MATERIALIST DOT NET

...was to do the washing and have a nap, but a friend invited herself over for dinner unexpectedly. over a coffee in the gardens, talked circuses and gambling kin and leaving cambridge for vegas, then sketched out some loose theoretical coordinates and preliminary practical steps for a bit of extracurricular fieldwork on the cambridge dogging scene. 'tis vigorous, apparently, and they encourage voyeurism. which is just another word for 'participant observation' without the 'participant' bit. I desperately, desperately want my first published article to be on depressing group sex in british car-parks.

after she left, decided to take to the high road by foot, out of town to the west. rob dougan on repeat, furious angels. discovered a horizon down the road and caught a sunset, then took a random sharp right down a carriage path, verdant and overgrown, which reached a huge plain of symmetrical rows, future corn I think. crossed the plain and found a hedge, something like an archway through it. through that, another field and a motorway bridge. stopped and turned back. when I reached the main road again my sandals were thick and heavy with clogged wet clay. took them off, walked back to college, barefoot in the dark, lit by the headlights of passing trucks. sat in the bar for a while, typing. now back to my room, put a movie on, type out some more stuff. wait for the apocalypse with patient cheer.

a day of rain and sunshine, but light of stride and unfettered. my solar plexus has been tingling with pleasure all day. ripe for the world, no expectations. clearly, the closure effected by drawing a clear line yourself is tangible. perhaps a petty economy of the final word is in play: to my relief, for the first time and, I fully intend, the last.

just received a call for articles, now speculating idly whether it might be feasible to submit an 8k article to the journal for the academic study of magic by august 1, about articulations of tradition and continuity in the sami new age of finnmark... certainly have some dramatic fieldwork to draw on. ghosts of evil old men wrestling reiki healers at the farm, curses with hairballs nested under floors for a hundred years, sami 'starchildren' reporting talking heads with hands for legs and aliens hand in hand with native americans at the foot of the bed, and so on...

the piece on sacrifice is shifting into abstract gear, I want to make some points about the contingency of biopolitical sovereignty - the power that vests in life and takes hold of it as its object - and the sacrificial calculus of reindeer populations. the sovereign state-power that theoretically possesses the ability to designate populations for death, and thus 'sacrifice' ridiculously large numbers of reindeer in a 'forced cull' to avert a crisis, finds itself blocked in its exercise on a number of fronts. with some work, I might even be able to turn this into an endpoint for my thesis.

otherwise, all is good. all the way down, in fact. and god damn was that about fucking time or what.

so I'm terrible at updating this thing at the moment. out of the blue, an email from ex-liaison yesterday snapped me out of the haze. after months of silence, a strange thing it was; evoking sunset drives, midnight apples at gas stations, latenight cinema screenings. ending on a note of 'just to let you know you were being mulled over, mid-teacup, smiling'. this from the woman that blanked me, cut me out of life and friendship like a razor and left me in the cold to roll in the human waste and fallout. hence frowning puzzlement, followed by 24 hours of erupting rage. tempered my intemperate impulse to reply, which would have generated something along the lines of 'fuck you you wretched pathological cunt-bitch, you have no right to fond memories. I want to rip them from your cracked and bleeding skull. die and suck cock in hell forever.' this would have made it easy for her, much as she'd never admit it, judgement and contempt are natural postures of her barbed intimacy, the toy-less empty centre of her kinder-egg. instead, wrote 'your gestures inscribed you as a memory that strengthens me for having endured it. if you were my friend I would be happy for you, that you have fond memories. but you're not. do you want to try and become one, now?' not something I expect a reply to. she runs from difficult confrontations. in my head, I see the dismissive response already : "I would never say that". god almighty, if I never hear those words again. to real-life readers: utter that phrase and I will feed you to hungry pigs.

