*insert insane amount of expletives here*.

sunday’s lack of concentration, anxiety bursts, political angst and perfect lunchtime left me feeling sad. not a kind of immersed sadness but a self-reflecting sadness that can switch into anger and longing every 12.4 seconds. i thought about this for a bit, as i do, while clearing the table and deciding against destroying other people’s property. i decided to map the exact thing i was feeling by recourse to utube. yes, you heard right, utube is a useful technology to get anger vented off. use utube irresponsibly. hellyeh.

i went clicking through rage against the machine to patti smith to faraquet to nick cave to the prodigy to basement jaxx, but none of this really hit it.

i thought about it some more and SKA PUNK emerged in my head. magic. i think i need to attend some really really loud drunken ska punk night.

i then thought about the mighty mighty bosstones, but they sound way too happy. streetlight manifesto are more into the right direction, and so did choking victim, and, of course, operation ivy. that lovely mixture of pisstake and anger and goodtime. yes.

i think part of my music taste has never evolved a single bit in the last decade or so and still loves da punk 3-chord-simplicity-rage too much. she’ll never change at this age!

*insert insane amount of expletives and skapunkchords here*.

feeling slightly better now.

for 2010, less thesis writing and more singing. definitely.

antonio negri.

Affective labor is itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities. The productive circuit of affect and value has thus seemed in many respects as an autonomous circuit for the constitutions of subjectivity, alternative to the processes of capitalist valorization. Theoretical frameworks that have brought together Marx and Freud have conceived of affective labor using terms such as desiring production and more significantly numerous feminist investigations analyzing the potentials within what has been designated traditionally as women’s work have grasped affective labor with terms such as kin work and caring labor. Each of these analyses reveal the processes whereby our laboring practices produce collective subjectivities, produce sociality, and ultimately produce society itself.

read the whole essay here.

thesis&i.

2 strategien fir mat der thèse emzegoen tëscht deenen ech am moment zimlich hin an hierpendelen:

1. léif kleng thèse, ech froen dech heimat ganz héiflich an matt ‘wann ech glift draga’ als hannergrondmusik fir deng frëndlichst mattaarbicht sou dass mer eis kontraktuell zesummenaarbicht geschwenn op en enn brengen an matt eise béider liewen weiderfuere kënnen. merci dass du hei nit domm gëss.

2. kleng domm houer, wanns du nit paréiers, da schécken ech déch do wu de peffer wiisst, an do kanns de dann frecken an vermuuschten. mech huet na nie een sou gelangweilt matt senge ville gescheite wierder di ech amfong nit wierklich verstin, an et huet na nie ee mech esou op de baam gedriwwe iwwer eng däermosse laang zäit wi’s du. verstan?

grommel.

GROMMEL.

will it ever end?

end of melodrama, back to work… GROMMEL.

image rippled from here.

hummingbird, hover.

i had a dream of hummingbirds. i don’t know where they live but these 2 poems are sweet.more on hummingbirds here.

Questions of Travel (Elizabeth Bishop)
There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
- For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains
aren’t waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theaters?
what childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?

Oh must we dream our dreams
and have them too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely, it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
- Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country, the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have an identical pitch.)
- A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
- Yes a pity not to have pondered,
blurr’dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful, finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
- Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages
and never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politician’s speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

“Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one’s room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there…No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?

and of course:

The Hummingbird (Emily Dickinson)

A route of evanescence
With a revolving wheel;
A resonance of emerald,
A rush of cochineal;
And every blossom on the bush
Adjusts its tumbled head, –
The mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy morning’s ride.

yes, perhaps?

the sock monster, a great cartoon series rippled from here. i suggest you read it from time to time.

haut de moien am wortchen…

note the great german grammar. and the way in which this kind of police report makes the news in luxembourg. ah, marienland, comme tu m’amuses… jo war et da lo eng bäckerei oder eng épicerie? an wat ass mat der spuerbëchs geschitt? eieiei…

Dieb mit Schwäche für Süßes

Einbruch in Geschäft in Esch/Alzette

(jot) – Einen Christstollen und vier Marzipanstücke hat ein Mann am frühen Montagmorgen gegen drei Uhr aus einem Geschäft in Esch/Alzette gestohlen. Der Dieb war durch ein eingeschlagenes Fenster in das Geschäft gestiegen. Er bestritt jedoch später gegenüber der Polizei, das Fenster selbst eingeschlagen zu haben. Er sei nur ins Geschäft gestiegen, um nach dem Rechten zu sehen.

