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Below are the 25 most recent journal entries.

	2009.07.10  08.49 Essential: good honours degree. Desirable: Psychic assassin ninja powers. Recently attended an excellent workshop (wish I'd thought of it) on how my job is presented in novels. It used fictional characters to open questions of how we see our roles, how other colleagues see us. Three small groups had an initial discussion about how we'd like to be represented in a novel. Group 1 wanted to be seen as friendly and approachable. Group 2 wanted to be invisible. My group asked me what I'd like. I said 'Oh, I'd like to be some kind of super-competent consultant in a big underground archive with a good suit.' To my surprise and delight, with no further prompting, they responded: 'Ooh! Like a sinister priestly order?' 'Can we be secretly in control of everything? I'd like to be really Machiavellian.' 'Can we have masks? We'd have like, the official mask for the job, so nobody would know which of us it was. Like in Greek theatre. We could have a good mask and a bad mask. Depending on whether we were going to help or not.' 'We need robes. We need to glide everywhere.' After we heard feedback from everyone, one member of my group murmured to me: 'Well, they want to be liked, and they want to disappear, and we want to be an all-powerful sect. We're going to wipe the floor with them....'

	2009.07.08  10.27 Before you judge me, walk a mile in my disgusting shoes. My usual shopping pattern is to notice that I want something, then wait long enough that the company making it goes out of business. Top tip for zero spending, there. However, sometimes I actually need things. In that case, I wait long enough until I can find them in a skip. This month, my annoyance about gender stereotyping seems to have compressed down to a single declaration bellowed at me from all angles: WOMEN LIKE SHOOOOOOOES. Also, women like shopping, and particularly, women like shopping for shoooooes. As though this were a) universal and b) somehow so invincibly trivial an activity that it can be used to denigrate an entire gender. Because of these things, I am glad to report that, needing a pair of shoes, I have just found them in a skip. (For those who worry about my wellbeing, they're a nearly-new good-quality pair in my size that were previously being used in an art project - yes, the art-skip at the back of my office triumphs again! - and they were left politely at the side of the skip, not covered in broken glass and jam. For those who worry about my sanity, I can offer no such comfort.)

	2009.07.07  16.38 Free books I'm having one of my periodic clear-outs. What, I ask myself, do I want to take my from old life, into my new life? Standing in front of the Piranesi etchings holding Little Ted, I think: 'Probably not JoAnn Loulan's Lesbian Sex.' Below is a list of books that seemed too rarefied or tatty for my local charity shop - let me know in the screened comments if you'd like any of them. Leave an address, UK postage only. ( Read more... )

	2009.07.02  15.45 Pride London - this Saturday I'll be helping to organise a bi bit of London Pride on Saturday. Details below the cut if you want to join in, but I just wanted to be wildly enthusiastic about attending. Unless I solve global warming, Oxford Street will never be closed off for me to parade along, being madly cheered by crowds. London Pride is, therefore, a really incredible experience, because I get to do just that. Virginia Woolf wrote: 'Again, if one is a woman, one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say when walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilisation, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical.' Last Pride, I was dancing down Oxford Street rather than walking down Whitehall, and I felt absolutely like the inheritor of my civilisation, and so I thought of Woolf. It isn't ideal - to be alien and critical for 364 days, and then feted like Bon Jovi for one Saturday - but it's an interesting experience. You don't have to be bi to come and walk with us. You certainly don't have to be bi to help me carry some of the numerous purple umbrellas. See you Saturday if you fancy it. ( Read more... )

	2009.06.08  10.20 Does anyone know of a London-based activity this evening relating to the BNP win, and how dismal it is? I was thinking 'vigil' or 'protest' rather than 'come round my place and kick the garden wall', but all offers welcome. I know standing around in the drizzle with a bunch of wellmeaning types won't actually bring a new age of unity and candyfloss into existence, but it might make me feel better. BNP homophobic arse, but with mildly humorous aftertaste, under cut. ( Read more... )

	2009.06.05  09.36 I am getting rid of some perfectly serviceable things which the charity shop would reject. Would anybody like: - minitubes GONE! - Wild Seed by Octavia Butler. No back cover. Fantasy/historical. Give me your address in the screened comments and I'll pop them in the post.

