

Increasingly feel that anyone not assigning full books is fundamentally unserious and lacks respect for their students. Too much reading? Shut the fuck up and have this 600 page novel read by next week. If that’s too much then the class isn’t for you.

Gabriel Finkelstein

@gabridli

8 months

I assign books because no one remembers articles. Ask a student if they remember the author and argument of an article they read five years ago. I want this stuff to stick with them. Also, what will happen to academic publishing when we never assign books?

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@telltelte

7 months

real ones know

Tyler Austin Harper

@Tyler_A_Harper

7 months

GOAT essay collections? Do the people have thoughts? I don't read enough essay collections. Taking recommendations!

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@telltelte

6 months

@MrHWM I thought I was inured to this sort of thing, since I grew up smack dab in the rust belt. But it all seems to have gotten so much worse over the last few years. I didn’t think it was possible, but Youngstown is somehow even rustier.

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@telltelte

6 months

because spending your life reading and talking about books/movies sounds like a much better way to live than being an accountant. That’s literally it. Anyone who says otherwise is either lying or deluded about what they do.

jenny say qua, ABD

@woke_and_broke

6 months

@matthiasellis What's the point of studying those books and movies if you believe they can be rendered meaningless in the face of nuclear annihilation?

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@telltelte

7 months

@_ryanruby_ There’s a great and heartbreaking essay by Leslie Fiedler about visiting him in Idaho just before his death. He talks about how much H would posture about critics being useless know-nothings, but upon further examination it was clear he’d read everything ever written about him.

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@telltelte

5 months

Today is a good day to go watch/listen to some of John Barth’s old interviews with Michael Silverblatt on Bookworm. There are moments in those conversations where he almost seems like an American Borges. A wizard of the word.

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@telltelte

7 months

@focusfronting Ian Miles Cheong? The coke dealer I bought from in Malaysia a few years back who had a picture of the king on his wall he used as a dartboard?

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@telltelte

7 months

@johannawinant Had a very old professor back in the day who told me the common read for freshmen at queens college in the early 60s was the brothers karamazov, and that there was a huge social penalty for not doing the reading

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@telltelte

5 months

@_ryanruby_ I don’t understand, though! Why would literature professors assign his epochal book of literary criticism and not his polemic on Palestine (which is very good but is very much of its 90s moment)????? This doesn’t make any sense!!!!!!

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@telltelte

9 months

this person is clearly unwell and I hope they get the help they need, but my god there’s such a weird kind of narcissism on display here. to map your own depression onto geopolitical conflict is such a particularly American behavior, I feel like. and a very online one.

Mis Leading

@FaatiTheStreet

9 months

I have contemplated self-immolation more in the past two months than I’ve thought about going to see Renaissance and I sobbed in utter confusion at how anyone is able to achieve any sense of normalcy while all of these people are being killed en masse.

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@telltelte

7 months

@AnnaCBross I think you could’ve found a few more opportunities to mention he’s just a freelance writer. You hardly bring it up.

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@telltelte

9 months

@ImReadinHere dude you need to log off

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@telltelte

7 months

Interesting thing happening where the “it” book of the year in theory/criticism is being roundly dismissed by every smart grad student I know, with great specificity, while simultaneously being praised by tenured mid career faculty - in incredibly vague, buddyish language.

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@telltelte

7 months

I don’t often share very personal things on here, but Ezra was my adviser and a very, very special man. Attached is something brief I was asked to write in remembrance of him. I’ll miss his magic tricks.

Bryan Waterman @waterman.bsky.social

@_waterman

7 months

I'm just heartbroken to find out @ezratawil passed away last month. We organized a group of untenured early Americanists in NYC in the early 00s and read each other's stuff. He was warm, funny, generous, and so so smart.

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@telltelte

5 months

@ExileGrimm Hey remember when he chased down a black jogger while carrying a gun

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@telltelte

7 months

@MrHWM This was the case for the college freshman English class I had to teach while working on my PhD. It’s what prompted me to make that post about reading assignments that everyone yelled at me about. It’s a fucking disaster, and it’s administratively enforced.

