Author Liam Hogan

• Shakshuka

  DIFFERENT RULES FOR DIFFERENT times of day are symptoms of a subtle tyranny. Humans have always obeyed the sunlight, getting up and going to sleep with the light, but it’s the modern city of workplaces and—and, though it’s a subject for another time, public transport—that has forced us all under the oppressive rule of the clock. Up in the morning and out to school as the song goes, we’re creatures of punctuality, routine, and the habitual regimen of the time-of-day, more self-disciplined to the hour than Medieval monks ever were. Even the most notoriously time-bound workplaces of all, the watches of sailors on board ships in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, were enforced by relentless explicit violence and compulsory drug abuse. Like proper post-Foucauldians on board the Inner West Line train to work, we get the discipline without the fun.

  Posted 3 January 2013 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Toasted cheese sandwich

  ‘HOW DO YOU MAKE such nice toasted cheese sandwiches?’ my assistant asked me.
  ‘Emmental’, I replied.

  

  Posted 10 November 2012 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• 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 | » Read more

• Pie

  DESCARTES GAVE THE WORLD a philosophical distinction between material and mental, a sharp break between the body and mind. He was hardly the first to make an artificial dialectic to justify other stances, but because Enlightenment idealists liked to attach the names of Great Fellows to Great Ideas, we’ve been talking about Cartesian duality ever since. Flesh and spirit. Matter and mentality. The apparent world of measurable, objective reality and the immanent world of subjectivity.

  If you, reader, are reaching for the safety catch on your Browning at the gross oversimplification of three hundred years of Western philosophy I’ve just committed, I am sorry. Because sometimes vulgarisation of a philosophy is a helpful approach to answering the important questions in life, like: “Where am I?” and “What the hell did I just eat?”

  Posted 5 October 2012 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Rissoles

  EVERY CULTURE HAS RECIPES where everyone gets to be an expert. They’re the ones where there’s no particular recipe, but you kind of know what to expect, and where the whole exercise in cooking becomes a self-reinforcing cliché. Clemenza’s meatballs in The Godfather are are the perfect example; the roly-poly gangster gives a cute little New York Italian lecture on criminal patriarchy, he sugars the chopped meat, then they go and kill some people. It’s culture, self-representation and wrapped in a fork-sized meat ball!

  Posted 20 September 2012 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• My Mum Doesn't Work For The Australian

  WHEN MURDOCH PAPERS ARE MENTIONED in class its always with an undertone of sarcasm. I don’t understand why. After all, my mum works for The Australian and she likes her job.

  Pity poor Max Maddison, first year journalism student, whipping boy of the week for everybody like me in Australia who disdains not just the Murdoch press institution but the entire sordid establishment of our media. If I have a hobbyhorse I like to ride, then at least I know there are many more like me: we are an angry, sarcastic cavalry of dissatisfaction.

  Posted 24 April 2012 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Toasted Sandwiches In Space

  
  Lift off: a Titan-Centaur rocket (NASA)

  ON THE 20 AUGUST IN 1977 an ugly rocket drew a smoky curved line in the sky, starting as a noisy flash at the launchpad at Cape Canaveral into a blink somewhere out to sea, off and out into the solar system for Science. “Ugly” is a kind word for it; a Centaur-Titan combination looks, sadly, like nothing else than the kind of phallic symbol you see chiselled into toilet doors all over the world. Take one big liquid-fuelled rocket designed to lob bombs across the Arctic (the Titan stage), strap two generic solid-fuel boosters onto the sides to get it off the ground in the first place, then onto the top add another big rocket to speed a robot up to escape velocity (the Centaur stage). It’s the kind of rocket that you set off underneath the ugly tree, expecting it to hit every branch on the way up. If Moe Syzlak were a rocket engineer, this would have been the lets-strap-together-a-bunch-of-rockets-to-make-one-big-rocket rocket he’d have come up with.

  Posted 17 April 2012 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• The Larva Rodeo

  IS THERE A THING OF which it is said,
  ‘See, this is new’?
  It has already been,
  in the ages before us.
  The people of long ago are not remembered,
  nor will there be any remembrance
  of people yet to come
  by those who come after them.

  When you turn your PC on in the morning and browse through the usual sites of work and study avoidance—email, Google Reader, the front pages of the newspapers, twitter—you generally expect most things to be as they were when you closed the machine down the afternoon before.

  Posted 10 April 2012 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Pizza Stone

  SOME MEALS ARE CONVENTIONAL, tracing a predictable curve from an ingredient list to a final shape-form as described by a precise and accurate recipe. They’re the meals Jeremy Bentham would eat, or maybe as a sped-up Taylorism could be applied to gastronomy. Other meals aren’t like that at all, and refuse to conform to your little boxes made of ticky-tacky. They follow their own rules, man.

  Posted 8 April 2012 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Stock

  FIRST, ROAST A CHICKEN. AFTER you’ve enjoyed the bird (and the roast vegies, and the stuffing, and the gravy, and the etcetera etcetera), you’re left with a carcase and a whole lot of gristle and fatty bits. In the morning, grab a pair of scissors, slice the bones up, simmer them in water for several hours with a couple of small onions, some celery, a carrot or two, thyme, and lots of salt. You weren’t planning on going to work that morning were you? You aren’t too hung over from the very nice white wine you had with the chicken to handle the congealed leftovers before noon? Good. Once it’s all bubbled away, strain it into plastic takeaway containers and put them in the freezer for later.

  

  Posted 2 April 2012 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more