Jordan Alexander Stein
Literature professor and book historian, except for one time I wrote a book about Nina Simone
- Will you be at MLA and/or can you get to Toronto a week from Saturday? Come launch, come party! Bring a friend.
- The rumor is true! I used the publishing history of Grove Press’s 1960s French translations to think about the history of midcentury gay male sexuality and the idioms it created, and how those shaped queer theory in the 1990s
- @jordanstein.bsky.social aims to historicize “outing” in queer Melville scholarship, the better to understand how and why that idiom appeared as it did in "Sex in Translation: Melville, Mayoux, Ashbery" muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...
- The special issue I co-edited on "Melville's Queer Afterlives" is here and it's queer. This issue has EVERYTHING: gay pirates, dirty pictures, racist internet fanfic, Gilbert Gottfried, original poetry, and just so many French people. Available at your library, but LMK if you're paywalled...
- "A miniature book published by St. Onge was the only book taken on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, and was thus the first book on the moon"
- For many of the years that Raymond Weaver taught at Columbia University, he lived at 200 W 108th Street, and maybe, just maybe, this now defunct mailbox in the building’s lobby was the one at which he posted his first letters to Elizabeth Melville Metcalf
- Take your watermark questions to The Grolier Club, they said. (They were totally right!)
- Dictionnaire de bibliographie Haitienne (1951) by Max Bissainthe is the first modern and still most comprehensive bibliography of Haiti printing. His typescript drafts at NYPL reveal his process, with note cards, paperclips, and typewriter errors corrected with scissors and now very yellowed tape
- Honestly thought I was just doing some due diligence at the American Antiquarian Society, but found truly amazing unique and under-cataloged Haiti items, plus some surprising interactions between print and manuscript
- There comes a time in every man’s life where he must face up to how little he knows about the stamps on French Revolutionary documents. (No, but seriously, please recommend some readings.)
- It becomes clear that this item’s excellent catalog record must have been a bit hard won.
- I’m an English professor in the US in 1967. I bought a house in town my first year on the job and earned tenure with two articles. My wife cooks my meals and my secretary does my typing. I have to read all the books published this year about the one author I study. There were two of them.
- "i asked grok" "i asked chagpt" yeah well I asked a rare books librarian and they found things I didn’t even know I was looking for, while answering questions about provenance
- Hello from the archives!
- Another good book day!
- Good book day
- Little known fact: Mary, the character played by Parker Posey in the 1995 indie film "Party Girl," was actually based on me in college
- If astrology isn’t real, why does Sarah Michelle Gellar share a birthday with Frederic Jameson?
- Reposted by Jordan Alexander Stein[Not loaded yet]
- The British Library’s incredibly rare and totally pristine copy of the complete 1875 French translation of Marx’s Capital in quarto was personally donated by the author, and while I am not 100% sure what I mean by it, I feel compelled to say: it could always be like this
- Happy 82nd birthday, Nina Simone!
- Short essay adapted from "Fantasies of Nina Simone" is up at The American Psychoanalyst tapmagazine.org/all-articles...
- Contrary to popular supposition, Deleuze and Guattari were not a couple. It was more of a schizuationship
- Happy birthday, Harriet Jacobs! Wow did you call it or what
- When we were in grad school, I recall that he in all sincerity wrote a seminar paper whose argument turned the "fact" that gay men cannot look at each other's faces when they have sex
- Please keep the “How could we have known!” crowd in your thoughts today
- Reposted by Jordan Alexander Stein[Not loaded yet]
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1878)
- “How did your first day back go?”
- Do you even lift up the downtrodden masses, bro?
- E.M. Forster, new year resolutions, 31 December 1904
- Reposted by Jordan Alexander Stein[Not loaded yet]
- College bestie (lesbian) had crush on hot professor (lesbian) & cajoled me (not lesbian) to take professor’s class with her, effectively as a kind of aspirational wingman. Class completely changed the direction of my intellectual life & 20 years later I published a book on things I first read there
- Why bother calling it “end of semester” if it doesn’t end?
- Reposted by Jordan Alexander Stein[Not loaded yet]
- This one goes out to all people who asked me in college when studying queer theory and Marxism would be useful in the real world
