Sunday 23 February 2014

I've just copied & pasted my entire PhD thesis - all 272 pages of it - onto a Blog page. It was a thoroughly laborious process, and I'm going to have to go through the whole damn thing again at some point, as
(a) the pagination doesn't seem to have gone through; and
(b) it hasn't captured the footnotes.
Why I can't simply upload the bloody thing, I don't know! Still, it's substantially up there now.

Wednesday 12 February 2014

Un petit séjour chez des amis à Paris, ou j'ai passé l'hiver de 2009-10, comme étudiant à une institue de recherches philosophiques pendant mon doctorat. A l'instant, je suis dans le biblio au Centre Pompidou, jouant le rôle tout à fait traditionel d'un romancier expat, en écrivant plus d'Amoeba Dick; que d'un Hemingway, moi!

Saturday 8 February 2014

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10625730/Downing-Street-police-porn-arrests.html This news has caused in me a change of mind. I now think that Andrew Mitchell would have been wrong to have called the Diplomatic Protection cops "fucking plebs". Plainly, he should have called them "dirty buggers" instead.

Friday 7 February 2014

Amoeba Dick passed the 80,000 word mark this afternoon, meaning it's on schedule for completion some time in late March. Next projects:- (1) Hire an agent to secure me a publishing contract for Amoeba Dick. One agent has expressed an interest, but wants to see a complete copy of the work before agreeing to represent me. (2) Upload my PhD thesis. This process is slightly complicated by the fact that my thesis features a lot of symbolic logic, some of the formatting of which tends to get lost when the beast is uploaded onto a new platform. So it'll probably take me several days, after uploading the whole thing, to go through it with a hard copy, inputting all the lost symbols. (3) Start work on my next novel, which will be one of the following two:- (a) a singularly revolting parody of Ulysses called - and I can only apologise for this - "Odour Issues". The less said about this the better, frankly, but I think it will be jolly good. (b) "Pretty Poli; or, Monsieur Perroquet's Ascent to a High Perch"; this being a novel about a very clever parrot which scales the greasy pole of human endeavour, in particular making a career in politics, eventually enjoying a period as Home or Foreign Secretary. Withal, this is a novel of hubris, for alas our feathered friend's downfall is brought about by a character defect peculiar, it may be supposed, to the generality of parrots, viz. a liking for smut.

I found this hilarious Swiftian Modest Proposal on Twitter this morning, courtesy of someone calling him/herself Northern Variant

As a Labour MP, I'm often chased down the road by very vocal Labour supporters. I welcome this level of passionate engagement. It's ...