MATERIALIST DOT NET

erratic, recently, in thought and writing - a few hours of "work" today produced as its climax a beautifully illuminated half-page of scribbled flowchart that illustrated the passage from statist striation of space [sketched map of northern norway with a grid superimposed on it] via local intra-ethnic conflicts [angry farmer stickman waving a shotgun at an unhappy stickman herder on the other side of a barbed-wire fence] to the political visibility of slaughtering as an enactment of responsible management [enormous severed reindeer head, with crossed-out eyes in a pool of blood, surrounded by staring stick people]. much as I rather enjoyed drawing this, I think I may be taking things a bit far.

am also possessed with a curious vibe that seems to make people want to talk to me. beyond the usual mishmash of conversations on the significance of the tonal properties of paleolithic flint when suspended with rubber strings in a cardboard box and repeatedly tapped with limestone, I also get a share of random intimate confessions, proffered business cards and invitations from affluent-looking strangers to spend the summer in the north of spain. curious - I wonder whether it may be because I genuinely do not give a rat's ass about this place anymore and therefore engage in conversations with totally flippant abandon. if two or more possible replies present themselves naturally in response to something someone else says, I'll just pick the one that involves monkeys masturbating in public.

drifted into consciousness stupid early today, with a sharp and somewhat curious sore-throat cold. curious, because the syndrome developed with quite bizarre rapidity: woken up around 05:30 by my own painful swallowing, then precisely between 06:24 and 06:29 my throat stopped hurting and things moved to my nose. by midday my ears were clogged, lungs rough and mildly congested, and by 3pm I felt fine again. slightly weird. if that was the major astrological turning point I was predicted a while back, I want my money back.

subsequently, a day for logistics, setting my armies in order. registered with a local GP, time for health-bill screening and all else aside, I may look obscenely healthy but losing a solid metric 20+kg is worth checking up on. also booked a college guest room for a visiting sibirskaya, sorted out the internet connection in my room. now: tidy room and clear workspace, reschedule collection date for laptop to be repaired, cancel some online debits, pay the college bill, finish thesis, take over the world.

otherwise, currently browsing a local network for a music refresh. starting from skinny puppy, front 242 and front line assembly, picked up some assemblage 23, leather strip, funker vogt, girls under glass. still finding my sea-legs on the MS EBM, so highly open to suggestions on this front. infinite greed mobilized by double-digit terabytes of available content also dictated some further semi-randoms: nightwish, linkin park, satyricon, body count, system of a down, finally members of mayday and the soundtrack to a PS2 game I finished last year. pillage and looting on the seven seas of the interweb feels as good as ever.

back in cambridge after a week and a half that have been really very good: motley textures, arching rubbery vectors, a top-shelf selection of interesting and pleasurable humans. exhausted, sated and restored, with recuperated faith in the possibility of adequate human life occuring in a way that involves me. much as I have the intention to write it all out, I probably shan't. but aye, thanks to all involved.

after some travails and minor sidequests, I have made it to norway, sans laptop but with an inexplicably swollen eyelid. the air is crisp, mounds of dirty snow line the road, the parental home overflows with a range of consumables plus decorated eggs [ie., love]. by my reckoning, the situation calls for long beachside walks in the hazy light, cannibalizing my own bookshelves and vast quantities of chocolate partaken with fresh coffee. [a weighing confirms that I have lost 25kg in the last two years, from 95 to 70, more than 10 of these since christmas. recent observations concerning my boniness are appropriate].

will be back in the uk and online on the 20th. happy jesus-death holiday to y'all.

some of you might have a notion of what this refers to.

walked in to the institute today, in a torrential downpour. skies were gray and the streets shrouded in a thin mist of spraying water from cars and impacting droplets. petals were falling off trees all along the way, and I had apocalyptica's cello rendition of enter sandman on my headphones, thinking in a vaguely connective way about charles schulz, the italian elections, cherry blossoms, berlusconi falling gently out of trees, and how very mono no aware the present situation would be, if my hands weren't tingling and I didn't feel like rubbing the world in maple syrup and having it for breakfast. as if to make a point, I turned onto lensfield road and next to a garbage bin came across a perfectly intact and perfectly white pigeon, dead but unsoiled, feet in the air, head turned to the right - to all the world the pure form of a dead pigeon, almost too perfectly formed and clean to be real. sad but to myself, I wonder what it might taste like with maple syrup.

