David Mitchell in AUSTRALIA 🇦🇺🦘 🇺🇦

How is a man supposed to get any sleep?

@ragandboneshop I want a time machine. I’ll take these people back to when they say there WAS a literary culture. But they’ll tell me it’s dead. And we’ll keep going back. Dead, Oral story telling. Dead. Back. Until I leave them with the howling apes & return & buy a book.

"literary culture"? how on earth are we even to talk about "literary culture" when all we get is "novels good but woke professors bad" / "au contraire m'lady, novels bad because boring"?

@ragandboneshop I can’t support capital punishment. But solidarity confinement only relieved by posts supporting whatever they say is not reading.

i am very much a midcentury ACLU type absolutist when it comes to free speech but my one exception is that i would heartily endorse a 100-year ban on "are audiobooks reading" discourse. you start it, you're immediately taken out to la cabaña for summary execution.

@hewantswealth Try not working for a while and see how it works out. You’ll save £10.

Picked up a prescription today and had to pay £10. Woman asked if I get it free, to which I answered, how would I get it free out of curiosity? She said if I was unemployed, on JSA or any other income benefits…got me thinking. The incentive to NOT work in this country just comes with too many benefits! If you work, you pay…if you don’t work, you get it free! What’s the point, honestly? 😂 Can’t even save tax free in my ISA as of next year…very unserious country we live in the UK.

@mcgillmd921 Your Roman bust business is all substance, though. No wonder you don’t have time to read 100 books. You’re busy turning the Stoic philosophers into bric-a-brac atkemporium.etsy.com

100 books a year is pure performative reading. All style. No substance.

@mcgillmd921 Some might say posting chunks of text from ancient authors is performative. All style. No substance.

@InuitKodiak To be fair and correct it was the leaked draft opinion for overturning Roe v Wade not the opinion. propublica.org/article/aborti…

@dmit131 Oh yes? What did he cite?

My sources have strange opinions. This article from 1957!

@JaycelAdkins You’re forgiven. Tale of Genji counts for a lifetime of reading.

Argh…I think I’ll end up reading a dozen books this year…what am I doing with my life!

@pensandpoison What are you reading at the moment?

English majors will read 900 pages of literary theory just to avoid reading literature itself.

@stephiegal @pensandpoison @RQA What is his name?

@pensandpoison @RQA I know a guy who wrote a book about Aristotle without ever reading a word of Aristotle!! And idiots think he’s brilliant wtf

@DrJustinbass Isn’t your beef with Yale, not this actor?

From 1701 to the 20th century, all students who graduated Yale would know Greek and Latin and have worked through Classic texts, line by line, such as Homer, Plato, Virgil, Cicero, etc. In the 21st century, all Yale graduates can boast that they worked through the English of Toni Morrison's Beloved.

@DrJustinbass Have you read Iliad and Odyssey? As a professor of New Testament studies I assume you’ve read them in Greek.

@rexpeony Have you read The Iliad or Odyssey? Is it part of your basic literacy?

@sglockenspeil @DrJustinbass @andrewrobs I think you’re missing the point here. No one is saying that every student of drama needs to know every detail of the Odyssey. But for a drama student to be clueless about what The Odyssey even is, that is highly concerning. It’s part of a basic literacy, I’d even say

@SeeEffects @ahistoryinart Boyd captures feeling of being at the Shoalhaven. But each to his own.

@ahistoryinart This is awful imo.

Arthur Boyd returned to Australia in 1971 having spent a decade in Suffolk (Ramsholt) and London. Shortly afterwards he visited the art dealer Frank McDonald on the banks of the Shoalhaven River in NSW and so began a series of single setting paintings recording this landscape.

@ahistoryinart I live in Aust. This captures the Shoalhaven beautifully. Boyd & Patrick White presented my world to me. Maybe that’s difficult to appreciate for people who come from cultures with centuries of art.(Aboriginal art was little known when I grew up)

@kez1848 @JaycelAdkins When I first read this I thought it was a political statement (leftmost book). I need to get off X!!!

@JaycelAdkins I’ve only read the leftmost book containing selections from it, but I absolutely loved it. I hope to read it in full at some point.

I wish it were financially feasible to do a reading group on ZUO TRADITION

@literaryeric You’re a Russian or Iranian bot, aren’t you?

@whollyfists Two different things entirely. But there are dozens of composers in the last 50 years better than Mozart.

Every year plenty of novels are published that are better than the Odyssey. Homer deserves our respect for being a pioneer, but you don’t have to read it.

@BenKentish Like attracts like.

In the space of literally two minutes walking through central London just now, was offered (by separate people) drugs, sex and brothels, accosted by some weirdo trying to get me into his “free taxi” and had someone else try to rob me. Never a police officer in sight, of course. I love London but criminals are being given free reign.

@moniza_hossain You are right. Reading is a way of transferring information. It’s a very good way but not the only way. I love reading. But humans existed for tens of thousands of years without writing.

1. We read with our brains, not our eyes 2. Using your eyes to figure out what letters mean is only important when you’re a child learning how to read words. You don’t need to prove you are literate as an adult

@worillessg Yes. I am very judgmental.

Do you judge people by the books they read? Be honest.