MATERIALIST DOT NET

London? Oi! Over here! I was looking for things to do, and besides, I need you to supervise my dissertation as no-one at LSE really can (yay, my turn to witter on about reindeer herders!) Nah, just bounce a couple of ideas of you. Will email phone/address to lousily-non-mobiled-you in hope of you having a spare moment.

flats - 22 02 07 - 20:28

in london til tomorrow eve, so drop me a mail. schedule quite busy, but I'm sure I can fit you in.

when's your dissertation due date? happy to have a look at your draft and give you some suggestions.

monkey on the road - 24 02 07 - 12:48

Draft?! Don't be silly, it's not due until May some time. Problem at the moment is turning the information/ideas I've got into an actual argument, i.e. structuring the damn thing.

Have emailed contact details. Am out for a drink with a mate tonight, and you probably don't want to do super-late 11pm meetup, so tomorrow any time is good.

flats - 24 02 07 - 17:07

P.S.

flats - 25 02 07 - 23:28

Ok, last message didn't like me, but to recap: muchas gracias for reminding me to read de Certeau. Has absolutely nailed down my argument so much more. But I still want to read your chapter 2, plz!

flats - 25 02 07 - 23:31

glad to hear it. I'll get around to shipping you the draft - though it's mostly ethnographic fluff, nothing to write home about in terms of spatial theory. a bit of chitchat about scott, some stuff about state sovereignty.

space monkey - 26 02 07 - 12:36

Hi friends!
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ryvus

Beatris () (URL) - 29 09 07 - 03:49

It's that giant stapler that used to call me sometimes when you were out rambling. It must be starting to catch up with you ...

Blonde Beast - 18 02 07 - 23:03

yes. probably worried, trying to give me the staples of my diet.

monkey runs but he can't hide - 19 02 07 - 14:32

or staple your stomach. ho ho.

Blond Beast - 22 02 07 - 15:27

Bloody hell, a monkey going without coffee? Voluntarily?! Did you experience shakes, dizziness, or other withdrawal symptoms?

flats - 18 02 07 - 21:37

nope. the blinding white heat of my headache kept me from noticing any withdrawal symptoms.

monkey pure as freshly fallen caffeine powder - 19 02 07 - 14:30

What is it about Valentine's Day that makes us all so defensive? The couples bewail the rampant consumerism of it (and secretly wonder if they ought to send a card anyway), and the single feel obliged to go out and give it laldy to prove they don't need an other half. Next year, can we all just make a pact to say nothing and pretend it isn't happening?

Blonde Beast - 15 02 07 - 00:00

yeah. the rant above does seem a tad out of proportion to the mild indifference I generally feel towards mister valentine. I think I was just using it as an excuse to rant about consumption.

as far as I am concerned, it should be a movable feast - to be declared individually and unexpectedly. as in 'hey - it's my valentine's day today. come to niagara falls and let me cover you in chocolate'.

I opine that similar surgical dislocations from the fixed calendar should be undertaken for Christmas, Easter and birthdays.

monkey believes global warming should herald a new age of non-calendrical individual time - 18 02 07 - 19:37

I think someone needs to provide the stereotypical female counter-argument, namely:
Yes, that'd be great if all men actually were that considerate. Having been to-whatever-extent socialised not to express their emotions very well, lots of guys are fairly shite at showing how much they appreciate their partners. Having a day set aside in the calendar in which doing so is pretty much obligatory (for the non-single, anyway) provides much-needed feelings of being appreciated within their relationship.

But what do I know? Never been in a relationship over Valentine's Day so never actually celebrated it!

And if you'd had as much 'classic'/turgid anth. bludgeoned into your head as I have, you'd be aware that 'gift adequacy' is an issue for all gifts, everywhere. Don't give your chieftan enough yams and bad things happen! Kula exchange absolutely required the giving of a somewhat better gift than you received, though I can't recall the sanctions for inadequacy here either.

Besides, it's the signifying quality of the gift that matters on Valentine's Day at least as much as the expense. A decent-looking handmade card carries more weight than a bought one; a few exquisite chocolates from a posh shop would be preferred (by me anyway!) to lots from Thorntons. I think quite a bit of it might actually be a dance of signalling that you understand your partners' semiotic priorities - viz, get a chic woman a teddy bear and that's it, you're dumped....

flats - 18 02 07 - 21:47

yeah yeah, gift adequacy here and there and everywhere. the troubling point is who dictates the standards of adequacy.

this is where the consumption hijack kicks in - who on earth, except six-year old children, makes valentine gifts? melt your own chocolate, brew your own champagne?

and this is where the expense/ signification dichotomy breaks down: simply, the expense is the signifying quality. it
measures how much you care. at least, given the powers that are currently in charge of poor valentine's estate.

even if you give somebody a beautiful homemade blabla - say, a tiny
polished music-box melted down from your own dental fillings, with a homemade recording of you playing the mooonlight sonata on the recorder - it's still an exception from the pecuniary standard, and thereby it invokes it. 'oooh that's a lovely gift'. subtext: 'so much better than something from the shop / a bottle of champagne / taking me out for an expensive meal'...

that is to say, commercial purchase remains the frame of reference. you can't avoid it. the only option is to sidestep and ignore.

re: the feminine argument, it's a really sad validation of the alienation diagnosis. if couples out there really are so emotionally disenfranchised and fucked up that they need valentine's day, I don't think there is any hope. bring on the apocalypse.

far away, monkey detects the low whirr of valentine, rotating in his earthly grave - 19 02 07 - 14:28

ho, monkey! that was *you* writing that trifle? I didn't know you'd also been employed by the trifle machine. cheers.

I'm lucky -- I've fallen into a group of friends here in NYC who still celebrate *Lupercalia*, with more of an emphasis on pleasure than fertility (thank god). Wish you'd been here! ;)

gus () - 20 02 07 - 16:27

eh, you're not dead. where are you living, got a room in a shared house or something? I ought to raid the SPRI library for my dissertation, but reeeaallly can't be bothered...

flats - 09 02 07 - 00:42

So my sicko friend - welcome back to the Camb mother's womb. There was little time last week to enjoy the sterile darkness college with you, but next time you might still be around, more sarcastic and depressed than you can now imagine. Watching the A-Team series and you are unsure of your response to Camb?...That's already a quite cool response, Mr. T.

DirtyMonk () - 11 02 07 - 11:59

flats: well, if you do turn up give me a call. lost my mobile in greece last autumn, so e-mail works better. staying in college. again.

indeed, filthy monk-man. a few more days on my own trying to make evening conversation with resident pod-people - capable it seems only of making conversation about college student politics and the logistics of arranging inter-collegiate mingling parties - and I in my mind I am already reaching for the trusty old AK-47.

inmate monkey bows to foucault, again. - 13 02 07 - 13:19

Lesson in how people work for the anthropology student (back to your theory of deficiencies again):

1. Buy mobile phone. Pay as you go, shitty phone, won't cost much.
2. Call your friends. Having a girlfriend doesn't make them redundant.
3. Have a social life.
4. Not hate Cambridge quite so much, because you're now actually spending time with people you like (and have actively sought out), rather than just those you bump into in the common room.

Do this, else methinks the monkey doth protest too much, and I shall conclude that you actually like wallowing in hating-everyone teenage angst that you're really far too old for! /horrible

flats - 14 02 07 - 00:46

ooo. easy there tiger. nothing here I'm too old for - re-enacting scenes from the old I-hate-wolfson puppetplay with my G.I. Joes every night makes me proud to be anal retentive!

having said that - the escalating ascetic redundancy of people [granted] coincides less with the arrival of blondes than with my overly long and obsessive folie a deux with this damn thesis.

once it gets the seal of approval I'll have proved something to myself that I only dimly realized I was trying to prove. I expect it'll free up the inner tension somewhat - though I doubt it'll make me buy another mobile phone...

monkey the obsessive recluse - 14 02 07 - 14:41

Proved what to yourself by writing this thing, exactly? I recall stuff re: a 'good enough' thesis not actually being good enough for you; that you want it not just to pass but - not set the world afire - but what?

flats - 14 02 07 - 16:46

heh. prove that I am able to write it, simply.

no need to set the world on fire - oh vain vain hope, for a PhD thesis - but to meet my own standards. which are not necessarily higher than submission standards, but not entirely coincident with them either.

defined instead by certain ideas of craftsmanship, tone and composition. plus - mind you - avoiding the kind of things that bore the hell out of me in the theses of other people...

pedantic monkey starts feeling the postnatal nausea, like a lost milktooth - 14 02 07 - 17:36