Matthew Harrison

@matthewharrison

pizza advocate; english professor

1,189 Following1,690 Followers4,145 Posts

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Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· 1d

Trying an adaptation of @zugenia.bsky.social's "Where Do You Know From" exercise for my 1st year writing class. Original assignment here: www.maifeminism.com/where-do-you... (full text of my assignment in ALT text if you want to steal it!)

Worksheet: Where are you coming from?
We’ll take a few minutes to think and then a few more minutes to write answers to a couple of these questions. Use full sentences.
1. What are your intellectual interests? That is, what are you so curious about that you read, watch, research, practice, or talk to learn more? Your answer might be a particular question or field of study, but it could also be about related to your relationships, hobbies, or sports.

2. How did you get interested in these ideas? Given only a few minutes, how would you tell the story of you starting to care about these questions? (Did it start with your family? With something you read or saw? A teacher or coach? Something else?)

3. How have these interests changed your life? (Have you traveled to competitions all over the state? Picked a major to follow your interests? Filled your room with movie posters? Learned to cook Korean food?)

4. How do you want your college experience to help you pursue the ideas that matter the most to you? (It could be through classes, through clubs, through competitions or performances, through the friends you make, the opportunities you take up, or something else entirely.)

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· 10d

@kqandrews.bsky.social this is the best google AI result for a book search i have ever gotten.

google search for animals i never saw.

the ai result: Most people never see rare, elusive animals like the deep-diving spade-toothed whale, the subterranean pink fairy armadillo, or the nocturnal pangolin because they live in extreme habitats, have tiny populations, or hide underground and in the deep sea

pictured: some ridiculous cute animal thing. looks like a failed pokemon.

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Jun 19

mom, someone's being mean in the groupchat again

me: God gives his most annoying battles to his whiniest warriors
friend: Gosh Matthew I can only imagine your battles

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Jun 18

I have been remiss in promoting this Shakespeare Association seminar, called Close-Reading Now, that @laurakolb.bsky.social and I are running next April. We're gathering folks who want to delve deep into particular poems. (They made me cut the line banning all abstract theoretical discussion.)

Close Reading Now
Matthew P. Harrison
(West Texas A&M University)
Laura Kolb
(Stony Brook University)
What does close reading mean for early
modernists? How does it make meaning,
particularly now? This seminar invites
papers that develop close readings
of individual early modern poems.
Participants will engage the nuances
of each other's practice, with broader
methodological discussion emerging
from the details of our work.

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Jun 11

ProQuest's AI generates "search suggestions" based on what you type into Early English Books Online. The search suggestions are conceptually connected, but they don't reflect what EEBO is--a database of transcribed early modern print--and so every single one is useless.

Searching for "bacon" yields topics like "culinary traditions" or "cultural significance."

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Jun 11

Tudor preacher Thomas Brice's ballad "Against Filthy Writing" has been automatically added to AllPoetry, illustrated by a photograph of the 16th century writer and an AI summary that's wrong on the details.

The Thomas Brice page. He's illustrated with a photograph of (I think) a historical rugby player

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Jun 11

Googling pseudonymous early modern tracts now often produces a hallucinated scholarly attribution. At first I would check the evidence, wondering if I'd missed something. Here's an example of how it makes up a scholarly consensus on attribution: Robert Parsons, Matthew Grove, Anthony Munday...

this time the AI attributes it to Munday.

Here, it's printed by Shakespeare's dad.

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Jun 2

Sparing you two most of the rabbithole I went down (Roman casserole dishes!), but I thought you might need the aubergine poetry.

To begin with, the earliest mention of eggplant dishes calledmusakkaoccurs in the early eighteenth century in the poems of the Turkish poetIbrahim Tirsi (d. 1727), where he refers to the dish several times. Hespecifies making it with dried eggplant in the following couplet:If I had a succulent piece of meat, my heart’s desireWould bemusakkamade with dried aubergines.Or the long curved type:If your temperament inclines you to eat musakka,Take local aubergine, all the slender arched variety.Or with artichoke:If there is a king of vegetables, the artichoke deserves that office. Letmusakkabe made, no other dish is worth

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Jun 1

george turberville invents the incel, 1567

screenshot of poetry:

I did pretend, pretend,
To be hir Friend
Vnto the end, but she refusde
My louing hart, and me abusde.

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· May 15

Apparently a drone image of the damage done by the fires south of town last night. 14,000 acres burned so far in just the Hunggate fire.

a suburban neighborhood, surrounded by the brown grass of a drought in the grasslands. to the south (up on the picture) huge amounts of blackened terrain.

