I saw yesterday that Twitter user WhelanWrites was asking for a basic rundown of some introductory Pynchon criticism. Rather than reply, I thought I'd put a few items up here so that they are better preserved for posterity. The request was that "Something biographical would be great... And something relating to gravity's rainbow specifically!", so I'll do my best on that front.

Last week I had the pleasure to attend the "Who owns the Story of the Future?" even taking place at the British Library, playing host to William Gibson, Cory Doctorow, Diane Coyle and Mark Stevenson as part of their Out of This World series. In case you haven't seen the exhibition and series of related events, I suggest you check it out.

A the time that I started writing this blog post, I was intending to extol the virtues of the newly released Fedora 15 compared to the trainwreck that is Ubuntu 11.04. It turns out the story isn't as clear cut as that, but wanted to give my experience in comparison installing across two machines. This all started when I upgraded my laptop (a Toshiba Satellite 650C) to Ubuntu 11.04 during the beta period earlier this year.

I had resisted the concept of having my own, academic, business cards for a long time. It seemed, and still does to an extent, an encroachment upon the sphere I love from the world of dehumanised business practice. However, networking is a fundamental part of academic conference attendance. I have several conferences coming up in June.

When I was in hospital the week before last, I was struck by how all-pervasive the rhetoric of "fighting" is when people are coping with illness or new disability. I'm sure that this has been covered by those in critical disability studies far better than I can put it here, but I wanted to flag it up as an area of concern. I certainly know that, for pretty much my entire life, this has been the terminology deployed.

Please find, for your delectation, licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license, my Prezi on Using Twitter for Research, a workshop I taught at the University of Sussex on the 18th May, 2011. Using Twitter for Research on Prezi Using Twitter for Research was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on May 23, 2011.

There has been much discussion of whether the US should have captured Osama Bin Laden alive and put him on trial, as per the Nuremberg precedent set in the apprehension and subsequent judicial sentencing of Nazi World War II war criminals. I felt it was worth making a slightly more critical evaluation than some of those views already put out there about this. The Nuremberg defendants. Front row, from left to right: Hermann Göring (death;

There was a recent conversation on Twitter's excellent #phdchat hashtag revealing the angst that can be involved in getting the balance right between holding an idea back (for formal academic publication) and putting it out there. I'd like, in this post, to enumerate the pros and cons of each side, both ideologically and pragmatically.

A few days late, but this is a quick post to highlight my statements, and photograph, on the Guardian books site. The piece was to highlight events pertaining to reading/celebrating authors in public, which linked in with the Pynchon in Public Day event which I organized last weekend. The piece has been widely circulated and I'm grateful for all the exposure!

In a fascinating LA Times piece published today, it is remarked, in conversation with a close friend of Thomas Pynchon that: So why don't we? Why don't those of us for whom Pynchon is a professional, and personal, interest do this? The answer, to me, seems self explanatory, but before answering, it's worth giving a brief history of Pynchon's stance on privacy. Featured image: Pynchon's hand giving a V-Sign around the door.

Attached are my lecture notes for the "Genre 2" lecture I gave at the University of Sussex (2011-05-04): Martin Paul Eve - "We've met before, haven't we?": Spatio-Temporal Distortion in David Lynch's Lost Highway. This file is released under a Creative Commons, Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license. It remains Copyright 2011 Martin Paul Eve. Featured image Copyright 1997 October Films.