Postdoctoral fellowship application, June 2006
12 months, to write and place two papers developing my doctoral thesis (analysing the Italian protest movements in the 1970s through contemporary press coverage) and submit an application for funding for a follow-up project (looking at British protest movements in the 1990s).
Rejected. Critical feedback.
Research grant application, January 2007
24 months, to analyse [...]
6 January 2008 – 10:53 pm
A post-Christmas meme from Rob.
1. Wrapping paper or gift bags?
Wrapping paper. Bags are for bottles of wine.
2. Real tree or artificial?
We switched to real trees a few years ago. This year was our first dead tree stuck in a bit of wood; it dried out quite a lot over the twelve days, and [...]
Some years ago, John Harris (not the pundit) proposed a thought-experiment called the Survival Lottery. The premise was that the supply of organs for transplant is currently inadequate to meet the demand. Moreover, the whole business of harvesting organs for transplant is fraught with practical and emotional difficulties, putting both the bereaved and potential recipients [...]
It’s been a bad week for deaths. Arthur Lee died last Thursday. If you drew a line from Brian Wilson’s ice-cream symphonies to Dylan’s lyrical manifestoes, you’d meet the Arthur Lee of Forever Changes right in the middle. Arthur Lee was a great artist, responsible for some of the strangest and most beautiful moments in [...]
When my son was born the midwife commented on his oily skin – “he’ll be a spotty teenager”. My own skin is noted for its sebaceous quality, so my reaction wasn’t surprise so much as anticipatory fellow-feeling – tempered by the utter inability to imagine this eight-pound armful as a teenager, spotty or otherwise.
He’s nearly [...]
Prompted by the title of a recent post, the other day I put on the Mull Historical Society’s first album Loss as a background for getting some work done – not so much music to work with as to work against. Colin MacIntyre (who is the MHS) wrote the songs on the album after the [...]
Ellis:
there is one dissenting voice on the blogger left. He believes he has located “a devastating case against Chomsky, focusing in particular on the Srebrenica massacre.”Yes, I mean you, Phil.
Well, I’m on to it, comrade. And I think we are are about to enter the exhilarating territory of a fraternal disagreement.
More soon.
Personal to ES: let’s [...]
I dreamed about my father this morning. In the dream, I’d somehow managed to establish contact with him where he is now (he died in 2001). He wasn’t happy: he was bored, he was lonely, he missed us, he missed his home. I didn’t like to explain to him that he couldn’t come back; it [...]
I went to my mother’s funeral on Monday. Writing those words I’m immediately reminded of Camus’ use of a similar opening, which he put to strikingly blank and dissociated effect (After the first sentence: “Aujourd’hui, Maman est morte,” you know that you are in the good hands of Albert Camus. The existential theme is just [...]
My mother once said that when she retired she’d call her house “YBOTHACUKIN”. (After some discussion she agreed that this spelling was a bit common and accepted my suggested alternative, the fake-Welsh “Y-BODD-Y-CWCYN”. Too clever by half, we were.) She never quite reached the point of “why bother”, and never intended to; it was a [...]
My mother died this morning. She was 84.
She was brought up in the Plymouth Brethren, a Protestant group with strict ideas about most things but not much internal hierarchy. At their Communion services, PBs would share actual bread rather than the rice-papery wafers they use in the Church of England. According to my mother, one [...]
24 January 2006 – 10:29 pm
Political radicals and activists are often stereotyped as people who’ve got something wrong with their lives – it’s just displacement, his Mummy wouldn’t buy him a pony… This is mostly wrong, of course, but I think it’s also partly right – and for the same reason that it’s mostly wrong. After all, everybody – with [...]
9 January 2006 – 10:40 pm
…it wasn’t a very good year. Eighteen wasn’t bad: when I was eighteen I passed my Cambridge entrance exam, got my first editing gig (a church youth newsletter), went abroad for the first time and did my first full-time job; the last of those doesn’t really qualify as good (I was a nursing assistant in [...]