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· May 12

...my drafts are so much worse here than they were on twitter

It's my birthday, so people keep explaining how much being an Aries explains my personality.

(I'm a Taurus.)

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· May 11

Four translations of a poem by Basho.

Bitten by fleas and lice,
I slept in a bed,
A horse urinating all the time
Close to my pillow.

Eaten alive by
lice and fleas--now the horse
beside my pillow pees

fles, lice--
a horse piddles
near my pillow

The fleas and the lice
and a horse having a pee
at my pillowside

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· May 10

The article points out that this pen drawing combines inspiration from a European Renaissance annunciation with Chinese landscape painting, for example.

In the top left, an angel appears to two men. The landscape, on the other hand, is reminiscent of other Chinese landscapes. (Sorry--I know little about art!)

caption: FIGURE 5. Celestial Vision, slightly tinted black pen drawing, Tabriz or Baghdad, ca. 1375–1400. Istanbul, TSMK, H. 2153, fol. 120v. Courtesy of the Topkapı Palace Museum Library

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· May 10

have gotten obsessed with this early 16th c. Ottoman manuscript (Topkapi Palace H 2153) that collects art from a huge range of traditions: as far as Europe ("in the Frankish manner") and China ("in the Cathayan manner"). great article here: journals.publishing.umich.edu/ars/article/...

two pages: each has a variety of different images, including European figures, Chinese illustration, and Persian paintings. Images are oriented in all sorts of directions; the effect is a dizzying array of differences and similarities.

image caption: Figure 4A (ABOVE), B (OPPOSITE PAGE). Bifolio with Eight Figures in European Attire; and two central Jalayirid Shāhnāma paintings, Tabriz or Baghdad, ca. 1370–74. Istanbul, TSMK, H. 2153, fols. 55r, 54v. Courtesy of the Topkapı Palace Museum Library

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· May 7

today's rabbithole: working Yolanda López's incredible Guadalupe triptych into this essay on teaching English renaissance literature.

Three paintings: oil pastel and collage. Each takes the imagine of the Virgin of Guadalupe and changes it to depict a member of the artist's family. Her grandmother; her mother working a sewing machine; her running with a starry mantle.

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Apr 27

im only answering your email if you're this stunning early modern painting of mosquitoes.

red waves; lots of tiny dots for mosquitoes. looks pretty.

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Mar 29

Mapping out (almost) every location mentioned in @carmenpelaez.bsky.social's /The Cuban Vote/ and cross-referencing with voting maps as I prepare to talk about the play with students. Turns out I'm still the Urban Studies major I was in college.

A map of Miami, with locations marked in blue and green. It's frankly too small for it to be interesting to anyone other than myself.

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Mar 22

saving this bit of my kid's worksheet for when things are going poorly

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Mar 10

THE DEVIL SPEAKS! in this version, we learn how the devil feels about it.

third image of the devil being gelded. this time he says "oh! it smarts."

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Mar 10

big news for devil-gelding fans: i found a later copy of this woodcut with one important difference.

another image. the gelding is subtler and the devil in the background more devilly. also the trees look a little different.

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Mar 10

i'm not sure who needs to hear this, but here is an early modern woodcut of the devil being gelded.

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Feb 15

That, in turn, sent me to this neat article about African spoons in Renaissance Lisbon: smarthistory.org/spoons-from-... In paintings: "African spoons were being used as implements to nourish the most important people in the Christian world: the Virgin, the Christ Child, saints, and cardinals."

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Feb 7

i immediately texted my wife

text message: "apparently this takes four hours and costs $80" "picture of dish" "Let's make it"

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Feb 5

I still remember (as a v junior scholar) trying to write this section of a review.

One factor may limit classroom use of this otherwise excellent volume. Deeply self-referential, dozens of citations in each chapter point to other pages and footnotes. The first four pages of chapter four, for example, cite ten other places in the present volume, including a later section of this chapter, the pages of the introduction summarizing this chapter (twice), and (separately, twice) the footnotes to the introduction’s summary. (One of these footnotes, in turn, refers the reader back to the pages from whence she came.) A similar dependence is shown on Borris’s previous work, cited more than fifty times. Particularly frustrating is the repeated practice of citing the bibliography of the author’s earlier articles, rather than naming sources directly. Though the connections made are often helpful, it makes assigning a chapter in isolation tricky. That said, this is at worst an inconvenience and at best a guide to further research.

