grey👽ham🐖boar🐗land🗻

my very first proper academic publication—‘Signets Reborn: H.D.’s Serpent-and-Thistle Signet Ring and Louvre Museum Item Number BJ 1212’, in Notes & Queries—is finally out!!! academic.oup.com/nq/advance-art… doi.org/10.1093/notesj…

Winnicott: ‘I have refrained from using this language because I am not sure it is what I mean’

figured out another way to Be Annoying while doing a Hybridity

(Trying not to think about the fact that the one that got in was by far the least aggressively hermetic, tricksy, pedantic, horny, or anti-colonial of my submissions - but a win is a win!)

So: I may have, in a slightly frenzied state of mind, compulsively written quite a bit of experimental poetry in Synthetic Scots a wee while ago… And may have just been informed that one of them will be appearing in print in a certain well-kent Sassanach university anthology…

Wrote about early modern sodomy, the vicissitudes of gay history, and why you should always carry your basket with you, for the new issue of the @LRB.

When I found out I’d gotten Cambridge for the PhD, one hour later an account called “William James” tapped me on The App. To this day, there’s a *tiny* part of me you couldn’t convince that this wasn’t the shade of an American philosopher granting his approval from the beyond…

Going to conversion camp to get some writing done…this gay shit is too distracting

@KarenFromFinan9 @nocontextrixya 3 too many syllables unforch

@nocontextrixya Is this a haiku?

they don’t you to know this, but you can find a guy to print out rare and out-of-print books for you and have them bound with your own hardcover design for 1/10th of the price of the original books

Hans-Georg Gadamer on Augustine, Time, and the Structure of Hope Gadamer revisits one of Augustine's most radical philosophical moves: the refusal to treat time as a sequence of three equal "beings." What makes Augustine's approach unusual is not just his conclusion, it's his method. He didn't treat the problem of time as an abstract puzzle to be solved from a distance. He brought it before God, interrupting his own argument with prayer, asking for help in the very act of thinking. That intimacy between devotion and reasoning wasn't decoration, it was the point. The insight it produced is deceptively simple. Past and future don't exist as independent realms. They exist only as they press into the present as memory and anticipation held simultaneously in the mind. As Augustine puts it: "We can only think of present signs of the future as being present, and we can only see traces of the past… as being present. Only that can we truly see as 'being.'" This is what he called the distensio animi, a stretching out of the spirit. Gadamer renders it plainly: that is what we call consciousness. The German word for the present, Gegenwart, sharpens this further. Embedded in it is gewärtig sein: to be awaiting, to be open. The present is not a fixed point. It is a posture of readiness that leans forward. Time, then, is not a container you move through. It is the structure of consciousness itself. The tension between what is remembered, what is attended to now, and what is anticipated. You do not have past and future. You are the act of holding them together. From here, Gadamer makes a move that feels almost offhand but lands hard. If consciousness is inherently stretched toward what comes next, then hope isn't a disposition some people choose and others don't. It's built into the architecture of awareness itself. Ernst Bloch was right to foreground it, Gadamer says, because it isn't sentiment, it's structure. "That is why I consider every pessimist a bit insincere; they wouldn't even be here if they didn't have hope." This isn't a rebuke. It's an observation about what it means to persist. To remain conscious is already to be oriented forward whether you name that orientation hope or not. Much of modern anxiety comes from treating time as a problem of storage. Holding onto the past accurately, predicting the future correctly. Augustine and Gadamer suggest a different frame. Time is lived through presence: the traces we carry, the signs we read, the openness we maintain toward what is arriving. Consciousness is the act of stretching across all three without collapsing any of them.

story of my life

Your ex is having a romantic date with someone else and you are reading Jacques Lacan - The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.pdf

@MageVivika @pop_mycology (god, now I’m suddenly thinking of when people the term “narcissist injury” to mean “a person I don’t like is annoyed”)

@MageVivika @pop_mycology honestly as slightly pop-psych-ish heuristics go, it can be reasonably helpful. the main problem with models like this is how easily they’re reified into weird pseudo-medical astrology, or, as you say, weaponised into moral discourses of “fundamentally good” vs. “broken & weak”.

starting a DARE-style campaign called "say no to attachment theory terminology" ❌❌❌

“say yes to Freud’s dynamic taxonomy of ‘libidinal types’ – as proposed in his short, under-appreciated 1931 essay of the same name” ✅✅✅

@exhaustdata I mean, you’re halfway there already, so it must be working.

I would like to be the person that wrote the 1922 novel ‘Ulysses’

@JoyceCarolOates @DHLawrenceSocNA

Bluesky is too good for me; Twitter is more the "scrimmage of life" of which DH Lawrence spoke, the realm of being that the novel inhabits.

“what about a kiss? […] what about a kiss on the mouth? what about a biting kiss, as well as everything that can be exchanged between lips, tongues, and teeth?” derrida

he never misses, unfortunately.