No I'm not!

(Mikhail Bakhtin)
I'm not boring (apologises for previous negative post... also for bad spelling - and that apology stands from now till the end of time, I'm only making it once...) Anyway, I just gave a paper on Nightclubs as Carnivalesque Spaces and people really listened and asked lots of questions and my chapter is going really well. Here's a random excerpt (from the chapter, not the paper):

"While it must be said that both scenes are predicated first and foremost on dance and music, where doof culture may be said to represent a ‘carnival of protest’, The Chemical Palace perhaps represents a ‘carnival of survival’, where new ways of living and of presenting oneself as a human being and a sexual subject are enacted on the dancefloor and beyond... St John explains that it is the all-inclusive ‘do it yourself/ourself’ ethos that permeates these events which gives them the ability to inspire participants to something more meaningful than a passive consumer hedonism (St John 2001, 15). Discussing the ‘greater social significance’ (beyond a simple pursuit of pleasure) of the doof, St John says that ‘spectator/star roles are not easily filled’ and then quotes Hakim Bey, who says ‘the artist is not a special sort of person, but every person is a special sort of artist’ (St John 2001, 15). According to Bakhtin’s definition of carnivaleque spaces ‘everyone participates because its very idea embraces all people’, making both doof culture and the radical queer dance party scene examples of carnivalesque space (Bakhtin 1965, 7). In FreeNRG, Graham St John also draws our attention briefly to Bakhtin, discussing instances in ‘Western cultural history’ – from Medieval carnival culture, to hippy festivals like Woodstock, to modern dance party culture – where participants have escaped the regimentations of the established social and economic order; he claims that ‘history reveals such Dionysia to possess a perennial quality’ (St John 2001, 17)."

It's also my birthday on the weekend and Liam and I are working up an acoustic version of "I saw a UFO and nobody believes me"!

I've just decided to get rid of PhD blog, and blog it here, cos my PhD basically is my life at the moment. Ah, that's the way it goes.

Yay! Sunday!!!!!