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Below are the 25 most recent journal entries.

	2008.07.04  09.16 Cultural objects which make me cry like a bastard In honour of tomorrow's Dr Who finale, which may have that effect. Micheal Rosen's Sad Book. I picked this up in a bookshop when looking for Christmas presents for children. Fortunately I had someone to cling to. It's about bereavement, and surviving loss. Quentin Blake illustrations are just wrenching. Also, The Red Tree by Shaun Tan, another book to help explain sadness to the young. (Can't remember if this actually made me cry - xxxlibris showed it to me, not, I think, from malevolent glee or anything.) The last two stanzas of Memory Unsettled by Thom Gunn: ( Read more... ) Martin Luther King's I've Been to the Mountaintop speech. ("But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now.") Sally Lockheart's pre-detonation speech from The Shadow in the North. A fairly random lot - no songs or films, although I'm sure there are a few - and that last one I'm irritated by the emotional manipulation of it, but it still finishes me off. It's Friday! Tell me what makes you weep! if it won't ruin your day.

	2008.07.02  14.36 Art skip The art skip is half-full all year, but now the end-of-year shows for the various art degrees are finishing, it's being filled and emptied far more often. Canvasses, plinths, brightly-painted sculptures, all jammed in with household goods because the students are also leaving their digs for the Summer. It makes it look as though art is a byproduct of heavy industry or renovation being carried out in the surrounding buildings, as though there are workmen inside saying 'Well, Geoff, we'd better rip out those faulty Koons homages and get in some video installations before the whole thing just falls down...' It also brings full circle the great student habit which the Onion described as "Item Found In Garbage To Be Turned Into Lamp Someday". The mockery of that article was the only thing that prevented me from filling my last house with stacks of bobbins, most months. Whereas the art skip is the opposite - stuff which someone did actually turn into a lamp, or some other aesthetic object - which may itself have been found in a skip - which will now go back into the skip. There's half a piano in there at the moment. Not the good half, alas - if it were the string frame I'd get it home somehow so it could pick up the tones of my conversations and vibrate them. It it was the keys I'd take a bagful (and then not know what to do with them). But it's the hammers and the dampers, which are now themselves getting damp. I did get a wine-coloured velvet bag, sewn with mirrors and grey satin panels. I think I will not take more from the art skip this year.

	2008.06.23  12.54 Alibi I did not kill squirrels, I was somewhere else, doing a thing which seems rather low-key now, but the sense that I'd signed up in front of (unknowing) witnesses did help me finish it. ( Read more... )

	2008.06.20  22.54 Mission accomplished, PayPal my bail There isn't a squirrel left alive in the Borough of Lewisham. I couldn't have done it without your kind, generous messages of support.

	2008.06.20  10.10 Newly vague Might I ask if my readers are going to BiCon? I am wondering about the outlay. If I don't go, I could put the money towards some Things I fancy getting, also some Places I fancy going to. Obviously in general I like people better than Things. Plus Things don't get ticked off if I temporarily prioritise people, whereas people (IMHO) don't like being ditched for Things. However, People are portable, whereas Places are pretty static. Places might win. I won't even bring in Experiences I fancy having, that makes it all five times more complex. Also, I'm planning to do something slightly taxing and potentially impressive this evening, but I don't want to say what it is in case it goes wrong. Can I still get the 'Whooo go you' with only this minimal disclosure, or is that only accorded when a person actually sticks their neck out and names their goal? A proper post may follow. I went to the Transfabulous ball in a facial outfit I am calling 'school-play emo Jesus'. The building was hot, the attendees were hot, the French rappers were fantastic, and I very much enjoy queer space.

	2008.06.16  17.05 Boots for sale! Buckles up the back, laces down the front, steel toecaps, size 9. Be two inches taller, and yet more appealing to Goths! ( Read more... )

	2008.06.16  10.19 Things I have said to people I have kissed during recent dreams Part II 'Mmm, you look really good in that shirt... Hang on, that's my shirt! I didn't say you could borrow my shirt!'

	2008.06.12  12.10 There Is Not an Acronym For Everything Yet Or, as I will be abbreviating it, TINAFEY. (Oh, go on, this is my best shot at transient notoriety.)