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@telltelte

8 months

I’m not exactly averse to controversial opinions about academic but this is the one that gets me in the most fights - and it’s a hill I will always die on.

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@telltelte

6 months

@MrHWM Henry James

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@telltelte

7 months

@saintsoftness This take is particularly bad

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@telltelte

5 months

@tonalplexus Every time I realize this guy exists and that his overblown prose, which is so purple it makes Barney look beige, somehow merited an editorial position at a reputable mag I get so fucking depressed

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@telltelte

6 months

Another teacher gone, and too early: my high school English teacher, George. The first one to notice I was a reader and began to throw books at me left and right at 16. Whatever I am now as a reader and writer, it’s because of him. Nothing in life prepares you to lose a teacher.

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@telltelte

8 months

Matt Sitman and JCO beefing is my own personal 9/11 😕

Matthew Sitman 🥥🌴🇺🇸

@MatthewSitman

8 months

It's important to recognize how reactionary JCO is being, actually. The idea that a rare exception (a billionaire widow) or, differently, this or that example of someone abusing "welfare," are used to dismiss or downplay the obligations we have to each other

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@telltelte

8 months

@MickTheebs chill out man I also like Costco hot dogs

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@telltelte

7 months

@_ryanruby_ Not to do an armchair analysis, but I usually just try to gloss his takes like this - which are patently wrong - as reflective of a profound terror about how much of himself he may have revealed in his work

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@telltelte

5 months

@DeleuzeForYou or maybe he just wasn’t much of an historian lol

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@telltelte

8 months

Yes or no: do you condemn Habermas?

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@telltelte

7 months

@MatthewSitman cut the fella some slack he’s been in the trenches for like three weeks now holding the fort against racists

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@telltelte

9 months

@oliviastowell what if I don’t think it’s too complex or jargony but often just very low stakes and boring

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@telltelte

6 months

@MrHWM I’ll never forget when I had to sit through a meeting with some Cornell professors and they blathered on for literally a half hour about how radical it was that they had changed their dept name to “literatures in english.” The Ivy League is not sending their best.

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@telltelte

8 months

@g_shullenberger I’ve never read a single review of ALC’s that amounted to more than a temper tantrum about not personally liking the author, dressed up in faux-philosophical language. Absolute charlatan. The Zadie Smith review in particular was impressively incoherent.

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@telltelte

7 months

@MatthewSitman It’s gonna go in your collected essays one day, no worries.

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@telltelte

8 months

We are so close to my uncle who likes normie stand-up discovering him and me then getting to play cumtown bits for my whole family at the dinner table

charlie

@mongoformayor

8 months

As he gets bigger (no pun intended) we inch closer and closer to the most predictable cancellation of all time

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@telltelte

9 months

@ambernoelle The overlap between these dudes and trad Catholics who think divorce rates are responsible for the decline of society will never cease to mystify me.

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@telltelte

5 months

@aliner Berryman, in one of his several beautiful and agonizing dreamsongs about Schwartz.

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@telltelte

6 months

I honestly don’t know how anyone who has spent ten minutes with 3+ grad students in the last decade could doubt for a second that this story was true lol

Tyler Austin Harper

@Tyler_A_Harper

6 months

This whole ordeal was not simply stupid, it was positively Trumpian. The journalists and media types who not only decried this anecdote as fake news without evidence, but who made baseless accusations of editorial malpractice, should be flat out embarrassed. And should apologize.

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@telltelte

8 months

@sillynous It’s called a provisional attempt. I don’t believe any 19 year old can really “get” Portrait of a Lady on a first run-through. But I think a familiarity from a quick read and then lecture about it might set them up to read it more substantively later on, when they need it

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@telltelte

9 months

this take was inevitable, and honestly it’s kind of quaint. like a return to stupid literary twitter of 2017. good for her - we all love a little nostalgia of stupider times.

sarah rose etter

@sarahroseetter

9 months

watching everyone celebrate what amounts to literary revenge porn against a mentally unwell woman who took her own life has me sick to my stomach