	2009.05.28  10.29 Watership Downer Ever since I saw the revitalised Cadbury's Caramel Bunny, I've been meaning to check her against the original. 1980s bunny: 2009 bunny: The slogan says 'Still got it'. I don't support mocking thin women to further fat acceptance, but the less fair, balanced and rational bits of my brane immediately thought: "She's still got what? Ameobic dysentery?" The new lips and breasts take her into what Alison Bechdel calls 'woman as mutant' - the female characters in animal cartoon strips having exaggerated human female parts, creating weird sexualised cross-species hybrids, while the male characters are just cats, bunnies etc. Her main example is the female cat from Garfield who has pouting lips. The original bunny was sensuous and luxurious and West Country (and probably inspired a lot of people to become furries and move to Devon). And she was originally voiced by Miriam Margolyes, a wicked dynamic fat lesbian: I haven't heard the new bunny speak, yet - maybe she just lounges, or perhaps there's a telly ad I've not caught. But based on the poster, Cadbury's have kind of lost it. Edited to add that the original was dodgy in its own right, but I'm unsettled that twenty years on, the use of a slightly curvy bunnylady to flog a chocolate bar seems pretty radical. Edited again to show the 'missing link' bunny, from the late 1980s/ early 90s, via steer:

	2009.05.12  09.52 I've mostly been doing unremarkable things, but this week I've been marking. I often get daunted by the sheer mathematics of marking. Everything multiplies up and looks terrifying. I sit down with a notebook and a nice pen and I write the candidate number and the title of the first question and experience a little warm glow of competence. Then I see the stack of blank brown envelopes next to me and think Oh good grief that took at least ten seconds - I've got umpteen candidates - that'll be 15 minutes/hours/days JUST WRITING THEIR DETAILS. (Calculations based on leaving out the 'warm glow' phase at least half the time.) This was particularly bad last year, when I volunteered to put a numerical value on everything in a three mile area for a tenner. This year, I'm just marking my own students. I miss the insight into other years of study, but I don't miss the Holy hell there are 300 of them that'll take eight weeks, when's the deadline, next Thursday. Marking is good - you can see what people think, hopefully you see people learn, on a really good day you can see where you've supported them in learning something. Most obviously, I keep finding a little circumlocution where, at draft stage, I advised the removal of something excruciatingly wrong. (I don't know if it's also been corrected in the brain of the originator.) At the end of each teaching year I'm unsure whether I'll get to teach next year, which is saddening.

	2009.04.28  17.46 See, I will not forget you... I'm thinking of this as a a clay sketch as it only took an hour and a half (with Primeval on in the background - can't decide if it's better or worse if I'm not watching the screen). ( Read more... )

	2009.04.14  10.47 "that the piercing bouquet of a given friend's particularity be done some justice" Eve Sedgwick has died. She was an excellent queer thinker. One of my favourite pieces was her 'axiomatic' observation that 'people are different from each other'. The list of potential differences she gave, just within the area of sexual preference, dazzled me every time and every time I spotted something new, for which I hadn't thought through the implications. And over time it was a mapping tool which allowed me to see how I was differing from my previous selves. She wrote on the complexity of identification, on patterns in literature, on coming out (in ways I nicked a lot and probably didn't credit her for, including a lovely comparison of gay American coming out and the biblical story of Esther), on fatness and femme-ness and cancer and pedagogy. On a cheery concluding topical note, she wrote an essay titled "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay" (mainly an investigation into the pathologising of effeminacy in boy kids). The other day I went to a naming ceremony at which the parents promised to help their child resist heteronormativity, which is totally awesome.

