Alex Grafen
@alehoof.bsky.social
Interests include: web(s), Xunzi, Yiddish, Zukofsky.
Reposted by Alex Grafen
In the world for real—get it here: www.unmpress.com/978082636879...
December 31, 2025 at 1:38 AM
In the world for real—get it here: www.unmpress.com/978082636879...
Reposted by Alex Grafen
Striking BL staff, struggling to pay their rent, advised to consider not giving presents this year, and interim CEO, Jeremy Silver, has the nerve to tell them they ‘don’t live in a real world’. Only 17% of staff guaranteed the Living Wage (£14.80 ph) suggests acute familiarity with the ‘real world’.
British Library staff asked for a decent pay. Instead they got ‘a few money-saving present ideas’, such as ‘consider not giving presents this holiday season’. They are on strike this week. I wrote about it for @lrb.co.uk. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...
Anna Aslanyan | On the Picket Line
On Monday morning, more than a hundred people formed a picket line outside one of the entrances to the British Library...
www.lrb.co.uk
December 12, 2025 at 10:00 AM
Striking BL staff, struggling to pay their rent, advised to consider not giving presents this year, and interim CEO, Jeremy Silver, has the nerve to tell them they ‘don’t live in a real world’. Only 17% of staff guaranteed the Living Wage (£14.80 ph) suggests acute familiarity with the ‘real world’.
Weird, basic errors in Duolingo’s Mandarin course
October 18, 2025 at 5:28 PM
Weird, basic errors in Duolingo’s Mandarin course
Reposted by Alex Grafen
Morning.
🖼️ Cormorant, Ohara Koson.
🖼️ Cormorant, Ohara Koson.
August 27, 2025 at 5:52 AM
Morning.
🖼️ Cormorant, Ohara Koson.
🖼️ Cormorant, Ohara Koson.
Reposted by Alex Grafen
Revolting Gays are fundraising to keep their website online. It's a great archive of queer life in 1970s south London.
Read more and donate here: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/revolting-...
Read more and donate here: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/revolting-...
Revolting Gays
Revolting Gays, a fascinating history of the LGBT+ squatter community in South London in the 1970s and the Queer Walking Tour of Brixton
www.crowdfunder.co.uk
August 26, 2025 at 9:58 AM
Revolting Gays are fundraising to keep their website online. It's a great archive of queer life in 1970s south London.
Read more and donate here: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/revolting-...
Read more and donate here: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/revolting-...
Reposted by Alex Grafen
Ghazal Mosadeq of @pamenarpress
has translated Parnia's "The Extinguished Star"
pamenarpress.com/post/parnia-...
has translated Parnia's "The Extinguished Star"
pamenarpress.com/post/parnia-...
Parnia Abbasi, a 24-year-old Iranian poet, has been killed in last night's attacks by Israel against a residential complex in Tehran's Sattarkhan neighborhood. Her younger brother and parents were also killed in the airstrikes.
May her memory be a blessing
May her memory be a blessing
June 14, 2025 at 9:24 AM
Ghazal Mosadeq of @pamenarpress
has translated Parnia's "The Extinguished Star"
pamenarpress.com/post/parnia-...
has translated Parnia's "The Extinguished Star"
pamenarpress.com/post/parnia-...
Reposted by Alex Grafen
Paper is finally up and open access (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...), it's a sequel to an earlier paper where we'd argued that there's not good evidence that pre-publication peer review is a net benefit (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1093/...). So in this one we suggest an alternative.
June 14, 2025 at 8:28 AM
Paper is finally up and open access (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...), it's a sequel to an earlier paper where we'd argued that there's not good evidence that pre-publication peer review is a net benefit (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1093/...). So in this one we suggest an alternative.
“In ruse, by the candor and the reist, the pith is in the shell of the make”
NYT: “For One Hilarious, Terrifying Day, Elon Musk’s Chatbot Lost Its Mind”
That’s not what losing your mind looks like
THIS is what losing your mind looks like
That’s not what losing your mind looks like
THIS is what losing your mind looks like
May 18, 2025 at 9:11 AM
“In ruse, by the candor and the reist, the pith is in the shell of the make”
Reposted by Alex Grafen
Coming by year’s end—
May 14, 2025 at 3:16 PM
Coming by year’s end—
Reposted by Alex Grafen
Welcome to the public domain, UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929), the surrealist short from Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí that shocked cinema with dream logic, stark imagery & one gruesome eyeball.
