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International Reprints and Australian Writing

By Jason Ensor ⋅ March 12, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

One important item to come out of the recent controversial Productivity Commission report is the recommendation for revised statistics on the Australian book trade. This article reviews the reprinting of Australian writing around the world.

Twitter and Oz Lit

By Jason Ensor ⋅ February 16, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

I don’t know diarist William Bunn personally but I know that on February 6 he was “Reading Sunshine and Snow” and that he had “read it nearly through”. You may wonder why someone would care what Bunn had on his bookshelves at the start of February, but Bunn felt it important enough to record this [...]

eLearning: Fleshpots and Gunsights

By Jason Ensor ⋅ January 20, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Like Mark Twain’s stroll through Australia’s abbreviated history, the Internet has ‘acres of the most strange and fascinating things’.

Critical Foresight: What is Time?

By Jason Ensor ⋅ June 14, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

During the second half of the twentieth century, it was commonly accepted that ‘we can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present’. [2] But if, as Stambaugh asserts, ‘temporality is … the occurrence, the taking place of thinking’, where thoughts and actions in time are contextualised by a taxonomy of tense, then any meaning, significance and value ascribed to the epochal moment like say the ‘turning of the millennium’ is a mere linguistic and imagined projection of our current prejudices, interests and concerns, and is in no way attached in any real sense to the advent itself. [3] In the words of metaphysical philosopher J R Lucas, ‘whereas the present and past are real, the future, as long as it is still future, is not’. [4] On this view, it may be reasonable to ask why it was fashionable during the late 1990s in Australia to gather futures around the number 2000?

Articulating Our Selves Online

By Jason Ensor ⋅ November 22, 2007 ⋅ Post a comment

A mate and I had recently completed another quest in a massive multiplayer online game (MMOG). Or more accurately, I spent some more time in front my laptop clicking the left mouse-button and moving a collection of pixels that I had named as a character through a sequence of pre-configured animations (walking, running, charging, fighting, etc). This I did alongside another collection of pixels that my friend had named and because I could see his formation of pixels alongside my formation of pixels on my personal computer screen, I filled in the absences and tricked myself with the illusion that my mate and I were working pixels “together” on the same virtual space; like two people sharing a desktop but without requiring the physical presence of the other. I’m certain he felt the same 5,000 kilometres away.

Failure of an Arts Education?

By Jason Ensor ⋅ August 23, 2007 ⋅ Post a comment

I’m doing this because I think there are problems for research when education becomes tied to “keeping the economy strong” at universities and I was prompted to respond to Richard Nile’s article posted at the Australian blog website (address below) on the same theme. My reply on this page is repeated there too. I confess I feel a little uncomfortable relating my experience. It is something that happened a good number of years ago and I’m not sure if the parties involved are still employed nor do I wish them problems. But the event did stay with me, provoked serious changes in my own professional life for half a decade, and it suggested to me that the future of education, while populated with lots of good and remarkable things, is also infected with a malaise of sorts when it comes to the arts and humanities.

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