	2009.04.13  21.30 Easter returns Editorial asides I have written on my hot cross bun recipe at an earlier date: 1 tsp (hah!) mixed spice I like them spicier. Kneed fruit into dough (or add it earlier, this is a swine). Thanks, past-self; maybe you could have put that advice in the recipe before the dough was finished. My knuckles ache, but the result is delicious. ( Read more... )

	2009.04.08  12.51 The moving finger writes, and having writ, I say 'Is that it?' I'm trying to find ways of talking about my creative writing without sounding like a tosser. This has led me to examine why I find it so embarrassing, and why I sometimes roll my eyes internally when people talk about their creative projects (only sometimes! I am usually attentive and charmed). I was talking to Mr Russet and I suggested that people often seem to use 'I'm going to write a book/create some art' as a way of saying 'This thing I have encountered interests me' e.g. 'I've found some propaganda pamphlets about the Mormon exodus and ...' choice a) '..they're really amazing for these reasons' - great! choice b) '...I'm going to write a novel about them!' - which can make me cringe, against my more sympathetic intentions. Perhaps because it's saying 'I've found these cool things, and I'm going to do something with them which is even more cool.' I'd be happy if people just enthused about things without feeling they have to contribute anything more - good enthusiasm is better than half-arsed art. Perhaps because the confidence to announce a project before it's begun exhibits an un-British amount of self-confidence. I do over-value modesty. Perhaps because so few of these things see the light of day. Anyway, Russet responded that he never finished any of the projects he spent hours talking to me about. However, I never roll my eyes at him. I realised PART II: I find rambling creative plans which may or may not come to fruition more interesting when they belong to friends. Novels often get compared to babies, by writers in ways that make me self-conscious and cringy ('Really? Does your sonnet sequence wake you up five times every night? Has your teenage palimpsest been selling meth from the basement?'). However, I've worked out that I also find babies much more interesting when they belong to friends. So, novels are a bit like babies, for me. I do like hearing about creative projects generally, even ones doomed never to reach fruition, so don't let this post prevent you. This is all just preamble to say I'm going to spend the long Easter weekend finishing off My Novel. It doesn't have a plot, but I think that will be easy enough to fix. Some things fall in love, other things blow up, how hard can it be?

	2009.04.03  11.27 What do you remember of us? Deceased relatives have been peopling my dreams. It's been a nice way to spend time with them, although confused by the creeping awareness that I'm dreaming, and thus fooling myself - trying to wheedle something out of my own brain and attribute it to someone else from whom I can't get more information. The dead relatives, sensing the futility of this, gently brush aside queries and smile a lot. Their demurral is in turn generated by my own beliefs about their decency (if they knew they were figments, they'd certainly refuse to dispense advice which might be misleading) ( Read more... )

	2009.04.01  12.05 'If you liked it then you should have put a ring on it." - Beyonce, discussing the usefulness of catching, ringing and releasing birds in ascertaining migratory patterns and lifecycles of endangered avian populations. ( Read more... )

	2009.03.12  13.49 Raptor facts Following my last useful post about bird identification, more information from a falconry talk I saw at the weekend. If a bird of prey has a much longer middle toe than the ones on either side, it means it hunts airborne prey - other, smaller birds. If it's a bit longer, it eats mixed prey - some birds, some ground-dwelling animals such as rodents. If its toes are all the same length, it hunts ground prey. If its third toe is a lot shorter than the middle toe, it's probably a lesbian.

	2009.03.09  19.12 Thank you for donating to Otterly Splendid. Your password for March is: I'd like to set up some regular charity donations - any recommendations? I'm thinking one that tackles generic global poverty and deprivation (something like Oxfam) and one that does something specific to my interests (gender equality, literacy and education, sexual health). I'm afraid I'm not particularly looking for medical research or support in post-industrial countries, or animals. I may crack and throw some sum at an otter sanctuary in return for special online access to their secret ottergalleries, but that's a personal matter. I couldn't find even an unreliable guide to financial efficiency in charities, online - hard to calculate, I know, but I'd like to see one if they exist. I know charity itself has problems associated, and I'm also looking at and working towards other avenues.

