Okay, I will concede that AITA reveals previously unplumbed Things In Woodsheds.... that I think might boggle even Aunt Ada Doom.
But honestly, this one. He asked me if him and his girlfriend could use my house to give birth at. I didn't even know what he was getting at at first but he explained to me that their apartment doesn't have a bathtub, is ( Read more... )

Spotted a tweet (I suspect it is one of those that gets recirculated at intervals) saying, 'Normalize reaching out to writers you don’t know to tell them you loved something they wrote', which could probably apply to other fields of endeavour as well.
And somebody eeyoreishly* responded - the implication being that they did this via Twitter, which ( Read more... )

Have been feeling grouchy all week, in fact this probably dates back to last week, and I could doubtless attribute some of this to still not feeling quite the thing, trying to get back into exercising and finding that really modest amounts knock me out, plus, possibly incubating a cold...
But I depose that it is infuriating if, several weeks ago, ( Read more... )

I'm glad that Jo Shapcott came through her cancer, and that she found it a valuable experience and got poetry out of it, but I am still irked at this narrative trope that terrible experiences - if they don't actually make you stronger if they don't kill you - make people in some way better persons or are some kind of transformative experience.

(I ( Read more... )

I suddenly (it seems suddenly, anyway) have a whole cluster of Stuff happening in the last couple of weeks of February and the first couple of weeks of March.

Partly this is due to confluence of work-related events in which I am involved, and personal academic-interest related events, which are all, of course, being organised by people who are not ( Read more... )

O, Pamela Stephenson Connolly, is this really, truly, only a trust issue?

Because what it suggests to me is that 'sexual liberation' has just raised the stakes on what it is that has the male pouting and saying 'if you really loved me, you'd ---', because this seems to me the 2010 equivalent of those women writing to agony aunts in the early 60s ( Read more... )

No guilt-tripping, please.

Email from correspondent (whom I may have mentioned before) who seldom if ever gets in touch except to ask me for a favour, responding to mine sending editorial suggestions on article, expressing a certain amount of miffiness (at least, it seems like miffiness) that these were not accompanied by a chatty email about what I've been up to lately. ( Read more... )

It's annoying enough when people I know (from really close friends to people who only know me as a name on a mailing list), who are aware of where I work, get in touch in the hope that I will do some library research for them, given the facilities I have access to. The annoyingness does vary: doing a quick search on online Oxford DNB for specific ( Read more... )

Having thought I'd got this month fairly clear to edit and expand paper from conference in the spring, the following things happened ( Read more... )