	2008.06.06  12.00 Careering I was introduced (conceptually) to Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell at a motivational event yesterday, and I feel motivated. Discovered pulsars. Thought they might be alien signals. Found they weren't, but were something fantastic in themselves. Her supervisor got the Nobel prize, she didn't - debatable as to whether that was an enormous swizz or not. Quaker (here I nod enthusiastically at thornbushrosy). I feel I should have heard of her before, possibly as an iconic screenprint on a geek T-shirt. The rest of the workshop included fascinating discussions about work and parenting. ( Read more... )

	2008.06.03  09.19 Sense of foreBoden Unsolicited voucher from Boden has now been snaffled, text of sinister letter that accompanied voucher remains under the cut for ms_bracken and others interested in offbeat whacky wrong marketing strategies. ( Read more... )

	2008.05.29  14.38 URAQT The Office in which I work is being merged with another Centre to create a Unit. It's not a bad thing at all - I'll get to spend more time talking to learning technologists, and they're so pleasant I might even start bringing in home-made biscuits. However, the new Unit has a terrible proposed name. Let's call the place I work Gradgrind University. The new unit will be the Gradgrind Learning Enhancement Unit - GLEU. We are the GLEU that holds everything together. We are GLEUsniffers. This shoudn't happen. Alternative acronyms welcomed. (I might try to sneak in something with an alternative, obscene meaning, but my boss is quite sharp.) You can chuck in any generic management terms and use 'excellence' if you need a vowel. Currently I am deciding whether I'd rather be in the Pedagogic Unit for the Direct Development of Learning Enhancement (PUDDLE), or the Strategic Academic Development Central Unit for Learning and Teaching (SADCULT).

	2008.05.28  11.39 Queer event at the British Museum tomorrow On the rise of the city, and the associated development of the no-tell motel, pulp fiction and physique art. Five quid, bring your own melancholy deep-eyed stranger.

	2008.05.27  14.39 Ivory oubliettes I want to work in academia because it is a rigorous, open-minded meritocracy! Pass me my eyeplugs! 1. A student in Canada has been hauled up for using Facebook to facilitate plagiarism. Or to set up a study group. I have no idea about the specifics of the case, but it rings alarm bells for me. I'm working on guidelines for our college tutors to help them help students avoid plagiarism. The gap in most of the literature I've read, and the plagiarism guides of other Universities (from which I'm ruthlessly copying) is around acceptable collaboration. There's a lot of material on stealing from texts - helping students avoid it by teaching them good referencing skills, planning assessments to make it less easy or appealing, detecting it after work has been submitted. But there's not a lot at all on how to teach students to distinguish between unauthorised collaboration and the good, beneficial practiecs: groupwork, peer mentoring, informal discussions. All these practices are potentially excellent, and currently being promoted (at my college, at least) - particularly as: student numbers rise, staff numbers drop, and Universities see peer assessment, for example, as a way to supplement contact hours what is valued in Higher Education shifts emphasis - the capacity of a student to apply what they've learned (which can be well demonstrated through discussion and debate) becomes favoured over the repetition of facts. Also, 'soft skills'/'transferable skills' such as teamwork become seen as a useful part of a degree (partly because of employability, which is an incresing concern as fees rise). social software becomes better at facilitating peer pedagogic interactions - and Universities, in part because of the above points, invest in technology which can allow their students to collaborate on University networks. I'm not an ideal tutor in this respect myself - I've often hoped my students might discuss work outside the seminar room, and to take this kind of initiative, but I've not given clear, explicit information on such activities (and I haven't checked my employer's policies on it, either). I hope this case is either dropped, or proved to be more clear-cut malpractice. And I hope more Universities develop clear policies on how to define, warn against, detect and deal with unauthorised collaboration. 2. People arrested for printing off Al-Qaeda Handbook when researching Al-Qaeda. I have less to usefully add to this, but more enraged snarling. A culture collectively asks: 'Oh why can we in the liberal West not understand the minds of these Mysterious Others?' but then expects people applying to research the subject to do so by telepathy. (I am aware that 'applying to do a PhD' covers a lot of ground, a lot of procrastination and sometimes, some really dodgy downloading. But staff who knew his work have backed him, which would seem to be a useful yardstick.)

	2008.05.25  11.56 I'm a little fuzzy from my cold; have you seen the sensory homunculus? It (to crib) 'shows what a man's body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the cortex of the brain concerned with its sensory perception'. Mine feels out of kilter; my throat is cavernous, my legs uncontrollably lengthy. However, I have tried a spot of editing (mainly chunk-shunting) and it's not going badly. I'm trying to be a bit more reflective about my criticism, rather than churning things out to augment my CV. I like fiction which doesn't completely do an injustice to the complexity of life. Not that it has to be vast in scope or have a microscopic eye for detail. And there's always some whittling and selection involved. But some nuance and complexity, an ear for the texture, is good. In turn, I want to be able to write criticism which doesn't then do an injustice to the complexity of the fiction. At the moment, I see myself boiling everything down to a single idea or a couple of opposed interpretations. I can convince myself that I'm just drawing out an interesting thread, but really, if I've been rending the text with carding combs for hours to create that thread, and I've had to cram most of a luxurious oily particoloured fleece into the wardrobe to hide what I've missed, I'm not doing a very good job. My latest piece has dozens of strands but I'm not sure they're presented in a neatly-woven argument. Working on that at the moment.