	2009.03.06  11.45 Holiday blogging I'm recently returned from Edinburgh, which (like Whitby) has a kind of hyperexcited golden glow for me, because I've had too much fun there. I went to the Fringe/Festival a lot with my school. We slept on the floor of a church hall in Leith, and stayed up too late with glamorous older kids and cool teachers playing the guitar, singing barbershop and eating kebabs. Kicked out at eight every morning, we trudged into town to attend a variety of events, some transformative, others involving students rolling around under a duvet full of jam reciting Jacobean revenge tragedies. (I have myself been involved in jam-rolling activities: at 18 I played Madame Sosostris in a gameshow version of The Waste Land. Well now that's done, and I'm glad it's over....) If I try to enthuse about Edinburgh it'll just be a big cliche - it's so architecturally gorgeous, and the landscape it's built over is so dramatic. The twisty old town and the upright nobly civic New Town shake hands across a breathtaking bridge and some excellent gardens. I took a friend to visit when it was misty for the whole two days - I kept throwing out an arm and saying 'There's a castle over there!' 'That way, there's a bloody enormous rock!' Unfortunately, he could barely see my fingers (there were postcards to prove I wasn't lying). It's humansized and walkable and has little rivers and excellent museums and art galleries. The tenement block flats are just stunning - high-ceilings, huge rooms, long shuttered windows, the communal stairs often painted green which (with all the light falling from above) makes them feel like a fishtank. And it has beaches which I hadn't visited before, half an hour out of town, in Portobello and Mussleburgh ('The Honest Town' - Mr Russet helped me overcome the urge to add an 'r' and an 'i' to that sign). I have to remind myself that if I actually moved there it wouldn't be a ceaseless round of lovely nibbles in charming cafes. Which was how I spent the weekend, with a lot of walking (Edinburgh always leaves my legs tired) and with Mr Russet (nothing can really go wrong because he exists).

	2009.03.05  12.06 Treadwells esoteric bookshop has a good lecture series on the history, culture and/or practice of various spiritualities. The talk on Radclyffe Hall on 20th May looks promising. Radclyffe Hall, however, does remain in many ways a horrible human. I've just reread the Diana Souhami biography - if you wring the paperback edition between your hands, contempt drips out of the spine and stains the endpapers. It's latent in the early days when she's holding seances and breeding daschunds, and seems a bit spiteful and overstated; it escalates and suddenly seems appropriate when she's supporting fascism and living in an absolute bargain flat in Florence (cheap because a Jewish family have recently been driven out of it). And the loathing becomes even more personal when Hall starts a relationship with a much younger woman and can't really see why her wife of umpteen decades is put out. Tantrums, and borderline assaults, under the cut. ( Read more... )

	2009.02.23  16.03 Corvid facts Trying to discover withmore certainty whether the bird I saw at Stonehenge was a rook or a crow, I find that the rook has a bare patch of grey skin on its beak, and the crow has heavy black eyemakeup and some kind of leather straightjacket.

	2009.02.20  09.40 Dad's nose. Mum's eyes. The Conservative Party's chutzpah. There's a new Conservative advertisement, which you can see at their website if you wish (http://www.conservatives.com/), but which is also up on a vast billboard on the street where I work. It says 'Dad's nose. Mum's eyes. Gordon Brown's debt.' Every time I go past it I think of another reason why it's genius, and why I don't like it. It's a reasonable complaint that the country's in quite a lot of debt, but this ad relies on some assumptions about babies and parenthood which I find problematic. (Problematic is a weasel word I overuse so much in my writing that near the end of any editing project, I go through with find + replace and a thesaurus. Shoddy but necessary.) Below the cut is an extended meander which is more about my particular cultural studies obsessions than decent political debate - if you don't like people reading too much into things, then skip it, because I love reading too much into things. ( Read more... )

