MATERIALIST DOT NET

some newbie notes, drawn from personal experience, on the manufacture of orgonite devices.

first, use a heat-resistant vessel. preferably glass or metal and not, for example, disposable plastic cups. in the first instance, the resin is corrosive and will eat through the thin plastic, burning holes in your vessel and leaking out to form rapidly hardening puddles on your work surface. then, yes, the catalytic reaction is exothermic and as the device solidifies it will emit enough heat to leave singe-marks and melt the vessel around itself, leaving you with a device that looks like a discarded piece of plastic crap, wrapped in shredded toilet paper. unless camouflage is your aim and you're aiming to gift a scrapyard, this is not useful.

second, as mentioned. shit is corrosive, don't get shit on your fingers. it'll burn and leave red marks, probably have long-term carcinogenic side-effects and most importantly, stick to your fingers forever. leaving them sticky, permanently dirty from adhered dirt and smelling - strangely - of synthetic fruit. on a related note, industrial gloves. not kitchen rubber made for handwashing. industrial. even those won't last very long.

third, the catalyst. do not err on the side of caution. use enough. the curing process is not as rapid as you might think. at least with uncomplicated and high-density devices, pouring is a simple two-stage process that leaves you ample time before your resin solidifies. too little catalyst will leave you, at best, with a loose, misshapen and permanently sticky device that smells funny and never sets properly.

all this said - damn, this is cool!

my flat is full of scrap and beautiful junk: heaps of single-terminated rock-quartz, tumbled haematite, herkimer crystals, pyrite, bits of coiled wire, bags of filed brass and scrap-metal shavings, tubs of industrial organic compounds. kindergarten with a budget, and toxic, highly flammable industrial playdough. when I'm not wandering around pound-shops looking for interesting shapes, or mining cheap kitchen appliances for appropriate metal, I get to stick shit together and make stuff. physical stuff. like, with my hands. tangible, material things, that I can't e-mail or transform into .pdf-files. pure brilliant.

i was mucking around stupidly on the web - looking for something unspecified that i didn't really know myself but which probably had nothing to do with anything - when i came across a group of finnish gifters.

who recently did a gifting run.

through lapland.

their webpage even has a reindeer on it.

now, in itself i won't claim that this proves the existence of the acausal connecting principle. it's just amusingly suggestive. however; factor in that until about six weeks ago, i didn't know a single finnish-speaking person who might translate for me, and it begins to resemble a mission.

I currently have three article ideas floating around in my vitreous back-of-the-mind plasma.

one of them picks up on a discard from the thesis, about herd management qua multiplicity, refracted through deleuze and guattari - rhizomes and arborescence, striation and genealogies, that sort of shizzle. toyed for a while with the idea of a tension between arborescent genealogy and controlled lineage on the one hand, unpredictable death and guerilla pack management on the other... then, ten pages into a thousand plateaus the other night, it occurred to me that rhizomes are about flexibility, and adaptive pastoral flexibility is about... climate change! the idea of juxtaposing D&G's late-seventies post-hippie 'schizoanalysis' with the earnest debates of current climate-change theorizers makes me laugh. talk about a homage to deleuze, and his act of fertile sodomy - 'approaching an author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous'.

the second one is still stranger, and still ill-defined. it follows up on a comment by one of the reviewers on the larry article, and would involve tracing the path of little larry empirically, combining this with a reading of agamben's profanations and some taussig spaced in for spice. I don't know where this would go yet, but it begs to be undertaken. the situationist in me wants to mess up all the categories and turn it into a personal-slash-theoretical gifting run: sacralization as profanation, and so on.

[i've been meaning to write something about the gifting movement ever since the first time the thought occurred to me, last year; watching clouds on a windless day, leaning against a shed in an empty airport parking lot. the moment it did, a discarded beer-can on the other side of the lot started rolling, and rolling, and rolled 50 yards in a straight line, across the whole lot, to nudge my waiting foot. I raised my eyebrows and accepted the wordless challenge.]

the third idea, finally, profanes method and convention even further. co-authored with a pseudonymous collaborator, on the ethics of certain transgressive fieldwork practices [and relations...]. the recursive implications here are so tangled that I don't even want to start unpacking them, for fear of damaging the beautiful knots. knot number one being, I take a fair degree of responsibility for having persuaded my pseudonymous co-author to undertake said transgressive practices in the first place. go me, turning other people's fieldwork into my own. parasite and performative voyeur. this one would be a hell of a kick to write.

I'm finding it a bit difficult to write here at the moment. not that there is nothing to write about: the life I lead at the moment is simple but pleasant, interesting in its detail. of course, much of the detail is curtailed. at least for the time being, I am opting to leave the lives of others discretely out of the frame: at least til I figure out how to write about them.

and this is the crux. my style whilst writing up was very particular; or at least, the space from where I wrote was, the texture of the world that I tried to capture. private and compacted, streaked with light. hermetic and allusive, intent on transforming the mundane into suggestive but indecipherable glyphs. this aesthetic motion encapsulated much of my pleasure in the writing.

things are different now. the centre is loose, and I don't know how I feel about things. the plane of the world has shifted and rebalanced: matter, light and meaning are redistributed. things that were important litter the floor like shed skins; new things play half invisible at the edge of the field, where it borders on the woods. the tides come in from new angles, and I just haven't figured out how to suitably translate this new fabric into words yet. when I try it on people, it still bounces off.

I'll get there, because it seems like a worthwhile undertaking to attempt it. in the meantime, forebearance.

and score! up yours, giorgio.

interesting shit going down these days. all over. kosovo declares independence, castro retires. the sun behaves oddly, birds build nests out of season, warm winters and glacial springs. friends get fired, pass their vivas, start new lives, get married, break up. my brother gets a job.

as for me, I trod on virgin ground today. tracing new paths, through woods made suddenly unfamiliar. alas, discretion bids me to silence on the details.

all in all, I think this coming year may be an interesting one. rather so.

bbc weather tells me durham is clocking a healthy negative seven centigrade. in terms of exposed-surface pain, this qualifies as bone-grinding fucking cold. my fingers and cheekbones hurt in public. it goes without saying that the delayed-output retention heater in the living room has died. stone cold. dead. indefinitely delayed. a non-heater. the flat is freezing.

I can handle cold. during fieldwork I'd go for merry hikes in minus 35: quite often because i had to, juju machine situation and all.

what I can't handle here is the relentless inescapable quality of it. there is nowhere to run in this country, because british people just don't know how to build a warm fucking house. I don't know what the hell possesses them instead to build all these miserable shitty little drafty hovels where they can huddle in the cold and frosted breath by their inadequate little radiators, watching the walls rot and scraping fungus off the carpets, but the sheer skullfucking self-inflicted misery of it does my head in.

what the fuck people! build some proper fucking heating systems! insulate! stop putting those damn carpets everywhere!

come the revolution, I am going to single-handedly track down the long-lost grave of the man who invented british architecture, exhume his body and have him violated by a pack of ugly pigs. angry, ugly pigs. with rabies. then I'll wrap it in a cheap carpet, stuff it into a malfunctioning freezer full of rotten leaves and have it watered with the cold urine of lepers. forever.

on national holidays - Proper Heating Day, Carpet Free Day - the post-revolutionary citizens of my future utopia will parade past his sad, vile body and desecrate it in a manner of their own choosing. prizes every year to the most inventive.

damn you, primordial British architect. damn you.

last night I dreamt I was standing in a field. the night was thick and green around me, verdant with foliage. there were people with me, but I can't remember who they were. I think they were there to show me what I saw.

I was looking up, and my face was bathed in light. the skies were blazing. from one end of the horizon to the other, vast structures of light moved slowly through the dark. dancing, flowing, revolving, forming shapes and gently disentangling. spoked wheels and snowflakes, radials, darting pinpoints moving like fish, in huge shoals of liquid light. radiant, soundless, enormous; perfectly coordinated, but without anyone to coordinate them. their motions were precise, delicate, exuberant: basking in the beauty of their own spectacle, the sheer telepathic choreography of it.

I can't describe how the sight made me feel. In the dream I almost cried with joy; when I woke, a deep inaudible note was sounding far off in the distance, in my chest, at the bottom of a well.

met her again yesterday. or, rather: she stalked into nero while I was unpacking my laptop. eyes darting, sniffing the air. seeking something. tall, slim, quite young, cheekbones, short curly hair, one eye slightly lazy. she spotted me and said hello, I said hello back. then she disappeared back out again.

who the hell is this girl! and why am I on greeting terms with her?

searing light and cold. world frozen still this morning, illuminated from behind. hands cold in my gloves and fingers hurt, wrapped around my steaming coffee. beautiful. stood on a porch for a while, waiting for a seminar, skies burning blue, an old song in my heart. at the back of my mind, like a waking dream, strangers I had never met encountered each other and fell in love.

