Category Archives: Blog

General musings, whinges and happy dances

Visual Culture and Algorithmic Tyranny: Facebook

Let me first acknowledge that as an online culture, as consumers of digital imagery, few of us limit ourselves to a single platform, like Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr. To use a geographic metaphor, most of us travel widely. But nonetheless, it may be worth acknowledging that for some people, virtual spaces like Facebook are Continue Reading

A Reading of E Unibus Pluram by David Foster Wallace

The language is dense and careful, as well as being wonderful writing. So you might want to read along:E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction.

Lacan in Woolf: To the Lighthouse and the Beauty of Diegesis

It’s one of those famous literary works you’re supposed to have read, may have taken a run at, and then ran away screaming. Virginia Woolf’s ‘To The Lighthouse’ is cited as one of the great works of modernist writing of the 20th Century. I will unashamedly admit to having skimmed it 20 years ago and Continue Reading

Intersexions: Lacan’s Refusal or You Will Find the Man of your Dreams in your Dreams

In Seminar XX, often called “Encore” or “On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge,” Lacan makes two very controversial statements. I think it is essential for anyone claiming to use Lacanian Psychoanalytical Criticism as their methodology to at least believe that they have understood what he meant by them.  The first is “la Continue Reading

A Writer’s Job: A Public Response to Michele Filgate’s “Literary Self-Loathing”

I’ve tried to put it out of my mind and move on, but seven hours later, I’m still livid over both the tone and the content of Michele Filgate’s “Literary Self-Loathing” article over at Salon.com. Yes, I left a comment, but that didn’t seem to bank down the embers of my ire. Please take a Continue Reading

Thou Shalt Not: Childhood and Sexuality

A couple of weeks ago, I was catching up with an old friend for drinks and the topic of sexuality and children came up. My friend is a parent, a lesbian in a same-sex marriage. They have twin boys, both just entering their teenage years. My friend also happens to be a lawyer. She is Continue Reading

The Strange Mix of Erotic Pleasure & Painful Rejection

I’m looking at what Judith Feher-Gurewich calls Lacan’s logic of perversion. There’s no judgement attached to the word, but it refers to more than what he considered ‘symptomatology’ – like sadism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, etc. These are the outward manifestations of an interior and alternate architecture of desire. “behind the ego’s back, at the level of Continue Reading

By Far the Best Review of Fifty Shades of Grey – Andrew O’Hagan’s ‘Traveling South’

For someone who doesn’t think sex belongs on the page, Andrew O’Hagan has certainly read a lot of it. Of course, you can imagine, I disagree with him. Sex, like all other facets of life, does belong on the page. But like all other facets of life, it deserves to be well-written.  Although he is Continue Reading

Finding Ways In

If you’re subscribed to this blog (I know a couple of you are) you may have wondered what I’m doing here with my posts. Here, at the very beginning of my journey, my readings and creative responses are the way I document my attempts to find ways into my topic. If I were doing a Continue Reading

The Slavery of Insatiability

There has always been pornography. It could be said that the Venus of Willendorf is pornography in as much as it is an extravagant and idealised image of female fecundity. For centuries, organized societies tolerated exemplars of human sexuality – either associating it with religious belief, as in the Kama Sutra and the carvings on Continue Reading