	2009.02.19  10.21 Things I should be doing, probably. Running, research. I'm finding it hard to motivate myself to do things which are about maintaining a steady state ("What do we want? Neither a deterioration nor an improvement in the current situation! When do we want it? Ongoingly!") or have very nebulous rewards. I've got out of the habit of running over the Winter, and was going to ardently re-seize it in the first week of February (other projects completed, Spring on the breeze). Then London had the heaviest snowfall since The Smiths disbanded, so I postponed, and went out this weekend. I was afraid I had seized up but can still run for about an hour without any trouble. Very very slowly, but I'll be fine if I'm pursued by something shambling with a short attention span. So I don't want to change the way I look or the things I can do, the zombie apocalypse will definitely arrive but you shall not know the hour nor the day, and I have to find some kind of motivation to excercise. The idea that it wards off depression is very lovely but (for me specifically) unproved. Preventing osteoporosis is more necessary but seems (reckless youth that I am) such a long way off. Which means I just have to do it for the fun of it. Look at the lakes, look at the megafauna, learn the names of the ducks and the dinosaurs, hear the moss squelch underfoot in the lawns and watch the seasons - already dull sage blades of bulb plants pushing up through grass, and being ambushed by the sudden smell of honey from untraceable early-flowering shrubs. Same stuff as last year, and the year before, but it recharges something for me. I will see if it's enough to get me out three times a week. There's always music. I'm finding it harder to commit to another project - more academic research (in my free time). The rewards are similarly vague, the process equally hard-work-fun rather than bubble-bath-and-treacle-tart-fun). I'm going to see if someone at work will have a chat with me, to pin down the relative usefulness. Hope your brainchildren are all thriving. And resolutions not flagging - one of mine was to get used to the natural color of my hair (after 17 years of continuous tinkering), and I'm quite liking it already.

	2009.02.14  09.23 Draft for a Valentine Inspired by Silk Road Cooking: A Vegetarian Journey - Sicilian Fava Bean Crostata Broad beans have a tough and spotted shell But a downy silk interior is revealed to the practiced hand Broad beans are unassuming But their split green hearts treasure up all the subtlety of Spring Broad beans are not currently in season Neither are we; I've walked through all the markets Jostled by the Brownian motion of the crowd, peered into every heaped basket You can get broad beans frozen, though, And Nigel Slater thinks they're almost as good I used to think I didn't like broad beans Turns out it was just that my parents left them too long on the allotment until they went all bitter and leathery And became as unpalatable as this developing analogy

	2009.02.09  16.34 Only connect (no, like, everything, dude) Checking online the recommended dosage for some snazzy painkillers, I find that the same painkillers have led to a sharp decline in the vulture population in the Indian subcontinent. How absolutely arbitrary, and depressing, is that? They give the anti-inflammatory painkillers to domestic cattle, the vultures eat the cattle carcases, and they get renal failure from the chemical accumulating in their feathery, carion-consuming bodies. 95% decline in 2004, 99.9% decline as of 2008. This has encouraged the growth of the rat and feral dog populations, and various other threats to human health. The Indian Zoroastrian Parsi community have been really hard-hit - they used vultures to dispose of human corpses in Towers of Silence, and now they can't any more. This astonishing series of facts (all gleaned from Wikipedia, adn thus potentially stitched together with lies) temporarly distracted me from my quest to find out if I can neck another of the little toxic rotters before 6pm.

	2009.02.06  11.37 Villainy afoot Crime on my mind – cut for mild mentions of improbable violence overheard, and some potentially callous musings on the odd ways crime is reported. ( Read more... )

	2009.01.28  16.23 Enjoying my employment (2) I administrated a seminar this afternoon - I bought them some cake from a Gaza aid fundraising stall, left it on the windowsill with the drinks, and promised the catering assistant I'd return the coffee urns to the college kitchens afterwards. When I come back to the room two hours later, it should be empty, but I can hear faint music, and musical sighing. Artists have nicked my room! I put my eye to the keyhole but can only see a woman with a ponytail, and the open sash windows. I pop up the corridor out onto the green, at dusk. The warmly glowing open windows allow me to hear undulating mass humming and voices whisper-chanting: I HEAR! NOI-SES! I HEAR! NOI-SES! I creep along the wall to the window, then lean briefly into the bright room, swipe both coffee urns from the windowsill and duck out again, cherishing a memory of people wearing neon, doing eurythmics and completely ignoring me. I carry the urns back and meet a colleague on the way. She asks me what I'm up to. 'Someone nicked my classroom,' I explain. 'They've got a flute. They're chanting.' She rolls her eyes and notes that you couldn't make it up. I go back for the empty cake plates and crumpled serviettes. The daylight's even lower on the green, which makes the long windows glow vivid orange and gold. Duck in... I SEE! A LIGHT! I SEE! A LIGHT! ...scoop up some ripped sugarpackets, duck out again. I hope their rehearsal/fitness regime/ritual wasn't disturbed.