This Sentence No Verb Rich Cochrane's Blog

The disorder London has seen in the past three days has certainly been unusual. Last night similar, although much smaller-scale, incidents took place in a number of other major English cities. Here’s how my thoughts stand on this at the moment. I’m responding here mostly to things friends have said over the past few days; I may in places be tilting at windmills, and I may change my views with hindsight, but it seemed worth recording my reactions as they are now.
Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Cohen is going after the Humanities in his contrarian manner, claiming that academics have nobody to blame but themselves for the ease with which the current government are going to get rid of them. He seems rather delighted, in fact, by the prospect of the slate being wiped clean.
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a bit late for Christmas puzzles but these occurred to me this afternoon and I thought they were worth jotting down.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few words may be in order in light of Cage Against The Machine, the campaign to sell enough copies of a John Cage’s notorious “silent” piece 4’33″ to make it the UK Christmas Number One single. I’m not going to say anything very big or clever here, and certainly nothing new, but it might be useful for those who find the whole thing a bit puzzling.
Read the rest of this entry »

I made a quick presentation to give a very simple skeleton for a lesson on New Historicist literary criticism that I’ll be doing next Thursday. It’s deliberately simplistic so please excuse my mangling of Marx, Foucault and everyone else in the middle bit.
Read the rest of this entry »

The National Secular Society put out an alarming press release last week insisting that the “BBC must not become an evangelical wing of the Church of England“. Leaving aside whether the C of E now has wings, how great is this risk and how do the NSS’s arguments stack up?
Read the rest of this entry »

Mary Beard’s latest Don’s Life column refers to the current culture of risk aversion in university research funding. As someone who’s putting together a funding application for the ESRC (with almost zero chance of success, I should add) her words seem absolutely right to me:

the only way sensibly to be able to conform to the AHRC guidelines is to apply for money for research you’ve already done

Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick note on the Conservatives’ latest election poster. It’s not that it’s negative: I’m fine with negative campaigning, and I think the Tories, having been in opposition for a long time now, have every right to score points off the incumbent administration’s record.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been reading a fair bit of radical pedagogy (Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux etc) of late and seeing the word “emancipation” so many times that it started sticking out of the page and looking wrong. Then I read something in, of all places, Huddleston & Pullum that I think made sense of it for me.
Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday we walked the lower half of the Ravensbourne River in South East London, recording our impressions as we went. We began at Lewisham DLR station.
Read the rest of this entry »