Blog posts

I guess I fall pretty squarely into the category of those who have, for the past year at least, become known as anti-american. And that’s why I turned fairly quickly to Arundhati Roy’s article in yesterday’s guardian. It’s a recurring theme for so many that our society’s desire for labels sets up dichotomies which rob us of the freedom to express nuanced beliefs. I wish I knew how to reclaim that. {I wish I could think how to structure that penultimate sentence} ...

So it’s been some days since this was last updated. Days of receiving much hospitality in Dublin and Belfast. Days of reading, talking, playing cards, writing (in other places) and changing plans for flying home. Many thanks are due, particularly to bananie and Susan for Belfast hospitality (and to the rest, but I don’t know that you have websites…) Time for reading is a great asset. I now hope to be the first person at the University of Reading to quote Ben Okri in an essay on quantum theory. And what’s more, I think the quote will help the essay as well as my notoriety in the department in which I study. ...

It feels a little like Bush’s speech on September 11th has made a hole in some floodgates. Since then, outspoken critics of US foreign policy have had a new hook on which to hang our arguments. This piece in the Guardian, the fore-runner to a documentary on Saturday explicitly links the US regime with the cult of (roman) empire which was a dominant force in the culture the early church was born into. It feels a little like the “you’re either for us or against us” has finally sunk in and a lot of foreign (and some domestic) critics are simply accepting that the Bush regime has forced them onto the opposing side. ...

I’m trying to work out how to respond to the news today. On the surface, Iraq’s latest offer appears fantastic: if it’s serious it should destroy all this talk of war and allow for increased security in that region. It’s no surprise, but rather sad, that the US government appears to be dismissing the offer out-of-hand. As with Afghanistan a year before, I wonder what exactly the Iraqi government could do to convince the US of any sincerity. Certainly they could hand over a stockpile of weapons, but that would require them to have the weapons in the first place…. if they don’t have weapons of mass destruction, is there anything they could ever do to convince Bush of the fact? ...

I’ve been searching for the photo from Friday’s Guardian online. The one with George Bush speaking to the UN while behind him and above him Kofi Annan holds his head in his hands. It’s a marvellous piece of photojournalism. It says it all. While I continue to search, this article is worth a read. If anyone knows where I can find the image (it was by reuters and used by the Guardian and the Independent for their front covers) please do post a comment and pass on the link. ...

I should have known that as soon as I broke down and went back to boots the sun would come back out. And so it has. A day of getting bits and pieces done: booked my train and plane tickets to go to Ireland; checked out The Postmodern Condition and Readings In Natural Language Processing from the library to help me get a bit further with my dissertation; worked on some possible designs for julielee.org; added some more press releases to greenbelt’s site; and that kinda thing. ...

My summer ended today. As I watched the rain pour down, I put aside the sandles which have seen me through the past three months and returned to my boots. The hope was to keep the water out, but that wasn’t to be. I’d forgotten about the holes in my boots. But the principle of the thing remains. Not much to report from the weekend. A good visit with family over the weekend. Viewings of unremarkable films. A fair bit more delicatessen planning (front page now updated). And my house is a fair bit tidier. ...

It must be an amusing spectacle to be sitting at an international conference surrounded by stuffily dressed delegates from across the world, debating the arcane points of a policy which will never actually be applied because the establishment don’t have the political will to do so, when all of a sudden a representative of the world’s richest nation stands up and kicks into a stand-up routine. Of course I’m not sure that that’s quite what Colin Powell had in mind when [and I know I’m coming to this a little late] he read through the drafts of his speech. He must have known that what he was saying wasn’t going to be accepted by many of the delegates, but laughter? That probably wasn’t in his imagination. ...

The first delicatessen of the season came and went and seemed to be quite the success. Good crowd right from the start and all three acts were well received. Particularly of course Julie Lee and ’the axis of evil’. Steve’s recorded his version of the history of the axis and I have a few photos for your viewing pleasure. And while all that was keeping us in Reading busy, the Earth Summit drew to a close much as we expected it to. The responses none of the NGOs wanted to have to release but I’m sure most expected to have to release are around. FOE sum it up pretty well, as did the guardian. ...

Continuing to plan apace for the next series of delicatessen. Looks like we’ve secured an act for October 17th, as well as ensuring that the PA will be in place tomorrow night and working out some special guests for Julie Lee’s set. Popped in to see Matt and Clare in their new place and ended up helping them unpack while discussing the delicatessen website with Matt. We have plans. And as usual after a discussion with Matt I found myself visiting a website I’d been meaning to visit for ages and not quite made it to yet. boxes and arrows will probably only appeal to the web geeks out there, but is sure to get a lot of traffic from this particular web browser. Not quite sure why they feel the need to have separate pages for printing. Surely CSS should do the trick? ...