Last night I had the pleasure of attending an event at Foyles bookstore in London featuring David Foster Wallace's Literary Agent Bonnie Nadell and Editor Michael Pietsch. The evening was in honour of the UK launch of Wallace's posthumous publication, The Pale King which is current receiving rather favourable reviews.

Hereby instigating an annual May 8th culture jamming festival to be herein evidenced by photographic, textual, cartographic and video documentation. To prove it really happened, that our world was not projected. Post horns, W.A.S.T.E. insignia, the novels of Thomas Pynchon read unashamedly on trains, while still sub rosa. It is simple, it is inevitable, it has begun.

I am very pleased to report that I will be participating as a panelist on the forthcoming Live Q&A this Friday (15th April) on the Guardian Higher Education Network. I'm hoping this event will be an exciting opportunity to engage with and discuss the community's concerns as regards postgraduate prospects. In timely fashion, the THE has an article on this very topic in their latest issue.

I have just had a review published in the Open Access journal Rupkatha. Rupkatha is an internationally recognised e-journal with a special focus on interdisciplinarity. My review, which appears in volume 3, number 1, is of Joe Moran's "Interdisciplinarity", 2nd edition.

Giving conference papers is a crucial part of academic life. It's the prime means of engaging with others in your discipline, getting a face associated with your name and, to use a vile term, networking. However, before you've made it big-time and are being invited to such events, you'll have to respond to calls for papers, or CFPs as they are abbreviated, and this is a bit of an art form.

This is a quick post to give an update on the report from the first meeting of the UK Pynchon Network. I have had several requests for reports on the day and also for recordings. This will all be forthcoming. The delay is due to the fact that Vimeo (YouTube has a restriction of 15 minutes length on most accounts) will not permit free account holders to upload more than 500mb worth of video per week.

Following on from posts by @lizith and @ORGMotivation, this is a brief post to explain my current research in plain English. A quick precursor. In many research projects, communicating what you are doing involves making a justification for the research. If that is not immediately obvious, then often the explanation in "plain English" involves making that rationale perspicuous.

An announcement that I will be speaking at the "Enslavement: Colonial Appropriations, Apparitions, Remembrances, 1750-Present Day" conference at the University of Portsmouth on the 17th of June.

I thought I'd share here some of the trials and tribulations I experienced in last night's upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04, Natty Narwhal. flgrx driver problems Using the flgrx driver most of my desktop was black, with occasional bits of the background visible.

I've been playing with the new setup of Unity on Ubuntu Natty 11.04 beta, which now comes preloaded with the forked LibreOffice. This has caused some problems for installation of Zotero, so I want to here give the walkthrough instructions that I used in a LiveCD environment to get everything working. Featured image by Wyatt Kirby with unspecified copyright or licensing provisions.

Today marks, by my calculations, day 548 of my PhD. I set myself a target to attempt to finish the thesis within three years (1096 days -- 2012 is a leap year) of the 1st of October, 2009; the length of full-time funding I receive from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. As a result, today marks the exact mid-point of that schedule.