a dancing star!

Next month marks the 10th anniversary of the passing of Gillian Rose, philosopher, scholar and teacher. She is much missed by all whom she graced.
London Consortium is holding a special conference on the 9th of December 2005 to discuss the legacy and impact of her life’s thought.
As a tribute to the philosopher Gillian Rose on [...]

The Heaven Select XI is even more invincible tonight and Sir Matt will surely include him straight away
Hugh, courtesy of Red News

These Elliott Smith-esque days are coming thick and fast. There are many more reasons to detest the ubiqutous iPod than there are seasons in the sun, the least of which is the overturning of conventional punctuation which results in Steve Jobs iCon (sic) biography. The more glaring one is that, for most, for the recent [...]

I’ve too much time on my hands but seem content to remain unproductive. Found this site, though, that charts one’s travels and justifies the collection of 12 used passports that lies piled amongst unused airline tickets, annotated phrasebooks and unsent postcards. It seems my mortal memory cannot contain the wonders of Istanbul’s mosques, nor of [...]

Bad things happen to bad people. I was reading Andre Schiffrin’s The Business of Books (subtitled: how the international conglomerates took over publishing and changed the way we read).
And it came true.
The itinerary for the forthcoming vacation to the West coast would have included a visit to “Midnight Special”, a specialist (read: leftist / critical) [...]

It’s just as well that it is a French word. I remember writing about “race” riots and the disenfranchised in 1980s Britain - the impact of Thatcherite economics, institutionalised racism, antagonistic policing methods, disproportionate unemployment rates etc. Listening to news reports, it seems that explanations are simply regurgitated, albeit with an easily ridiculed French accent. [...]

Interesting concept. Thousands, if not tens of thousands of books, unowned by any single natural individual and free for anyone to browse and absorb, guided by an idea that books are not primarily the vehicles of accumulation but of communal participation, what is now sometimes called a “knowledge base”. If we were able to envisage [...]

We angstsy moderns wear our and everyone else’s anxieties on our sleeves. Mine jolted me out of bed this morning with a venom worthy of a jilted lover: it is not that my books will never see the light of the published day, but that they will be the ones that you see on display [...]

Alas now on a less topical note, I was all ready to unleash a sniggering line or two upon hearing news that the Bush adminsitration “announced a $7.1 billion strategy yesterday to cope with a possible influenza pandemic” (NYT, 2nd November 2005). Perhaps my tickling of the world’s funny bone would take the form of [...]