Saturday 21 December 2002 at 06:51 am
oslo is very cold, even for a daytrip. the streets are lined with ice and your steamy breath mingles with the breath of a thousand other cold but padded yuletide wanderers, pregnant with their shopping bags and moccachinos.
my favourite- hare krishnas on the corner, chanting, orange skirt sticking out under enormous blue puffer jackets, banging cymbals with heavy padded mittens. cold but cheerful.
grok, in all its infinite permutations, the enthusiastic foolishness of human beings. fools who settled this frozen country, fools who stayed, fools who come back to it year after year; and fools who sing in it, in midwinter streets, freezing, happy in their orange skirts.
weird.
Tuesday 17 December 2002 at 1:31 pm
tomorrow morning, 04:55 train from cambridge to stansted - ach. funereal time to travel. as usual, it'll take me a week to recuperate...
transporting a nearly ludicrous amount of books and christmas presents, laptop and camera - no clothes or other paraphernalia. have enough stuff back in norway to keep me through the christmas holidays. will also travel in a suit, to minimise hassle of packing the darn thing.
mother will pick me up at the airport at 10, and travel me back to a snow-shrouded house on top of a cliff by the sea. where lights are hung around the corners and in trees, and little arctic mermaids frolic on the beach.
or something.
so off it is then, to christmas cakes and faerie snow and yarns spun round the fireplace. merry christmas to y'all.
[not that I won't be updating. I just wanted to say it.]
Saturday 14 December 2002 at 11:51 am
got up ridiculously today. woken at 1.30. sick almost, but deeply pleasurable. a life of spasmodical productiveness <--> general insouciance. yew. no achievements, except read a couple of chapters of d&g, on machinic assemblages + regimes of enunciation. nothing remotely related to what I'm meant to be doing, but useful in expanding my frame of reference.
here: page looks boring. thinking of pasting up a few pictures - plenty of diskspace. there is a certain inertia to be conquered regarding whirring up photoshop and suchlike to start making things. not to mention lots of ideas, no synthesising power.
ach. I'll leave it til over christmas.
on another note, friend here wants me to write something on tetsuo - cyborgic madness and unstable, invasive polymorphous technology, that sort of thing. might just do that - I'll have a look around and see what exists on it, but I suspect the pickings are slim, short of posturing pomo cultural studies scholars...
Thursday 12 December 2002 at 4:20 pm
'This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.'
[Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: 161]
...come again?
Thursday 12 December 2002 at 09:27 am
I have become ill. organism is feverishly on strike. I harbour multitudes, as ever - in this case, multitudinous disorganised viral armies. millions of microscopic agents of potential but unlikely death explode out of my bodily orifice every time I breathe.
yew. a time for keeping still and quiet under the duvet, carefully managing vital resources.
other things worth mentioning - as I said, went to oxford over the weekend. saw lots of dinosaurs, real and not, and shrunken human heads. am getting more exercise than usual, of the rather enjoyable kind. I bought a book and soon lost it, at a bus station.
I met up with flats, an old old online conosciuta - I shan't flat-ter her here, as I think she be not the type to take compliments, but as one might expect she was brighteyed and sharp, and most enjoyable company.
contrary to expectations, I am actually quite enjoying deleuze and guattari, though the usefulness of concepts like the rhizomatic nomad war-machine assemblage is a bit uncertain at the moment. namedropping stuff, more likely.
anyway. back to bed it is for me.
Monday 09 December 2002 at 10:33 pm
man. it's taken me something like ten days to recuperate physically from writing that last essay. my metabolism is way too fragile for this stuff - I'll be in a wheelchair when I finish my dissertation...
update. I spent the weekend in oxford, catching up with old, old friends, wandering around my old college and spending some quality time at the pitt rivers museum, the largest repository of ethnofetishism in the country.
I dragged my cypriot liaison along, as well as the wry german misanthropologist that represents my other half in terms of college life here. the guy I always end up hanging out with at the periphery of every social gathering, generating ironically playful deconstructions of social dynamics in that uniquely charming anthropological fashion.
the whole experience was quite enjoyable - we crashed at a friend's house. or rather, the house of his tutor, that my mathematician-turned-builder friend has been refashioning. keywords were mild delocalised excess, mellow DJing, wine and some pretty interesting conversation.
otherwise, I just finished reading hollebeq's 'atomised', a thoroughly misanthropic little work that alternates between savagery and gentleness - a sort of social pornography of the declining west, featuring snuff, group sex, nietzsche, molecular biochemistry aaaaand lines such as 'In the middle of the suicide of the West, it was clear that they had no chance'. cheerful stuff.
besides this updated pop version of Spengler, I'm wrestling with deleuze and guattari's thousand plateaus, aptly subtitled the second instalment of capitalism and schizophrenia... classically pomo work, full of derridaisms like 'there is no ideology. there never has been.' ermmmm? please explain this to us laypeople mister guattari? "nope. work it out for yourself. hwaaarhahahahaha..."
bastard gnomic ****sucking french poststructuralists. one of them even committed suicide. talk about evading the issue.
anyway. gotta go to bed. have a virtual date tomorrow.
