What in the hell …

This started out as a comment over at Rough Theory but got too long so I figure I’ll post it here. (more…)

My wife had an ex-boyfriend who was a jazz snob. (I disliked him anyway because they were dating and I wanted her to be dating me, which very happily did end up happening.) He was pedantic about music. (more…)

I taught the first bits of v1 of Capital recently. Parts of chapters 1-3, all of chapters 4-7 or 8, and a short excerpt of chapter 10. They were like “this working day stuff is way easier to read!” I agreed and lamented that I hadn’t made them read more of it. I said “if anyone wants to read the whole chapter and write something on it I’ll give you extra credit.” One student emailed me and said basically “chapter’s a bit dated, all that stuff on England in the 1800s. Can I write something else? I have some idea on the structure of Capital as a book.” I said “sure.” I’m condensing very, very little here - it was all short and quick. Today he handed me a thing he wrote on what he thinks of the book from what we read of it and how it might be restructured. The document is about 9 1/3 pages single spaced. !!

I’m recommending that he read Wage Labor and Capital, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and Value, Price and Profit. I’m also recommending Engel’s Outline and the book CyberMarx (he works in IT).

He gets an A, of course, but I’m not telling him till later in the semester.

November is National Novel Writing Month. The idea is that your write a novel in one month, with a novel defined as 50,000 words. The web site describes the idea thus:

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

It’s been a little while since I’ve engaged much with Negri’s recent work or other post-operaismo material. Given how phenomenally important all of that was to me, it’s been a really long time, relatively speaking. I just stumbled across a translation of Negri’s response to Macherey’s criticisms of his recent work, an excerpt from which is pasted below. (more…)

I drank the valerian and mint tea. I took the herbal make-you-sleep-well pill. I breathed slowly and relaxed. Etc. But no. I’m awake again. Stupid body. Or is it mind? (Perhaps I’m being deceived by an evil genius? [Perhaps I’m made of glass!]) Ah well. Affords me the opportunity to note a great new game my wife and I made up the other night when we were in bed. See, we play this game. (more…)

In Minnesota, in particular. I went to the Minnesota History Center for the second time ever on Friday, my second ever foray into archival research. (more…)

I spent much of the summer just slightly the wrong side of depression - felt worn out most of the time, no energy, etc, which meant I couldn’t take advantage of the free time I had being unemployed. I also felt tense about the financial costs of being out of work. I started to feel better toward the end of August. I think this was all partly because I really wore myself out around May and June. University started up again right after Labor Day, after a trip to visit family and attend general assembly of the union (all told, a really good trip but intensely draining), and the strike here started at the same time. That’s over now, in a somewhat demoralizing way and certainly took a lot of energy, and life is again stressful and enervating and rushed. Still the right side of depression, but I have moments (”what in the hell am I doing all this for? oh yeah, because I don’t think I have any other options,” not a restorative internal dialog by any means). (more…)