	2008.05.21  13.14 Sleep paralysis round-up Tips on avoiding sleep paralysis, from the researcher who tortured me for a tenner ("You will hear some white noise. Listen to the white noise until you hear a voice. Who is the voice telling you to kill? Write your answer in Box A.") ( Read more... ) I also experience hypnogogic hallucinations - short vivid hallucinations that coincide with the onset of sleep (they're the result of a back-stage run-in with Doctor Mephisto and his Amazing HypnoGoggles). Usually I see a spider on the wall, but in a holiday bonanza special last month, I saw an eight foot goth in a gas mask leaning over the bed. More initially alarming, but a lot easier to check if it was still in the room and had scuttled under the chest of drawers.

	2008.05.19  19.25 I've got a cold with elements of confusion and doddering, so obviously I'm thinking about extreme memory loss (I'm also a cultural studies person so after a quick trawl through medical sites, I'm mainly thinking about it in terms of fiction, wistfulness, and as a lever to examine perception and identity.) A lot of the ways I filter information are learned, but now feel instinctive. So I built them up through individual incidents and conversations and things I read, but I don't specifically recall all of those every time I use the guidelines I derived from them. (I try to stay aware of it, so I can tweak them and rearrange them, but I'm sure I don't keep on top of that process.) If I forget the learning process, would I lose the instincts? Would I start processing information differently - would I be monumentally vulnerable to social messages telling me to process things in a certain way, which I currently gently remove, ant/sleeve style? Would I be me, basically. I used to be so calm about the idea of fragmented, non-continuous identity! I can't believe two days of snot and snoozing and soup has reduced me to clingy solipsism. Do you ever wonder, if you had serious amnesia, what parts of your current life would give you the best clue to who you are? Old photographs, the anecdotes of loyal companions, the CV, the fridge, the ticket collection? Littering my room I have things I grabbed in my youth, gifts I'm displaying for a set amount of time before I slyly retire them, obscure private jokes, objects about which I am absolutely fiercely sincere - how would that make any sense, with the context gone? My grandfather has a stash of letters which would give the basic information about what I've been up to, but they're masterpieces of minor misdirection. I'm writing notes for my successor for when I leave my job, and I suppose one could do something similar for one's life - or just go round and put Post-It notes on everything, in case of emergencies. The wardrobe gets 'YOU WERE ON A TIGHT BUDGET'. Family have 'DECENT SORTS/SLIGHTLY UNRELIABLE NARRATORS'. Friends - I think I'm incredibly lucky to have gathered them, and I'm terrible at giving them appropriate upkeep, but if I've just fallen off a bike or something I'll need cheering up, so I'll give them 'ACCURATE REFLECTION OF YOU, HONEST'. My books would be useful ('NO, YOU HAVEN'T READ ALL OF THEM'). And I imagine the room coming into focus, and my diligent companion passing me a laptop ('Oooh, am I a Mac person?' 'No, you're too skint and pedestrian.') and the DC says: 'Luckily for you, you kept a blog! For years!' Hurrah! None of this 'mirror darkly' bollocks! Unmediated contact with self! - and there'll be links to baby anteaters, and complaints about the quality of A/U crossover Harry/Jack Bauer h/c schnoogles, and I'll be utterly mystified.

	2008.05.16  11.33 Things I have said to people I have kissed during recent dreams "Wait, I should check with my partner whether this is OK. Don't go anywhere!" "We may as well make the most of it, I wouldn't touch you with a bargepole if this wasn't a dream." "It's amazing that you're still exactly how I remember you. I mean, the time I put your name into Google Image Search I got a much older bloke, with no hair, wearing an anorak. But you, you look - just great."

	2008.05.09  11.28 Friday philosophical fun! I didn't go to parallelgirl's workshop last weekend on exploring my embodied identity through plasticene. That was in part because she's already seen me examine my identity twice (which was enormously helpful to me, but how much does everyone else want to know about me, expressed through glitter and half-remembered Heidegger)? But I should have gone, because the sun is poking awake cumbersome thoughts, and I could have examined them with safe space and safety scissors. That night I dreamed I was on hajj; I flew in low over Mecca, the Great Mosque to my left, streams of pilgrims in white below me. All the domes and minarets were made of plasticene. Anyway, it's Friday - what are the significant questions around which you structure your life, selfhood, and philosophical and political approaches? I like questions, I need some new ones. (If I get any responses, please be nice to one another.)

