Peering through a lens at the fluid, substratum scale Covid-19 moves through, I can’t help note their physical body’s semblance to World War 2 naval mines, drifting in swells of ocean current. But Covid-19 doesn’t drift, it has agency. It isn’t conscious, doesn’t think, but it does have agency to perform one function: propagate. In …
(This is arguably too long for a blog post, but I wrote it in Word & it was honestly just easier due to time constraints to dump it in one, especially owing to the footnotes. I think the ideas in here, if a little dense, are worth bearing with & attempting to absorb. I have …
While studying toward my MA, I am doing assistant editor work for the University of Exeter postgraduate journal Exclamat!on. If you are a postgraduate & want to submit, the guidelines are below. You'll need to be fast, so hopefully you have something hiding away in a folder somewhere. If you miss this round, keep us …
A noun matters, it signifies implicit meanings, enabling those who understand what the noun is signifying, to utilize it for axiological, praxeological and ontological assessment, which furthermore, can have material socio-economic and cultural repercussions, as I hope to illustrate. Somebody asks if we like the taste of something, a mushroom, for example. The word …
Continue reading "Gift Exchange in Willa Cather's 'My Antonia'"
I am currently reading Frank Herbert’s Dune. I am not an inveterate science fiction reader, despite always feeling pulled to sci-fi themes. I have been particularly affected by the death of the Imperial Majesty’s Planetolgist, & planetary ecologist of Arrakis, Liet-Kyne. The Baron Harkonnen realizing Kyne’s betrayal forces him adrift into the unforgiving density of …
It has taken me longer to get this done than I promised. I started writing it just before I was due to move to Exeter. I am beginning to settle in here. But Jeju & Korea are never far from my thoughts. Genesis Yoon Yong as both hero & poem germinated together. I had read …
(More untidy, preliminary insights from reading Heidegger. ) Taking a thing for granted is complex. There is an art to not taking something for granted. Being in the world is firmly established, as we interact with other things, tools or technologies, in order to provide the balance needed to be alive, we don’t exactly sense …
Continue reading "Learning the art of not-taking-for-granted"
Metaphor to magnify This may be a bit rambling, it may chime, but this is a semi-riff-with-structured-argument on a number of books (provided at the end) I have read in the past month (except Being & Time, which I am currently reading, but which has featured in good measure in Morton’s & Harman’s books). I …
The Rock (not the muscle-headed Hollywood Rock who doesn’t perform his own stunts but looks hard like he does) in T.S. Eliot’s play explains, The lot of man is ceaseless labour,Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder,Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant. Now assuming idle here isn’t a play on idol—which, with a lit-crit …
I originally posted this piece on Medium, which I recently discovered. I want to ask a favour of you. I have never asked anyone to follow my blog, & I now have over 700 followers, so I don't feel guilty asking something of people now. I may (most likely will) be returning to England in …