things are actually not bad, currently. an overall sense of expanding horizons and possibility maps directly onto my increasingly flippant sense of amused detachment. en route from minor meanderings and an eventide drink in town with the lovely flats, I passed unfazed and soundproofed by headphones through the dismal ritual of the wolfson college salsa night to secure an organic fruit-juice with soda at the bar. safely blocked out, I amused myself watching the couples cavort to the shuffle of my industrial playlist for a bit.

the current question: once i complete my final term of compulsory residence in june I am getting the hell out of dodge. I buy the books I need, never have supervisions and really, thesis-wise, law of diminishing returns applies to seminars. where to go? a friend has a "lifetime contract" teaching at the university of the azores. on some level I want to break down and beg him to find me some cheap accomodation. write up with only sheep to distract me, plus I'd probably pick up functional portuguese in a few months. other alternatives are as plentiful as there are nice places with affordable rent, decent quality of life and access to the sea. southern europe tops the list, but I might consider greater leaps [eg. venezuela? hmmm venezuela...] if the thesis reaches an editing stage that doesn't require crates of books to come with me. meanwhile I'll take suggestions.

the less said about leeching spambot batallions and exceeded bandwidths, the better. in nietzsche's words, measure the strength of a man from the parasites he carries.

otherwise, fresh from a shockingly pleasing intersection which, true to my gnomic tact, [hey flats! this one's for you:] I'm going to leave unnarrated here. nyeh nyeh. today, a coffee-walk bookshop foraging-raid secured baudrillard on the system of objects, zizek on the sublime object of ideology, and as a detour, derrida on the politics of friendship, which came 'warmly recommended' by my ex-motherinlaw, during lunch the other day. not two words I'd associate with jacques "my prose is a medieval torture instrument" derrida, but hey. no one said keeping an open mind was going to be painless.

the last couple of days I've been listening to front line assembly's 'barcode' more or less on repeat- mostly for the sheer vocal texture, which sounds like what I imagine my own little slaughterhouse will sound like, when I finally manage to apply a tactically reworked version of derrida's spectre to it... haunted by industrial rhythms and evil things that make thick liquid sounds. zizek defines the spectre more or less as the residue of the real, produced through the necessary incompleteness of any symbolization relative to what it seeks to represent. the unrepresented returns to haunt the symbolic order that expels it. this is a temporary interpretation - I still have no clear idea what zizek means by 'the real' [I know, this is what theory does to you] - but something that may or may not be an example:

at the end of last year, a cat that moved into the college grounds attracted enormous attention, out of proportion to its diminutive slack orange frame. students fed it en masse with stupendous and surprising affection: cans and cans of tuna, bowls of milk at night in the clubroom and so on. attentions that soon turned as illicit as the cat grew fat and shiny. college forces cracked down with equal disproportion- loud posters in doorways, DO NOT FEED THE CAT, circular emails to all members of college, quoting the paragraphs in the tenancy agreement that prohibits the keeping of pets and so on... from our lunch-break bench under the tree at the far end of the little park with the horsey behind that anonymous building in the north-east corner of college, all the fuss seemed rather curious. but it is not. here is why. simply, the cat is the symptom that disturbs the stable order of college. in it become vested all those memories of a normal life, outside and before, in which there were animals to feed, families, friends, social lives, in short: to students, the cat embodies the memory of a lost normality, a past existence untouched with the systemic artifice of college life, a nearly effaced and forgotten order in which sanity was not an uphill struggle fleeing the constant threat of an institutional adaptation that leaves you unsuited to life 'outside' - like that guy that comes out of prison in the shawshank redemption and proceeds to hang himself in the first motel. the cat is thus the monstrous expunged spectre that inhabits the tightly governed symbolic order of college, embodying the unrepresented: posters and circular emails are expulsions, purgations, purifications aiming to reestablish the stable tyrannical governmentality of the everyday student factory. which does not include cats: cats do not foster excellence. in short, these are exorcisms. this highly simplified interpretation sits within an overall theory of college governmentality, developed over several years of intensive if marginal ethnography. with a nod to james scott, i have in mind a lovely article bringing together key incidents of college life in the last few years: "seeing like a college - the biopolitics of cats, curtains and coffee cups".

otherwise, walking around the back of the new blocks at the other end of college tonight, unexplored territory, we were spotted by an infrared [!] security camera that brought the night-porter along at a jog, carrying a clublike flashlight, to investigate our suspect activities: trying locked doors and stuff. discovered that said blocks are not only lavished with ornamental greek statues and other marble structures, but college cards of mere mortals such as us do not suffice to sweep us past the magnetic locks. higher security clearances are apparently required to access the nice statues and the bright lights. curious.

