We have a new cat bed for upstairs, as the one in which Hans passed away last week clearly still smelt of him, and/or death, even after multiple washes, and the surviving two refused to use it. The problem is that it’s a design which Hector can get his teeth into, literally, and drag it off the bed onto the floor – and even down the stairs. We thought he had abandoned this habit, or we would have bought a different type, but clearly he was just waiting for conditions to change to resume his plan. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Writing’
Shoulda Woulda Coulda
Posted in Musings, tagged research, Writing on March 1, 2024| Leave a Comment »
Twelve Days in the Year
Posted in Musings, tagged 12 Days in the Year, Christa Wolf, Writing on June 20, 2023| Leave a Comment »
I’m in Bochum, for a conference starting tomorrow on Bier in der Antike; wonderful to be back in Germany rather than just getting fifteen minutes’ sanity from the Taggesschau every evening (time devoted to Johnson shenanigans in the last fortnight? Zero), lovely to be back on Eurostar, at least once you’re past the security and passport queues that make the experience barely distinguishable from an airport whereas once it was completely calm and relaxed. But the reason for writing this is not to make you all jealous about the beer thing, or to grumble about Brexit again, but to announce a new writing project. (more…)
It Wasn’t Me
Posted in Musings, tagged plagiarism, Writing on March 10, 2023| 6 Comments »
I massively pissed off my wife a few nights ago, by going upstairs to the ‘study’ (which doubles as the music room, as well as general storage and nursery for chilli seedlings) to work on my jazz composition homework for twenty minutes or so, and re-emerging just under an hour later. I readily accept that this is not acceptable behaviour, and have agreed to try setting myself an alarm next time – because this was genuinely a matter of losing track of time due to total absorption in the task of trying to get a melodic phrase right. You can almost hear it in your mind, you know you’ll know it when you hear it, but there are so many different things to try adjusting in the hope of getting closer to what it’s supposed to be, not to mention the need to try to save the better versions in case you want to return to them, that suddenly an hour has gone by and you’re not necessarily any closer to success. (more…)
Automatic for the People
Posted in Musings, tagged ChatGPT, essays, history, Writing on December 12, 2022| 2 Comments »
As the great philosopher Thucydides once said, “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” This quote has been interpreted in many different ways over the years, but I believe it is still applicable to modern society.
At its core, this quote is a reminder that we must not allow our society to become divided between those who think and those who act. It is essential that those who think and those who act are working together in order to achieve the best possible outcome. This is true in any field, whether it is business, politics, or the military. (more…)
Write Here, Write Now
Posted in Musings, tagged Long COVID, work, Writing on July 5, 2022| Leave a Comment »
The continuing joys of Long COVID… The main function of this blog post is just to give a link to a profound and thought-provoking piece by the ever-wonderful Maria Farrell over at Crooked Timber, talking about her experience of living with and adapting to ME/CFS, with an eye to this new epidemic of the after-effects of the plague. It’s full of striking and memorable phrases (“cosplaying normality”!), and you simply need to go and read it, and reflect.
I found it quite uncomfortable, to be honest. (more…)
It Wasn’t Me
Posted in Musings, tagged coronavirus, Writing on August 31, 2021| Leave a Comment »
One of the weirder experiences this summer – another minor symptom of the whole lingering plague thing – has been an intermittent feeling of total dissociation from my own publications: looking at books and thinking, well, I know I wrote this, and I can recall the circumstances and motive and so forth, I just don’t feel as if it’s mine. This is probably not unconnected to struggles with getting any new writing done; besides persistent fatigue and brain fog, apparently I need to feel like the sort of person who writes academic sentences for more than the odd hour at a time in order to actually write any – and actually writing some, as I have managed to do occasionally, unfortunately doesn’t seem to do much to convince my psyche that, yes, this really is what I do for a living. I do feel extremely sorry for the various editors who have had to put up with delayed submissions and requests for extensions because of chronic existential crisis. (more…)
Crown of Creation
Posted in Musings, tagged academia, jazz, Writing on July 16, 2021| 2 Comments »
Final jazz composition class of the year, and, no, to be honest I didn’t really want to spend the first part of it discussing creative processes and the things that get in the way of writing. In musical terms, it’s a very interesting question, and I’ve made enormous progress this year; I had not realised quite how much I like being given homework on a weekly basis, but this is not just about having a structured task to complete but also learning the importance of setting parameters – rather than “go away and write something”, it’s a matter of e.g. “go away and write something featuring fourths”, immediately giving a focus for one’s efforts, and that then reinforces the need to set some other parameters for oneself, at least as a starting point. It works both as a learning experience (getting a really good understanding of fourths by exploring the different things you can do with them in the process of trying to produce something that sounds half decent) and as a structure for the process, and I’m going to see how to replicate this in some of next year’s teaching – tricky, since this is about developing skills more than learning content, whereas ancient history courses tend to be more the other way round, or at least the skills are developed in parallel over the course of the year rather than explored one by one, but not impossible… (more…)
Dear Editor…
Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged higher education, publishing, Writing on December 5, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Subject Heading: Why you are not getting that article/chapter any time soon
(1) It’s been a horribly busy term and I simply haven’t had any time to focus on research or writing. I have a couple of commitments in June and early July, plus taking a short holiday (at last!), but I’ll then be able to get down to this properly. (more…)
How Not To Write
Posted in Musings, tagged academia, Writing on May 11, 2019| Leave a Comment »
I’m doing the final polish of this piece while wondering why watching Meet Me In St Louis seemed like a good idea – THIS is one of the classic movie musicals?!? – and ignoring the cats, who are NOT getting fed until half eight. It was sketched out last week, between rewatching Independence Day (far superior to Meet Me In St Louis despite lack of songs and some common themes), then drafted in between cooking vindaloo and chana masala, sitting on the train into work, and eating homemade muffin (proper English muffin) while being yelled at by cats who want to be let outside to intimidate the local wildlife. (more…)
All The Books I Haven’t Written (Yet)
Posted in Musings, Publications, tagged Death, Writing on January 18, 2018| 4 Comments »
A day or so ago, I remarked that one reason I take a “that’ll do” approach to writing books is the fact that there’s always the next thing that I want to move on to writing about. Yes, butterfly mind and all that. This thought was then powerfully reinforced by the remark of a friend on Facebook: “Anyone else at that age when they think ‘that would be a great project, conference, grant, book…’ and then, ‘hmm, I wonder how much longer I’ve got?’” Oh god yes – and I’m not thinking about retirement, because (1) I suspect retirement ages are going to retreat endlessly into the future as we approach them, as in one of Xeno’s paradoxes, and (2) I have every intention that retirement will enable me to write much more, whatever my wife thinks about finally getting the garden sorted out.
No, we’re talking about death here. (more…)
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