Tim Groenland

@groenbot.bsky.social

1839 Followers 1644 Following

Academic in Dublin. Contemporary literature & publishing.

A big bowl of cherries
A TV panel standing in front of a screen listing the "Top 5 Crushing England Losses"
"The promise of the American university for people like me always rested on its contrast with the ruined state of our life-worlds, its resources and laconic freedom offering an alternative of sorts to the limited opportunities and increasing threats back home. That difference no longer exists in any meaningful form. You watch what you wear, think twice about what you say, here as anywhere. This is how empires collapse."
A juice-stained hand holding a plastic container filled with blueberries, in a forest
FOUCAULT IN WARSAW by Remigiusz Ryziński (Open Letter, 2021): OUTSIDER EVERYWHERE: WITOLD GOMBROWICZ IN ARGENTINA by Mercedes Halfon, trans Rahul Bery (Fitzcarraldo, 2026)
A poster for the Viking Voyage theme park ride, with the words: "Vikings you are called!"
Image from a property listing showing its location about 1 metre from the dual carriageway in South Dublin
Cluba da Esquina by Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges
A statue of Sean Heuston, his hands out of proportion by a factor of least 1.5
A flyer for MoLI's First Friday event on Friday, 5 June. The relevant text reads: 8pm/Discussion: Joanna Walsh and Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz - In conversation with Tim Groenland about their new books, AMATEURS! and JUDITH BUTLER & FILM
Pigs at a barbecue, with empty plates, awaiting sausages
A garden fence, on which is a sign with a picture of a hand reaching towards a pear. Text says "Fruit plukken is verboden"
The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature by Gerald Howard, Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built by Gayle Feldman
The labyrinthine investigation now centres on whether Montclair, employed at the Marie and Louis Pasteur University, a teacher training college in Besançon, used the fake medal and a “doctorate” from the University of Philology and Education in the US to obtain a promotion and pay rise.
The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories (2025), edited by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
FALLOW issue 3; RUINS, CHILD by Giada Scodellaro; THE POSTHUMOUS BOOK OF SHAHRAZAD by Raquel F. Menéndez (trans. Robin Munby); ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME IV by Solvej Balle (trans. Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell)
László Krasznahorkai, SZATAŃSKIE TANGO
A small to medium-sized urban fox standing outside a pub
Mamdani, "Who can better understand those who weep..."
There have been many conversations recently about arts infrastructures, or the lack of them, in Dublin and nationally. These conversations might come as a surprise to an outsider, given the generally positive international coverage of arts funding in Ireland. And on the whole, it is true that budgets for arts funding have increased in recent years, with particular expansions in direct bursary support for artists. The Basic Income for the Arts scheme, trialled for three years and recently made permanent, has also contributed to a general improvement of living conditions for a certain number of artists. (The scheme, which was established by the previous arts minister to provide a living income for artists, is currently limited to 2,000 recipients, awarded on a three-year cycle, so its impact on the sector is, for now, necessarily constricted.)
Ryoki Watanabe in the iconic 2002 Ireland jersey photoshoot
Literature in Questions, Littérature en questions Professional Round-Table – 20th March 2026 at 7.15pm The French Library, Alliance Française Dublin. With Bridget Farrell (Bullaun Press), Marie Hermet (Translator) and Adeline Baldacchino (Printemps des Poètes). Moderated by Tim Groenland.
CONTENTIOUS SPACES by Rosaleen McDonagh
COMMENTS I'm in the files!
The book that made me fall down this whole rabbit hole to begin with was Christopher Buehlman’s The Blacktongue Thief, centring a fiddle-playing, green-eyed, copper-haired thief named Kinch Na Shannack. Kinch is Galtic, meaning he’s from a race of people who drink whiskey, farm tubers, live near peat bogs, and speak with a “handsome brogue” that makes them say “cork and kark almost the same”. His people were forced to mass-migrate west “what with the old Famine”, and if you haven’t guessed which culture the Galts are based on yet, I’ll give you one more clue: Buehlman, an American, self-narrates the entire audiobook in an Irish accent.