Thursday 05 December 2002 at 09:26 am
exhausted at the moment. my body feels like a sleep deficit bank - about 40 hours of sleeplack embodied. with high interest rates. socially malfunctioning.
I need to spend more time sitting in my room by myself, reading, chilling, replenishing my vital forces. none of this '4am lets walk into town to film whale skeletons' stuff.
ach. except for the fact that I sleep through my days at the moment, I'm trying to read a novel [Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon] and thinking vaguely of film script possibilities involving gigantic whale skeletons.
Tuesday 03 December 2002 at 9:25 pm
walked into town today to shop for christmas presents, came across a most amazing feature of the cambridge landscape.
walking through the new museums site, past the material sciences department, if you turn your eyes up to the level of the second floor, there is a full-size 50-foot whale skeleton. hanging in mid-air, in a niche in the structure - it looks as though an entire level of the building has been taken out to make way for it. exposed to the open air. the bones look weathered and old, textured like the building. bizarre, beautifully surreal juxtaposition: the skeleton looks oddly at home among the gray, skeletal buildings of the site.
I'll try to get a picture of the thing up here sometime soon.
Monday 02 December 2002 at 5:16 pm
in the midst of all my academic ramblings and strange adventures, I do miss my family back home sometimes. going home to see them over christmas will be good.
Monday 02 December 2002 at 09:00 am
so the evil monkey god battles equally evil but considerably less powerful phantoms with his savage weapons. the demotic army of cannibal american monkeys, the 'world eaters', have elected a suitable general from their own ranks. the greatest monkey leads the greatest monkey army into the messianic struggle of the New Age and so on...
...as an aside, I so wonder sometimes whether the New Agers stop to think sometimes and have a close look at the brave new age they live in, that has such people in it? mass suicide would be an option. ask me, the Enlightened Ones are leaving. whales beach themselves and eskimos stop having kids. the world can no longer be thought of as a cosmic kindergarten - more like a quarantined insane asylum. our own little hellish self-constructed corner of the universe - and we human beings are captives of each other. pity the wretched creatures that share this soiled globe of the New Age with us.
...but, cosmic dystopianism aside, reverse hanuman and his world domination plans aside, the garbagisation of the planet aside, how are things on your micro level?
good, thanks for asking! my weekend in london went well, I absorbed some new DVDs and relaxed for a couple of days in ex-girlfriends flat. particularly pleased to have hooked up with an old acquaintance who moved to vienna with her lover after university.
all is well in my little bubble.
Monday 02 December 2002 at 08:13 am
harry potter tops box office while half of africa is starving to death. miss world next to woman stoned to death under sharia 'law'. the ghostly outline of a new and horrible fascism emerges from the invertebrate mass of American 'culture' [note: in this paragraph quotation marks mean exactly the same thing].
something is seriously, seriously wrong here. more than ever, every passing day seems to mark another stage in the hidden decay of the world. and as in the physical world, descent comes so much more easily than the long struggle to ascend.
bush, bush, bush. tangled streams of the world run like a web of veins carrying sick fluid to the dark heart of the new world order: the gravity of the situation centers on Him, the bowling ball in the einsteinian rubber sheet of politics. the monkey god that does play dice - nuclear, biochemical, whatnot, with us. every day. and he cheats with loaded dice and loaded guns.
how long will it take to repair the ireversible damage of the maniac? the world is reluctantly dragged and reshaped in the net of his ambitions. a new bipolar order where 'the Enemy' is more than ever a phantom - real wars against imaginary Enemies. a war of ideas fought with crude physical weapons. shooting up. at least it helps pump tax money into the weapons industry... pays a few wages, a few bonuses, a few executive lunches, a few 18-hole backyard golf courses...
the world is sick and the more I hear about, the sicker I feel myself. reading the news makes me feel like a helpless snuff voyeur, powerless and secretly addicted to depravity and to my own powerlessness. an indifferent media bovine munching cannibal prion breakfasts.
man. gotta go to work.
yes, fools they be but happy fools they are. :D
akstrgzr - 31 12 02 - 16:00
Sometimes folly, like ignorance, is bliss.
misteraitch (URL) - 07 01 03 - 06:10