Listen. Are you listening? You’re not listening. I am talking to those of you in this class who might be interested in writing. Every moment of your life, you’re writing. Even in your dreams you’re writing. When you walk the halls in this school you meet various people and you write furiously in your head. [...]
Summer time to me means time to read books. The kind of fun, fascinating books that my studies don’t always include. And I’ve read a fair few books this summer, presented here in chronological order as I’ve read them: Robert M Pirsig: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I liked this. There is just [...]
I just saw today that Kurt Vonnegut, writer and misunderstood anthropologist has passed away, aged 84. So it goes. (as a lot of obituaries no doubt will be saying referring to Vonnegut’s own writings) I’ve enjoyed all that I’ve read from Vonnegut’s pen, both sharply sarcastic and quietly wise. If you haven’t done so, I [...]
My friend Marie-Louise left for Afghanistan recently to spend a little over four months there working for a development NGO called DACAAR. I helped her set up a blog which she has named Eyes Out There for her to tell the world about her travels. Since I won’t be going to Afghanistan any time soon, [...]
Two British literature experts have been conducting a study comparing the favourite fiction books of men and women. Many of the interviewed had some professional connection to literature. Apparently, they were much surprised by their findings which showed that men preferred angsty existentialist books while women preferred books of passionate struggle. The top 5 lists [...]
Having been ill for a couple of days this week has left me completely zonked. This resulted in a rather bizarre case of insomnia which brought me through Samuel Delany’s Babel-17 last night. Uh, Spoiler alert! Babel-17 reminds me a lot of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Both books use the idea of languages that function [...]
I guess it was just a matter of time before the growing field of ludology began using games themselves as a way to explore its boundaries. Finnish ludologist Aki Järvinen has made a game about games which he obviously had to call Game Game. He says that it is the same kind of meta-referential use [...]
This morning, instead of studying for my Digital Rhetorics group exam this Thursday, I read Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael in a self-indulgent attempt to stop my cold. Ishmael is a strange sort of book. Very insisting and assertive. The story is actually most of all the socratic dialogue between the main character (who also narrates the [...]
While I was in Manchester, I was surprised at how stunted and illegible the local students’ mobile phone text messages usually were. Every text message is limited to 160 characters or spaces, and if you exceed that, the phone company will charge you for two messages. Since the students are really cheap (except for when [...]
Today, I chanced upon an alternative American history text book with the rather provocative title “Lies My Teacher Told Me.” Based on 10 years of research partly spent comparing 12 different common US high school history textbooks with the more or less accepted historical “truth” as it is decided in academic circles, the author, James [...]