Katie Murphy

@manymanyplies

Glaswegian academic, Oxford. Mostly found in the c17th. Preoccupied by essays, etymology, grammar, puns, paintings, Czech. Out in summer 2027: Robert Burton: A Vital Melancholy.

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Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· 17h

Just in case anyone was wondering. (Wild, wild essay. The pitch she lives/writes at!)

Screenshot of an essay by Annie Dillard called _Total Eclipse_, with the epigraph "Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.”

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· 3d

...in a document I gave them at the start of the last academic year -- this was my go at it:

Substituting your own engagement will not help you become the person that you can be, and that an undergraduate degree, with its freedom for reading and thinking, can enable; nor will it help you develop the skills in critical thinking and judgement that enable not just better reading and writing, but a richer texture of life and a better, more engaged participation in the complex world in which we live. Reading, thinking, and writing well are hard. That difficulty is strenuous – even, on occasion, unpleasant, irritating, anxiety-provoking – and it is easy in such circumstances to reach for a shortcut. But we strongly encourage you not to, for your own sake.
If you use text generated by an LLM for submissions, whether college essays or university assessments, unless it has been explicitly allowed and acknowledged, it is plagiarism – which is cheating, passing off work done by something or someone else as your own – and, if detected, it will be penalized. It is difficult to detect, so that might seem a small risk, in comparison to time gained. But you will thereby lose opportunities to develop yourself and your thinking, and to participate as yourself in the communal endeavours of reading, attending, interpreting. As David Russell recently wrote, ‘Although some people, for instance, have credited a book like Middlemarch with changing their lives, no one has had this reaction to a summary of its plot.’ If you want to change your life and your mind – and great art, and discussing great art, and thinking and writing about it, will do that – then you need to do the reading, thinking, and writing for yourself.

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· 7d

Makes me think of the alforja in Zurbarán's St Margaret of Antioch.

A photograph of Zurbarán's St Margaret of Antioch, who is carrying a large Peruvian bag over her left forearm (while her right holds a spear with which she's casually skewering a dragon, not even looking).

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· 9d

I mean: among other things. (Le cloporte, c'est moi.)

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Jul 14

Going to try to make this accidental 'livelihoo' on the OUP website into a thing: capricious quality of life and lifelikeness, essayistic esprit, careless brilliance.

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· May 14

I didn't have space to write about this beautiful c14th ivory in the Courtauld: love the pair of the Ascension on the left, Mary & the disciples rocked back in wonder, & Pentecost in the next frame, where they bow in gratitude. To create such verticals in tininess, & a long horizontal frame!

A miniature ivory diptych, with three registers on either side; very intricately carved, each scene taking place under a series of decorated florid arches, which help to create depth. Working from bottom left to right, and then upwards: 1. The Anunciation, and Nativity; 2. The Adoration of the Magi; 3. The Betrayal; 4. The Crucifixion and Resurrection; 5. The Ascension; 6. Pentecost.

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· May 14

It's the Feast of the Ascension! This time last year, I wrote about the flagrant silliness of paintings of disappearing feet in paintings for @apollo-magazine.com, and why their silliness (believe this non-sense if you can!) is the point. apollo-magazine.com/ascension-fe...

Hans Süss von Kulmbach, 1513, in the Met. A brightly coloured painting, in which, in the lower 4/5s or so, a cluster of Mary and Jesus's disciples cluster round a gap on the ground, gazing up, with wide eyes and sometimes dropped jaws. Dangling down from the upper frame are a pair of legs from just under the knee down, and a pair of flexed feet, surrounded by a billowing red cloth: Jesus mid-ascension.

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Mar 17

This is genuinely helpful for an article I have coming out, in which there's a tangential paragraph about translations of names for night-birds in a c17th phrasebook. One is 'caprimulgus', which is rendered 'milker of goats', which I thought wasn't an English concept at all: but I'm wrong, it seems.

