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Alex Grafen

@alehoof.bsky.social
60 followers 169 following 19 posts

Interests include: web(s), Xunzi, Yiddish, Zukofsky.

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Reposted by Alex Grafen
Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
How complete + final the feeling as I lift its curve in the net is a hybrid lyric-essay that moves between elegy, translation, & ecological witness, finding its gravitational centre in a sketch by Barrie Cooke of two figures hauling a pike from a boat. www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page...
Book cover for How complete + final the feeling as I lift its curve in the net by Ellen Dillon, published by Broken Sleep Books. The background is deep teal, with the title and author name in lighter blue serif type at the top. A framed painting in the lower half depicts a large whale surrounded by a shoal of small sketched fish, with a small seated human figure visible inside a glowing cavity in the whale's body. The artwork has a dark, chalky, hand-drawn quality.
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Daniel Kennedy @fliglman.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
The next big trend will be non-liminal spaces: a sumptuous bedroom, the Hagia Sophia, a zoo
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Alex Grafen @alehoof.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
The “taste fault lines” here are fun
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Alex Grafen @alehoof.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
I was reminded of this story after coming across this poem from Snooty Tipoffs
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Jeepers creepers, where’d ya get those peepers,
jeepers creepers where’d ya get those eyes?
Oh those weepers, how they hypnotise.
(apol. Louis Armstrong)
[p.487 of Prynne Poems 2016-2024]
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Jeremy Noel-Tod @jntod.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
Seems a good day to remember that, in his book An Intelligent Person's Guide To Modern Culture, Hungary's favourite right-wing thinker Roger Scruton implied that the Pet Shop Boys made a 'minimal contribution' to their own records. They successfully sued him for libel. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/enterta...
news.bbc.co.uk
BBC News | ENTERTAINMENT | Libel damages for Pet Shop Boys
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Aves do Brasil @avesbrasil.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
🇧🇷Cardeal-da-bolívia 🌎Paroaria cervicalis O cardeal-da-bolívia é uma ave da ordem Passeriformes, da família Thraupidae. 📷 Luiz Damasceno
Um pássaro com a cabeça e pescoço vermelho vívido, corpo branco e asas cinza-escuro, empoleirado em uma ripa de madeira clara, com um fundo verde desfocado de folhagem. Suas garras cinzas agarram-se firmemente à madeira.
Atenção: O alt da imagem foi gerado automaticamente.
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Good Trailcams @goodtrailcams.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
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Mark Scroggins @markscroggins.bsky.social · 31/12/2025
In the world for real—get it here: www.unmpress.com/978082636879...
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Helen Goodman @helengoodman.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
Striking BL staff, struggling to pay their rent, advised to consider not giving presents this year, and interim CEO, Jeremy Silver, has the nerve to tell them they ‘don’t live in a real world’. Only 17% of staff guaranteed the Living Wage (£14.80 ph) suggests acute familiarity with the ‘real world’.
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Alex Grafen @alehoof.bsky.social · 18/10/2025
Weird, basic errors in Duolingo’s Mandarin course
Duolingo screenshot translating 星期三 as “week” rather than “Wednesday”Duolingo screenshot translating 怎么样 as “how is the weather” rather than “How are you?”
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Reposted by Alex Grafen
Rachel Deering @racheldeering.bsky.social · 27/08/2025
Morning. 🖼️ Cormorant, Ohara Koson.
The image is a Japanese woodblock print titled "Red Mask Cormorant on Rock" by Ohara Koson (1877-1945), a prominent artist of the shin-hanga movement. The artwork features a large, dark-feathered cormorant standing on a rocky outcrop, with its wings partially spread, possibly in the act of drying them or preparing for flight. The bird is rendered with detailed plumage and a distinctive long, pointed yellow beak. Waves break against the rocks it stands upon. In the background there are birds in flight in the distance.
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Polari Press @polari.press · 26/08/2025
Revolting Gays are fundraising to keep their website online. It's a great archive of queer life in 1970s south London. Read more and donate here: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/revolting-...
crowdfunder.co.uk
Revolting Gays
Revolting Gays, a fascinating history of the LGBT+ squatter community in South London in the 1970s and the Queer Walking Tour of Brixton
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Reposted by Alex Grafen
ArabLit & ArabLit Quarterly @arablit.bsky.social · 14/06/2025
Ghazal Mosadeq of @pamenarpress has translated Parnia's "The Extinguished Star" pamenarpress.com/post/parnia-...
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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 14/06/2025
Paper is finally up and open access (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...), it's a sequel to an earlier paper where we'd argued that there's not good evidence that pre-publication peer review is a net benefit (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1093/...). So in this one we suggest an alternative.
Jury Theorems for Peer Review
Marcus Arvan, Liam Kofi Bright, and Remco Heesen

