It is an honour to have a short article on kissing in photography published in the same issue as a discussion on HBO’s TV show ‘In Treatment’ and the rise of internet sex. Read the article here (PDF 1.7MB).
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The British Psychoanalytic Council
Transmission: HOSPITALITY
I am off to the Transmission: Hospitality conference, my second one this summer and one I am particularly looking forward to, as I will be part of a panel I proposed a few months back and which will be chaired by Dany Nobus. Here’s what Nicky Bird, Bran Nicol and I will be discussing on Saturday morning:
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Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society at Middlesex University
On the 5th of June, I will be giving an overview of my recent work on seduction at the Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society conference at Middlesex University. Here’s my abstract, to whet your appetite (if psychoanalysis, culture and society are your thing, of course): Make me yours: studying the psychodynamics of seduction through works of [...]
My book has arrived!
If you think I have been quiet since Christmas (or even before) it is because writing a thesis does not leave me much to say. All my energy is thrown into those pages, into those words, but today I had a lovely surprise when other words I had written a while ago, turned up, nicely [...]
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I share the pain
Stephen Fry understands the precise feeling: I began writing seriously when I was about thirteen. Out streamed poetry, stories and novels, the latter of which were always aborted early, usually half way through the second chapter. It took my friend Douglas Adams to encourage me to go further and he did this by pointing out [...]
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Managing Creativity: Exploring the Paradox
We are in the last throws of preparing the texts for the forthcoming ‘Managing Creativity: Exploring the Paradox’, a book edited by Barbara Townley and Nic Beech, published by Cambridge University Press. I contributed a chapter on my favourite lemon squeezer. After writing a code of practice for work, various course reports, three chapters of my PhD thesis and a number of articles for a Spanish tendencies webzine, tackling a specialist, yet broad audience was a breath of fresh air.
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An artist reflects on an artist’s Biennale
Wonderful! Arttra have published my thoughts on the 53rd Venice Biennale here.
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RIP John Hughes
Yes, another RIP. I skipped Merce Cunningham’s because I thought I would get a reputation. You see, self consciousness has been on a high, lately, due to my creative writing (this endless chapter 3) and the fact that, this week, two people greeted me with ‘hey, I was showing your blog to my wife…’ I [...]
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Mario Benedetti RIP
Today, I woke up with the news of the death of Mario Benedetti, a Uruguayan poet that accompanied me during and since the tedium of my teenage years, a constant in my life, a voice of dissent, a compromise to politics and literature. He showed me that poetry can make you laugh, really laugh. He [...]
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Valentino
I received feedback on my second chapter from my Director of Studies. Very fair and helpful but it filled me with dread in relation to losing the plot and the focus of the thesis. It is more difficult to write a thesis-as-piece-of-work than a thesis report. I know the challenge would be here all along. I have had it pretty easy until now, no data gathering in the conventional sense, no number crunching, no narrative analysis, no conventional, run of the mill method. Because of this, it is not, at the time of analysis and evaluation that I am finding it difficult. What I do requires a lot of thinking and a lot of looking because it is evanescence. It disappears in my hands as I write. Then, at times, it also surprises me.
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