Forgetting reasons

Writing is always an act of recovery. Truths cannot be told. What was I about to say? Tinnitus of the edge closing in: call it a demented pleasure-seeker's journal, the slip into or off something more or less comfortable. Sell a million. Measure the benefit. That way more utility? Identity and tradition, culture and place, … Continue reading Forgetting reasons

X-Files

An atheist, materialist, anticapitalist poetry that trusts no one, not even itself? What kind of cultural capital does poetry have? How is that capital distributed and redistributed? And how does the distribution of that capital relate to the distribution or redistribution of any other kind of capital?

Privatisation

Privatisation, the political economic theme of the '80s and '90s, is often discussed in industrial terms. Coal, steel, automobiles, communications, water, and so on. But, I don't hear the term applied to housing. There was a "sell-off" of public housing, but it wasn't spoken of in terms like the sale of our national housing industry. … Continue reading Privatisation

Ethics and poetry: just a trash bag

I have been re-watching The Good Place and recapitulating reading I did a year or two ago. Warning: suicidality, violence, PTSD Doing bad things and having bad outcomes: selling a cure you know does not work to someone who doesn't need it; phishing attacks on pensions and payments through cold calling, website spoofing, and scam … Continue reading Ethics and poetry: just a trash bag

Small cosmos: virtual hypertext

The magic in poetry is that not only is a poem LIKE a cosmos, it can BE, maybe simply, IS a cosmos of reader, hearer, speaker, writer, words, sounds, spaces, histories, intentions, interpretations, meanings, etc. Every poem carries its shadow and illuminates third spaces. There is a lot of dark matter under and behind and dark energy throughout.

A hidden curriculum

Published on: Jan 18, 2018 I examine two related concepts: hierarchised identity formation and the enclosure of desire as a hidden curriculum. A hidden curriculum is, I suggest the collection of assumptions, often about power (Brookfield 2017, chapter 2) that is communicated alongside and through the practice of overt curricula. A hidden curriculum is conveyed … Continue reading A hidden curriculum

Tinkering with algorithms

I read Franklin Foer's Facebook's War on Free Will the Guardian's "Long read" for Tuesday 19 September 2017. He recapped a familiar argument: you are Facebook's product. But when he hit "data science" I turned up my sensors. He says, "There’s a whole discipline, data science, to guide the writing and revision of algorithms". Then he … Continue reading Tinkering with algorithms

Pay gaps, gender gaps and other crap

Money is power. More particularly, money is patriarchal power. Now here is the rub. If you use the powerful's form of power to overthrow the current power, you simply replicate power as it is. You do not transform it. OK, it is a little more complicated, but that is about it. If you use hierarchised … Continue reading Pay gaps, gender gaps and other crap