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.
The Pirate Bay released a fabulously entertaining press release yesterday, containing the memorable claim that “we’ve done what they [Hollywood] did”, meaning circumventing legislation to open up a restricted field to business and the public. Techdirt examined this claim, and found historical evidence for it. About one hundred years ago, Thomas Edison’s “Motion Picture Patents Company” tried to monopolise film equipment production, but Carl Laemmle’s Universal Pictures refused to bow down, and cinema-goers flocked to the “illegal” movies of Laemmle, and fellow independents.
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.
The cover of this book features a photograph of a series of worn posts stretching out across a sandy beach. In the distance the sea and sky, a series of thin, bleached strips running horizontally. A grey landscape worn down by time, and by the sea.
Brighton punches above its weight in all aspects of culture except one: history. We have venues for music, galleries for art, cinemas for film, theatre for plays, groups for geeks, workshops for writers - the list goes on and on - but nothing for history. The Catalyst Club caters for it a little perhaps, but it doesn’t have a historical remit, it just happens that the subjects discussed there inevitably involve events from the past, which isn’t strictly history.
I’d like to go somewhere where I could hear someone telling me something interesting about a historical subject new or largely unknown to me. I was put off history at school by a bad teacher, but recently I’ve realised its import. It touches everything. It doesn’t matter what one does, the more history one knows, the better placed one is in one’s field.
So two alternatives present themselves to me. Either someone tells me about an existing historical lectureship group in Brighton (comments box below), or perhaps I could start one? I know from FlashBrighton how simple such groups are to organise; a venue, a few emails, and they run themselves.
What do you think?
It’s fine to take anyone’s idea you want and just use it without permission.
Well that’s it, that’s all I really wanted to say, but one has to justify these things, right?
the necessity to develop and apply geometry to farming produced by the seasonal flooding of the nile found expression in a series of mathematical papyri. the great egyptian mathematician ahmose was responsible for the moscow mathematical papyrus:
moscow mathematical papyrus - courtesy of wikipedia.org
i’ve finally finished my essay ’swindon orbital’, which has taken 4 months to complete. for me it’s a major piece of work and i’m happy with it, with some reservations (which i think is healthy). i’ll keep this short post because the essay itself is what’s worth reading. if you’ve not heard about it before and would like to know more, start off here.
once completed, friend and fellow writer james burt suggested it should be published in actual book and promoted in swindon, so i did. details of its promotion - including a bbc radio interview and a newspaper article - can be found here. if you’d like to purchase a printed version of the book contact me directly here (copies cost £5), and if you’d just like to download the pdf, you can find it here.
if you do read it, please come back here and add your feedback. i’d like to know what you think.
