iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I don't know how this happened but a rogue AI swarm has hacked my chapter draft and added a long, theoretically-dense digression on a subject that is tangential to my argument

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

"tv is the new novel" oh really? It's the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given? Grow up

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

How it feels to hyphenate an adjectival phrase but not hyphenate an identical noun phrase

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Woke up in a cold sweat from a dream in which Melvyn Bragg asked me to give a quick definition of modernism

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Would be interesting to stage a Shakespeare play but in a modern setting or possibly another historical era. Has anyone tried this

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Citing your book without reading it is a sign of respect in my culture

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Using an em dash: my readers will relish this elegant parenthetical remark Reading an em dash:

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Ohhh my god are you trying to erase the traces of your own personality from your novel? Should we tell everyone? Should we throw a party? Should we invite Flaubert

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

(taking a drag on my cigarette) I haven't used punctuation since 1995 my entire oeuvre is one uninterrupted sentence

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

What is it called when you read a book with a subtle or innovative thesis, briefly possess a new picture of the topic, but then gradually forget the details until you basically assimilate its argument to the common sense view you already held

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Everyone who writes more floridly than me is an affected windbag. Anyone who writes more tautly is a thin-lipped automaton. Only I know the exactly correct balance between stylistic exuberance and measured prose

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Nice try but that's a straw man argument. My actual suggestion was to build a man out of sticks and mud

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Literature courses should simply be about great books. Discussion should focus on how great they are. There is no need to mention anything other than the books themselves

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

It's actually autoautofiction. It's about a character who resembles me writing a novel about a character who resembles him

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

I'm sorry for the confusion. When we said we "green lit" your screenplay, we meant that it would forever remain tantalisingly out of your reach, like the American dream itself

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

That's just humanismslop. You only like it because you intuitively regard human flourishing as an intrinsic good

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Everyone who works harder than me is guilty of romanticizing their academic calling. Everyone who does less work than me is a lazy hack. Only I know the exactly correct balance between being exploited and phoning it in

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

The first sentence of Wide Sargasso Sea doesn't get talked about enough as one of the all time great openers: "They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did."

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Has Bryan Johnson tried commissioning a cursed portrait to keep in his attic

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

A "trivia night"? To me, all human culture and society is important. It's called history from below, maybe look it up sometime

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

I'm going to push back slightly on that opening sentence. Does Buck Mulligan need to be both "stately" and "plump"? Some readers might find this level of detail excessive

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

(arguing with the bookseller) actually in the early modern period "romance" meant a fanciful narrative set in an imaginary or exotic world so there is no need to have a separate "romantasy" section

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Hillbilly elegy? You mean Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751)?

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Ohhh my god are you telling the story out of chronological order? Should we tell everyone? Should we throw a party? Should we invite Homer

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Getting ready to ask a question related to my own research interests

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

A classics professor is clearly not qualified to evaluate a movie. To correctly appreciate the medium of film, you need a degree in English literature

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

I am proud of being an autodidact but unfortunately my instructor was incompetent

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

This note gets it just right. You apologise for eating the plums, express sympathy for their owner and explain your motivation for eating them. Just one note: consider offering to replace the plums. This small gesture could do a lot to smooth things over

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Humanities academics tend to propose monocausal explanations for complex phenomena. This tendency is responsible for the crisis of the humanities

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

IMAX is the only format that renders the dialogue as dactylic hexameters. In ordinary theatres it's plain old blank verse

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

My main problem with Nolan's Odyssey is that it is only a copy of a copy, reality itself being merely a copy of the original Forms. Ultimately all such simulacra are a civic ill

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Every nonfiction book is called like Republic of Cheese: How Gouda Saved Democracy and Created the Modern World

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

When people ask me for fiction recommendations, I simply hand them this. Why read a single text when you could understand mimesis itself?

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Some personal news. I have accepted a job at Anthropic—the AI company—overseeing em-dash usage

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

I don't read classic literature because it is not relevant to contemporary life. Only the fiction published in the most recent issue of the New Yorker can really reflect modern realities

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

"I reached my reading goal" oh really? You determined how the work's form registers the contradictions of its historical circumstances? I didn't think so

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

A common mistake with breakout groups is to hover nearby, which makes students self-conscious. Instead, I have developed a technique where I actually leave the room and then surreptitiously re-enter disguised as a student myself

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

People say that academics spend an inordinate amount of time exploring niche research questions, but this is unfair. We also make exaggerated claims about the significance of these questions

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Someone described my paper as "generative"

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

The culture is in decline. For gen x, a hidden recess in your workplace led to the inside of John Malkovitch's head. For gen z, it's just a series of empty spaces and some furniture

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

"Happy Bloomsday" Uhhh this is incredibly insensitive towards people who lack interiority. Maybe consider who your celebration of stream of consciousness narration is excluding

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

These research questions are situated at the intersection of this fellowship application and my desire to be awarded a fellowship

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Academic writing should be addressed neither to the public nor to other academics. It should be addressed to a single interlocutor with whom you have a petty rivalry and whose work you are trying to discredit

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Classic novels simply aren't relatable. Even contemporary literature is often about things I have never personally experienced. My preferred genre is autobiographical fiction that I have written myself

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Everyone who reads fictional narratives that are shorter than the ones I read and calls them novels is cheating. Everyone who reads longer fictional narratives is showing off. Only I know exactly how long a novel should be

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

It is ridiculous to accuse English departments of destroying literature. We are much too busy indoctrinating our students with the ideas of Michel Foucault to worry about that

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Have writers considered thematising the vexed relationship between representation and reality. Perhaps in a self-reflexive vein

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