I am pleased to announce that I will be speaking at the “Transforming Objects” conference at Northumbria University in May this year. Thomas Pynchon has been critically considered, for almost the whole of his writing career, to hold an idealist stance, both epistemologically and ontologically. Objects, in the strange counter-universe of his novels, are held to be projections, unrealities of deluded questing subjects.

Yesterday I had the extremely good fortune to see Talawa's production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot at the Albany Theatre in Deptford. It had been hyped in the media as the first British all-Black Godot. While the ethnicity of the performers is integral to the performance and the skills, speech patterns, accents and mannerisms that they bring, it didn't need this hype.

My incredibly talented friend, Jake Wilson, has composed a series of Folk-Rock songs based on the diary entries of Robert Scott on his ill-fated expedition to the Pole. I thought it worth pointing out that the website for this is now up. Opportunities to purchase the album to be added in the near future, but for now you can listen to all the songs.

Seriously, just what in God's name do you think you are doing? I am referring, in this bombastic introduction, to the Department of Health's decision to continue to defy the democratic right of the population to see the transition risk register for the proposed NHS shakeup. Let me tell you a few truths about democracy and a few points about risk assessments.

A quick tip that I think it's worth raising, as it's just come to the fore in my life(!), is that the citation style you employ can have a large impact on the number of words over the course of an 80,000 word thesis. I have been using, until today, the Chicago style with a full note on every page.

I did an interview at the weekend with Mark Carrigan on open source solutions for academic publishing and the potential future role of the library.

I have a guest post over at the excellent Berfrois in which I review the newly released Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon. The piece is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND license, so I could post the entire thing here, but I'll let you read the entirety over at their site.

Yesterday, Tuesday the 21st of February 2012, I participated in a discussion at the University of Sussex Researcher Hive on copyright and academia, with particular emphasis on doctoral researchers, joined by Sarah Robins-Hobden, Liz Thackray and others. This post will attempt to document some of the ideas we discussed.

In response to the question of why we use secondary sources, one of the most overheard statements in my seminars has to be the perennial student response: "to back up your argument". Last week, I formulated a concise way of thinking about this that dispels this argument and also makes it clear where the space for originality lies.

I am pleased to announce that I will be speaking at the "What Happens Now" conference at the University of Lincoln on twenty-first century fiction.