Love and lust are, like hunger and thirst, hormone-induced states that our brains reward us for lest we forget to have sex, eat and drink. Love, feeling madly in love, is different from hunger or fear, though: [T]he brain areas active in […]
I hadn’t realised that William Mitchell was Australian until I started watching this video of a talk he gave about his recent book, Me + +, archived in an impressive collection of talks given at MIT. There’s also a talk by Maurice […]
I’ve been grading. Last year I was frustrated at how much time we spent on grading at the end of the semester, when it wasn’t going to help the students learn at all. Now I know that that’s called summative assessment and […]
Trond’s musing while making sound installations: “Why should sound still have a human presence and expressiveness when there’s no one performing it anymore? (..) Is interaction nothing but a cheap workaround for this problem, leaving responsibility of presence to the audience?”
Oh no. “How’s my dwarf hamster?” my daughter asks, on the phone from her grandparents’ moutain cabin. Oh, fine, I say, walking into her bedroom to check. I stop. “Uh… The cage door’s open. And, uh, the cage is empty.” She doesn’t […]
When we stepped outside everything was white and cold, except for my fingers. When I took off my mittens to adjust her sunglasses my fingers turned lobster red, the red of flesh at a temperature that is all wrong. She cried that […]
My Boyfriend is a Twat is acerbic as I suspect only Brits can be, hilarious in a frightening way, and also equipped with a annotated blogroll of other blogs that don’t mince words. Hell, they don’t even dice them.
Diane‘s analysis of diet blogs (Feb 25) says a lot about blogs and narrative in general. Perhaps blogs require a narrative of change: “Once you’re no longer fitting into the category of “on a diet,” which has a built-in narrative structure, it […]
Hanna cites some descriptions of the commonplace books many readers used to keep, and some still keep. One of the descriptions proposes a completely different way of reading — a way of reading similar to today’s netsurfer-writer: Unlike modern readers, who follow […]