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@telltelte

5 months

being a PhD student and most of my friends being MFA students meant constant mediation between these spheres, and I still feel traumatized by attempting such a futile task

Jacquelyn Ardam

@jaxwendy

5 months

@joelyfitch all of the real answers below but also the glee PhDs and creative writers take in hating each other

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@telltelte

6 months

I got quote tweeted by a host of my favorite podcast :( time to disappear forever

Sam Adler-Bell

@SamAdlerBell

6 months

disagree! i think Chalamet is a fine actor, particularly in the role of "somewhat silly and acutely self-conscious boyish man with ideas and impulses that are bigger and more human than he has the intellectual capacity to understand or fully integrate."

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@telltelte

7 months

@rhodeislander @sacrelicio hey shut the fuck up

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@telltelte

7 months

@TheLincoln Not a novel thought, but I really do think we’re just gonna have to bring back handwritten short answer responses. I know that poses its own problems but I don’t see any way around it.

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@telltelte

7 months

Read this story tonight by @MrHWM and was completely blown away. Like I told a friend, shades of early Roth in the beginning (and he can match Roth’s humor) but quickly becomes its own deeply unnerving thing. I’ll be thinking about and rereading this one for a long time.

Desert Horror

@deserthorror

9 months

“Featherweight,” by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain | The New Yorker I don’t usually read The New Yorker stories but this one got its hooks in.

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@telltelte

6 months

@pourfairelevide I honestly thought Hugh Kenner put this shit to bed with his writing about the timetables of the trolleys in Ulysses. At least Kenner was an interesting writer.

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@telltelte

6 months

@DoctorPissPants I ordered one fucking yesterday in Eugene Oregon

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@telltelte

9 months

the hysteria is starting to tonally ramp up. I’m excited to see where this ends for him. Probably holed up in a suburban ranch house with several assault rifles and stuffed animal hostages, who he keeps screaming at about how good the economy is

Will Stancil

@whstancil

9 months

Hundreds of braindead leftists retweeting this because they think “25% is greater than 20%” is some kind of incredible math insight and completely miss that REAL EARNINGS ARE GOING UP

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@telltelte

6 months

@kukukadoo Again, I present the table of contents for woody harrelson’s dad

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@telltelte

7 months

@saintsoftness I’d honestly be crestfallen if a teacher I respected enough to ask for a letter of rec did something like this. It would feel like a knife in the gut.

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@telltelte

7 months

@BudrykZack the godparents of their kids were a couple they met at a parenting class

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@telltelte

6 months

I’ve been kind of disappointed that all the chatter about Zone of Interest hasn’t sparked a Martin Amis revival. I know he had some duds, but when he was at his best there was no better writer of sentences in English.

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@telltelte

5 months

the only reason this guy has a career in “journalism” is because his dad sold out his friends and wrote a book-length gossip column about far more intelligent people than him. That’s literally it. And this joke of a family has been coasting off his father’s rotten soul ever since

John Podhoretz

@jpodhoretz

5 months

I know Andres a saint and all, and hates Trump and stuff, but he can go fuck himself with this disgusting blood libel.

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@telltelte

5 months

@MrHWM I am not prepared for their takes about king of the hill, man. I’ll actually have an aneurysm.

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@telltelte

7 months

incredible to me that this many people think “liking good food from a variety of places” is somehow bad

Gender Calvinist

@duns_sc0tus

7 months

Many white people have this, frankly, bizarre, fetishistic relationship with non European food that drives me insane

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@telltelte

7 months

literally none of these people are capable of just going to a bar or coffee shop and having a chat with a stranger without seeming like a huge freak

Osita Nwanevu

@OsitaNwanevu

7 months

It might not be politically correct to say, but I think it's time we started asking whether the contemporary right is capable of assimilating into American culture.

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@telltelte

10 months

@__AustinAdams The knee-jerk reaction to him is just the same old resistance to anything one was forced to read in high school. Discovering Nine Stories in college really helped me appreciate just how damn good he was.