More. ➡️ blog.archive.org/2025/01/01/w...
#PublicDomain #InternetArchive
More. ➡️ blog.archive.org/2025/01/01/w...
#PublicDomain #InternetArchive
May 12, 2025 at 2:07 PM
Welcome to the public domain, UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929), the surrealist short from Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí that shocked cinema with dream logic, stark imagery & one gruesome eyeball.
More. ➡️ blog.archive.org/2025/01/01/w...
#PublicDomain #InternetArchive
More. ➡️ blog.archive.org/2025/01/01/w...
#PublicDomain #InternetArchive
Reposted by Alex Grafen
www.circle.org/winterinyidd...
This Sunday: Winter in Yiddishland! (online) I'm teaching a beginner's class playing with adjectives and reading a poem about Winter by Communist résistant and poet Dovid Pliskin z"l. Also performing my Yiddish translation of Lionel Bart's Oom Pa Pa in the concert
This Sunday: Winter in Yiddishland! (online) I'm teaching a beginner's class playing with adjectives and reading a poem about Winter by Communist résistant and poet Dovid Pliskin z"l. Also performing my Yiddish translation of Lionel Bart's Oom Pa Pa in the concert
Winter in Yiddishland — The Workers Circle
www.circle.org
January 30, 2025 at 5:33 PM
www.circle.org/winterinyidd...
This Sunday: Winter in Yiddishland! (online) I'm teaching a beginner's class playing with adjectives and reading a poem about Winter by Communist résistant and poet Dovid Pliskin z"l. Also performing my Yiddish translation of Lionel Bart's Oom Pa Pa in the concert
This Sunday: Winter in Yiddishland! (online) I'm teaching a beginner's class playing with adjectives and reading a poem about Winter by Communist résistant and poet Dovid Pliskin z"l. Also performing my Yiddish translation of Lionel Bart's Oom Pa Pa in the concert
Latest Plastic Language excellent as usual!
Plastic Language w/ Nina Mingya Powles 22nd January 2025
Playing Spoken Word, Field Recordings, Folk, Ambient Jazz. Will René presents Plastic Language, a show exploring the spoken word across a variety of genres & recorded media. This volume features speci...
www.nts.live
January 24, 2025 at 7:28 PM
Latest Plastic Language excellent as usual!
Reposted by Alex Grafen
Woman behind the till at the petrol station to her colleague mopping the floor: ‘That floor is constant, I can’t keep up with that bloody floor’
January 15, 2025 at 9:19 AM
Woman behind the till at the petrol station to her colleague mopping the floor: ‘That floor is constant, I can’t keep up with that bloody floor’
Reposted by Alex Grafen
Just a quick thread of my publications in 2024. As usual, DM me if you can’t access
“The University as a Contested Space: ‘No Platforming’ controversies at British universities, 1968–1990”
www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edi...
“The University as a Contested Space: ‘No Platforming’ controversies at British universities, 1968–1990”
www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edi...
The University as a Contested Space | 7 | ‘No Platforming’ controversi
In recent years, there has been much attention paid by the media and by politicians to the alleged free speech ‘crisis’ at universities in Britain, with ‘woke’
www.taylorfrancis.com
December 19, 2024 at 8:22 AM
Just a quick thread of my publications in 2024. As usual, DM me if you can’t access
“The University as a Contested Space: ‘No Platforming’ controversies at British universities, 1968–1990”
www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edi...
“The University as a Contested Space: ‘No Platforming’ controversies at British universities, 1968–1990”
www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edi...
Reposted by Alex Grafen
In Super Mario World, letting Yoshi rest on top of a Control Coin block with the coins leading straight up and then pressing a P-Switch will cause Yoshi to become "abducted" by the blocks, ascending off the top of the screen.
December 4, 2024 at 4:18 PM
In Super Mario World, letting Yoshi rest on top of a Control Coin block with the coins leading straight up and then pressing a P-Switch will cause Yoshi to become "abducted" by the blocks, ascending off the top of the screen.
Reposted by Alex Grafen
My working of a Hungarian folk-song (from 'What's in Store').
December 3, 2024 at 7:36 AM
My working of a Hungarian folk-song (from 'What's in Store').
