What in the hell …

*sigh*

The “what it the hell elipse question” thing was meant to help me avoid the need to come up with titles but sometimes I can’t come up with a question to come after the elipse. Same problem as trying to come up with a title. Annoying.

I finished reading Hamerquist’s Althusser essay, took very fragmentary notes. I still haven’t even scratched the surface on my post on ch25 of v1, nor have I reviewed my posts on ch23 and 24. I get so little sleep and have so little time to read these days, I’m not sure when I’m going to get to that, let alone all this stuff. On the plus side, my daughter is amazing and beautiful. Yesterday she developed a new laugh, a high pitched squeak/shriek/chirp and today she graced me with it several times.

For now, new reading plan, at least for political stuff. I’m going to read these, in the following order, mostly more stuff by Hamerquist. My friend Pete and I are going to try to talk about this stuff together to formulate questions and responses. This too will no doubt be interrupted (for instance, as I read the last chapter or so of Commonwealth, and as I read Manituana on the bus), but whatever. I accomplish only laterally, by procrastination, and without goals I can’t procrastinate.

1. http://bringtheruckus.org/?q=node/64
and http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/books/fascism/shock.html

2. http://bringtheruckus.org/?q=node/69
and http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2006/08/on-islamic-radicalism-and-left.html

3. http://bringtheruckus.org/node/79 (Akuno first)

4. http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2009/02/paretsky-responds-to-thinking-and.html

5. http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2009/04/response-to-paretsky-21909.html

6. http://bringtheruckus.org/?q=node/63

7. http://bringtheruckus.org/?q=node/73

8. http://bringtheruckus.org/node/83

So there’s this online interbloggist reading group we’re gonna have on ch25 of v1 of Capital, one of these weeks. One of the cool tricks is this aggregator of posts thing. Problem is, it aggregates posts based on having the word “Marx” in the title. Several of my posts recently have had that in the title, but haven’t been part of the reading group. Sorry everyone. My fault. I’ll try to remember to start using a euphemism for Marx in post titles, so as to stop spamming y’all in the reading group.

Sheer fucking will. Against the weight of evidence and disposition I am possessed of a positive attitude and enthusiasm. I will it so! Begone dark clouds - having torn from your grasp your silver linings I now banish you from my presence! Hello glass half-full, fragrant and delicious. Good day to you, tasks to which I commit willingly and unreservedly, you enhance my life so.

I am a model of equanimity and poise.

Post titling convention be damned.

I set a goal recently, trying to get more serious about climbing. Following on from that, a few fitness and medicine related things.

1. I’m going to finally call my old family doctor to see about getting my medical records re: my heart murmur.

2. After I have that info (or I know it’s unavailable) I will see a doctor here to make sure everything’s good and see what they say about long term heart health. When I go, I’m going to bring the info from the gym’s fitness assessment web site and have a conversation with the doctor about fitness. All the machines at all the gyms I’ve ever been to say “see a doctor first” and I never did. So I figure I’ll double check. I’ll also get my pertussis shot, as part of preparing for my daughter’s birth.

3. Then I will get a fitness assessment at the gym. I will use that to set some goals for working out, with the aim of making me a more effective climber. (That involves, among other things: losing a few pounds, getting stronger forearms, more ab/core strength, better endurance and cardio fitness over all.)

4. Then I will take the climbing techniques class at the rock climbing gym.

5. Then I will read the climbing fitness and technique book I got, and get something about Devil’s Tower to help stay motivated.

I’m back to climbing. I definitely feel like I used to be better at this, but I wasn’t climbing all that long so I should get back to where I was in short order. I’ve found I really like to go to the climbing gym by myself, especially if it’s not crowded. I do more climbing in less time that way, it’s a more efficient form of exercise and I like the focusing part of it. I mean, I like to climb with people too but it’s just a different head space. I particularly like to go when the gym’s not crowded, like I said. I like to do the same routes or route several times, and I’ve started to track numbers of climbs in my notebook. I track attempts and completions. Today I had 8 attempts up the wall and 6 completions. Those were all at 5.7 or 5.7+ level. (Actually, the 2 attempts I didn’t complete were on this one 5.7+, the 6 completions all on this one 5.7.) I also had 8 attempts and 6 completions on a traverse. For folk who don’t know, a traverse is climbing along the bottom of the wall, parallel to the floor, as opposed to climbing up the wall. I was at the gym for an hour and a half or so, maybe two hours tops. The two times I’ve gone on outdoor trips with four or more hours at the site I’ve climbed up maybe 5 or 6 times, so this is about twice the climbing in half the time or less than half. Pretty cool. My immediate or maybe middle-term goal is to get to 10 completions each, at the wall and on the traverse, regardless of how many attempts that requires. I plan to keep going on days and times when I think it’s not likely to be crowded, to go two to three times per week, and to stick mostly with the same routes and in the same difficulty level. After I get the ten and ten I’ll try to climb all the routes in the gym at this level, aiming for the same number of completions. After that I’ll up the difficulty level and pick one route to concentrate on again until I’m back to ten and ten with that. That’s the plan anyhow. It feels really good to be back to climbing.

A question on my mind lately as I plan to soon rejoin the world of stuff to read, in which people read stuff. Well, there’s this stuff that I mentioned a bit ago, and then there’s Big Flame, and of course I need to wade through material on the common (and really, the commons, for good measure), and there’s all these theses that Angelus posted, with more to come, and stuff from Wildcat and this other German group, and NP’s back to blogging, not to mention a great deal of material on anarchist organizations of which that link is just one example…

The LS Schmittfest bonfire’s settled down into orange and black embers. In his raking of the coals Craig suggests people reflect on nationalism and proposes privilege as a further conversation topic. (more…)

Buy a copy, and then use these notes to return to it.

The stuff on urban and rural is quite like immaterial labor in those circles today, as is the stuff on language. The stuff on labor as political basis may be useful for challenging Virno’s assertion that the Arendt/Aristotle formulation has broken down in postfordism, since labor was already conceived as and functioned as political in the 1840s. Also would be interesting to compare artisan labor w/ immaterial labor, esp printers, worker-poets, pamphleteering incl Ranciere on artisans and response to him. Sewell starts the book asserting essentially the hegemony of artisan labor, rather like immaterial labor, also shows up limits of the abilities imputed to hegemonic immaterial labor (among them universalizing a nonuniversal position). Also check out the book Alberto recommended on immaterial labor and utopian socialism.

Also to return to -
p189- 193 on corps, corporation, etat,
194-200 on the July Revolution, change in idiom, change in the use of the term “exploit”
201-206 on the idiom of association, Buchez,
206-211 on association, corporation, conflict with the masters
211-215 on changes in the concept of labor and broadening the field of association
222 on the use of the term “social” (see also 143-4 on “industry” and “society”)
228 on Villerme and a moralizing bourgeois image of the workers, need for discipline (like Lenin)
235-6 on Louis Blanc, (petit) bourgeois radicalism
236-242 on worker poets and changes in the concept of labor
249 on the concept of labor
262-265 on the concept of labor, socialism, labor as providing a right to participation (the workers are the people)
267-270 on the relationship with rural and agricultural workers - a universal idiom but one which neglects important differences (universal program for association based on the experiences of urban workers). See especially 267 on “workers of thought” and “workers of the head”, and 269 on the power of speech, language as foundation

Pillage material from the bibliography on 285-290, 293, 295, 296, 298, 299, 301, 302, 305, 309-317.