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@telltelte

6 months

hey Becca Rothfeld is a great reader and Lauren Oyler is a very okay writer. The review is fine. Im sorry, I know Oyler is very clever on Twitter and that’s all that matters to most of you, but you’re gonna have to grow up and fucking deal with it. A bad book is a bad book.

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@telltelte

6 months

@AmericanGwyn I know I’m supposed to say “The Dead,” but the Joyce story that moved me the most, to this day, is “Araby.” So much packed into just a few pages.

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@telltelte

9 months

@lionel_trolling Really not thrilled that we are all just accepting “lapsed substacker” as a legitimate title

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@telltelte

8 months

@charcuterie1444 I’ll show him a fucking hyper-object: my fist shattering his jaw.

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@telltelte

8 months

@charcuterie1444 Why are these people so terrified of things having historical meaning?

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@telltelte

9 months

@rockera_bella @PanasonicDX4500 @orangustanley enjoy losing lmao

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@telltelte

5 months

Finally got over to Portland and had myself a real time at Powell’s

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@telltelte

6 months

@snarkademic why won’t this person get more specific about what that would look like, i wonder

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@telltelte

6 months

deleted my post about The Discourse. Trying to stop wading into those things. But Jon is a great guy and the accusations of misogyny seem really unfair and like big reaches.

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@telltelte

6 months

remember when flannery o’connor said that it’s true everyone has a novel inside them, but in most cases that’s exactly where it should stay? This poem is gonna make me feel that way about poetry

Vinay Krishnan

@vinayrkrishnan

6 months

new poem

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@telltelte

8 months

@csilverandgold he’s going to poster’s valhalla for this

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@telltelte

8 months

@ThankUBayesGod @sillynous I have a friend who, upon rereading portrait, worked up the courage to admit her husband was abusing her and to take the kid and leave.

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@telltelte

6 months

this dude calls himself a rust belt writer and yet he treats not terminally online regular people like they are aliens

BOBBY MARS

@bobby_on_mars

6 months

Done with the weird bitches. Gonna meet a normie girl on hinge. 27 or so with a boring professional email job. Likes to go to brunch. Has a “doggo.” Dyed blonde hair. Goes to the gym and does meme workouts to make her ass bigger. Has never felt real pain in her life.

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@telltelte

7 months

When people tell me there hasn’t been a cultural decline I just point to something like this, or to Bellow’s Herzog becoming such a phenomenon. It’s really hard to not think something profoundly bad has happened to the reading public.

Kerwin Fjøl

@zermatist

7 months

Insane to think that Umberto Eco's "Name of the Rose" was an international bestseller in 1980. People were reading books then, like really reading them.

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@telltelte

5 months

@focusfronting There are few things I’m as proud of as I am being blocked by Malcolm Harris 😌

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@telltelte

8 months

@benwurgaft ….did you slip an indigo girls lyric into this take

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@telltelte

7 months

I like to think a pug could be the kwisatz haderach

Żarówka

@BivouacChillin

7 months

The pug in Lynch's Dune makes perfect sense. Just like Paul, it's the product of generations of selective breeding that should have made genetic perfection, but it's kind of just a little freak

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@telltelte

10 months

@wasilalitaha @mehdirhasan Apparently they don’t, because regardless of who is the president, Arabs are being slaughtered en masse.

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@telltelte

8 months

@ThankUBayesGod @sillynous I don’t really know what to tell you. I started reading Henry James at about 19, before I’d experienced much as an adult, and returning to it over the years in difficult moments has been incredibly helpful for me

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@telltelte

10 months

@AmericanGwyn I actually think he’s fine and that hating him as 75% internet affectation

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@telltelte

8 months

@pourfairelevide I also just don’t think we should mock anyone for how they find love in a world this lonely and alienated

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@telltelte

7 months

I honestly can’t even get mad at this. I’m just full of pity for this man. How sad, how empty his life is.

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@telltelte

5 months

@pourfairelevide @vorticistgirl Thank you for giving me ammunition to defend my 6 beer minimum each time I stop by my daily joint.

