Following the suicide of Aaron Swartz, I believe it makes sense for one to make as much academic work as possible freely available to the world, even for lowly MA students like myself. Here then, is a PDF of my latest essay, critiquing the postmodernists’ critique of history.
I once saw a boy get run over, and it’s something I’ve never forgotten. Telling a friend the story recently, it occurred to me how a written account might be of general interest. Essays can be at their most illuminating when they plainly describe events without analysis. Classic journalism, I guess.
My latest essay then, is the description of the accident I saw, put as objectively as I can. Names have been changed, for the usual reasons.
An essay I wrote on the London Riots was picked up by Sanford Housing Co-operative in their in-house bi-monthly print magazine “The San”. So popular was said essay amongst the readership that they invited me to make a regular contribution.
I present therefore, essay #2: Unfriend Facebook: Why Facebook Is Anything But Your Friend. Written in the light of recent Facebook changes, the essay highlights why these and previous Facebook features are bad for all of us.
I thought I’d expand my tweets about the #LondonRiots into an essay, analysising the root causes of the trouble. Even if I say so myself it’s a great essay, and I really recommend it.
You’ll find it here.
Blakes Road, the book I am writing, is the story of a walk I took last year from England’s south coast to London. Specifically from Felpham, near Bognor Regis in West Sussex, to Bunhill Fields, a cemetery in Islington. The distance was something around 70 miles, and it took four days walk, meaning the book is divided into four chapters.
I am halfway through the task of illustrating ‘Blakes Road‘, the book I am currently writing. I’m illustrating the book as it is, in part, a paean to William Blake, and Blake illuminated almost every page of his own books, so I feel I should do the same.
Here are a few of them:
The copywriting I do for DotBrighton is the perfect writing gig for the world of 2011. As it is a voluntary, unpaid, restrictive, and unpublished role this might seem counterintuitive, so I’d like to explain why. It has a number of key things that are unexpectedly right with it.
Every drop needs squeezing from 140 chars. Let me show you how that’s done. Here are four tweets - all of which can be improved - from four Twitterers I follow: Jeremy Keith, Aegir Hallmundur, Simon Warrick & Jenny Rolfe. These four were in a block and I chose them at random to show that any tweet can be improved:
Let’s start with Jeremy’s:
Nettle roots go deep. Really deep. You never know how deep. They’re also rhizomic, which means they sprout long, tough underground stems - rhizomes - that seed new plants, and is the reason that they’re often found in clumps.
Playing football last Friday I broke the little finger of my left hand. The bone has also twisted, meaning that I might need surgery to straighten it. This means my left hand is more or less useless. Just living simply becomes a chore. Anything involving water is particularly tough, the hardest two tasks are washing up and shampooing my hair. But more or less every activity involves both hands, I have sadly discovered.