Abstract:

Peer review is often taken to be the main form of quality control on academic research. Usually journals carry this out. However, parts of maths and physics appear to have a parallel, crowd-sourced model of peer review, where articles are posted on the arXiv to be publicly discussed. In this article we argue that crowd-sourced peer review is likely to do better than journal-solicited peer review at sorting articles by quality. Our argument rests on two key claims. First, crowd-sourced peer review will lead on average to more reviewers per article than journal-solicited peer review. Second, due to the wisdom of the crowds, more reviewers will tend to make better judgements than fewer reviewers will. We make the second claim precise by looking at the Condorcet jury theorem as well as two related jury theorems developed specifically to apply to peer review.
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Alex Grafen @alehoof.bsky.social · 18/05/2025
“In ruse, by the candor and the reist, the pith is in the shell of the make”
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Mark Scroggins @markscroggins.bsky.social · 14/05/2025
Coming by year’s end—
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Internet Archive @archive.org · 12/05/2025
Welcome to the public domain, UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929), the surrealist short from Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí that shocked cinema with dream logic, stark imagery & one gruesome eyeball. More. ➡️ blog.archive.org/2025/01/01/w... #PublicDomain #InternetArchive
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Annie Gottfried Cohen @annsplaining.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
www.circle.org/winterinyidd... This Sunday: Winter in Yiddishland! (online) I'm teaching a beginner's class playing with adjectives and reading a poem about Winter by Communist résistant and poet Dovid Pliskin z"l. Also performing my Yiddish translation of Lionel Bart's Oom Pa Pa in the concert
circle.org
Winter in Yiddishland — The Workers Circle
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Alex Grafen @alehoof.bsky.social · 24/01/2025
Latest Plastic Language excellent as usual!
nts.live
Plastic Language w/ Nina Mingya Powles 22nd January 2025
Playing Spoken Word, Field Recordings, Folk, Ambient Jazz. Will René presents Plastic Language, a show exploring the spoken word across a variety of genres & recorded media. This volume features speci...
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Jeremy Noel-Tod @jntod.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
Woman behind the till at the petrol station to her colleague mopping the floor: ‘That floor is constant, I can’t keep up with that bloody floor’
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Reposted by Alex Grafen
Evan @evansmithhist.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
Just a quick thread of my publications in 2024. As usual, DM me if you can’t access “The University as a Contested Space: ‘No Platforming’ controversies at British universities, 1968–1990” www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edi...
taylorfrancis.com
The University as a Contested Space | 7 | ‘No Platforming’ controversi
In recent years, there has been much attention paid by the media and by politicians to the alleged free speech ‘crisis’ at universities in Britain, with ‘woke’
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Supper Mario Broth @mariobrothblog.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
In Super Mario World, letting Yoshi rest on top of a Control Coin block with the coins leading straight up and then pressing a P-Switch will cause Yoshi to become "abducted" by the blocks, ascending off the top of the screen.
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Reposted by Alex Grafen
Trevor Joyce @trevorjoyce.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
My working of a Hungarian folk-song (from 'What's in Store').
Katy falls sick
by the walnut trees,
by the hazel trees,
by the nut-tree grove.
Her mother asks her
where’s the pain.
Not my head,
not my heart.
My head
doesn’t hurt,
my heart
doesn’t hurt.
Mother have my heart
cut out,
my calling heart,
my joy.
Have it cut out,
pack it up in a case
and carry it safe
to the shop.
When they ask you
what you sell,
say it’s Katy’s calling heart,
her joy.
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Reposted by Alex Grafen
Wojtek Borowicz @wojtekborowicz.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
This is a good an important piece but let's not overlook the bit where retired French railway workers are casually running a Batcave for train nerds
Quote:
That summer of 1993, as a last resort, we placed a classified ad in a French railway enthusiasts magazine: “Seeking information about 1914 Orient Express.” One issue later, our phone rang.

