not the motorcycle diaries

Today’s (recurring) crisis is the discomfiting sense that I have lost my creative voice,that sociology has trained me out of it. In such moments it has helped somewhat to recall sociology’s interpretative, ethnological and narrative tradition, as highlighted by Zygmunt Bauman, Scott Lash and Fuyuki Kurosawa; also its early intention to provide accounts of social life richer and more inflected than those provided by coldhardscience(tm). Reading lectures from The College of Sociology has given me further confirmation of this intention, even C. Wright Mills has reminded me that imagination is allowed, if a bit dangerous. “Science … tends to reduce sensibility to a minimum” said Georges Bataille at a Saturday COS lecture on February 5 1938. “The phenomena I attempt to descibe are lived by us…I am obviously distancing myself from what I gladly refer to as science’s deep slumber…”.

Still, I am currently stalking-with-a-view-to-seducing a supervisor in cultural studies, and today I joined the Centre for New Writing.

Now excuse me while I actually go and do some work on my PhD.