Dear Iain, As I have narrated here, on the very same day you announced your imminent death of cancer, I had sent an abstract for a conference about your twelfth (and last!) SF novel, The Hydrogen Sonata. The conference is next October, the paper is written, and you were supposed to live until then. Unfortunately, […]
I’m writing this post in answer to Sophia McDougall’s juicy article for the New Statesman, “I hate Strong Female Characters” (15 August, http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/08/i-hate-strong-female-characters). Basically she complains that while male characters get pinned on them a variety of adjectives (see her list for Sherlock Holmes), female characters in recent audiovisual fiction “get to be Strong.” McDougall […]
I love documentaries. Not nature documentaries, whether they are of the cute, cheesy variety or of the ultra realistic kind –which, for some reason or other, always include grisly scenes of bigger animals killing smaller animals. I mean culture documentary films. My second dream job after university teacher, is ‘documentary film maker’. (Actually this is […]
Last Christmas holiday I published a post on the Harry Potter series which has led to my teaching next academic year an elective subject on Rowling’s dark yarn. Having enjoyed season one of TV series A Game of Thrones, I told myself that perhaps soon it should be the turn for George R. R. Martin’s […]
I have just checked my personal teaching account, wondering whether hours I’m owed had been finally counted. Yes, whoever does this has entered the hours corresponding to my supervision of a PhD dissertation (or is it for two dissertations? I’m confused). Not yet, however, the 21 hours corresponding to the three BA dissertations submitted in […]
As the BA Coordinator, one of my duties is to welcome our new ‘English Studies’ students in a joint session before registration. Apart from helping them regarding choices they need to make on their registration form, I give them a few pointers about how to become successful university students. I have gone as far as […]
Our ever expanding academic duties have included this year the novelty of participating on the examining boards for the new BA dissertations or TFG (‘Treball de Fi de Grau’). July has thus yet another day of very hard work that, as usual, must be deducted from research and that delays the official date for the […]
English is an infinitely flexible language and so, the word ‘unwrite’ does exist. Oxford Online ignores it but not Merriam-Webster: “to obliterate from writing: expunge, rescind”. I have also comes across an article by learned Laurence Lerner, “Unwriting Literature” (New Literary History, 22: 3, Summer 1991, 795-815) and an article in, of all places, The […]
MASCULINITY EMBODIED (AND THOSE MANLY VOICES!) Today I need to say something about men’s voices. A few years ago I got contacted by an American man with a warm, husky voice, Dave Muldoon, who asked me to help him develop a PhD dissertation on men’s voices –he is himself the voice of Tom Waits in […]
This is a post I wish I didn’t have to write, as I wish that E L James’s Grey Trilogy did not exist. I’m even deeply concerned that by publishing this, I might be calling anyone’s attention to this disturbing, revolting piece of trash. After meeting Christian Grey I can only say that I am […]