22 October 2009 – 10:45 am
June? June?
Oh well – I’m back, probably.
What’s been happening? Looking back at the last two posts, both those papers got rejected; in one case it was more of a “revise and resubmit”, so I’m not particularly distressed. The other was more of a “hit the back wall without bouncing” rejection, which did stop me in [...]
Last night I dreamed an angel kissed me, Solpadeine…
I’ve just finished a paper. I never have much trouble writing, once I get going; my problem is always that I try to get the kitchen sink in, while also being vaguely provocative and gnomic in the manner of Debord or Garfinkel or Nils Christie. So I [...]
Anothere meme (I’ll get back to proper blogging soon, honest) – via. Books this time, and a tie-in of sorts with the BBC’s Big Read (although I can’t find a BBC page with this list on). Viral boilerplate follows:
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books [...]
Just recently, I’ve got heavily into traditional music – specifically, traditional English, Scottish and Irish music. One of the effects has been to make me feel a bit ambivalent about the local folk club – which is ironic, as it’s going to the folk club that exposed me to traditional music in the first place.
I [...]
A meme from Paulie:
Q1. How would you define “atheism”?
The dogmatic certainty that God does not exist, and that His non-existence really matters. Like Paulie, I prefer ‘agnostic’ as a label.
Q2. Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition?
Church of England; I described it here. We were quite big on the story about feeding the hungry [...]
A bit more oneirography (I don’t intend to make a habit of it). I had a dream last night which reminded me oddly of a dream I made up some years ago. (I wrote it for a short story (unpublished); the story was vaguely, partially autobiographical, but the dream was completely made up.) See if [...]
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 [...]
It struck me the other day, after seeing Robyn Hitchcock on Later, that I don’t go out much these days. I was never a really frequent gig-goer, but for many years there were a few people I’d invariably see if they came to Manchester. Robyn was the longest resident in that category; I first saw [...]
Or: my life as a biographer.
Rob asked about my reference to writing a biography of Debord. It goes back to the old bastard’s death in 1994. I marked his passing by sending postcards to several people with his dates and the words “Bernard, Bernard, this bloom of youth will not last forever”. More practically, I [...]
Autocomplete blog meme. Simple procedure: type each letter of the alphabet in the address bar (one at a time, obviously) and see which blog comes up first. The result should be a map of your personal blogosphere, or at least those bits of it you’ve visited recently.
I saw this on a blog somewhere years ago [...]
10 February 2008 – 11:04 pm
I think the real problem was that I’d finished the gin a couple of nights before. Obviously gin wouldn’t be a good alternative to vodka, but if it had been there on the shelf it would have reminded me that there were alternatives to vodka, and then I might have thought of using brandy. Which [...]
29 January 2008 – 1:18 am
Picture a man of 35. He gets up every morning and gets in his car, goes to the office, moves papers around, goes out for lunch, plays poker, moves some more papers around, leaves work, has a couple of drinks, goes home, meets his wife, kisses his children, eats a steak in front of the [...]
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 [...]
I’m sorry to see that Ellis has closed his blog. I’ve enjoyed and admired Ellis’s writing since we were both contributors to Casablanca; I remember he did a piece on the slave trade ostensibly by John Smith, which antedated Tony Benn’s joke at the expense of the Economist by a decade and a half. Unfortunately [...]
2 September 2007 – 6:19 pm
I happened to watch Matt Weddle’s acoustic cover of “Hey ya” today, courtesy of whoever posted it on YouTube. The video’s great, if you like watching bearded men playing acoustic guitars. After watching it I spent a happy five minutes reacquainting myself with the video for the original song, which is still a very fine [...]
29 January 2006 – 11:22 pm
Or: what gets left out of those ‘meme’ things.
7 places I’ve loved
1. Pendine: the cliffs, the endless horizon, the beach in the off season
2. Scilly, especially St Agnes (and the view of St Agnes from St Mary’s, at sunset)
3. Florence
4. Paris
5. Edinburgh
6. Brighton (and Hove, actually)
7. London, especially Somers Town
[The only] 6 membership organisations I’ve [...]
I heard the other day that I’d been awarded a doctorate. Which was nice. I started doing it at the beginning of 1999, walking out of a perfectly good job in the trade press in the process, and several times in the intervening six years it had looked as if it wasn’t going to happen. [...]
Or: I’ll be your mirror. Or: I got it from Clare.
Not so much a chain letter as a chain interview. Carrie interviewed Clare; Clare interviewed me; and I might (I said might) interview you.
More on that later. Now for the much more interesting topic of, er, me.
1. What role does music play in your life?
Two [...]
Pearsall has handed me the book stick. Thanks, Pearsall (how do you pronounce that, by the way?)
1) Total number of books I’ve owned
About 2000. Certainly there are at least 2000 books in the house at the moment. Several hundred of those belong to my wife; our children have got at least a hundred between them; [...]
It’s true what they say about Oxbridge. I spent three years at Cambridge doing little more than fade into the panelling, but I still knew (or at least bumped into) some stars in the making – a Tory MP here, a Guardian columnist there. Not to mention the thesps. A friend of a friend acted [...]
