As part of my MA course on ‘Postmodernities: New Sexualities/New Textualities,’ which deals with Gender Studies as it is easy to surmise, I decided to include a ‘chick lit’ novel. I needed something reasonably short and, ideally, about a woman who already has a candidate to be her Mr Right but who comes across the […]
I was trying to get my students interested in Oscar Wilde’s peculiar position as a late Victorian celebrity avant la lettre, and before I really knew what I was saying I blurted out that his celebrity status then was not so different from that of Venezuelan import Boris Izaguirre today. That surely got their attention […]
It’s taken me a few months to go through the 2,000 pages that compose Robinson’s trilogy about the (hopefully) soon to come colonisation of Mars: Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1992) and Blue Mars (1996). At some point, particularly when the end of the Mars 500 experiment was announced (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_500), I thought that Mars […]
I have a new book out. It’s very small, only 84 pages, but it’s taken plenty of reading and plenty of thinking, so I thought I’d use this blog to publicise it a little bit. The volume is called Desafíos a la Heterosexualidad Obligatoria and it’s part of the enticing collection that Meri Torras is […]
I’m beginning to sound like a broken record but I guess this is yet another sign of my incipient depression. A few days after the Spanish elections the Catalan government insidiously announced yet another paycut for civil servants, something between 1 and 3% to be deducted off the extra month’s salary paid in June and […]