There’s an entertaining thread on the Mark Radcliffe show at the moment. He’s playing that game that we’ve all done where you create a name from certain elements, and the name is then your porn star name or somesuch. My porn star name (my first pet plus the street name of my first address) is… Continue reading What’s in a name?
EducationGuardian.co.uk | Research | How The Waste Land was done You’d have thought it would be difficult to say anything new about The Waste Land but Prof Rainey appears to have done the impossible. In doing so, he has managed to confirm what I suspect many people have felt – that the poem is not… Continue reading How The Waste Land was done
CultureSpace: I Blog, Therefore I AmThis is interesting – suggesting how identities in cyberspace are being shaped by the blogging phenomenon. I read today that there are about 4 million active blogs and millions more that have been started but then fallen into disuse, rather like the diaries we all used to start on January… Continue reading I Blog, Therefore I Am
Easily Distracted � Sample syllabi Just came across this – it looks like it could be a great course. I’d sign up…
Memex 1.1 The great John Naughton shares my frustration with corporate slogans. As he points out, consultants are paid huge wodges of money for this dross – you wonder why the companies concerned never seem to follow up by asking their clients if the slogans made an impression.
Curtis Bowman: Theodore DalrympleHere’s an interesting blog piece (what IS the word for a small section of a blog? – entry perhaps?) on Theodore Dalrymple (who would have guessed that’s a pseudonym?) whose writings I have often been intrigued by. Curtis Bowman is not unsympathetic, but objects to TD’s dogmatism. I know what he means,… Continue reading Theodore Dalrymple
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Nothing but the truthMore here from Jonathan Coe on BS Johnson. Coe makes the point that Johnson used the novel as a form, which might contain anything, including autobiography. The novel, in this view, doesn’t have to be fiction. In that sense, Johnson compares to the early heroes of… Continue reading Coe on Johnson
Guardian Unlimited Books | Special Reports | Top prize for biography of writer who won no glory This is good to see. The Samuel Johnson Prize has been awarded to the obscenely talented Jonathan Coe for his biography of the almost forgotten – but not now – experimental novelist of the sixties, BS Johnson. His… Continue reading B.S. Johnson triumph
On the way to work today, I overtook a lorry with the legend: “Rawlings Transport – keeping it real”. I don’t know where to begin on this – “keeping it real” was what hippies in Haight Ashbury did in 1967. Why a transport company – sorry, logistics solutions provider – should feel the urge to… Continue reading Meaningless slogans once more
The OU’s new expensive advertising campaign campaign hit the TV screens last night. The slogan they’ve gone with is “Powering People”, which makes it sound like they’ll be plugging students into the National Grid. This might not be such a bad thing, on reflection…Even so, there’s an ever-rising number of these mindless taglines, and I… Continue reading More Meaningless Slogans…