One and a half hours waiting in line at fremmedpolitiet. A minute at the counter. Half of that was spent listening to a Norwegian who’d matter of factly by-passed the queue to complain loudly about some foreigners who were misusing her address […]

I’ve been fretting and procrastinating over another definition I’m writing for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, you see, this one’s on cyberpunk (the genre) and I’ve never published a thing on cyberpunk. Except for a hastily written definition I sent to […]

I need to go to the police to get my residency permit stamped into my new passport. They’re shut today but having got my passports out, old and new, I leaf through the pages. Each stamp brings back memories: Rome in March, […]

“Knowing what I now know about Martian history, of course, it all seems crystal clear to me. But at the time I was surprised how quickly I was able to pick up Martian with just a smattering of Klingon and Basque.” (from […]

I showed my students Dakota and Genius and Ashcroft Online, asked them to brainstorm ideas for their term papers, and fifteen minutes later almost all of them told me “I want to make something!” I’m amazed. I think I’m so stuck in […]

My daughter’s having her first violin lesson today. I rubbed rosin on the resiliently slippery horse’s hairs of my old violin bow for ages last night, rubbing and rubbing until finally the old hairs were sated enough that music could be heard […]

Biography‘s special issue on Online Lives is available online through libraries that subscribe to Project Muse. The table of contents is free for all and you can order paper copies through libraries.

My mother came home from India and brought me a dress embroidered in blue, green and gold. The dress drops to my thighs, loose trousers hang under it and a long, broad scarf is for swirling around myself. An Indian woman would […]

Tom Coates of Plasticbag.com has posted an article about weblogs as mass amateurisation. I’m not terribly interested in that, but love the nitty gritty of his comparison of the homepage to the weblog, midway in section four, near the end of the […]