home cooked theory

Earning kindness

Going away made me realise in a whole new way how lucky I am to have my own home, to live somewhere near my work, to enjoy what I do (most of the time), to be able to afford to do things I like doing (well, reading newspapers and books doesn’t cost much in most [...]

Small steps

I’ve been back in Brisbane since Saturday and I’m having trouble adjusting. My mind and my heart are still back in the UK, and my body, while very much here, is aching and complaining about the lack of sleep on the flights home. I’ve been too tired and fluey to go out and walk around [...]

Back soon

[From Toothpaste For Dinner, via my favourite blog stalker]
I’ve been off the grid quite a bit over the past few weeks of travelling, and loving it. Stay tuned for tales from abroad when I get back to Bris on the weekend.

Lessons from Lenin

This is where I went today:

He warned them about Stalin and they didn’t listen. Idiots. BTW, Lenin’s wife was so incredibly hot! The entire museum, so far as I could tell from the English guide, did not mention their marriage or relationship in any way. I want to know more about her (NB: Gorky’s [...]

Transit

Yesterday I caught a cab, a train, a bus, a plane, a bus, another bus and then another train. At the end I had made it from Oslo to Tampere, which has a cool looking cathedral amongst the smokestacks and shopping centres outside my tiny hotel window. It’s either ham or cake for breakfast in [...]

Politics

‘Agamben reconceives the very notion of the political. In so doing, he develops an understanding of the political that equates neither to a purely linguistic relation nor to grounded intervention in specific social or institutional contexts. And it is primarily for this reason, I would suggest, that his work is proving so important for a [...]

Politically correct

‘…although cultural studies may perhaps tout as radical its preoccupations with such subjects as democracy, emancipation, egalitarianism, identity-formation, multiculturalism, postmodernism, feminism, queer studies, anti-racism, postcolonialism, marginality, hybridity and so on, in actual fact these are simply struggles at the cutting edge of the ‘politically correct’ ideology of capitalist expansion. For Zizek, cultural studies is thus [...]

Fidelity

‘… cultural studies’ primary deficiency is in providing a satisfactory theory of the event. Cultural studies has been remarkably tight-lipped about the various reasons why so many people have made history by rejecting their cultures in favour of something that happens to render them null and void: the rapture of listening to a prophet who [...]