iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Deborah Lam

Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 03/08/2025

Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” (1936)

A picture of two paragraphs from Benjamin’s The Storyteller about how modernity has removed death as a public process and component of life. “Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity, and when their end comes they are stowed away in sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs.”

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Deborah Lam @deborahlam.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

Back in York for the first time in over 5 years and am reminded of just how it feels to be in love with a place.

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Reposted by Deborah Lam

Glen O'Hara @gsoh31.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

The university death spiral is everywhere, and for everyone: they're all just on a convoy into the same black hole. Oxbridge, LSE and Imperial excepted, they must all *necessarily and inevitably* end up crushed to the size of an Oxo cube if we go on like this. www.bristol247.com/opinion/your...

bristol247.com

'The University of Bristol has embarked on a path like a death spiral'

UCU members are opposed to academic departments across the university having to make at least a 50% operating surplus

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Deborah Lam @deborahlam.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

Sorry but this wins best architecture pun

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Deborah Lam @deborahlam.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

Brought students to the @ashmoleanmuseum.bsky.social a couple of weeks ago, and had a great time talking to students about how poisonous and toxic everything was in nineteenth century art. At least they didn’t have to worry about microplastics?

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Deborah Lam @deborahlam.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

Today is print day at the Bristol Common Press, and Jamie and I have settled for a chaotic Pre-Raphaelites at the Oxford Union type energy.

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Reposted by Deborah Lam

Erin L. Thompson @artcrimeprof.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

I hadn't know that in 1920 E.M. Forster wrote (in a review of Wallis Budge's memoir) such a concise and magnificent f*ck you to colonial collecting in general and the British Museum in particular: archive.org/details/p1at... (attn @alexanderchee.bsky.social!)

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Reposted by Deborah Lam

Tate Collection @tate.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Max Beerbohm, Spring Cottage, Hampstead, 1860, 1917 botfrens.com/collections/14375/cont…

date inscribed
Bequeathed by Sir Hugh Walpole 1941

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Deborah Lam @deborahlam.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

I’m catsitting and forgot to make the bed after a nap, and Morty is so cute in his ammonite form so I guess I’ll just freeze. @pamplemoussepam.bsky.social

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Reposted by Deborah Lam

Mateusz Fafinski @calthalas.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

I have taken the resources that were in the budget and which you were probably saving for higher education Forgive me they were needed to feed the AI bubble and to dismantle the humanities

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Deborah Lam @deborahlam.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

This is why Romantic literature exists and you can’t convince me otherwise.

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Deborah Lam @deborahlam.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

‘Come on friendly quokkas and fall on Slough’ has now replaced ‘Not with a bang but a whimper’ as the best way the world ends.

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Deborah Lam @deborahlam.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

Actual photo of me in Edinburgh, fuelling my obsession with smoked fish

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Reposted by Deborah Lam

Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

I just want to teach them to write...

I'm Julius Ceasar being stabbed to death by ChatGPT, Google Search AI, Grammarly, Microsoft AutoCorrect

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Deborah Lam @deborahlam.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

When you have to be crucified but a banger just came on –

A medieval picture of Jesus, crucified, having a little boogie as his hips don’t lie (and aren’t nailed to the cross)

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Deborah Lam @deborahlam.bsky.social · 24/12/2024

That’s the Wordsworthian lyric for you

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Reposted by Deborah Lam

Kristin Grogan @kristingrogan.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Did Elizabeth Bishop write this

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Deborah Lam @deborahlam.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

Last year for Christmas, I asked for a head torch. This year I’m asking for a toolbox. They say most boys grow up and date someone like their mum, but my boyfriend is dating his dad.

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Deborah Lam @deborahlam.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

Today, I got taught what a womble is by English staff and postgrads, and I wonder now why wombles aren’t in the Life in the UK test as they seem much more culturally salient than Wordsworth.

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Reposted by Deborah Lam

Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

“Who can say how little we should know of many periods, but for their art? History (so called) has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; Art has remembered the people, because they created.”

Ada Phoebe Gorman’s embroidery of a William Morris commissioned pattern

The panels are embroidered in wool on linen and features a pattern of alternating rows of clumps of stylised flowers, large blue artichoke heads and blue flower-heads against a background arabesque pattern of stems, leaves and small flowers. It is embroidered using stem, satin, long & short, French knots, split and back stich.

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Reposted by Deborah Lam

Kye @kyebarker.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

To get in on the fun that @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social seems to be having posting William Morris designs, here are some doodles that Edward Burne-Jones made of Morris 1/4

Drawing of Morris exhausting his friend, Edward

Drawing of Morris making a wood block for a book

Drawing of Morris living large, sleeping after eating

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Deborah Lam @deborahlam.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

God is dead, Ruskin is rolling in his grave.

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Reposted by Deborah Lam

Sarah Mead Leonard @smeadleonard.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

proud to say that I am and will always be a deeply unserious person

Half an everything bagel, with William Morris's Strawberry Thief pattern overlain on the cream cheese.

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Deborah Lam @deborahlam.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Can’t stop thinking about how ‘il contrapasso’ in Dante’s Commedia refers to the laws of punishment in ‘Inferno’ that corresponds to the sin (‘opposite suffering’) – but this is the bum version, the opposite posterior.

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Reposted by Deborah Lam

Dinah Roe @preraphsrule.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Another delightful discovery from today's foray into cat #poems that influenced Christina #Rossetti: William #Blake's water colour illustrations to Thomas Gray's 'Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat'. #Romanticism #cats

Blake's watercolour depicts two winged goldfish-like creatures swimming below a cat, who is perched on a rectangle that reproduces the poem's title.

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Deborah Lam @deborahlam.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

“I’m sorry I couldn’t make the EDI meeting, I was too busy being overworked while being casualised and precariously-employed.”

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Deborah Lam @deborahlam.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

This is how blood gets spilled and wars get started.

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Deborah Lam @deborahlam.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

This is how Ruskin would react to recent events @lettersofnote.bsky.social

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Deborah Lam @deborahlam.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: my 19th century starts in 1739. No, you don’t want to know when I think the 18th century starts.

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