Wednesday 29 October 2003 at 7:23 pm
humpty dumpty has apparently been
sanitized for untroubled consumption by tender young minds.
find this difficult to believe, but it was corroborated by the local bbc news tonight. signs of a creepingly invasive culture of deranged hyperprotectivity - in an age when the grotesque detail of everyday violence is available 24/7 at a click or a flick, and children are ever more likely to outclass their parents in savvy media consumption... parental corporations resort to ridiculous steps to improve their profile vis a vis target demographics - ie. hysterical parents.
'look, we care' presumably translates into increased sales. at the expense of realism or relevance. hey, better to leave children unprepared for the brutality of life on this globe, if this allows you as a parent to preserve your fragile, objectifying fetishism of innocence. if you keep the kids locked up in the basement, you might even manage to raise them into 'adults' as maladaptive but perfectly innocent albino monsters.
fucking unbelievable.
Wednesday 29 October 2003 at 12:22 am
turned 26 recently. wondering if i should not be growing up and starting to do something proper with my life - sustaining myself and others with the sweat of my brow, as god spake unto adam.
im sure it will pass. who am i to abide by biblical injunctions.
Wednesday 22 October 2003 at 7:19 pm
increasingly i am starting to think that the best preparation i could undertake for the field would be a sort of practice micro-ethnography. to get me used to the specific techniques of fieldwork - interviewing, logkeeping, participant observation... i'd have to identify something rather quickly though - and it would have to be local. maybe a local church, or a movement of some sort. ideally something that involved a learning process connecting increasingly skilled physical practice with the performance or enactment of some sort of group identity.
there is an active falun gong movement in cambridge, which would be a rather interesting experiment from more points of view than one. not least to find out whether they really are as terroristic as the chinese government purports. almost a perfect case study - acquisition of traditional or neotraditional physical 'knowledge' in the form of enskilment linked to and required for participation in global resistance movement... i might have to think seriously about this.
Monday 20 October 2003 at 11:46 am
am proving rather less efficient at disciplining myself than i hope. got up at nine, fully primed to launch myself into a definite period of sustained work. instead? i spend the morning half in bed, reading primo levi's the periodic table. very enjoyable book but entirely, entirely beside the point.
i have to write my report for this - next - year. until i do, i am chained metaphorically to my desk at the spri. i say metaphorically because i dont necessarily exist physically within the space of spri much of the time.
i know the outline and the rough shape of what i will write, as i've known for about a year and a half now... but the details have to be disentangled - and in working out the anatomical details, it so often happens that i subvert my own rough taxonomical classifications. what i thought was a fish turns out to be amphibian, or a mammal.
theoretically i need to flesh out my notions of the relationship between practice and knowledge and correlate this to a method. the methodology is the key part at this point - the whats and hows, which are all enmeshed in the whys. i suspect the end result will be pretty distinctive, as i had hammered into me a kneejerk skepticism to much of the common currency of anthropology, but that remains to be proven.
Monday 20 October 2003 at 02:43 am
i have a cracked front door that leaks, no funnels cold air into my room. stacking a heap of clothes up against it helps keep the air and evil spirits out.
---
new monkey picture i like. very much. evocative. "snow monkey prayed and prayed, but the water kept rising".
Friday 17 October 2003 at 2:23 pm
had a number of unusually vivid dreams last night. i remember fragments. i was wandering through a modern museum filled with obscure but detailed artifacts. the meticulously labelled skull of the world's smallest ballerina, complete with a name and dates that i can't remember, arranged with those of proto-humans and other small people. many of them had rotten teeth. also, a range of incomprehensible technical equipment from a famous expedition to a place i had never heard of, complete with names, images and dates.
and a fish tank made out to look like a cave, filled with ugly fish called pollicini, italian for 'little thumbs'. when i wondered why they were called that, one of them opened its mouth and showed it to be full of wriggling thumblike growths, like worms or deformed teeth. the mass of growths was so thick that it stretched the mouth unnaturally. the fish looked like it was vomiting the mass out and grinning as though retarded at the same time. my companion through the museum was transfixed by this, while i wanted to move on. somehow, she walked into the tank through a side door, to play with the fish. this made me very anxious. she walked around inside the tank, there was a thin white line around her, that made her look like a superimposed cut figure pasted into old movies. as i looked in through the glass, i realized the cave was actually the body of a gigantic thumbmouthfish, and my companion was underneath it. i thumped the glass to alert her, but the fish opened its mouth and swept down to crush her, slowly as though not fully awake.
at that point i woke up, horrified.
Wednesday 15 October 2003 at 01:13 am
tory leader responds to leadership rumblings within the party - get this, allegedly over his payment of a secretarial wage to his wife, when a worker at his secretariat claims she in fact did no work at all - by pulling out his moral blam blam six-shooters on national tv in defense of good old-fashioned male protectiveness and the noble virtues of patriarchy, tokenised by his consort.
'say what you will of me but do not touch my wife. i will protect her at all costs.'
strategically, the move may just be his most succesful gambit for the public eye and affection yet. what better than a guttural appeal to core nuclear family values and virile chivalry to confront the emasculate doublespeaker mister bliar, incarnate and advocate of globalisation, moral crusades in far-off countries, other abstractions with little flesh on their bones for many people... whose wife fends for herself very well, thank you, she can choose her own financial advisors...
ach. i find myself cheering for the tory party leader. things must be coming to an end.
Tuesday 14 October 2003 at 2:01 pm
as usual I've let my online scribbling slide to the side for the summer, as always seems to happen when the temperature rises and I end up spending less time disgruntled in front of a computer screen.
after a summer of decennial anthro conference in manchester, a few weeks in norway catching up with friends, a week in france for a friend's wedding, a few weeks of railing through europe and to finish off a couple of weeks in cyprus, I'm now installed here, in a new house with two other people. good by english standards - only one cracked window and the ceiling looks like it might hold, which would be my first in private housing for the 8 years I've spent in this country of architectural deficiencies. whatever structural issues may be or arise, however, they are still dwarfed by the relief of having escaped the institutional life of college.
the status of my work is uncertain. I still have no clear idea when I am going out to the field, even where I'll be going. spring next year looks like a probably time, karasjok in the north-eastern part of norway a probable site, but even if undoubtedly substantial, the body of work that needs to be undertaken before then remains pretty shadowy to me. it doesn't help that my marks from last year are still unfinalised and I have no feedback on last year's work - in this place four months to mark a thesis is not enough, apparently...
eh. I guess I'll work it all out as I go along.
Monday 13 October 2003 at 10:53 am
reorganising the entire site, got fed up with the clumsy and limited old design. new features include highly flexible category system, due credit to engine powering the site, and a webcam picture of yours truly (for the time being) in the top right-hand corner. appreciate.
Did you write a big post that was up this morning and was following up my long comment on your Matrix Revolutions post? Because I saw it then and can't see it now, and like rather too many things at the moment it's confusing the hell out of me. Do headaches make one stupid or delusional too? Perhaps.
flats () - 10 11 03 - 23:16