The Eternal Student – Peter M. Ball

Big Thoughts

Oh, I’m not a feminist…

I recently answered a bunch of questions for the 2012 Australian Spec Fic Snapshot project, a semi-regular interview series that surveys the Australian SF scene and presents the interviews in a week-long flurry. I don’t know if my particular snapshot will be online by the time this post goes up, but it’s coming and in one of my answers I mention the rise in feminist discourse taking place within SF over the last few years and how happy I am to see that happening despite the fact that my engagement with feminism is haphazard at best. And I’ve been thinking about that phrase, a lot, since I sent off my snapshot response. My initial intention with that phrase was to acknowledge that I’m basically white, male, university educated, and middle class. I am white male privileged incarnate and get to play life on the lowest possible difficulty setting, and even as someone who tries to be aware of that, even as someone

PeterMBall 06/06/2012

Works in Progress

Juvenalia Week

After realising that the last few years have been rather good to him on the writing front, Jason Fischer has decided to take a quick tour through the lands of the writer he used to be and declared this Juvenalia Week. And since he’s under the assumption that the embarrassing mistakes of yesteryear are something all writers share, he’s encouraging others to join him in his public display of work from our misbegotten pasts. I’m nothing if not a joiner, but seeing as I can’t find my old book of short stories from when I was actually a jouvenile I set the way-back machine to the file on my computer marked “Poetry, 1998” and grabbed one of the hundreds at random. I wrote a lot of poetry over ’98 and ’99 – I’d decided that I’d write a poem a day while I worked on my honors thesis in place and white-space poetics – but this one seems to hit all

PeterMBall 14/10/2009

Big Thoughts

Random Thoughts While Reading Theory: Technique of Art

Think about writing for a moment. Not the let me tell you a story kind of writing I usually talk about here, but handwriting; the physical act of picking up a pencil and writing a sentence. Think about how automatic it’s become, how long it’s been since you’ve had to pay attention to the way your hand moves or the little tics in the muscle that allow you to scribe an L instead of a T. How many little things are happening without your knowledge, or the way the physical sensation of holding a pen stops registering because the act of writing is all just an automatic reflex now. Hold onto that thought, ‘cause we’re going to come back to it. Over the weekend I started one of my long-term projects in the name of the 80-point-plan – reading an anthology of literary theory essays with an aim towards filling in my patchy awareness of the field. My goal is

PeterMBall 03/08/2009

Works in Progress

This Post in Bullet Points

Off to the Gold Coast again today, in order to learn how to be a PhD student. One might think that after so many years I’d have worked out how by now, but one would be mistaken (said without snark – there’s been a gear-shift in the process recently, and I’m the kind of driver who grinds gears until someone points out the various ways that’s a bad idea). Finally made it to the post-office during work hours yesterday, which meant I could pick up some of the packages of awesomeness waiting for me (a copy of Couch, courtesy of Ben Francisco, and copies of both Cory Doctrow’s Overclocked and a collection of Hugo award winners courtesy of Jason Fischer – thanks to both of you, for they were awesome things to discover). Reason my thesis leaves me a funk #29: I haven’t actually finished and submitted a *new* story (as opposed to resubmitting something that’s already been out) since

PeterMBall 26/03/2009

Journal

The things you forget

First real day of classes today, which basically meant I spent seven hours running around like a mad rabbit trying to explain things without a break. Am now thoroughly exhausted and good for nothing, but feeling that warm accomplished glow that comes from returning to work. But, oh god, I forgot exactly how tiring first year classes are. I shall do very little tonight that is not television, reading, and picking up a meal from Subway.

PeterMBall 09/03/2009

Tag: The Eternal Student

Oh, I’m not a feminist…

Juvenalia Week

Random Thoughts While Reading Theory: Technique of Art

This Post in Bullet Points

The things you forget

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