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November 2011

Know it's pandering to his trolling, but Clarkson earns over £2m per year. Many of the people he'd have "executed" for striking earn 20-40k

Another day featuring 6 hours of consecutive teaching. Went well, but with 1 week left of term, it's major research time! #phdchat

Exciting day today! Off to Sussex for lunch with SAGE publishing then back to London to see the Richter at Tate with fellow PhD types.

Methinks, as Pynchon puts it in Inherent Vice, that it's "long past time to be, as Shaggy would say, like, gettin out of here, Scoob"

Enjoyed telling my Literature students about the Gulliver-inspired big and little endian in computer science today. Cc @drtomcrick @Eingang

Bringing that back to my usual tweets about lit., there's a Richard Fariña ref. (BDSLILLUtM) in "It's About that Time" #Alabama3

"Have you ever been to the Galapagos, you know they got lizards there that ain't got no eyes, she says, that comes as no surprise" #alabama3

A warm welcome to @SussexUni/BMS researcher @DrRachStanley who is embracing Twitter and all its offerings. cc. @SussexDocSchool, @lizith

1 highlight of last 24 hours was supervisor telling me to start working on a monograph proposal and emailing me successful examples #phdchat

Great couple of days. Supervisors love my latest work, teaching was ace and now have issue and vol for forthcoming journal article.

.@ButchOtter, Idaho hasn't executed anyone in 17 years. Please don't restart with #PaulRhoades on Friday, stop the execution.

Brrr. Notable temperature difference in Brighton. Seminars I'm teaching today on Swift's scatalogical poetry, though, which should be fun.

How can Frank Miller justify drawing a front cover for Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, a book *about* the preterite 99%, then say this?

Excellent! Looks like I'm going to get to give my David Lynch/Spatio-temporal distortion lecture at Sussex again this year.

Currently wishing technicolour violence upon royal mail delivery staff who don't ring the doorbell with crucial deliveries. I WAS IN.

Today will begin at the British Library. When they close for the queen, I will move to the Criterion Theatre to see Mark Rylance. Oh well!

Much of today's march was spent, by my cohort, thinking up "catchy slogans": what do we want? Renaissance humanist education values...

So, in addition to protesting for the future of UK HE, I also finished journal article revisions & did thesis research today. #phdchat

Pynchon research snippet: no source, Latin or Greek, for the Infancy Gospel of Thomas features the rabbit golems of p. 486 of Mason & Dixon.

Also love the way that, like, Pynchon's 18th-century characters, like, speak like this: "as a boy made small, as you'd say, toy Golems"

Hmm. Nasty mis-print in first ed. of Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. P. 486 should read Exodus 3.14, not 4.14. Wonder if replicated subsequently?

Academia.edu informs me that people are searching for my Wittgenstein and Pynchon paper. Would be nice if they'd hurry up and publish it!

If you are a UK-based academic & would like to co-sign a letter of support for the protest on the 9th, let me know. Full text on demand.

If Google claims that G+ is all about freedom of data etc., then why are there no RSS feeds on any of the pages, and why is Dapper blocked?

Felt so angry at pension debate on R4 yest. "When the gov. has no £" The gov has no £ because it went to banks to pay their huge bonuses.

Note to self: never again leave work with an incomplete sentence reading: "the question that must first be broached is". #phdchat

Don't forget that tomorrow @SussexUni are holding a debate on the Environment & Health. Get involved by using #SussexConvo

Off to Sussex to teach 2 hours of workshop then 4 hours of seminar. Lots of Douglas Adams quotation re assessment will be used: don't panic.