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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

Thrilled! Ecstatic! In raptures!

MY JANE AUSTEN BREAKUP ALBUM
By John Owen Havard
Non-fiction: Memoir
Yesterday
Professor at SUNY-Binghamton John Owen Havard's MY JANE AUSTEN BREAKUP ALBUM, a story of emotional discovery and self-reinvention in the wake of a crushing breakup, drawing wisdom from the moral philosophy of Jane Austen's novels, pitched as Andrew Sean Greer's LESS meets HOW PROUST CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE, to Helen Rouner at Penguin Press, at auction, by Alia Hanna Habib at The Gernert Company (NA).

John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

...so it will be very interesting how the parents of the many students, from all kinds of backgrounds, with such high school learning plans respond to Trump's proposed dismantling of the Department of Education!

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Great point. Rather than privates being at an unfair advantage, state students are at an unfair disadvantage. As far as the U.S. goes, I can only comment on my large state Uni, where students from all kinds of backgrounds come in with disability (etc) accommodations dating from high school plans...

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

The Harris campaign have blamed the timeline and seem to think they did nothing wrong and that she was a great candidate...

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

That said, she was sometimes obligated to write on the stairs. I am sure the women with no financial independence who escaped abusive situations to protect their children will be sympathetic, such are the common struggles faced by all Women.

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

I won't walk out of a bar if it is playing Michael Jackson (a predatory child molester, if you believe the survivors, whose abuse *was also enabled by and not incidental to* the art and its self-mythology). I wouldn't take Munro off a syllabus. I don't know if I'll ever open one of her books again.

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

At times she sounds a bit psychotic, which she also wrote about (see "Dimension," raising the question of whether psychopaths can write about psychopaths, which presumably they can, since the psychopath in that story writes to the mother of their child, who he has killed, about being a psychopath).

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

The point is not just that she wasn't a sprightly Canadian lady with a twinkle in her eye. It's that she ultimately folded this depravity into her personal self-mythology. She made it inseparable from the art. She used people as fodder, as content. Her own children, my god.

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

That said, I never had any personal attachment to Alice Munro, beyond a vague feeling that I might not enjoy having her as a neighbor.

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

(Reading the article whose online title is "Alice Munro's Passive Voice" and whose print title is "You Won't Get Free Of It." I would have been fine with "The Monstrosity of Alice Munro.")

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

Does anyone know whether PLUTOCRACY is based on a real board-game? (he asked meaningfully). From Alan Hollinghurst.

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

That’s Gavin and that Stacey and that’s Nessa and that’s Smithie (James Corden, who I once observed serially eating three hamburgers).

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

Is anyone else watching the “Gavin and Stacey” Christmas special with an insistent family member? Know you are not alone.

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

X, Threads, Facebook being the other three. I remain very active on Instagram @johnowen82

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Abandoning this site will mean having FOUR defunct social media profiles!

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

Why do I feel so rough? Do you think it was all the wine?

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

Not really passing the "spark joy" test here, is it?

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

Watching QUEER did not make me curious to know more about William S. Burroughs, to be completely frank about it.

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

I’m sorry but “we were successful where we campaigned!” is a bit like saying “my garden isn’t a total mess in the small, familiar area that I have devoted my energies to gardening intently (helped out by a small army of gardening volunteers)!”

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Frank O’Hara, our great poet of the Troubles.

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

I just binged “Say Nothing” ask me anything about the history of Northern Ireland.

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

I’ll be on Instagram for the foreseeable future, find me there! @johnowen82

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

According to the book I am reading, “what used to be called lace-curtain Irish”!

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

I was today years old when I realized that Frank O’Hara was Irish.

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

It’s finally our season on this new app. What could go wrong?

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

Fellow Blue-Sags, rise up! ♐️

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

“Really holding space with that and feeling power in that… I’m in queer media, so…”

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Reposted by John Havard

John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

I think it is best for everyone involved that we do not compare this space to Twitter.

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

I think it is best for everyone involved that we do not compare this space to Twitter.

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Reposted by John Havard

John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

I’m not an expert, but I feel like this was also an argument behind Brexit. And it didn’t work. But paging the experts! @stephenkb.bsky.social @pickardje.bsky.social @chrislhayes.bsky.social

But there is an intellectual movement behind immigration restriction that seeks to reshape the relationship between employers and their sources of labor.
According to this rising conservative faction, most closely identified with Vice President-elect JD Vance, cutting off the supply of vulnerable foreigners will force employers to seek out U.S.-born workers.

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

I’m not an expert, but I feel like this was also an argument behind Brexit. And it didn’t work. But paging the experts! @stephenkb.bsky.social @pickardje.bsky.social @chrislhayes.bsky.social

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

The stones. The slaps. The feet. 🪨👋🦶🏻

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

@johnowen82 is my Instagram handle btw, not the Other Thing. Here right now but always there!

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Second or Third edition... it's a really tough call.

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

“Snow on the Ground! ~ What is to Become of Us?” Jane Austen, March 7, 1814.

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

“Snow on the Ground! ~ What is to Become of Us?” Jane Austen, March 7, 1814.

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

I am going to be so productive after I binge another four episodes of “Say Nothing.”

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Reposted by John Havard

Sophie Coulombeau @sophiecoulombeau.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

I just spent three hours on a train sitting next to a girl who took several photos of her copy of Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo but did not open it once.

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Reposted by John Havard

Briony Neilson @brionyneilson.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Another day, another design for a ballet costume for a vegetable. Today I give you: the carrot (pen & ink and watercolour over pencil, V&A)

A drawing of a costume for a carrot with an orange upper with tapering end and a green base

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Anyway, it’s a fucking terrible situation. For underemployed young men. For undocumented workers who have been here for years. But the solutions being proposed oscillate between fantastical and chilling.

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

This is totally something I would have written.

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

I have some sympathy for the hillbilly-elegy-ization of it all. But as the article concludes, “It’s not like, by getting rid of the other guys, suddenly employers will say, ‘Oh, great, here’s this reserve army of labor sitting there, raring to go.’”

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Maybe it’s fairer to say that it didn’t happen than that it didn’t work. Immigration remained very high under the Tories, the NHS had to scramble to get nurses after Covid, nobody wants food to cost more, etc. It probably wouldn’t have worked, but it also wasn’t tried, either.

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Anyway. A REAL PAIN. Tender, raw, and unexpected. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ And I need to talk to someone about the scene with the stones at the grandmother’s house!

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Will Sharpe (unrecognizable!) was so good as a bumbling British tour guide. Keiran Culkin is recognizable and also unrecognizable, so great. It is annoying that Jesse Eisenberg made a film this good.

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John Havard @johnhavard.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

I really, *really* enjoyed this I was really not expecting to!

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