yesterday morning I woke wide without reason, at 08:36. the timestamp of her email. damn the synchronicity of it. thinking about this around midnight last night, something intangible came back to me. the room brightened and grew sharp, I fell asleep giggling. a few hours later I woke up again, lay in the dark for a couple of hours, thinking without knowing what I was thinking. as I write this, I note the sheer rage abating, wonder vaguely where it originated. the lack of interactional closure is one, I guess. the cut is a first. her previous boyfriend, here, was also cut, abruptly, in a similarly total manner, and was fucked up for a year. considerable resentment at the remembered microphysics of her intimacy; abusive, for an off-the-cuff lack of a better term. my own inability to understand a psychology that she didn't understand herself either. she frequently found the brutality of her own gestures, the sources of her anger unknown and inexplicable. some is anger at being tricked by her self-deceptions; in other words, my own wounded pride. rage at having loved a false persona; she pulled it off so well, when it crumbled it was impossible to comprehend. still is.

in the end though. acceptance? people are what they are. tat tvam asi. or rather, atat. what does it matter now to me that she was what she was? there is no need to understand. the residue is dead, the grounds charred and the temple razed, the bits of masonry left under my skin where I can't quite reach them are dissolving with time. I am out, in a world of real people with emotional responses I can understand. much as she made me doubt it for a while, I am not crazy. vaguely, I pity her future lovers. as the shrugging medium said, looking in the cards a few months ago, 'it was an experience, wasn't it...' me [half-heartedly]: 'what doesn't kill you make you stronger, huh?' medium: 'exactly! exactly. now, about these breathing exercises...'

at the risk of sounding reactionary, a brief foray into the spam section of my inbox confirms that digital capitalism and the bloodsplattered conversation between spam-filters and spammers is mangling the english language in new and quite amazing ways. proliferating encrypted mutations that I really have some trouble deciphering.

otherwise, the weather slips between cold and unsettlingly hot. one deeply amusing 'disciplinary incident' involving a 'formal complaint' and my 'filthy' feet, carelessly located and displayed over the back of the wrong chair in the college clubroom. elsewhere, my ongoing experiment in the personalising appropriation of capitalist non-space also proceeds apace: I recognise and greet nero's staff in civilian, one of them has even nicknamed me, 'Mariachi'. as a nod of playing along, I have a new and hideously beautiful pair of sunglasses, cheap and reflective.

'professionally', I have a short seminar piece to write relating sacrifice to industrial meat production, a topic I've picked but which as yet makes sense to me. in general, 'twixt modulated distractions and writing I have a rhythm of some sort going. my sixth chapter tries to relate what I think is the fetishistic quality of the industrial meat-commodity to the political economy of reindeer meat, in the light of a slowly emerging overall argument that concerns the production and tactical dispersion of forms of visibility. this leads into the question of whether and how the notion of 'biopolitics' might be applied to animal management, which I'm saving for the conclusion. 'tis good, almost to the point of being interesting, but conversely I simply don't have the time or energy to write out the everyday in anything like an interesting form.

first, the insects. two nights ago, two enormous shiny black flies crawling in a pattern all over my front door. then, watching an anime late last night, a small bug with an enormous lumpy thing attached to its back crawled past my bed from left to right five or six times. never once the other way. then mammals. I'll leave out the human serendipities. when I left college yesterday morning, the college cat sat immobile in the middle of the lawn, staring into space. when I came back that evening it was still in the same position, small sphinxlike orange glyph planted out on the geometrical expanse of the lawn. probably to preserve energy. the poor thing is looking thin and hungry these days, quick alert movements and big open fragile eyes like a hunted animal. either the exorcisms are working or, more likely, the fad to feed the cat has passed out of short-term political memory. I have a can of tuna and a mission, what I need now is a balaclava and some IR goggles.

...or pollen, or increasing comfort with hazy futures, or some minor but interesting modifications. either way, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed I tend to have nothing particularly interesting to write about. the world passes through me and I through it, sleek furry ferret-like animals, and the friction generates little in the way of words. I feel no holes, chuckle at random, keep my iPod on shuffle.