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Jonathan Goodwin

@joncgoodwin.bsky.social

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

It amazes me how some academics never learned from S&W!

"I. Only the dead, such is the satirist's declaration of intent. The product conforms. Juvenal attacks no person or group invested with power and influence; and the poems disclose no concern with matters of high politics in his own time. Themes and examples come out of the past, Domitianic in the first instance, turning later for supplement to the reign of Nero, to the 'luxuriam imperii veteris,' as he styles it (4.137)." (Syme, "Juvenal, Pliny, Tacitus" AJP, Summer 1979)

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

To be fair, there was quite a lot of codswallop circulating about Joyce at this time, but still:

"talkie-1930
James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1869, and was educated at Clongowes Wood College, in Kildare. He adopted a literary career, and began by contributing poems to the Dublin Nation and other periodicals. In 1899 he published a volume called "Chamber Music," which was followed in 1900 by "Shorter Poems." His most ambitious work, "Ulysses," appeared in 1906, and was succeeded in 1911 by "The Songs of Ulster." Joyce has also written several plays, including "The Shadow of the Glen," "Deirdre," and "The Dynasts." He has lived abroad for some years, and has published two books in French, "Lea Longues et les Breves" (1908) and "Lea Pécheurs d'Islande" (1910). His latest work is "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (1913). Joyce's books are distinguished by a vivid and original imagination, and a style at once forcible and picturesque. In personal character he is said to be gentle, simple, and sincere. He belongs to no school of thought, but stands apart, thinking and feeling for himself. Address: Care of Messrs. Maunsel and Company, Limited, 50, Lower Baggot Street, Dublin."

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

A table of NFL conference championship games by winning percentage on basis of points scored.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

Davenport to Laughlin on reading and completism: (hadn't heard this habit of Harry Levin's before, though I am Levin's Enkelschüler, if that is in fact the term):

"Reading opera omnia. You would be horrified to know how little I've read. Being a prof was a matter of reading the same things over and over. I'm trying to repair my ignorance. It was Harry Levin's practice to read ALL of any author, an ideal few can live up to, and why should one when there are authors who invite rereading and study? I would much rather have seen all paintings ever done, and all statuary." From Davenport's Letters to Laughlin, p. 220

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

A potential "sleeping beauty" here, in terms of citation potential:

Google scholar screenshot showing a (fictitious?) reference to Freddy Lounds, a character from Thomas Harris's Red Dragon.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

I collect inspirational footnotes and share them from time to time:

Here's the OCR transcription of the text in the image:

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*The Making of Victorian England* (London, 1962), 14. In fact I tried to count and failed. Some time ago I spent the better part of two years coding the evaluative language used in thousands of historians' book reviews, punching IBM cards, and attempting to correlate the language employed with dozens of other variables having to do with historians' generation, field, status, etc. It was a total waste of time, producing nothing intelligible and permanently dampening my enthusiasm for introducing quantitative rigor into intellectual history.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

I approve of this general concept and am working on the stats of Roderick Hudson and Guy Domville as we speak, but check out the intelligence and especially wisdom scores here, if you have read the source material:

Dragon Magazine feature showing Cugel from Jack Vance's purported D&D stats, comically inflated.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 22/09/2024

From an issue of Byte devoted to C, perhaps this is why Hugh Kenner started writing a column for them:

"A C Language Primer/Part 1: Constructs and Conventions in C/by James Joyce" Byte Magazine, January 1983.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 10/08/2024

Cyd Peach, when she takes Tom Wambsgans into her office, has a copy of Henry James: A Life in Letters on her self, alongside a volume by Tom Brokaw.

Cyd Peach's office bookshelf in Succession, S2E2. Henry James: A Life in Letters is on the far left, mildly incongruous.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 06/03/2024

Regarding the news: www.axios.com/2024/03/06/a...

A quotation on remote delivery in higher education from DeLillo's Americana, pp. 119-120.

Screenshot from Real Genius, showing tape recorders recording tape-recorder.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 05/01/2024

Another Colette, known to me from her association with Bertrand Russell, but was that satyr capable of this?

A passage describing the actor Colette O'Niel (Lady Constance Malleson) rowing to Sweden in June 1941 from Finland and having to forage in the forest in Sweden for forty days. From The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914-1970, p. 394.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 03/12/2023

I participated in the Faculty Appreciation Clinic. Here I am pictured holding a racquet with green strings (Hyper-G 120mm).

A group of University of Louisiana at Lafayette faculty and the women's tennis team and coaches after a "Faculty Appreciation" clinic.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 27/09/2023

With all the buzz about training sets and so on, here is an open-access wizard-vicuna model delivering a straightforward and accurate plot summary:

A false summary of Don DeLillo's Players generated by the wizard-vicuna large language model.

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