The final version of my PhD proposal is here; only changes really are a substitution of the Calvino for the Borges opening quote and the addition of a witty (or pathetic, depending on your mood) concluding statement.
I have a weeks extension. How? Using Zeno, of course. I informed my supervisor that since yesterday there was one day until it was due, and that I needed to complete half of what I had done in half of that day, and then half of the half remaining in the remaining half, and so [...]
Australian Eastern Standard Time: 4:30am.
Words in Whole Damn Thing: 22,500
Words in Body: 14,000, becoming more ambiguous, some swimming in vague middle distance between eyes and screen, some intermittently disappearing and reappearing.
Words in Footnotes: 4,000.
Words in Bibliography: 3,000.
Words in Need of Home: 1,500, but that seems too little.
Words invented for special purposes: Several.
Hours remaining: 11.
Symptom of [...]
Words in Whole Damn Thing: 21,000
Words in Body: 9,000
Words in Footnotes: 3,000
Words in Bibliography: 3,000
Words in Need of Home: 6,000
Hours remaining: 23
Number of times I have completed the sentence “The next to point to note is that” with “I have still not finished this fucking thesis”: 1
Thanks to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Arts and Letters Daily is back.
Honours Thesis Progress Report
6,500 words in body.
2,300 words in footnotes.
That’s about halfway there.
With 2 days to go.
Who needs sleep?
Research Proposal, Sydney University Philosophy PhD Program, 2003
Brad Weslake
The following is from Wittgenstein’s Zettel—I stumbled across it today in the course of finishing my thesis, and it sums up all the sceptical thoughts concerning metaphysics I’ve been having in the course of writing it.
413.
One man is a convinced realist, another a convinced idealist and teaches his children accordingly. In such an important matter [...]
Gender Relations: 1
Today I observed, as I drove up the hill towards my home, a little boy and girl sitting back to back on a skateboard, just sitting there on the footpath, on this skateboard, with their arms linked, each trying to propel the skateboard forwards with their legs, until they toppled, so slowly as [...]
“During the most recent presidential election a Time magazine-CNN poll asked voters whether they were in the top one percent of income earners. Nineteen percent reported that they were, and another 20 percent said that they expected to be there one day.”
(David Brooks, “Superiority Complex”, in The Atlantic Monthly, November 2002).
[Brooks is the guy who [...]
A small boy plays pool with a white ball and his imagination, under the impossible noses of old men. It is Grand Final Day, Melbourne, and we are all voyeurs, peering through the screen, peering over the edge of the fence, at the players on the field—to them, acting; to us, watching. In the press [...]
Driving to the nursing home with nana, it looks like rain but so far only specks on the dirty windscreen of the van she has a little difficulty getting into, these days. I drive somewhat distractedly, drifting slowly back and forth between the edges of the lanes, and other drivers stay out of the way [...]
A few days ago I found a dog-eared copy of this first novel by Dave Eggers, coincidentally [see below], in that terrible, terrible second-hand bookstore on Beaumont Street in Hamilton. (Eggers readers will notice that the word repetition that is part of his signature style is contagious). (An example of the terribleness of this bookstore: [...]
Some questions prove very resistant to answers. Nevertheless, while creationists would say that God created the first chicken and evolutionists would say that the term “first chicken” is ambiguous (there being no necessary and sufficient conditions that define the condition of being the first chicken, in the same way that given a hundred colour patches [...]
Last night I read Jean-Paul Sartre’s short manuscript Existentialism and Humanism, in which he set out to defend the existentialist philosophy against criticisms that had been made against it, particularly by Marxists, and particularly for its being (perceived as) overly subjective (amongst other things). I think there is a lot that Sartre says that is [...]
A few months ago I sent a submission to Post Taste magazine, and I just received news that I have been published in Unsolicited, their online edition. The story is called “Tim got a mind like a vertical hold” and can be found here.
“You ask yourself, why am I bothering to write these books? I can’t pretend the mainstream will listen to the news I have to bring. I can’t pretend I’m subverting anything, because any reader capable of decoding my subversive messages does not need to hear them. I can’t stomach any kind of notion that serious [...]