iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 22h

Yes, it did have a certain quality to it. I could just hear A's intonations perfectly 😅

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The Poetry Society @poetrysociety.org.uk · 08/10/2026

Congratulations to Anne Carson, winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature! www.theguardian.com/books/live/2...

theguardian.com

Canadian poet Anne Carson wins Nobel prize in literature 2026 – live

Decision announced by permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The slight nip in the air this morning made me think of this gem by Wordsworth 🍃🍂

Wordsworth's 'While not a leaf seems faded' (September 1815):

WHILE not a leaf seems faded; while the fields,
With ripening harvest prodigally fair,
In brightest sunshine bask; this nipping air,
Sent from some distant clime where Winter wields
His icy scimitar, a foretaste yields
Of bitter change, and bids the flowers beware;
And whispers to the silent birds, 'Prepare
Against the threatening foe your trustiest shields.'
For me, who under kindlier laws belong
To Nature's tuneful quire, this rustling dry
Through leaves yet green, and yon crystalline sky,
Announce a season potent to renew,
'Mid frost and snow, the instinctive joys of song,
And nobler cares than listless summer knew.

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London Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · 04/10/2026

‘Pope dextrously conjures a world of facts and experiences in which the rules of engagement are complex and exacting. Here, alliances are repeatedly tested and may suddenly dissolve, and one false move can result in expulsion from the charmed circle.’ Freya Johnston: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

lrb.co.uk

Freya Johnston · Wants, Frailties, Passions: Pope amuses himself

Alexander Pope’s works are full of the voices and characters of other people, friends and enemies, the living and the...

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Hester L-J @starcrossed2018.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

#ProdigalPrince my new #SlowShakespeare blog, reading 1 Henry IV every day, around 10 lines at a time, starts TOMORROW, 1 October! Here's one of my favourite Hals (and actors): Geoffrey Streatfeild @the-rsc.bsky.social 2007-8, with David Warner as Falstaff.

A photograph of a play in performance. An older man with luxuriant white hair and beard is looking past the camera, holding up both his hands. He's wearing a crumpled white shirt and a reddish-brown leather jerkin, undone and unkempt, over an ample belly, with a jaunty red scarf. Sitting behind him, feet up on a bed, is a younger man with slicked down blond hair, wearing cream trousers tucked into black boots, a messy white shirt and cream jerkin. And quite a lot of eyeliner.

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I've just reread all the history plays and I agree. On this reading, I was struck by their dynamism, pace and all-round proper drama. More of this.

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Desperate plea: would anyone happen to have access to Alan Howard's edition of John Eccles's Incidental Music, Part 3 (2023)? I need to see the notes for one of his songs, and I can't get to it for a while... @awinkler90.bsky.social?

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Yes, Leonie!! Many congratulations! 🥳

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I'm really enjoying Gibbon's footnotes in Decline and Fall. My favourite so far is this banger about 'camelopardalis'* (aka the giraffe): 'The tallest, the most gentle, and the most useless of the large quadrupeds.' 🦒 Ouch. *Q: Why don't we use the Latin? It's so brilliantly apt because ungainly.

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

My last teaching job was at Nottingham. Great people doing great work despite all this. They deserve so much better. ✊

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Just out of #SenseAndSensibility. Stick to novels, kids; film adaptations just break your heart 😞

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Saving this withering put-down from Austen for my next meeting: 'Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.' — Sense and Sensibility, vol. 2, ch.14

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Dr Charlotte Parsonson-Young @charlie-l-y.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

On Saturday 10th October @cromwellorg.bsky.social is holding our annual Study Day, this year in Worcester on the theme of 'Ending the Civil Wars'. All welcome, and tickets are available for both in-person or online attendance. Registration closes 2nd October. #earlymodern #britishcivilwars

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London Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · 18/09/2026

As universities are cutting English degree programmes, Colin Burrow isn't the only one asking ‘what’s the point of literary criticism?’ But he has several answers, and in this episode he joins @moonjets.bsky.social to discuss them. Listen here: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

podcasts.apple.com

What’s the point of literary criticism?