catalyst for the walk was dinner invite by sweet former lover - not the most recent but the one before - living over on that side [hey, you're reading this too: thanks! another nice person I owe a meal. flats: lose some weight and people start giving you free food! not to be disparaged]. having lunch tomorrow with her, a two-year affair, plus the equally lovely mother of the one before her, of three and a half years. [one friend thinks I'm completely insane for keeping in touch with former liaisons. but then, she is getting married. madnesswise, I'll pick mine over hers.]

otherwise again, little. a couple of trivial conversations, nothing acute. some very enjoyable email exchanges recently, which are sadly being interfered with by my finite typing powers. a cute girl in college found this site by accident and identified me from an entry about reindeer and alien abductions, she is british and I detected just a touch of awkwardness in her manner, about the incident. though having stumbled onto a rather sweetly simple-minded rant about the president monkey that I wrote five years ago in a different persona, she did produce some highly enjoyable stories about her grandfather hiding refugees in his garage back in the old days. very nice.

a recent government audit confirms that nope, the days are not exactly ablaze with naked skin and swordfights at dawn.

still vaguely good though, bobbing along with a kind of gentle positive buoyancy born from sheer repetition, and a mild weightless drug-haze of excess theory that leaves me in a curious state. I think on my toes, like someone trying to attract a very large and warlike invisible kitten made of glass. when I read, my hands move in little arcs and twirls, conducting a smurf orchestra inside a very small broom closet.

not sure whether I should admit this, but the highlight of the current day was zizek's impatient dismissal of eco's 'the name of the rose' as 'spaghetti structuralism'. I swear I laughed for one minute solid, curled up in a corner sofa of the common room. I guess anyone who can get a multi-page lacanian analysis of kinder-eggs not only written but published deserves some cred, if not to be thoroughly violated:

"A child who buys this chocolate egg often unwraps it nervously and just breaks the chocolate, not bothering to eat it, worrying only about the toy in the center--is not such a chocolate-lover a perfect case of Lacan's motto 'I love you, but, inexplicably, I love something in you more than yourself, and, therefore, I destroy you'? And, in effect, is this toy not l'objet petit a at its purest, the small object filling in the central void of our desire, the hidden treasure, agalma, at the center of the thing we desire?"

I think I need an intervention.

recent experiences have left their imprint. if I see for example a housemate come in of a morning, sweaty, decked out in training gear, my immediate visceral response is not what it used to be. some time ago, there might have been some gentle mockery, transparently directed at myself, and the perpetual hidden transcript of the 'ah I should be doing that too, if I was a better person'... now things are completely different. let's say the sweating person is someone I vaguely like, maybe a divorced christian pedagogue in her mid30s living on the second floor.

witnessing her, I catch myself in the act of a genuine and instinctive concern, bordering even on alarm, open potentially to pity. obviously I do not give voice to it, in fact it is tempered and neutralised as misdirected almost as soon as I register it: to my knowledge, she is perfectly grounded, not to be pitied. still, interesting. I guess what it bespeaks is that I have a new appreciation for [and fear of?] the sheer hatred potentially involved in practices that take the self as their object, to be remoulded; brutalities enciphered in patterns of marathon scars, torn softnesses, frames painfully restructured, and so on. perhaps ironically, or maybe not, this new pity coincides with my most victorious regime of physical mobility since I was 20. for half a year now, I walk an hour a day at least. at my own pace though.

funny few days. periods of great clarity, a sense of intangible progress, one abysmal dip or two, and my second chocolate fondue in a very short time [you're reading this: dude, do I owe you both a proper meal or what. alternatively, come to wolfson for brunch one of these saturdays...]. something relative to my thesis is working itself out in my head, an opaque field of indiscernible intensities. a friend remarked that things appear to have been set loose in me that had been brewing for a long time. from what I hear, I am working on funky shit again.

as of tonight, brainstorming with a depressed danish guy etching burning people in free fall on the college bar napkins, a few new non-track ideas for the imaginary band.

1. a deeply concentrated bald two-year old child plays the piano with increasing intensity, until he goes berserk and starts banging away, foaming at the mouth. the child in question always does this, apparently.

2. a man with a german accent narrates in detail a great song that has never actually been written and never will be performed. halfway through there may be a fight about how the song goes.

3. one for the awkward silence series. at 4am in the morning, a guy stands in the rain for four and a half minutes looking up at the dark windows of his ex-girlfriends house. distant traffic.

4. my favorite. at 2am, one muffled cry of female passion from the floor above startles a PhD student as he translates Lao propaganda leaflets in his cell. he realizes that in three and a half years of college life he has never once heard the sound of passion. the restored silence feels like a ticking clock in the background.

5. one which I'm going to censor.