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@telltelte

10 months

@yakabikaj The indigineity discourse is like creationism in America. There’s a whole fabricated discourse with its own esoteric facts, designed to serve as gotchas for opponents, that ultimately just serve to distract people who think “displacement of millions is wrong.”

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@telltelte

10 months

@monicabyrne13 This is a particularly funny form of misogyny too because, as much as I love Bellow and Roth, they also wrote mostly about the vagaries of relationships lol

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@telltelte

8 months

@jwest_edm Should have clarified that I meant this more for lit and history students

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@telltelte

6 months

the only actual instance of punching down I’ve seen in my life has been progressives with graduate degrees making fun of working class people who eat at Olive Garden

vcrboipretty

@vcrboipretty

6 months

no one is punching down. you're all powerless losers

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@telltelte

9 months

buddy there’s only one person increasingly manic here

Will Stancil

@whstancil

9 months

You can really see this kind of accelerationism taking shape on the left, with increasingly manic attacks on Biden, seemingly because they sense blood in the water and think if they make him a vessel for everything they hate, whoever replaces him will be everything they want

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@telltelte

7 months

@saintsoftness The sweatpants thing is so real. I cannot comfortably write in the pants I wear out and about. Reminds me of John Cheever, who apparently used to dress up in a suit, ride the elevator down to the boiler room, and strip down to his undies to write.

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@telltelte

8 months

@MrHWM Love Medicine is one of the best books I’ve ever read

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@telltelte

7 months

Took some Xanax before bed and retweeted the fuck out of Michael Caine last night

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@telltelte

5 months

Downloaded this app again literally just because I want to see all the coping and seething about Ann Manov’s review lol

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@telltelte

5 months

two really great readers and writers

porochista khakpour she/her پوروچیستا خاکپور

@PKhakpour

5 months

Great Becca Rothfeld event with @PhilKlay at @mcnallyjackson tonight

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@telltelte

8 months

@bartleby_era Grad school and the English PhD helped me in a lot of ways and I am mostly grateful for it but I mostly look back on the warnings I received from profs like this warmly, and feel they were right to have said what they did.

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@telltelte

10 months

Great review of @dan_sinykin ’s book. Love that it attends to that piece on CM. I admit I had a skepticism of data-driven approaches to lit scholarship, but he really sold me here on how, by analyzing on a macro level, we can understand how art is strangled by conglomeration

The New Republic

@newrepublic

10 months

Big Fiction is a fresh intervention on the forces shaping the art and media we consume, principally due to the richness of the context Dan Sinykin provides and the impressively broad array of evidence he marshals, writes @scottwstern .

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@telltelte

9 months

@AmericanGwyn @MrHWM I picked up a copy of Galveston at a used bookstore in Sweden not too long ago and am hoping to dig in soon. I didn’t know it existed so it was a nice discovery.

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@telltelte

8 months

canceling all my NYE plans because the @artofdarkpod fellas just dropped another heater

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@telltelte

9 months

@jonathanbfine this guy’s obsession with trans people is incredible. he wakes up and just lunges for the phone to start tweeting about them, and doesn’t stop until he goes to bed.

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@telltelte

8 months

The best man I ever knew in academia, my dissertation adviser, died today. If you had a good mentor in the hell that is grad school, please let them know how much you appreciate them. The world feels lonelier today.

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@telltelte

6 months

I hate this so fucking much

T

@GuadagninoFilms

6 months

TIMOTHÉE AS BOB DYLAN ERAAAA

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@telltelte

6 months

watching a game in a bar full of people who are mostly interested now because they have money on the game is so fucking bleak Jesus Christ

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@telltelte

7 months

@MrHWM There’s also something about the way he emphasizes “everything - we are open to EVERYTHING” that makes me think the FBI should check his hard drives

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@telltelte

7 months

@MrHWM One bright spot, though, was that the students, at least in my case, were not happy about this. Like I said, it came more from the admins. The students were annoyed they didn’t have better and longer reading assignments.

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@telltelte

6 months

As a deep admirer of Paul Auster I fuck with Harold on this one

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@telltelte

10 months

@zhuphilia Fitzcarraldo

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