under the top soil, air

Yet again, time has got the better of me and another fortnight has passed since my last posting. I am particularly sore about this, as in the last weeks the number of people following my blog has increased by a full 100%. I own then that it is nothing less than a dereliction of duty to have lapsed once more, and I am sorry. I do not deserve your patronage.
What paeans of sagacity have I to convey since my last scribblings?
We’ve been fairly busy with socialising, which has all been pretty booze-soaked. Now, I’m no Isaiah Berlin, and so I cannot report wittily upon dinner dance repartie with Coward, Engels, Monroe and Eichmann, however there have been a couple of entertaining outings. First, a dinner out with Anne’s work people and their people, the main entertaining feature of which was the comedy mismatch between G, who after a few drinks effused at great length about his exploits with bikers and all variety of bovine-strength hallucinogens, to the great discomfort of less psychedelic-minded fellow diners. Next, followed a trip out to the pub and back to V and S’s new house, wherein fizzy wine and great quantities of Bristol cigarettes contributed to some hilarity but also the beginnings of that unpleasantness that the youth of today refer to as a ‘whitey’.
During the working week I’ve been trying hard to get something coherent and with solid word count together for my end-of-year piece of work, that will convince an independent professor type that I am not a dullard or dimwit and may be permitted to spend a further year of a PhD in solitude rearranging the words of others and pebble-dashing it with my own dubious insights. Although it hardly seems to be the done thing, I have been trying to contrive some systematicity and sharper focus in my discourse analysis, and have taken to using an approach devised by one political environmentalist, or maybe environmental politicist, called Dryzek, and since taken up by others. So far, so uninteresting. But I have uncovered one or two interesting things about this, that ostensibly shouldn’t happen within the academic process at all. This Dryzek geezer, you see, has developed a fairly detailed approach to doing discourse analysis, which he calls a ‘components analysis’. It basically means looking for particular types of things in the way things are talked about, whether in speech or text, then collating these things into wider over-arching ideas. He has used this approach as the basis of a whole book he’s written. It has been drawn on furthermore by some eminent writers, such as the well-respected natural and social science researcher Hulme, and by thinky-tanky types as the basis of their own discourse analyses. Yet when I decided to dig a bit deeper and see where this approach came from, how it developed, what underlying ideas and rationales there were for its construction and application, my mind-shovel barely scratched the methodological top soil before hitting thin air. He cites only *himself* as a prior reference to the approach. Undeterred, I followed this ten-year-previous reference up, and found a thoroughly obscure paper about something largely unrelated - an earlier version of his ‘components’ approach was indeed described and used, but no reasoning was given for it, or citations provided as to why it was a sensible idea. It was just presented in four bullet points, stark as you like, suspended in space, the unsupported seems-like-a-good-idea of someone. Now, I’m not saying it’s *not* a sensible approach, but it seems very illustrative to me that within the academic process, provided you can chuck a name and a year of something or other published down, you’re pretty much on safe ground. For my part, I didn’t have to dig - I could have just said, this is what I’m doing and I’m allowed to do it intellectually because Dryzek (1997) and some other really important people like Hulme (2008) have done it too. Makes you wonder if those others who used it went into its background, and just how much of this sort of thing goes on.
Also, I’ve been organising a conference. And we have had the maximum permitted two weeks of summer already.
Anyway, last weekend ended up booze-soaked as well, even though we really didn’t want it to. The Vegan Fayre was in town - woooop! What fun! A Vegan Fayre! Bring it on! I say Vegan, you say Fayre! - which we did want to go to because reggae legends Macka B and Horace Andy were both there. So anyway, we went along in the morning on the Sunday having paid our money and got our hands stamped so that we could go back in again. Then at about 1pm we met T, H, P, F, C and B at the Old Duke ‘just for one pint’. It must have been about four pints later I popped home to change my trousers, and accidentally washed my stamp off. Meanwhile at the pub, worse-for-wear P thought it was funny to lick Anne’s stamp off, and as it turned out we’d lost the original tickets. So instead of seeing any reggae legends that we’d paid for, all this lot came back to the boat, and then yet more people came, and we drank yet more booze in the sunshine and had a bbq, which was all kind of nice, except it meant we drank all day long and ate little more than a burger. P was so far gone he was parading around in his pants having to be stopped from jumping in the harbour. Still at least the following Monday to Thursday I managed to be completely abstemious.
That said, it’s Saturday today…