Blogging Volumes

We are losing control. “As soon as the sun went down, police stormed the bandstand.” On Saturday the 13th of March, Sisters Uncut tweeted those words, referring to the excessive police response to a vigil for a woman likely killed by a member of the police. It is a continuation of the forceful police responses towards activist groups like Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion in the past couple of years, and yet another example of institutional violence against women. In a lecture on depression at Stanford University, Dr Sapolsky points out that “women have a higher incidence of depression than men do. Approximately twice the rate.” As a biologist, he naturally focuses on the hormonal and cognitive origins of this statistic, but then argues that a sociological approach is also necessary to understanding this disparity: “Lack of control can cause depression; in society after society, women traditionally have less control. No wonder they fall into more depression.” But with th

Here is the script of a short play I wrote as part of my Creative Writing degree. It's part of a module called Transformations, in which we've studied Ovid's Metamorphosis , Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream , and Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy . All of these texts talk about how we're always transforming, and here is my attempt to demonstrate the module's overall theme, that stories themselves can be entirely original, even when they're just a bunch of other texts transformed... Ovid's Meta-Mulberries Bare stage. PATRICK and KRISTIE shuffle on from opposite sides. Patrick wears a Golf brand T-shirt and light brown chinos; Kristie wears black lipstick, high boots and a T-shirt with Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son album cover on it. They stand still six feet apart, hands behind their backs, neither facing the other. They focus on the audience. PAT: Hi. KRIS: Hi. PAT: Hi. KRIS: Hi? PAT: Oh did I already- KRIS: Woo two? PAT: What? KRIS: