Spam is the new surrealist poetry. I still cherish with some fondness the email I received a few months back from the nice Jewish gentleman with the recently dead wife and the fixation on Kabbalah, "post-Auschwitz Spiritists" and Jewish goddess figures, whose ramblings encompassed pre-Christian gender politics, medieval sex magic, Borges, Bacon, ( Read more... )

Working at home today, hooray! Busy putting together a long and complicated document to convince the Staffing Committee that the job I am doing is not the job they think I am doing (mystic Jedi hand gesture). This is fun, and is allowing me, via the eradication of all actual personal voice, to exercise all my rake-in-the-grass diplomatico- ( Read more... )

Today there are Things That Make Me Happy On A Friday (apart from the fact that it's a Friday, naturally, this week's Fridayness being unpleasantly undercut by the fact that I have to be on campus tomorrow to guide confused would-be students through the mysteries of curriculum design during University Open Day, sigh...). Therefore and however, anti ( Read more... )

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Hooray, my dreams are back! not sure why, but I've apparently got the stress under control, or at least come to terms with it, to the extent that I'm sleeping properly and being properly active of a night. The night before last featured a dark, desolate, Mordorish landscape filled with dank lakes, in the middle of which a ruined castle on an island ( Read more... )

It turns out I actually did make a New Year's resolution, despite intending not to - it seems to have sort of happened. Apparently I've resolved to keep on top of my work email instead of letting it build up to ridiculous unanswered piles of increasingly querulous queries dating back up to a month. There's this happy little row of orange answer ( Read more... )

Wading through CVs for a job we've advertised. No selection process in which I have had a hand will ever employ anyone who:
1) promises to "develop the implementation model";
2) writes an application letter with the caps lock on;
3) does these completely obscene things to the innocent apostrophe.

A girl has her code.

Ah, proofreading. The process wherein one engages with a professional nitpicker who is engaged, about 80% of the time, in eradicating infelicities and inconsistencies from one's writing. The other 20% of the time they are engaged in enforcing arbitrary and unnecessary visions of "correctness" upon one's deathless prose. I have prevailed in the ( Read more... )

Today I finally found time to work through the sample edited chapter of my book the nice copy-editor sent me. She is on record as saying that it didn't need much editing, as I write very well (preens), but she's bloody well gone through the entire thing and changed "which" to "that" throughout. I am reconciled to the American spelling, although the ( Read more... )

Quite the worst part about a full-time job - or, possibly the combination of full-time job with Sid and glandular wossnames - is that it renders me incapable of much over the weekends, as I veg out and gently recover sanity. This, alas, is not good for my research goals, or for the marking I should have been doing. Do I care? Not a whole lot, no ( Read more... )