An image of a c17th book, with Latin, English, and French translations of names of nightbirds.

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Mar 14

I took the hint, I read the book, & thrilled to it: so good on what it's like to read & think, & try to read & think, & still to have a body as you do so. The protagonist is writing an essay on Shax's sonnets, & though we don't read the essay, I also ended up w/ a fresh perspective on the poems.

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Mar 9

Is it my Presbyterian upbringing or my professional life as an early modernist that made me misread this sign at Paddington Station as saying 'Calvin Bar'?

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Mar 5

I have had such a tense and intense time reading Zuzana Říhová's brilliant Playing Wolf, a tale of city folk who enter the rituals of dark fairy tale in a Czech village. I am excited to discuss it with her TONIGHT, at the Czech Embassy: anyone at a loose end in W London: come! Link below.

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Mar 4

After 22 (gulp) years in Oxford, things have now achieved their peak: last week I saw someone toast a crumpet on a fork over an open fire, & today, college lunch featured BOTH toad in the hole AND spotted dick, dishes I had only read about, cannot distinguish, & still suspect of being fictional.

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Feb 27

Encountered an errata slip today which has immediately become one of my top three -- for goodness/badness/consequences.

A book called What to Look for in Winter; the errata slip says '"The red and purple berries that look like tiny jam tarts are not poisonous" should read "The red and purple berries that look like tiny jam tarts are ALSO poisonous"'.

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Feb 26

Gave a paper today about Thomas Browne; went to a dinner; was supervised at dinner by Thomas Browne; will, tomorrow morning, supervise someone else on Thomas Browne.

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Feb 20

Today's migraine-inducing boggler

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Jan 9

Publishing in the Humanities:

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Jan 5

The cognitive dissonance in the Abbey shop is amazing. Shelves of missals and the Rule of St Benedict, carousels of rosaries, and this:

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Jan 5

As my (Glaswegian) godmother said, when I (Glaswegian) sent her this photo: she must be busy.

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Jan 4

Such peculiar accoutrements, always! My favourite is the obvious National Gallery Annunciation, in which Gabriel is interrupted about his important business to comment on some town-planning. And spot the pickle!

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Dec 9

Scholarly diet and lifestyle, 1660s.

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Dec 6

I have a brief review in this week's @thetls.bsky.social of a novel by Nicol Hochholczerová, This Room Is Difficult to Eat. For reasons into the which I will not go, it was difficult for me to read -- but I'm glad I did.

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Nov 9

Maybe I'll get on board with this AI lark after all, if it starts claiming that I have coined 'key concepts in literary theory' when all I was up to was trying to find a link to an essay I wrote. Then again, as it says at the bottom, 'AI responses may include mistakes'.

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Oct 25

Advice in a 1944 Colloquial Hungarian textbook; useful for the internet age.

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Oct 2

Obligatory Oxford-academic's-first-trip-to-the-Schwarzman photo.

A view askew of the geometrically complicated ceiling of the new Schwarzman Humanities building at Oxford.

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Sep 20

Long before 'cozzy livs' and 'platty jubes', Scots were suffering from the 'shakky trimmles'.

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Sep 9

What do people who don't use Bible Gateway use as a first stop when they want to compare multiple translations of the Bible, across multiple languages? Because this has just flung a spanner into my afternoon:

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Sep 8

If only I'd thought of that, responds Keir Starmer.

Headline: "Senior Labour figures tell Keir Starmer to stop making mistakes"

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Aug 30

Ah, the seventeenth century, when the dream was not artificial but Human General Intelligence, revealed by art.

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Aug 23

Splitting; or, one of these is not like the others.

Katie Murphy@manymanyplies· Nov 22

To even my own surprise, I appear to have written an essay in a volume on Walter Pater. Many congratulations to the editors, and thanks to their patience with my c19th noviceishness. I wrote about what Pater means by 'quaintness'. Very much looking forward to reading the other contributions.