Boy I’m tired. What a sissy I am. Just because I woke up before dawn and have been slaving away at revisions all day (except for the times I was walking a very slow exasperating dog I know, which is not exercise but a kind of anti-exercise, a kind of minus exercise) – is that any reason to be tired?! Yes, apparently. Anyway I am. But a reader (an avid reader, in fact, he tells me – my favourite kind) sent me a link to this amusing story, which restored my energy and enthusiasm just enough to jot a note on it. Auckland, Auckland – what are you thinking of? Pull yourself together.

A spiritualist group has been given

My head hurts. Or is it my stomach. Or is it some finely-tuned moral or cognitive or aesthetic sense situated somewhere between the two – somewhere mid-gullet, perhaps, or resting on the back of the third rib. Whatever it is, it comes of reading this. What is it that’s so irritating about this…

The Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s led some of us to believe that the end of the canon, the end of seemingly objective appraisals of “aesthetic complexity” through close readings, the end of the representation of the culture of white males as culture per se, meant that some major battles in the politics of representation had been won. Some scholars however, suspected that the