	2008.05.08  09.49 Mother of the more famous Tim janinazew, plumsbitch, xxxlibris and other high-shine fashionistas - Vivienne Westwood is speaking this evening at Goldsmiths and has already sold out, but there's live streaming of the event here from 6pm. It's called 'Active Resistance to Propaganda' and it's being chaired by Angela McRobbie.

	2008.05.06  19.48 Freecyle my brain It's balmy early Summer, and the smell of freshly cut rhizomes reminds me: I'm looking for an online site where I could give people access to my reading lists and seminar plans. I found one a few years ago - it was small at the time, but so was The Internet. I've forgotten the name of that site. I've found pages listing materials held elsewhere (e.g. on academic's own institutional pages), but I'd prefer to have someone else host them - I don't have any hosting space at the moment, and I'm sure the site I saw previously had a rather useful search facility. Also, it might be best to do it anonymously, or pseudonymously (I'm not sure about my legal position, and also I'd have to go over them endlessly checking for factual inacuracy, oversimplification and doodles of Ood). (This is following on from a conversation at the weekend about the gift economy in academia - the massive amount of unpaid work that people do for each other tracking down quotes, finding articles, proofreading and so on. I was wondering why I'd become relatively stingy lately, and realised that it was because I've been rather busy with teaching. But I can convert that time back into something more generally useful by putting my course materials up for grabs.) I'd mention potlatching here but I don't want to balance out all my redistributive endeavours by a half-arsed cross-cultural terminology-grab.

	2008.05.02  10.58 Dodds and Benedict would be, paradoxically, proud. The current circulating meme forces me to confess: I have done obscene things with my entire friends list.

	2008.04.29  21.24 The sighing sound, the lights around the shore It was a pleasant coincidence that I ended up editing an article on the uncanny while holidaying at Whitby as the Goths descended. (Inasfar as my entire life revolves around three topics, and that focus will tend to generate "coincidences".) I was looking at uncanny doubles, specifically - a joy when the streets are full of superficially identical Goths. I'm interested in how the uncanny double of 19th century Gothic fiction is often a bloke coughed up from the id, who will persuade you to terrible deeds, or get fed up with waiting and go off and commit them himself, leaving your sepia carte de visite on the scene (Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde). But the double of sensation fiction is a working-class woman who is 'swapped' for the heroine and buried under her name, for financial gain (Lady Audley's Secret, The Woman in White). (Both kinds were in evidence at Whitby: the chaps headbutting a flaming football around on the beach, and the immaculately dressed Victorian Ladies with vivid earthy vocabularies.) Both sorts of double highlight and hinge on fears about class, sex and ambition (not a hugely original observation - much does). However, much as I love them, I'm not sure how actively useful/socially progressive the doubles are - the uncanny is hard to direct and resonates after the basic mystery is solved. Getting in a ghost or a monster to tackle the subtleties of social oppression is like doing brain surgery with a sparkler - showy but inaccurate, with lingering unintended effects. Just when I was feeling underdressed, a secondhand stall at the bazaar (I believe they're called 'Second Coming') offered me another coincidence - a three-piece suit with a wondrous long coat, from the ENO's Tales of Hoffman - the very stories Freud uses to develop his theory of the uncanny. However, I couldn't have worn it for work (unless I took up a new post as a circus barker, in Nuremburg, in 1865) so I repressed my desires.

	2008.04.21  18.01 Extreme Images I was tagged! To discuss how critical discourses can still be of interest during a legislative fight which seems to call for a more simple discourse of rights and harm! Absolutely true. I'm interested in the legislation currently passing through the House of Lords governing the possession of 'extreme images', and the Critical Sexology seminar this month was a chance to hear more about its aims and flaws. Discussions of pornography - of a highly abstract and rambling nature, no pics - under the cut. ( Read more... )

	2008.04.11  11.03 Neal Stephenson speaking in London, 8th May Neal Stephenson is the keynote speaker at a free afternoon conference on Science Fiction as a literary genre, organised by Gresham College, on the 8th of May. I've reserved a place, but marking essays may prevent me from attending (rage, sorrow). I'm particularly disapointed as Stephenson is quite reticent about getting into conversations with his readers. The other speakers/topics also sound interesting - bit of 19th century SF in there. Excuse me while I rush through the Five Stages of Quite Trivial Grief before lunch.

	2008.04.05  09.45 March books Lost track of these, so this is a reconstruction from the piles around the flat. ( Read more... )