home cooked theory

Extreme conference week

I’ve been at three conferences this week, and we’re just over half way through AoIR now. I’ve met some cool new people and reconnected with some old friends from interstate and overseas, tho organising duties, change of season sleeping patterns and tendonitis are keeping me from seeing many papers. Yes, tendonitis: I’ve been ordered off [...]

Shake down the thunder from the sky

This year I’m not going to miss it.

Kracauer, cultural studies and the Left

Some of you have noticed that I recently had Joe Moran’s Reading the Everyday in my currently consuming. Can’t remember if I mentioned that I set his chapter on ‘Workspace: Office life and commuting’ for my students in New Media. It’s a lovely reading of The Office, for one thing, but it’s also a nice [...]

Hot chips, wine & amphetamines

Yesterday, as part of the Brisbane Writers Festival, I went to a masterclass on how to sustain a freelance career. John Birmingham and Antony Loeweinstein took turns sharing their experiences in front of an almost entirely female audience. The turnout was interesting in itself, and I asked them to comment on it. I was particularly [...]

More notes on cool

It’s taken me a long time to get my notes together from Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool, but I want to share some of them here given how much use I’ve made of them in the conference papers and grant applications currently occupying my time. I didn’t realise how fitting Geert’s description was going [...]

MySpace, boys in jackets

Social Networking with Demetri Martin (link changed due to copyright issues).
Last week I used an older clip from The Daily Show to introduce students to the idea of blogging as a subculture. It was good timing on the back of the Emmy Awards, and the ongoing success of Stewart and Colbert’s respective empires. But I [...]

B(u)y me

If only every day at work could be this fun! I arrived at the office this morning to find 6 copies of my Now Published Book waiting in my pigeon hole, and spent the rest of the day rushing about between teaching watching my inbox fill up with lovely messages. My face hurts from smiling. [...]