The voice on the other end proposed that we meet in their club, in the basement of Paris Gare de l’Est. We passed through a glass door marked “No Access” to discover a cavern of rooms filled with vintage railway posters, books, and the biggest working model train set I’ve ever seen. Our informants—a pair of retired French railway employees—were waiting. 

We explained what we were looking for, and what SNCF had told us. A glint appeared in the two gentlemen’s eyes. The elder of the pair leaned forward. “They think they destroyed the archives,” he said. “We took ‘em home. We’ve got ‘em.”
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Alex Grafen @alehoof.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
“Life there was always animated, there were always people, some working, some looking on. This was also the place where the gossips congregated, for it was from here that all spicy village news was set in circulation.” Surprised to see “spicy” being used in this way in a text from 1931
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Nadine, Hunter of Rocks @nadwgab.bsky.social · 07/11/2024
A little piece of mineralised sunshine! Agate is a translucent banded variety of quartz Its name comes from a river in Sicily that was once called Achates (now called Dirillo). The Greek philosopher/naturalist Theophrastus found agate along this river between the 4th & 3rd centuries BCE #minerals
A D-shaped slice of translucent orange agate standing vertically. It has concentric bands of darker orange running through it, and the sunlight shining in the background through the window highlights some of the finer banding. From the Natural History Museum, London's collections.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 24/09/2024
"Does the Audubon Society really want to avoid cooperating with its staff union so much that it is willing to run a test case that, if successful, could destroy the labor rights of 100+ million people in the country?" www.nlrbedge.com/p/audubon-so...
nlrbedge.com
Audubon Society Argues NLRB Is Unconstitutional
More liberal non-profit madness.
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Molly White @molly.wiki · 02/09/2024
Happy Labor Day. I wrote a Wikipedia article about the gay, anarchist, anti-profit publishing collective Come!Unity Press (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come!Un...) after stumbling across a poster they printed in 1971. bsky.app/profile/moll...
en.wikipedia.org
Come!Unity Press - Wikipedia
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Alex Grafen @alehoof.bsky.social · 02/09/2024
V pleased to have a poem in Gilded Dirt iv (the Bermuda Sadcore issue). Poem features a moving lodge and a cheese sandwich as well as parts of the Mengzi and a Python tutorial.
yumpu.com
Gilded Dirt #4: Bermuda △ Sadcore
Featuring nearly thirty authors, our next issue takes a slomo plunge into the ocean in search of lost cities, cephalopods and that selkie we made friends with in ’93. The issue features poetry, fictio...
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Alex Grafen @alehoof.bsky.social · 23/05/2024
Transcriptions of five sample pages from the notebooks Louis Zukofsky used to write 80 Flowers can now be seen at z-site.net/80-flowers-n...
z-site.net
80 Flowers notebooks - Z-Site
The following transcriptions draw from two notebooks that Zukofsky used in preparing and writing 80 Flowers: a working notebook, in which Zukofsky gathered notes relevant to the project and developing...
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Alex Grafen @alehoof.bsky.social · 18/10/2023
Lunch walk: kingfisher on a jetty, which flew away as I passed by; in the distance, what might have been a shoveler duck - if so , the first I’ve seen this winter.
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Alex Grafen @alehoof.bsky.social · 15/10/2023
A high-quality sentence in Lack (1965)“That redoubtable egg-collector the late Rev. F. C. Jourdain was once struck in the face by a nesting robin.” (p.162)
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Alex Grafen @alehoof.bsky.social · 14/10/2023
Dusk walk: visible breath, wood-smoke, dunnock, robin, bright white bindweed.
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