Last post of 2013!! Other bloggers use the label ‘Kindle freak’ meaning someone in love with their e-book readers, as sold by Amazon. This is not quite how I use the label here, as, although I like my Kindle Touch e-book reader fine I am not much in love with Amazon’s attempts to control me […]
If you have already read my posts for the films Battle Los Angeles and Warrior you must already know that I find testosterone-driven Hollywood films very useful to grasp the real state of our current gender discourse, and, thus, correct the utopian drive of (pro-feminist) academic theory. As I have been preaching for the last […]
The Office for the Quality of Teaching (Oficina per la Qualitat Docent, or OQD) of my university asks me to pass onto the Department’s students a link where they’ll find a survey about which competences are desirable in a teacher. Curioser and curioser, I discover that the survey demands no ID, so I take it […]
Jaime: This one is for you… I’m sure you have noticed the relentless advance of US-inspired bakery in our cities and towns, aided by diverse TV shows (currently, for instance, Cupcake Wars on Divinity). This invasion of muffins, cupcakes and an endless variety of decorated cakes has been quite fast and, as it happens with […]
For the last five weeks I’ve been teaching an MA course with the title of ‘Postmodernity: New Sexualities/New Textualities.’ This was originally called ‘The Discourses of Desire,’ a title I much preferred but that was dropped out to include some reference to the confusing idea that we live in postmodern times (they seem to be […]
Two weeks ago I attended a conference and I found myself listening to a paper which dealt exactly with the topic of one of my publications (a chapter in a collective volume, four years old). I’d rather not mention which topic as part of the self-censorship that I must apply here, or risk losing the […]
A few months ago I saw with my two little nieces the Disney film Bolt (2008). This is a delicious comedy about a cute dog who, like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, has no idea that his life is happening in front of hidden cameras. In this particular case, Bolt, a star in a […]
This post is, particularly, for our second-year Victorian Literature students who must be this week hurrying up to finish their paper proposals and thus meet the 18th November deadline. They have been asked to write a paper (1,500 words with three secondary sources) on the narrator(s) in either Oliver Twist or The Tenant of Wildfell […]
Back in 2001, Nicholas Blincoe and Matt Thorne edited an anthology of short fiction, All Hail the New Puritans, which aimed at defining a new literary school. This, basically, applied the minimalist principles of the Dogme 95 film movement to prose fiction, as stated in the (controversial) manifesto that opens the collection. A few years […]
As I age I understand less and less the mechanism by which some stories are instantly embedded in our brains and other pass through leaving no trace. I keep lists of the books that I read and the films that I see like Japanese tourists who take photos of everything to fix the memories of […]