Christopher Pittard

@christopherpittard.bsky.social

2823 Followers 1502 Following

Academic, Course Leader in English Literature at University of Portsmouth (but posts are my own, mind). Victorian literature, detective fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dickens, Wilkie Collins. Next book: *Arthur Conan Doyle* (Liverpool UP, 2028).

A pub table at a window, with the book *Finders Keepers* on the table next to a pint. A bookshop is distantly visible across the street.
A photo of a paragraph from *Dracula* in which Renfield is described as "mixed up with the Count in an indexy kind of way." Bluesky's autocorrect is not keen on "indexy".
The Radcliffe Camera in Oxford, seen through a window.
A pint of pale sits on a circular table at a window.
A 90s Penguin Classic copy of Jude the Obscure. If you're my age, this is what Penguin Classics should look like - black and cream design, and a close up detail of a painting (in this case, a man on a wagon approaching a distant Oxford, or - Jude cover jackpot)
Two Christies, Orwell, Blackburn, Perec, Garner, Dickens, Barnes, Flanagan, Scovell, and another author surname I can't include because Bluesky's autocorrect won't allow it.
A grey and white cat on a wooden fence getting a head scratch and convincing us that we had not, in fact, entered some purgatorial realm.
Appignanesi and Forrester, *Freud's Women*; Ayme, *The Man Who Walked Through Walls*; Heaney, *Field Work*; Hoban, *Amaryllis Night and Day*
"Books which are well nigh unsortable: ...periodicals of which you only have one issue... [such as the conference schedule issue of] PMLA."
A hardback edition of Perec's *Thoughts of Sorts* in dark blue cloth with light blue/white type.
A programme for David Haig's play Magic, showing portrayals of Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle on the cover.
A tuxedo cat investigates a stack of books: Wilkie Collins' The Black Robe, Benson's ghost stories, Garner's The Owl Service, Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep Nortb, and Mark Ford's Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner.
A message from jobs.ac.uk telling me there have been no new jobs matching my search criteria in the last 3 months. Still, at least Antonia Bance gets to tap dance on the coffin of Higher Education like she's Roy Castle or someone.
BBC News headline - "Vance pulled out of hus chair during panic on stage." Did he, though?
Kittens! Two black and white kittens watching snooker on TV.
A black and white cat sitting in front of a TV showing snooker, shouting.
A black and white cat watching snooker on TV.
Arthur Conan Doyle.
The Happy Eater logo: a spherical red smiley head and disembodied hand, pointing into the mouth in a way that definitely doesn't look like the customer is trying to induce vomiting.
An email from Pearson Higher Education with the subject "Class average: 68% But who exactly is struggling?"
"Christopher Pittard suggests Charles Dickens' repetoire as an amateur magician influenced his structure of Bleak House."
A poster of the first edition of *The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie* on a brick wall. The cover shows white silhouettes of a teacher and six girls beneath a tree.
A copy of Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
A copy of *Transforming Orality: Articulating Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Britain.*
A contents page in Donald Barthelme's *Sixty Stories*, saying that 'For explanatory notes on the text, please visit www.penguinclassics.com/sixtystories.' You didn't get this nonsense with the black spine Penguin Classics - you know, the ones with the red stripe at the top that always ended up fading.
Screenshot of website for my Agatha Christie course saying "only 3 places left."
A copy of Foucault's *The Will to Knowledge* next to a half empty pint of Featherbed.
"Shakespeare set Macbeth in Scotland because it offered a properly desolate setting.... "The dead man's knell is there", Shakespeare wrote."
A copy of *Brian* in Fitzcarraldo blue, on a pub table next to a green and white bag of jelly babies and a pint. Beer *and* jelly babies, you ask? It was Tom Baker's birthday (in 2025). Those are the rules.
A black and white cat watching the curling.
A copy of Classics: A Very Short Introduction.
A copy of Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction.
A seating plan for tonight's opening day, Friday evening, showing of *Melania*, where none of all 36 seats in Screen 7 have been sold, which is even worse than *Police Academy 18 - The Return of Fart Squad.*
Seat availability for screening of Melania at Portsmouth Vue, at 1.15 today. Six seats have been sold, five of them in a cluster in a back corner, and one by itself in the fourth row. You have to wonder about that guy.