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7 days is a long time in academia

A much better week this time around. Must be something to do with students actually being here, and therefore everyone has to get on with the job rather than worrying around like headless chickens worrying about how to do it. Whatever the reason though, this week has been wonderful. I’ve: Talked for two and a half [...]

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of Clockwork Men

Waterloo Bridge. London. November 1995. A man has just fallen from the parapet of the bridge into the Thames below. His name is Matthew Ogilvy, and he has come to believe that there is something dreadfully wrong with his life, and the only way he can correct it is to die. He might be right. ‘of Clockwork Men’ [...]

On Neotericity

I feel I should offer some words of explanation. No, that’s wrong. I believe I should offer some words of explanation. Better. Some of you out there have (however well meaningly and lightheartedly) observed that my use of ‘neoteric‘ positions my writing as deliberately highfalutin’, or just plain obscure, and I want to briefly, although seriously, address that. I [...]

Asides

• A few weeks (I think, probably less) I wrote about indigenous peoples and their beliefs. I was flippant, without being dismissive, and thought about the subject for a few days before filing the theme to be retrieved at some later point. Witchdoctors in Tanzania are killing albinos. "They are being killed because local witchdoctors say their body parts provide the potent ingredient for magic charms, which many local people use to bring success in business and love. The bodies are left limbless and sometimes with a huge hole in the neck, from where blood would have been drained." Richard Dawkins quotes H G Wells' New Republic in The God Delusion: "The men of the New Republic ... will have an ideal that will make the killing (of their inferiors) worth the while" The zeitgeist of belief doesn't always move forward with a hop and a skip. Sometimes it lingers in the past, festering and polluting. #
• Is the neverending story of gameplay v narrative over? Not without an appreciation of the materiality of the playing experience, it isn't. And what Keith Stuart misses (in an otherwise concise round up of theoretical perspectives) is that there's something about the reading experience that isn't accommodated in the current popular critical field) #
• "Mr Cameron said it was "pathetic" for Mr Brown to read out quotes from novelists". Which novelists?! I accept that quoting Frederick Forsyth might be pathetic, but what if Brown starts quoting Balzac, Proust or Eco? Where will Mr Cameron's much-lauded derision of the written word be then, I wonder? #
• Katherine Hayles suggests that House of Leaves attempts to 'eat all other media'. What's the consequence, then, of a work that attempts to regurgitate the media it's absorbed? #
• Now the time has come to propose, or confront, a fundamental truth: like the being who wears it, the superhero costume is, by definition, an impossible object. It cannot exist. Link. #