iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

adam @damfales.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

Today I defend my dissertation! Thank you to everyone on here who helped me get to this point! If you’re in Chicago, come to Jimmy’s at some point after 5pm to celebrate!

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

Two important updates: 1) I’ve started The Rehearsal season two 2) I’ve finished my dissertation

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

Getting a PhD has prepared me for a job, but the problem is that job is nineteenth-century law clerk.

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

just now learning that my university has announced the end of the university

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

This week I used my favorite dissertation productivity tool: telling someone you’re going to meet a deadline they didn’t ask for and that might be impossible

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

Are there polls here yet

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

Rereading Moby-Dick for the first time in a few years, and it is so wild that anyone ever thought Middlemarch was better than this

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

These thoughts are all still fresh, so I'm not sure how much they bear out, but Uncle Tom's Cabin seemed a lot more disjointed this time around, so it's hard to say it's doing the thing (aesthetically, I think, but maybe politically too) that we often refer to in our account of her sentimentality.

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

So I guess the joke about being gaslit is that I think there is the account we've received of why Stowe is "bad" (politically, aesthetically, etc.), but there are many parts where she seems to do something quite different and maybe better (aesthetically if not politically) from those accounts.

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

Ah, I see what you mean. I guess what I mean by gaslighting is that there are parts that I find great and even difficult to wrestle with—especially St. Clare's speech, and in this reading, I was stuck on the Prue sequence—but those passages seem almost distinct form the rest of the novel.

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

I'm coming around to it! I'm auditing a course in which we just read it, and the discussion has been making me reconsider some opinions on Stowe. I think there are many parts that are truly extraordinary (especially in the final third) but a lot of it leaves much to be desired.

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

You’re correct, but if posting this is wrong, I don’t want to feel right

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

I share an office with a 18c novel scholar, and this means I don’t have to read Clarissa because just ask questions whenever it seems relevant.

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

The other dumbest part is I know that quakers are basically just like other people but they say “thee” and “thou”

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Forever in awe of the work produced by my colleagues

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

Dumbest part of studying the nineteenth century is that I know how to spell “daguerreotype”

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

Can’t believe I am expected to sit here and write, the thing I have wanted to spend my life doing

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Reposted by adam

Charm City Art Spice @rahnealexander.com · 27/12/2024

this is the last week you can make "2024 hours to go" jokes

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

Happy Holidays / RIP Jesus and Joe Flaherty

A still from the TV show Freaks and Geeks in which Harold Weir (played by Joe Flaherty) sits at a dinner table and looks stern. The caption reads: "I know a baby who was born in a manger. You know what he’s doing now? He’s dead!"

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Posting an indefensible and niche take shortly before hitting my screentime limit on this app: we’re so back

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Time to reread the second best novel of the twentieth century (Contending Forces)

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Champion of two centuries

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Contending Forces (1900)!

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

In the opening year of the century we had Sister Carrie and Marrow, and then after that nothing but decline

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Rereading the greatest novel of the twentieth century (Marrow of Tradition)

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Rebecca Colesworthy @rcolesworthy.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

BREAKING: 8 MLA past presidents--incl Judith Butler and Chris Newfield--publicly call on the MLA Executive Council NOT to block a vote on a BDS Resolution. Please read and share their letter today in LitHub. Members deserve to debate and VOTE. lithub.com/8-former-mod...

lithub.com

Former Modern Language Association Presidents Call for BDS Vote

In late October, the leadership of the Modern Language Association (MLA)—one of the largest and wealthiest US scholarly organizations in the humanities—refused to allow the organization’s Delegate …

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

E Alex Jung always does such great work but wow what an awful set of things

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

The one-two punch of the Brian Jordan Alvarez piece and the Know Your Enemy courts under Trump 2.0 episode is doing bad things to my mental health

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

Moving from aesthetic judgment to interpretation is vital for scholars. But it is not vital for the critic. The move is a move because these activities are not the same kind of thing. The role of criticism is not that it interprets but that it alerts us to what we should be interpreting. V J Adams

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

Important reminder this holiday season:

A passage from Jacques Derrida’s Given Time that reads, “But keeping begins by taking. As soon as the other accepts, as soon as he or she takes, there is no more gift. For this destruction to occur, it suffices that the movement of acceptance (of prehension, of reception) last a little, however little that may be, more than an instant, an instant already caught up in the temporalizing synthesis, in the syn or the cum or the being-with-self of time. There is no more gift as soon as the other receives—and even if she refuses the gift that she has perceived or recognized as gift.”

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

I am about halfway through at the moment and this checks out

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

Is this what they call a mid life crisis?

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

According to my Letterboxd, mid films of this year include Challengers, Arcadian, Monkey Man, MaXXXine, and Alien: Romulus

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

This is like scrolling through my phone contacts

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adam @damfales.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

“All Things Are Too Small…tries to pass off general moral-aesthetic judgments of taste as precise acts of historically specific evaluation, of diagnosing a sick culture…. We learn nothing from this.” Mitch! Mitch!! Mitch!!!! www.clereviewofbooks.com/writing/becc...