"I'm not confused. I'm just well mixed." – Robert Frost
Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton died last week. I'm not interested in particularly praising or trashing his philosophy, though that won't stop me: his ideology is not one I share, his view of the world is one I reject, and his views on race, gender, and sexuality were totally awful. His philosophy was rather dull and … Continue reading Roger Scruton (1944 – 2020)
(This is the first film review for my blog: not my usual wheelhouse but for Chris Morris, I will do anything.) The Day Shall Come is a good title. It’s a statement that invites a question: which day? Cheekily, followers of Chris Morris’s work might answer ‘The Day Today’, and seen through the lens of … Continue reading FILM REVIEW: The Day Shall Come (2019, dir. Chris Morris)
I spent my summer in the most productive way possible: finishing the Herculean task of watching every still-existing Doctor Who TV story broadcast (I need to go through the missing stories but I take victories where I can get them). It occurs to me that, in a lot of ways, the story of post-war Britain … Continue reading The Greatest Show in the Galaxy
It's been an unacceptably long time since I updated anything here, so I thought since I promised fiction, I'd put here a short story I wrote a few months ago. It's a short science-fiction piece about alien skulls, extreme wealth, the inter-spatial housing crisis, and a real estate mogul obsessed with the colour gold... *** … Continue reading FICTION: Pure Image
When faced with the name Elizabeth Sandifer, any good Doctor Who fan (like me) will think of TARDIS Eruditorum, or "A Psychochronography in Blue." Often political, regularly strange and always insightful, the series of blogs from beginning to present of Doctor Who is an incredible achievement. At once, it's something of an unofficial history of … Continue reading REVIEW: Neoreaction A Basilisk (Elizabeth Sandifer, 2016, Eruditorum Press)
In Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People, Timothy Morton looks on Marx as a piece of computer software. Specifically, he seeks to sweep through Marx's thinking and identify the 'bug' in his system, which is, according to Morton, his anthropocentrism. Whether Morton succeeds or not seems to me a difficult question, but, for reasons I hope … Continue reading REVIEW: Humankind (Timothy Morton, 2017, Verso Books)
CAMILLA: You, sir, should unmask. STRANGER: Indeed? CAMILLA: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you. STRANGER: I wear no mask. CAMILLA: [terrified, aside to Cassilda] No mask? No mask! -- The King in Yellow, act i, scene 2(1) Masks are one of my keenest aesthetic interests. When writing fiction I return … Continue reading Take Off Your Mask
Having spent the last two-and-a-half years at university, I've gotten pretty good at writing introductions. You outline your answer to the question, set out the steps you will take in getting there, and reduce the argument to a nice abstract summary. To quote one of my lecturers: "It's not a whodunnit. Don't keep us in … Continue reading Introductions
Time Can Be Rewritten 