Die Polizei ertappte den Dieb auf frischer Tat. Der Besitzer stellte später fest, dass eine Spardose, vier Marzinpanstücke und ein Christstollen gestohlen worden waren. Die Staatsanwaltschaft ordnete eine Hausdurchsuchung in der Wohnung des Mannes an. Dabei wurden die gestohlenen Süßwaren sichergestellt. Die Spardose konnte jedoch nicht aufgefunden werden.

Die Staatsanwaltschaft leitete ein Strafverfahren gegen den Dieb ein und ordnete seine Verhaftung an. Da nützte dem Mann es auch nichts, dass er behauptete, die Spardose unweit des Geschäftes auf dem Boden gesehen zu haben und nichts mit ihrem Diebstahl zu tun zu haben.

(LW 17.11.09)

trailblazing.

धैर्य लक्ष्मी

The swift had been on her way for years, noticing time creep up only in the bitter hours before dawn. The thirst for learning was not the sole source of her being’s joy. She admitted this only on occasion, when in a safe place, and when her being was not terraced by her racing breath. She had been blessed with abundance and a love of learning, but had gotten so used to the grind that it took her a long while to tell the effects of wear and at times obstinate toil from this new radiance that had come about so unexpectedly.

The force of the impact even from this distance amazed her, as the blaze touched her spirit and made it all worthwhile.

 

elinor ostrom.

something i forgot to mention when it happened. this is slow news station, welcome, earthling.

her work should be more widely read, although her (and williamson’s) reception of the nobel prize in economics has not been well-received by the community of economists. bad practice not to read outside of your own discipline and saying that she’s not a ‘real economist’ anyway. here  she is presenting some of the ideas her work is based on. her work on common property, cooperation, and trust is a fundamental contribution to studies of institutions and is highly relevant for anthropologists similarly interested in how ordinary people organize themselves to manage their shared resources.

ach, to graze only within your disciplinary boundary means to be condemned to specialist narrowmindedness. geoff hodgson has collected the admittedly very mature reactions to the news of her and williamson’s prize here. more available – email me.

just as a reminder that anthropologists have something to say to the world, in general. we just have to find ways in which to present this, and not be afraid of our expertise. (thanks sophie)

photo: reuters

cycles, ripples, patterns, shapes, rhythm.

the seemingly cyclical nature of knowledge formation.

Emergent structures are patterns not created by a single event or rule. Nothing commands the system to form a pattern. Instead, the interaction of each part with its immediate surroundings causes a complex chain of processes leading to some order. One might conclude that emergent structures are more than the sum of their parts because the emergent order will not arise if the various parts are simply coexisting; the interaction of these parts is central. Emergent structures can be found in many natural phenomena, from the physical to the biological domain. For example, the shape of weather phenomena such as hurricanes are emergent structures.

It is useful to distinguish three forms of emergent structures. A first-order emergent structure occurs as a result of shape interactions (for example, hydrogen bonds in water molecules lead to surface tension). A Second-order emergent structure involves shape interactions played out sequentially over time (for example, changing atmospheric conditions as a snowflake falls to the ground build upon and alter its form). Finally, a third-order emergent structure is a consequence of shape, time, and heritable instructions. For example, an organism’s genetic code sets boundary conditions on the interaction of biological systems in space and time.

 

it’s in your power, says hobbes.

i’ve been psyching myself up to believe the following:

i’m supergirl who finishes thesis without grumbling. grrrrrr…. hear me roar.

it’s in my power to FINISH the thesis entirely. i just have to actually get uncomfortable and deal with it. motivate myself again and again that it’s actually a pleasure finishing it, not a high ordeal. this is difficult in the november uniform grey.

it’s really strange how fast i become disconnected from the things i write that then are oh-so- disappointing. writing is such an incomplete technology, i should draw more – i think that captures more of the process.

i am all about written communication now, though. conveying my point clearly, ruthlessly deleting what is less to the point and making it a beautiful clean sculpture that is compellingly beautiful and true. hehehe.

and banishing all irrelevant meanderings to this place.

i’m sure no one will notice for it is teeming with them already.

above a draft of lincoln’s proclamation for emancipation…