A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker, 1925-2025; Montreal Stories, Mavis Gallant
The Last of its Kind by Sibylle Grimbert, Vintage Contemporaries by Dan Kois, Genre Bending by Jeremy Rosen, The Rarest Fruit by Gaëlle Bélem
THE NATIONAL TELEPATHY by Rogue Larraquy, translated by Frank Wynne (Charco, 2024)
on the mic, he's a freeholder known to lift an ox over each shoulder ahem... wheat sower and a wif stroker can't plant the crops if it gets one degree colder *woman's voice says "Villein"* his work is agricultural everything he makes, the lords tax it multiple
"The art of digression is the intuitive approach to the complexity of reality." But what is reality? And besides, I am not Diderot. No, I have not solved the problem yet.
Text from the order page: "We no longer accept orders from the EU (due to Brexit) nor the US (due to tariffs), apologies."
A series of enthusiastic Youtube comments. The first states: "THAT'S WHY HE'S THE GOAT!!! THE GOAT!!!"
Thanks to our growing insight into Epstein’s world, we have gained a clearer picture of the psychic and economic logic of the contemporary far right. Just as Epstein wanted to close off all escape routes to his female victims, Trump and his tech reactionaries want to shut down all alternatives to the household economy and turn the presidency into a founder-controlled family firm. Attacks on the administrative state, the public sector and unions, and the transformation of border control agents into a personal militia can be understood as parts of a broader programme to extend the rule of master and servant to the entire economy. Perhaps if we all become Uber drivers, Amazon third-party sellers, trade contractors to real estate moguls, or academic supplicants to billionaires then the founder will be safe from collective sacrifice?
The First Draft Symposium: Developing The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary Editing 13 February 2026 Venue: Zoom (single link for the full day; registration required) Paper lengths: 15 minutes
THE CHANGELING by Joy Williams
Front cover of Mariusz Szczygieł's NOT THERE (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones)
To think of all the times I've lied to a poet! A poet never gives you a poem to read - they shove it under your nose. And then shamelessly question you: "Don't you like it?" And telling a poet "Your poem leaves me cold" would be like spitting in their face. But you have to say something. So I've come up with a wonderful lie. "You know what," I tell them, "to feel a poem properly you have to tune its rhythm to your own rhythm, as Kapuściński once said. But I'm finding it harder and harder for my inner rhythm to harmonize with any poetry at all. It's as if I were doomed to some awful, vulgar rhythm from the outside, from the street, from TV... So I'd really better not desecrate your poem with my clumsy reading."
A weather report for Dublin depicting almost unremittimg rain for the week
Chapter title from SEIOBO THERE BELOW: "Screaming Beneath the Earth"
SEIOBO THERE BELOW by László Krasznahorkai
OLD KILN by Jia Pingwa, accompanied by lego man for scale
He often shifts between such withholding and the kind of intimate disclosure that we might now call oversharing. His infamous archives—which are held in a series of filing cabinets that he sleeps next to on a foldout cot and swag—contain materials that he does not wish to be released until after his death. These archives hold all of his published and unpublished writings and correspondence, as well as highly personal information, including a 20,000‑word essay detailing past actions he finds shameful, a horse‑racing roleplaying game that he has been playing for several decades (known as the “Antipodean archive”), and even, apparently, his penis measurements. The archives could be viewed as the most extreme possible experiment in autofiction, or an extended, textual mode of avant‑garde performance art, as if Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist is Present” were stretched across an entire lifetime. However, even some of his friends have found his archives simply disturbing. The author Barry Oakley described his reaction upon discovering that Murnane’s archives included a record of his bowel movements and descriptions of 1000 pornographic images he found erotic. Oakley told Murnane that the archives “were both extraordinary and somewhat disturbing” and reflected a tendency toward “solipsism”; this led, in his view, to the end of their friendship (for a second time).
The scene from the beginning of Children of Men where members of the public watch the cafe TV
Words from a headline: "Groenland-crisis"