one of those mornings.

something a little odd happened earlier. I was walking up the street to my flat, minding my own business, utterly lost in my own thoughts. on a whim I looked up, and straight into the eyes of a girl walking down the hill in the opposite direction. it felt like an electric shock of recognition. pre-conscious. a shudder that ran through the length of me. before I even registered it, I had passed her by. ten paces up the street I blinked, shook my head, turned around. she was walking slowly down the street, half turned back, looking over her shoulder at me.

now, if I was more of whatever it is that makes people do this - or rather, if I was less lazy - I'd have turned back and found out who the hell she was, how come she jolted me like that. I certainly had the urge to do so. as it was, I had other priorities. a rucksack full of fresh groceries, and a paper to write. so I kept walking, and the moment passed quickly out of sight.

durham is drizzly and rained-upon this morning. the skies are a mottled cotton gray, cut with bird silhouettes and patches of hazy light, and I woke from strange dreams. something about a cloned african woman being kept in the basement of an abandoned hotel, a place made of winding shafts and wet concrete. she was naked, and for some reason she was also quite important. I woke up grinning like a demented monkey, with an urge to reach out and set fire to the world.

I also woke up unnaturally early, before dawn. ignoring the urge to incinerate the world, I lay in bed for more than an hour, watching the dark turn to cautious murky light through my curtains. this is not an isolated occurrence. recently I have taken to waking up spontaneously before my alarm clock rings. that is, before 8am. this is in serious breach of my character notes, which specify 'decadent nocturnal' in large capital italics at the top of the sheet. very odd.

this might form part of a wider pattern. the chinese zodiac turns these days, marking the ascendancy of the rat: first among peers. full circle; by the looks of it, a mass phase-shift as well. in my circles at least, there seem to be things happening that have never happened before. deep, structural changes. strange new things are in the air: bright and invisible, poised, hovering just below the horizon. 

for myself, I had an unexpectedly brilliant job interview in Newcastle yesterday, ethnographer in a rural economy project about knowledge brokerage in scientific field practice. an hour-long interview that turned into one of the theoretical coffee-chats I've spent the last five years having, in Cambridge. comfortable, interesting, very enjoyable. whether or not I get the job, it was quite an eye-opening experience. never thought I'd enjoy a job interview so much I came out on a high. fingers crossed.

received my first paycheck the other day. or pay-cheque, rather: unlisted, electorally speaking, the banks won't let me in to roost in their cozy little vaults. for the time being, therefore, I am paid in cash. and not just in any cash, either: thick bundles of £20-notes that I keep in a large, crinkly white envelope under my bed.

there's something quite thrilling about this. makes participation in the economy feel material again, maybe. used as I am to plastic, money in its physical form had started to feel increasingly fleeting, intangible. ripples on the surface of invisible flows that pass mysteriously through my bank account. insubstantial but powerful tides, their ebb and flow expressed in flickering numbers on a screen. health indicators in a computer game, simulacrum wealth.

now getting paid in cash, on the other hand... mm. substantial. affluence directly proportional to a physical mass in my hands. delicious.

I half want to buy gold with the money. walk into a shop with a bundle of consensually valuable paper, slap it on the till and demand substance. of course, said substance would come in the form of a not-so-very-useful pinhead made of gold. still, it'd be there. or even better, supplies and useful goods for bartering after the global meltdown. a donkey, maybe. a donkey would be great. I could keep it on my terrace, grazing on the foliage. a donkey and a crossbow. just enough to ride out and raid some caravans.

hm. we can all see where this is going, really. next thing you know, I'll have a shotgun in the cupboard, keeping 'em city council feds from trespassin' on mah new land. BLAM! this is mah godgiven terrace, suckers! BLAM BLAM! get off mah land! I ain't paying durham no council tax! BLAM BLAM! no siree!

I'll take suggestions as to new layout possibilities - for the moment, absolute minimalism is the defining parameter.

been having one of my habitual breaks, the last few months. the meantime has been saturated - I defended, corrected, resubmitted, earned my doctoral state of grace, changed my vice of choice and my civil status, moved to a new city and started a new job. them be the macro strokes; in between, the gaps proliferate with undocumented detail. the world is freshly made, I feel like naming things.

decided a couple of days ago to pick up the habit of writing here again, but it has taken me since then to sort out the invariable server-side code degeneration and internal errors that have accrued after my last entry in august. entropy thrives in a closed system.