Podcast Episode · The LRB Podcast · 18 September · 37min

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Annalisa Nicholson @apuddleofmuddle.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

✏️ Mark your diaries! Next month @cemskcl.bsky.social, Kerry Apps, Hannah Dawson, Catharine MacLeod, & ME will be talking about Restoration women, their libertinism, their consumerism, & their contact with the expanding world. Book here & spread the word 🌍 kingsearlymodern.co.uk/events/world...

kingsearlymodern.co.uk

Worldly Women at the Court of Charles II: Exile, Excess, and the Expanding World — CEMS KCL Blog

Join CEMS for a conversion on women and the Restoration, featuring Dr. Annalisa Nicholson, Dr. Kerry Apps, Dr. Hannah Dawson, and Catherine MacLeod.

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

They're bastions of free speech, though, yeah?

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becimay @becimay.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

My TLS piece on the Exeter cuts ✨

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

A true powerhouse and an inspiration this one, as are you all. The waste of talent, knowledge, and skill is unconscionable. Give them hell indeed.

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Shakespeare Bulletin @shaxbull.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Stephen Watkins reviews Shakespeare’s Globe’s 2025 production of Troilus and Cressida, directed by Owen Horsley 🎭: www.shakespearesglobe.com/whats-on/tro... 📰: muse.jhu.edu/article/998132 📷: Helen Murray

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Starting Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. See you all in 2031 or so! (Unless, you know, we decline and fall ourselves before then...)

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Fair. But I will not be moved on this.

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

The absolute pits is As You Like It. No drama, no theatre; characters (I use that term quite incorrectly) just spaffing off about nothing. No one cares. It's tedium ad nauseum et absurdum. It's boring to read and even more soporific to watch. Awful. (Man, I feel good getting that off my chest!)

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I'm so glad Faustus is on your list. It's so crap.

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Fortuitous cross-over in my reading? I recently finished Martin Amis's Money, in which John Self gets badly caught out by his date: 'Silently but irrefutably I farted in the cab back to her duplex.' Evidently, he'd have benefited from borrowing Rabelais's copy of

Arts honestè fartandi in societate [The Art of Farting Politely in Public], a book in Pantagruel's library. From Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, book 2, chapter 7.

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Simon Kővesi @kovesi.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Colin Burrow, defining literary criticism, brilliantly, in the LRB: @lrb.co.uk

In the LRB, Colin Burrow writes:

But to return to the point of it all. Literary criticism is primarily about learning to read very complex creations and situations carefully. That requires a willingness to think and rethink, to take a thought and run with it until it either ceases to be viable or (ideally) generates its own internal impetus. It requires accepting that sometimes you get it wrong and that sometimes other people get it wrong. It makes you pull together a whole range of messy human bits and pieces, from autobiography to philology to counting lines and underlining letters and seeing almost invisible patterns, through histories of individuals and of peoples. All of this can go towards understanding the way a poem might cohere or interestingly not cohere. You’ve got to be bold sometimes in pushing a point and sometimes you’ve got to be humble about things you can’t see or haven’t seen. There’s a dash of politics, or more than a dash if you want that, and there could be a dash of religion too, if that’s your thing. But there has to be a great measure of self-awareness, about where you stand or sit or the corners into which you have been pushed by where you come from. Literary criticism is a supremely occasional skill, where you have to be bold enough to operate where there aren’t any clear rules and make up your own, and decide for yourself what you think, and maybe set that beside what other cleverer people have thought. Someone else might come along and see it differently, but if you’ve made them argue with you then you’ve done something worthwhile. If that doesn’t have a point to it, just in itself, then probably living doesn’t have a point to it either, because making ad hoc judgments on the basis of a mosaic of information and misinformation about people and about what you should say on a particular occasion, even a difficult one, is what we all need to do every day. Literary criticism is like the mess of life, an exercise in tact and understanding.

