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... I learned from Doctor Who. And sf more generally.
I appear to be gaining a reputation for asking pointed questions. I've realised this before, as when I managed to put down a senior academic by noting the similarities between their paper and something television critic wrote nearly forty years ago - but I'm intrigued by the mismatch between the perceived value of my opinion by myself and by others.
This came back to me over an incident this week in which someone stated that they were getting annoyed, and I had to struggle to see this as a result, rather than a challenge for further action. Getting annoyed? I should push a litte further...
I must stop shaking beehives.
A public reflection on this (Facebook status) produced a response from someone who I've seen deliver a number of papers, in particular one in which spaceships were described as phallic or vaginal (with the Enterprise being an interesting liminal case). That seven word summary obviously doesn't do the paper justice, but the other liminal case I could think of was the TARDIS. Clearly it is phallic as it is a cuboid (...), but on the other hand its interiority makes it vaginal. I was given no answer at the time. And apparently scored a point. I can't remember this being deliberate.
Then this morning I remembered a forgotten umbrella. In Spurs, Derrida writes about images of feminity (as truth, modesty, as withdrawing from the light) and invokes a line in Nietzsche's unpublished manuscripts, "I have forgotten my umbrella." On the one hand, in its folded form, the umbrella is phallic, on the other, the opened state is a concave shape or cup.
There's an article in that.
I can't see me writing it, mind.
The second article idea of the week - or rather the first, as it sprang into mind last Friday - came to me in a coffee bar in Whitstable; reading through The Seventies Now I came across mention of a trope that echoes something in a contemporary British writer, and which again is to be found in Derrida (in Disseminations). This one I may write.
Two Derridean articles in one week, and that's before we deal with his "The Law of Genre". There may be a book in it.
I hope not.
I appear to be gaining a reputation for asking pointed questions. I've realised this before, as when I managed to put down a senior academic by noting the similarities between their paper and something television critic wrote nearly forty years ago - but I'm intrigued by the mismatch between the perceived value of my opinion by myself and by others.
This came back to me over an incident this week in which someone stated that they were getting annoyed, and I had to struggle to see this as a result, rather than a challenge for further action. Getting annoyed? I should push a litte further...
I must stop shaking beehives.
A public reflection on this (Facebook status) produced a response from someone who I've seen deliver a number of papers, in particular one in which spaceships were described as phallic or vaginal (with the Enterprise being an interesting liminal case). That seven word summary obviously doesn't do the paper justice, but the other liminal case I could think of was the TARDIS. Clearly it is phallic as it is a cuboid (...), but on the other hand its interiority makes it vaginal. I was given no answer at the time. And apparently scored a point. I can't remember this being deliberate.
Then this morning I remembered a forgotten umbrella. In Spurs, Derrida writes about images of feminity (as truth, modesty, as withdrawing from the light) and invokes a line in Nietzsche's unpublished manuscripts, "I have forgotten my umbrella." On the one hand, in its folded form, the umbrella is phallic, on the other, the opened state is a concave shape or cup.
There's an article in that.
I can't see me writing it, mind.
The second article idea of the week - or rather the first, as it sprang into mind last Friday - came to me in a coffee bar in Whitstable; reading through The Seventies Now I came across mention of a trope that echoes something in a contemporary British writer, and which again is to be found in Derrida (in Disseminations). This one I may write.
Two Derridean articles in one week, and that's before we deal with his "The Law of Genre". There may be a book in it.
I hope not.
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