February to May 2002

I spent much of February travelling around New Zealand South Island.

Ten Years of Book Reviews - 28th February

Today is the 10th anniversary of my first book review. I've written a brief history of ten years writing book reviews.

Gamelan - 14th April

My gamelan group had a meeting today to discuss our August performances in the Sydney Opera House, which look like being the most complex ones we've ever undertaken, with near-continuous dancing and the individual pieces and dances integrated into a unified story spanning the full hour and a half. If you're going to be around, keep the evening of Friday August 16th or the afternoon of Saturday August 17th free!

I've started work on a (rudimentary) glossary of Central Javanese gamelan.

Community Organisations - 21st April

Yesterday I finished a PHP course organised by Community Activist Technology (Sydney) and today I was on a panel on Censorship and Media at an "Interface" conference organised by a student/youth Nexus. It's reassuring to see so many well-organised events in Sydney being run by community organisations.

Doctorates - 25th April

Soon I'll be the only person I know without a doctorate! Well, not quite, but it feels a bit that way: I already had more friends with doctorates than I could list, but two recently finished PhDs, another should finish soon, and two more have just started. Do I regret abandoning mine? Nope. Will I ever go back and do one? Maybe, but I become less and less attracted to formal study as time goes by.

Palestine - April/May

The Age has refused to run a cartoon by Leunig, Australia's best known cartoonist. Fortunately Mediawatch has put it online so we can make up out own minds whether it is "inappropriate" or not: cartoon, background.

There's some fascinating material at the Electronic Intifada. I particularly enjoyed the parody newspaper Al-Bassaleh, which manages to be genuinely funny about serious subjects while at the same time making one think.

I'm looking for some reading on Palestine - something more recent than Arab Historians of the Crusades! Since it's such a contested topic, I'm tempted by the book The Israel/Palestine Question in the Routledge "Rewriting Histories" series, since I was impressed by their volume on the French Revolution. I've asked Routledge for a review copy.