Reposted by Alex Grafen
This is a good an important piece but let's not overlook the bit where retired French railway workers are casually running a Batcave for train nerds
November 21, 2024 at 3:04 PM
This is a good an important piece but let's not overlook the bit where retired French railway workers are casually running a Batcave for train nerds
“Life there was always animated, there were always people, some working, some looking on. This was also the place where the gossips congregated, for it was from here that all spicy village news was set in circulation.”
Surprised to see “spicy” being used in this way in a text from 1931
Surprised to see “spicy” being used in this way in a text from 1931
November 15, 2024 at 1:48 PM
“Life there was always animated, there were always people, some working, some looking on. This was also the place where the gossips congregated, for it was from here that all spicy village news was set in circulation.”
Surprised to see “spicy” being used in this way in a text from 1931
Surprised to see “spicy” being used in this way in a text from 1931
Reposted by Alex Grafen
A little piece of mineralised sunshine! Agate is a translucent banded variety of quartz
Its name comes from a river in Sicily that was once called Achates (now called Dirillo). The Greek philosopher/naturalist Theophrastus found agate along this river between the 4th & 3rd centuries BCE #minerals
Its name comes from a river in Sicily that was once called Achates (now called Dirillo). The Greek philosopher/naturalist Theophrastus found agate along this river between the 4th & 3rd centuries BCE #minerals
November 7, 2024 at 8:24 PM
A little piece of mineralised sunshine! Agate is a translucent banded variety of quartz
Its name comes from a river in Sicily that was once called Achates (now called Dirillo). The Greek philosopher/naturalist Theophrastus found agate along this river between the 4th & 3rd centuries BCE #minerals
Its name comes from a river in Sicily that was once called Achates (now called Dirillo). The Greek philosopher/naturalist Theophrastus found agate along this river between the 4th & 3rd centuries BCE #minerals
Reposted by Alex Grafen
"Does the Audubon Society really want to avoid cooperating with its staff union so much that it is willing to run a test case that, if successful, could destroy the labor rights of 100+ million people in the country?" www.nlrbedge.com/p/audubon-so...
Audubon Society Argues NLRB Is Unconstitutional
More liberal non-profit madness.
www.nlrbedge.com
September 24, 2024 at 2:15 PM
"Does the Audubon Society really want to avoid cooperating with its staff union so much that it is willing to run a test case that, if successful, could destroy the labor rights of 100+ million people in the country?" www.nlrbedge.com/p/audubon-so...
Reposted by Alex Grafen
Happy Labor Day. I wrote a Wikipedia article about the gay, anarchist, anti-profit publishing collective Come!Unity Press (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come!Un...) after stumbling across a poster they printed in 1971.
bsky.app/profile/moll...
bsky.app/profile/moll...
Come!Unity Press - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
September 2, 2024 at 10:59 PM
Happy Labor Day. I wrote a Wikipedia article about the gay, anarchist, anti-profit publishing collective Come!Unity Press (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come!Un...) after stumbling across a poster they printed in 1971.
bsky.app/profile/moll...
bsky.app/profile/moll...
V pleased to have a poem in Gilded Dirt iv (the Bermuda Sadcore issue). Poem features a moving lodge and a cheese sandwich as well as parts of the Mengzi and a Python tutorial.
Gilded Dirt #4: Bermuda △ Sadcore
Featuring nearly thirty authors, our next issue takes a slomo plunge into the ocean in search of lost cities, cephalopods and that selkie we made friends with in ’93. The issue features poetry, fictio...
www.yumpu.com
September 2, 2024 at 10:53 PM
V pleased to have a poem in Gilded Dirt iv (the Bermuda Sadcore issue). Poem features a moving lodge and a cheese sandwich as well as parts of the Mengzi and a Python tutorial.
Transcriptions of five sample pages from the notebooks Louis Zukofsky used to write 80 Flowers can now be seen at z-site.net/80-flowers-n...
80 Flowers notebooks - Z-Site
The following transcriptions draw from two notebooks that Zukofsky used in preparing and writing 80 Flowers: a working notebook, in which Zukofsky gathered notes relevant to the project and developing...
z-site.net
May 23, 2024 at 8:53 AM
Transcriptions of five sample pages from the notebooks Louis Zukofsky used to write 80 Flowers can now be seen at z-site.net/80-flowers-n...