Category Work

• Morning Coffee: Post-Work

  

  ROUTINES MATTER. MY GRANDFATHER could roll and light a cigarette one-handed, without spilling any of the tobacco from his pouch. My own morning routine involves dismantling and refilling a stovetop coffee maker, which I’ve discovered I prefer even to someone else making me a coffee at a shop, in a much better machine. I think my grandfather and I—apart from respective addictions to habit-forming substances—share a taste for ordinary rituals of making and busy-work. Disassembling, washing, refilling and heating the machine does a wonderful job of occupying time and activity while I wake up, and it’s not the same if I just hand over $3 for the same drink in a paper cup. I can well understand the dilemma of the quitting smoker, who asks herself or himself, hanging desperately out for a denied cigarette, never mind the actual drug, what am I supposed to do with my hands?

  Posted 3 June 2013 · Author Liam Hogan

• LaTeX and BibTeX

  HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES writers and researchers, a great secret is being kept from you. You know about C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures, and you’ve probably encountered scientific and technical types on the Internet, recognising them by their ferocious militant atheism, their communication through image macro memes, and their irrational fondness for light rail projects. When you sigh, minimise your web browser and get back to work in MS Word, though, their laughs are on you: it’s a horrible platform for writing, a worse one for presenting lengthy text, and there’s a much better alternative.

  Posted 25 October 2012 · Author Liam Hogan

• Spanakopita

  WHENCE, THEN, ARISES THE ENIGMATICAL character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? …The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.¹

  Children of the first decade of this century have found their relationship to food revolutionised by the entry to television of a special genre of cooking show: competitive cookery. Food shows are as old as the medium, and the cook-off is hardly a new form of competition. The genuinely new format is the cooking spectacular with glorious winners and a hyper-marketed process of competition, the entry of reality TV into the field of food.

  Posted 10 October 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Empanadas

  AT SOME POINT IN 1997, at about 1.30am, in a loading dock opposite Railway Square in Sydney, I swore a sacred unbreakable oath. “As God is my witness,” I said to myself, “I’ll never work in the food industry again”. It’s one of the few promises to myself amongst the many I’ve made I can honestly say I’ve kept. Should any freebooting restaurant manager come sauntering up the steps of Rancho Estanmore, out to press-gang me into kitchenhand or service work, I’d not hesitate to defend my honour.

  Posted 18 May 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Embrace Labor's Delight

  SO THE PRIME MINISTER MADE a speech. As speeches go, it’s not actually that bad, speaking as someone who’s drafted notes for a few of them. Addresses the topic, makes some good noises, intelligently mentions the subject of the speech, isn’t boring. And since it seems to address precisely the experiment I’m taking with my life for the next little while, that of not entirely working, and doing some study, it’s of particular interest.

  To my mind it comes across a little bit too much as the Nightride bus of meaning, which has had to endure the 11pm-4am shift of habitual language, and has had the suffering drunks of pandering to the press gallery vomit half-digested cliché all over the back seats. Sure, it gets you where you want to go—but then you want to brush your teeth and have a shower. If think if I read the phrase “forwards not backwards” again I’ll go out and throw myself under a vehicular unit of public transport infrastructure. The front end, not the back end.

  Posted 2 April 2011 · Author Liam Hogan