What in the hell …

Politically speaking, I mean. (more…)

I have much better things to be doing with my time, I really do. But instead I started a blog (a blahg) at stripgenerator, after making some (loosely autobiographical) comics there. If you view it, click to the last page then read forward. They’re in reverse chronological order - newest are at the top just like a blog. The chronology is important: this is a serious narrative form.

Pandora Dot Com has helped me find some great new music. Like Botch. And I just heard this Johnny Cash song for the first time: “25 minutes to go“; all I can say right now is wow. (Turns out it was written by Shel Silverstein, who also wrote the famous Cash tune “A Boy Named Sue.” Neat.)

Matt is a good friend and comrade. A mutual friend had some heavy stuff go down that I agreed to help out with, which meant I had to duck out of another commitment (in addition to not putting in my share of household duties and not being around enough at home, and my usually un-honored commitment to get a reasonable amount of sleep, but I digress, the point of this post is Matt’s awesomeness not my burnt-outness). Matt stepped up at very, very short notice and filled in by giving a talk. And the talk he gave is quite good. I particularly like these bits:

our tendency as academics is to get together and host conferences with jargony debates in which the question of organizing gets put off the table, or as only ancillary, as we endlessly lament the “neo-liberal transformations in the university structure.” Not that these debates are bad or not worth while. I think they are important, even necessary, but we should not confuse them with organizing.

This sums up my frustration and yet participation in a great number of things.

Graduate students also often commit themselves unquestioningly to extraordinary amounts of surplus labor (…) The point is not to ban these things, but to get paid for them. And not in the sense of “good experience” or “will look good in the service section of your vita” but in the sense of hard cash to put food on the table.

This makes for a clear link between academic work and the wages for housework etc analysis of unwaged labor in capitalism, as well as the functions of certain nonmonetary and usually immaterial exchanges instead of actual wages.

Check it out.

One of my all time albums is “revenge of the little shits” by I Spy. I don’t own it anymore, I don’t know know where it went. I do have the I Spy complete discography album, though, and I mostly just play the “revenge” section. I love how the songs sound - angry, loud, mostly fast tempo but with tempo changes and stops and starts, dissonant but with melodic parts - and I like the anger and sincerity in the lyrics. And among other things I love how short the album is, how fast the songs are - not in terms of tempo but in terms of duration: they’re over quickly. They’re concise, economical, nothing wasted. It’s like ten songs in about 11 minutes. When I first heard that album I would play it 3 or 4 or 6 times in a row - as long as many albums are. (At one point a housemate said “look this is a good album, but … can you not play this again? for a while?”)

Along the same lines, my friend whose cat I’m watching and whose books I’m reading said I can borrow stuff while he’s away like films and CDs. So I borrowed Nasum’s “inhale/exhale” CD. I used to own this one too, but loaned it to a friend along with my AC albums and never got any of that stuff back. I don’t listen to grindcore usually or much at all really but every once in a while it’s just right. Sometimes some of the trappings seem a little silly to me - the fonts and the images in the album art and the imagery in the lyrics etc etc - but it’s really good music. I like the abrasiveness of it, the noisy-ness of it, and the anger. I like the sort of athleticism of it - playing really incredibly fast and frenetically but with an element of control, especially as Nasum does it with the pauses and change ups. I know people or at least used to know people who would say “this isn’t music” about stuff like this, I like that Nasum has parts - but, happily, short parts - that even if people didn’t like them are clearly and conventionally music (albeit heavy metal music). That’s a good combo. I like the vocals, the low one and even more the high pitched shrieky/screamy one. That stuff is hard to do, and is impressive, and I like how it sounds. The other thing I like, again, is the brevity. Two of the songs on the album are less than 20 seconds long. There are another 13 that are under a minute. Only three are over 2 minutes long. Again - concise, to the point, very little wasted. And it’s very funny that the album closer “can de lach” seems really, really long at less than three and a half minutes. I think this music makes me listen to and pay attention to other music differently.

It’s also really good music for turning up loud when the neighbors are being loud and annoying in the parking lot just outside my apartment window.

And by the way, Teengenerate - holy crap, Teengenerate!

[Yet another in the “reminder to myself to do something” recent thread of posts, as my reading outstrips my note-taking and thinking/reflecting, and as my interest in reading outstrips the actual time I have to read, which is to say “I shall return! no really!” once more.] I’m feeding a friend’s cat while he’s away, which means I not only get to spend time with his lovely and fun cat (I miss my poor departed cat very much) but I also get to spent time which lovely and fun book collection. Today I leafed through a Castoriadis book and read a few pages of an essay by Balibar, where he goes on and on about ideology. Ugh. What’s the point? I really don’t get it. That’s not at all the version of Marx/ism that I like (and in case it needs to be said, this version is neither anti-intellectual/anti-theoretical nor is it stupid). One of the bits I noticed in the Castoriadis was a tendency he saw in marxism toward two basic impulses: revolution and systematization. From the skimming I did I don’t get the impression he was in favor of the latter, at least as executed by the marxists he was familiar with. This struck me as the case with the Balibar (and all of the Althusser I’ve read on ideology). [More to follow.]

I’ve never liked the blog-as-newspaper/magazine/publication idea, blogs as a sort of combination of public radio commentary and call-in plus public meeting thing. It’s not that I’m against that per se, it’s just not what most of the blogs I read are about or why I keep this space up. I keep this thing going for my own use, started because I wanted to try and get clearer on some terms and ideas and books and I only know how to get clearer on things by talking or writing. One result of all this that I didn’t expect was that I’ve gotten in touch with some people I like very much and who are very interesting and nice.

I’ve occasionally called this blog a conversation - one mostly about books, one that happens in a diner booth with coffee and greasy breakfast food, a semiprivate conversation that happens in a semipublic place - and I’ve occasionally called this blog a notebook - where I jot down ideas mostly about books, in order to work my way toward something like coherent thought. I just stumbled on the tags used by Doc to refer to some of this blog. These offer another way to characterize the content of this blog: dodgy rants and politico-hacks! Coming from the good Doctor I take this as a compliment. That’s (also) what this blog is and is about (and proudly at that). WHOO! Or rather, woooo!

This one, I mean: The Porcelain Workshop - For a New Grammar of Politics, by Antonio Negri. (more…)