RSS
 

Archive for the ‘Academic’ Category

16 Feb

Humans are creatures of habit, but those habits are often placed on the flimsiest of foundations: I think here of my morning routine, which consists of grinding some coffee and switching on the water for a shower, followed by a quick check of emails and a scan of the internet. What if any of these actions don’t happen, or even just happen out of sequence? Then there’s a certain disconnect between my environment and me, which takes a while to refocus. Strange stuff.

Although, these bright mornings are making it much easier: Ernesto talks about those clear mornings in London here.

 
 

23 Jan

Last week, a knock on my door signalled the arrival of a book I’ve been expecting for some time: the grandly titled ‘Has Man a Function in Universe?’, part of a series of books, curated by artist Gavin Wade, based on the Strategic Questions asked by Buckminster Fuller, who said:

It is my working assumption that the following 40 questions must be definitely answered before we may realistically discuss our respective philosophies and grand strategies.

My interest in the book comes from the artist Neil Chapman‘s seemingly chance encounter with an essay I wrote for my MA course about the Oulipo group. Printing out that essay on green paper, Chapman has chopped it up (it was made up of a number of free-floating paragraphs), and then integrated some of my text into the sections of the book produced by him. Rather chuffed about the whole thing, I am.

(Strategic Questions website here.)

 

11 Nov

The last few days have been along these lines: drudge, drudge, drudge, sick, sick, doctor, hospital, doctor, hospital, drudge, drudge, positive meeting with my supervisor about recently submitted chapter. So it’s not all bad, then.

 

09 Oct

The Nobel prize for literature has been awarded to French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. Fair play, etc. What caught my attention was the statement from the Swedish Academy:

As a young writer in the aftermath of existentialism and the nouveau roman, he was a conjurer who tried to lift words above the degenerate state of everyday speech and to restore to them the power to invoke an essential reality

As a fan of the ‘degenerate state of everyday speech’ which so enlivened the twentieth century novel (particularly in the works of James Joyce, Flann O’Brien and Raymond Queneau) my initial reaction to this statement was a terse: ‘fuck you’.

See NY Times here.

 

20 Feb

The first story on the Earlham Road Project in a while is here.

 

27 Nov

I’ve spent since early September either locked away in a small room trying to grind out words for a chapter of my thesis, or (only very occasionally) in college tracking down books and reading (parts of) them. I’ve made plans, met word counts, typed and re-typed, and submitted only a little behind schedule, and yet the dissatisfaction persists: everything is always provisional, never complete. Now, a couple of days after my submission, I’m back on the case: another chapter to be done. Hoping that this time things will be much smoother.