Hammered, Sloshed, or just Unbottling Poetry? How to Talk about Inebriation

I vividly remember, early on in my university life, some witty, exciting new friend explaining to me that if you selected any noun — ‘laptop,’ ‘trainer,’ ‘daffodil,’ etc. — and added an -ed ending —…

My Body Is A Prison — Get Me Out of Here

This month has seen the end of what was a rather laborious cancer scare. Hearing the news that I was victim to a pretty sizeable but now known to be thankfully benign tumour clogging up the nerves and arteries in my leg, there was one pretty existential…

Keep Calm and Carry on: Accepting the State of Exception

I have, recently, been trying to understand the concept of a ‘meme.’ Its only necessary characteristic seems to be the activity of self-replication — a characteristic that it shares appropriately with a virus. I have one ‘meme’ that…

Music, Repetition, and Memory: on Discovering and Re-Discovering A Tune

The consumption of music is an odd process.

In particular, the moment when a song is stumbled upon and something clicks, hitting you somewhere between mind and body. I can’t fully…

The Queen of Paradox

Human affairs…in which nearly everything is paradoxical.

— Emmanuel Kant

Ways of Writing — A Personal Comparison

…I will now claim — until dispossessed — that I was the first person in the world to apply the typewriter to literature…The early machine was full of caprices, full of defects — devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues…

‘Unpath’d Waters, Undream’d Shores’: Longing for Water

“Searching my heart for its true sorrow,

This is the thing I find to be:

That I am weary of words and people,

‘Apparently You’ve Got A Massive Door’ — the Importance of Measuring Buildings

There is nothing like a tape measure to raise eyebrows. Depending on the company you keep, it is a reasonably safe bet that any conversation involving one will sooner or later dive below the…

Online Protest: Troll-Dodging and Detachment

Activism has never been e-asier. Going are the days of frostbitten picket lines, of lying prostrate in front of impending bulldozers and of eco-squatting in the next Amazonian tree to be felled by cut-throat conglomerates. These days there’s very…

Parlez Vous Français? Umm, No.

I am learning French. I would try to write that in French except my skills don’t extend that far yet. I learnt French at school and just assumed that I was essentially only a few steps away from bilingual. A few audio lessons, a brush up on verbs, saying ‘Merci’ rather than…