On Dylan's Merseybeat-rocker from 1965

"There is a new thing," we are told, A new thing in the midst of the old, We know and do not know the new reality, We live in hope in paradox and incongruity, We worry about the now, Because the now does not exist for us. With tattered garments and flat bellies Our now constantly shifts into tomorrow A tomorrow yet deferred to another tomorrow.

It is such a privilege and a joy to work with colleagues who are tremendously generous with their time, intelligence, and resources. For me EATS is an academic organisation in which we can all strive for excellence and encourage diversity, a platform that enables us to be creative in practice, and a way of connecting friends within Europe and the world to generate research impact.

In “How to Disappear,” a song from her last album, Norman Fucking Rockwell!, Lana Del Rey leads us to expect a how-to manual, but she gives us a poem instead: “Now it’s been years since I left New York / I got a kid and two cats in the yard / The California sun and the movie stars I watch the skies getting light as I write / As I think about those years / As I whisper in your ear / I’m always gon’ to be right here / No one’s going anywhere.” Such an unabashed display of sentimentality is compounded by the photographic and/or painterly image on the album’s cover, in which Del Rey clings to a man, a handsome man, and she clings to the American flag and Americana, and she clings to kitsch and she clings to melodrama and the problematic histories that each of these normative and patriarchal phenomena might provide, even as they all sink together. Staying with the doomed ship (loving the doomed ship, even) is an act of radical generosity.