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Dryden scholars, not so much. We don't get asked to lots of parties, either.

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Disgraceful stuff. Thinking of you all today.

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

There's nothing quite like it, is there. Solidarity. Hoping, always, for brighter times... 🙃

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Thanks. I'm in meetings discussing the new term and all my academic colleagues are gearing up and I miss that feeling. I know it's all a bin-fire, but this will be my third year not in the classroom...

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Apropos of nothing really: my god, I miss teaching😞.

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Catching up with mon cher ami this weekend. It's been a while.

A copy of François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, translated by Thomas Urquhart and Pierre Le Motteux.

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RILCH at LJMU @rilch-ljmu.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

#CfP: “Stuart Drama” conference, 6-9 July 2027, @ljmuofficial.bsky.social. Abstracts by 2 October 2026 #Skystorians #EarlyModernEvents stuartdrama.com

Text: “Stuart Drama”, surrounded by a host of seventeenth-century playwrights.

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Real back-to-school feel, as we return to #choir rehearsals this week at #Colchester #Choral Society. This season, we have fantastic programmes of #Britten, #Bach and more. Do join us if you're able: info and tickets available at colchesterchoralsociety.co.uk/concerts/

Concert programme information for Colchester Choral Society's 2026/27 season, starting with a Benjamin Britten anniversary concert on 14 November at St Botolph's Church at 7.30pm.

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Had a great day visiting Benjamin Britten's house (The Red House) and concert hall (Snape Maltings) in Aldeburgh, Suffolk today. The exhibition at the house was particularly good: highly recommended for know-alls and know-nothings alike. The weather was suitably atmospheric - Grime-y - too...

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

🤔 Hmm. I just want her Ovid tbh.

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Andrew McRae @mcraeandrew.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

‘Even prestigious Russell Group institutions like Exeter are not safe: it has recently announced hundreds of job cuts that fall disproportionately on the humanities, with English set to lose 25 percent of its staff.’ Isabel Armstrong excellent on the value of English tribunemag.co.uk/2026/08/savi...

tribunemag.co.uk

Saving English

The government’s drive for ‘vocational’ education is accelerating the death of the humanities, at a time when the study of literature is more vital than ever.

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Amazing, thank you! What a production! Presumably that means the paper is from 27 Feb, so that will enable me to narrow it down a bit 🙂

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

It's been resting inside the book for 82 years, and you can tell where it sat all that time: they clearly gave up at the end of Act 2 of Lohengrin.

Stained mark where the newspaper bookmark has been.

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

This scrap fell out of my new/old Wagner. From the review of Jennie Tourel's performance as Carmen at the City Centre Opera Company, I date it to Feb 1944, which is corroborated by a reference to Operation Hailstorm (17-18 Feb 1944) on the reverse. Can anyone suggest which NY paper this is?

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Excited by this new arrival: Librettos of Wagner Operas (1938), parallel-text, with 'principal airs'. I know what I'm doing for the rest of the week! 🎼🎶🎭

Page of Tristan and Isolde, with musical motif.

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Yeah, it's so wild. Basically just screaming it! Very envious you did it at the Proms: that acoustic 😱. We did it at Winchester Cathedral, which was a real treat.

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Stephen Watkins @drawcansir.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

I remember our choir master, years ago, warning us in rehearsals that we'd fight against the Berlioz Requiem but that a moment would come when we'd all fall hook, line, and sinker for it. He was absolutely right. It was the Lacrimosa that did for me. Truly awesome. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

bbc.co.uk

BBC Radio 3 - BBC Proms, 2026, Pappano Conducts Berlioz’s ‘Requiem’

Live at the BBC Proms: London Symphony Chorus and Orchestra conducted by Antonio Pappano.

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