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Feb 4

I've been looking at the poem "Surge: to a woman" and thinking about how we translate anger, not just across. languages but across periods. Inés Hernandez, below, offers a staightforward translation, while Alicia Christoff parenthetically intensifies emotion: "(Fuck that noise!)"

Surge!

To woman

Surge! Rise up, with fists! Into life, into activity, into the beauty of actually living: surge – like sap

into tree the tips, like electricity in a storm – gorgeous with energy, resplendent with virtue, strong as

hell.

You, sitting all queenly, universally adored, a sovereign attended by her vassals: don’t lock yourself up

like that, all triumphant in your holy temple or your courtesan’s chamber.

That’s not worthy of you. Don’t be a Queen or a Goddess: be a mother, be a woman! (You think

you need men for your worship? Ha!)

A woman, a true woman, is more than a god or a queen. Don’t get drunk on the incense at your altar

or the applause at the footlights. (Fuck that noise!) There are greater and nobler things than all of that.

That is unworthy of you, before Goddess or Queen, be a mother, be a woman.
One who is truly a woman is more than a goddess or queen. Do not let the incense on the altar, or the applause in the audience intoxicate you, there is something more noble and grand than all of that.

Surge
(Rise Up! To Woman)
A la mujer.
Surge! Surge a la vida, a la actividad, a la belleza de vivir realmente; pero surge radiante y poderosa, bella de cualidades, esplendente de virtudes, fuerte de energías.
Tú, la reina del mundo, Diosa de la ado-ración universal; tú, la soberana a quien se rinde vasallaje, no te encierres así en tu tempo de Diós, ni en tu camarín de cortesana triunfadora.
Eso es indigno de tí, antes que Diosa y Reina, se madre, se mujer.
Una mujer que lo es verdaderamente, es más que diosa y que reina. No te embriague el incienso en el altar, ni el aplauso en el escenario, hay algo mas noble y mas grande que todo eso.
Los dioses son arrojados de los templos; los reyes son hechados de sus tronos, la mujer es siempre la mujer.

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Jan 28

Okay, also, I love his and Celia's bonkers translation of Catullus, where they try to retain as much as they can not just of the meaning but also the SOUND of the Latin. not surprisingly, the dirty poems are particularly wild.

32
I’m a bow, my dual kiss, Ipsithilla,
my daily key, eye, my eye’s litde leap-horse,
you bid me to “when,” I’m your meridian.
That: so you see as sure as that adjuvant,
no case, limb, menace obscure your tableland,
no tidbit love you outdoors far as a bier.
Stay home, my man he asks we pair us—no bis—
nine continuous gasps, no refutations.
Very, so he could, yes start if you bid to:
he’s primed now a joke-stuffed satyr, so pin us!
pert under the tunic, pulling up the quilt.

Catullus English and Latin from here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Catullus_32
Literal English Translation Original Latin Line

I beg you, my sweet, my Ipsitilla,
my darling, my sophisticated beauty,
summon me to a midday assignation;
and, if you're willing, do me one big favor:
don't let anyone lock the door,
and don't decide to go out,
but stay at home and get ready
for our nine successive copulations.
Honestly, if you want it, give the order:
I've eaten, and I'm sated, supinated!
I'm poking through my cloak and tunic.

Amabo, mea dulcis Ipsitilla,
meae deliciae, mei lepores,
iube ad te veniam meridiatum.
et si iusseris, illud adiuvato,
ne quis liminis obseret tabellam,
neu tibi lubeat foras abire,
sed domi maneas paresque nobis
novem continuas fututiones.
verum si quid ages, statim iubeto:
nam pransus iaceo et satur supinus
pertundo tunicamque palliumque.

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Jan 28

Small good thing: this tiny, silly bit of Zukofsky.

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Jan 23

Another small good thing: we've loved Priya Krishna's /Indian-ish/ as a cookbook for years. Recently bought Priya's Kitchen Adventures for my son, and he's loved reading and cooking from it. The recipes are organized by country, and so it's prompted conversations, too. (Also, the food is good!)

Front cover of Priya's Kitchen Adventures: A Cookbook for Kids.

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Jan 23

i've been exhausted whenever i check social media recently, because so much is bad. I'm starting a thread of small good things. first: this pastel piece, "Tiger in the Rain," by @chloecumming.bsky.social, that my wife bought me for Christmas. I love it so much.

pink clouds over a yellow tiger, who seems both bowed by the rain and still strong.

Matthew Harrison@matthewharrison· Jan 19

@ztul.bsky.social fyi