PORN STUDIES
Linda Williams, ed.
I never took any courses from Linda Williams while she taught at UCI, but this is no surprise — I was in grad school for English lit while she was over in film studies, and though there can be and is some crosso[…]

I DON’T beLIEVE IT!!
i got into Eyes, Lies & Illusions for free, by pretending to be r.sinker not m.sinker and thus in the education&outreach racket. This wz a good thing, cz it’s a bit lame for ‘9, sadly. Werner Nekes&#8[…]

Hidden secrets of nursery rhymes: lit crit equivalent of “The Magic Roundabout is all about drugs”, surely? And why is the book title a Smiths reference?[…]

BLOCK BLOG
2: Time To Murder And Create
How I Got It: Borders Charring Cross Road, which happened to be the first place I looked. After the difficulty of finding number one, I though this might be the case here. The only problem was its top shelf pos[…]

SUPERMAN IS DEAD
So said the cover of the Evening Standard yesterday. Ho hum, I said. Its not anything we haven’t seen before. He’ll be back in a couple of months.[…]

Five Things About Michael Chabon’s
THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY
1: Clay doesn’t have any amazing adventures
Okay, he maybe has the amazing adventure that many of us have, living in a big city, doing work you like, doing wor[…]

Bernardo Belloto
Slaughterhouse Five is a book I read every couple of years. It is strange and horribly beautiful and I’m not sure I understand it all. More civilians died in Dresden than in both nuclear attacks on Japan combined. I don’t[…]

Retracing long worn away steps without going anywhere — of course the advantage of travel literature in many ways is the joy of being able to visit places in the comfort of an armchair, but then there’s also trying to find spots that just[…]

Derrida obituary in The Guardian: here. Does a terrific job of a summarising work and life concisely and clearly. The leader here is certainly more appropriate than the Times one mentioned below, and not just because I agree with it to a far greater […]

Jacques Derrida 1930-2004
Expect to see more of kind of obscene gloating in the next few days. There are few scholars whose death could provoke such unseemly and offensive glee among the staff of what used to claim to be a paper of record. The violen[…]