Peter Carey is one of my favourite authors, and I’m obviously going to have to read his latest book: it’s based on the Ern Malley hoax, which my Great Uncle Jim was one of the instigators of. Uncle Jim wrote rather traditional […]

“I kiss you as we’re sitting on the sofa with the computer open beside us. I lean against you, pushing you down until you’re lying beneath me with your head resting gently on the keyboard of the laptop. I lift my eyes […]

Seeing the world absentmindedly through the LCD screen of a digital camera you’d almost forgotten was still turned on you’re surprised by details usually unseen, views you’d never have pointed a camera at if your eye was hard against the viewfinder.

Oh my goodness. I’ve just ticked off all but one of the items on my work to-do list leaving nothing but “start prospectus for book”. You know, the book that would be based on my PhD thesis but popular while still serious […]

Torill is cutting up her dissertation committee’s comments to keep some measure of control. I know that she’ll fly, without even needing to row.

The American Elf is James Kochalka’s online , presented in short, daily comics. James and his wife had a baby last Thursday, and Grumpygirl’s comments on reading the daily strips during the long, long wait for the birth are interesting in terms […]

Now this is a good quote for bloggers, found and cited by Alex: I believe that an intellectual should use newspapers the way private diaries and personal letters were once used. At white heat, in the rush of an emotion, stimulated by […]

In Norwegian a navlebeskuer is someone who’s so busy looking at their own navel they can’t see anything else. Today that’s me. But at least I’m looking through a breathtaking camera with a macrosetting that is clearly going to leave my old […]

I finally revised the definition I wrote of “weblog” for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative and sent it back to the editors. The changes were mostly small, the one I like best being a suggestion from an editor that I weave in […]

The Gender Genie is scary: it can tell I’m a woman from what I write. Apparently I (as a woman) write relationally (with, me, you, us, here, his) whereas men write informationally with lots of categorisation (it, they, the, a, more). Informal […]