What in the hell …

Word play, mostly. But also hopeful signs of a coming thaw, loosening icebound streams.

All of which is to say, Duncan, I’ll pack my copy of v1 for my holiday travels and will do my best to get back on track…!

/ End odd mood.

There have been a number of big and/or intense actions on university campuses in recent days, as detailed on various web sites. (See for example here, here, and here.) I’ve not followed that stuff much at all, from (what were, I think,) the first ones in New York to the more recent ones in California. I think this is important and exciting stuff. I wish someone would sum up what’s happened so far for me, in a short-ish and readable article with a “for further reading” section at the end.

I wonder how much of all this is the result of longstanding projects and relationships and how much of this is the result of things (you know, things - relationships, networks, etc) that are being built much more quickly. I particularly wonder about how this stuff is spreading. Are (some of) the same people involved from one effort to the next? If so, at what level - planning, or just spreading the idea? Are people hearing about occupations then being inspired to occupy? If so, by what means? And what people? Few or none of the possibilities here are mutually exclusive. My hunch is that this stuff is being spread something like the following - radicalized students who are plugged into some informal information networks hear about one occupation through somewhat passive outreach (by passive outreach I mean here material that one sort of has to be looking for to find, not a clear or well worked out definition I know), get fired up, try to spread information further in other parts of their social and information networks. What I wonder most about is the participation of less politicized students. How much is it happening? If it is to much of a significant degree, how is it happening? How much outreach is being done beyond the circles of the usual suspects? (I don’t mean that dismissively, I can’t think of a better term.) I think this has a lot of bearing on what might be done by those of us who aren’t involved and who live far away. Among other things, I wonder if some kind of coordinated outreach might be done, and if that would be actually useful, to let more people know about all this - beyond the usual suspects.

I don’t know much about beer, except that the beer I like I tend to like a lot - I like it very much, and I like to drink much of it. I’d like to have a better sense of what I do and don’t like and a better vocabulary to talk about it. I really, really like Newcastle brown ale, and Goose Island’s brown ale. I bought two other brown ales recently, thinking that “brown ale” meant more than it does, apparently. One of the two was okay, not as good as either Newcastle or Goose Island. I can’t remember what it was called. The other, Bell’s Best Brown Ale, didn’t taste good to me. So much so that I gave the other 5 bottles in the 6 pack away. My friend Matt works in a brewery, he tells me that I probably don’t like hops much. Hoppy beers make me unhoppy… ! Ha!

After I gave the beers to my neighbor I started thinking, when would I drink that beer? I’d definitely would drink it if I had kept it around the house but I wouldn’t have liked it. It’d be a first beer that I’d endure, not enjoy. I think it might be an okay second beer, or third beer. Then I got to thinking, what makes for a good second beer? To be clear here, “second beer” doesn’t mean “the second drink you have”, it’s the second type of beer you drink while drinking. So, if you have a pint of Guiness then a pint of Stella, the Stella is both the second drink and the second beer. If you have three pints of Guiness then a pint of Stella, your second drink and third drinks are Guiness, the Stella is your fourth drink and your second beer. I know I have tastes about what I like better in a second beer, but I’m not sure what they are, because I don’t drink very often anymore. I’d say this brown ale that I didn’t like would be a lousy first beer for me (because I don’t like how it tastes). It’d be an okay second beer, because by the time the second beer rolls around I’m in a more charitable mood. I think it’d totally work for a third beer, because the third beer mostly just has to be wet and beer-ish in flavor. Ideally it should be lighter too. Hmm.

Inconclusive. Clearly further inquiry is needed.

’tis the season when I wonder what the fuck I’m still doing in this forsaken wilderness, or at least moan a bunch about the damn weather.

Currently 3 degrees F (that’s about -16 celsius), -12 (that’s -24 C) with the windchill. I wish my dog could walk herself.

EDIT:
It’s 2ish in the AM, I took the dog out one last time before going to bed. The dog was already asleep, I woke her up. She was happy to see me but when I walked over to the door and started putting on my coat she realized that I wanted to take her outside. She turned and walked away, headed back for her bed. I called her again but she wouldn’t come to me. I had to trick her, I opened the pantry door. We keep the dog food in the pantry so she always comes running when she hears it. I had the leash ready so when she ran over I clipped it on her and made her come outside with me. She looked at me like she was being punished. I took a bit of dog food with me, as a reward for enduring the cold. She peed really fast then turned back toward the house. My dog normally loves walks. I just checked, it’s 0 degrees F, -14 with windchill right now.

‘Tis the season when ’tis fairly easy to strike up a conversation with any stranger here, as long as it’s about the weather, and when ’tis fairly hard to have any conversation about anything else.

Did I mention that it’s cold?

What is baby and what bathwater? I can’t answer that here (with regard to autonomist marxism I mean, with my actual baby this is a lot easier), but I’d like to sort it out eventually. In any case, it’s abundantly clear at least some of it is bathwater… For now, just some notes from some earlier conversations, to come back to later-ish. (more…)

Hey y’all - folk who use blogsome will get this. In the user interface bit called “dashboard” there’s a section called “incoming links.” This is nice because it tells one when someone else has linked to a post on one’s blog, helps one ID people’s responses and such, in order to potentially start further conversation. Well, mine’s been full of spam for a while now, all articles that have nothing to do with my blog, all from this URL: http://feeds09.technorati[DOT]com/~r/trarticles/~3/

Anyone know how to make that go away so I can get the actual useful incoming links thing to work again?

Edit:
By the way, several years late, I figured out how to make recent comments appear! Neat, eh? Lower right hand corner of the page.

I just wasted a great deal of time tracking down these quotes… I had jumbled them all up in my head and had attributed that mishmash to E. P. Thompson. I no longer have time now to work on what I’d planned to work on w/r/t these. Ugh. For now:

Neurath: “We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry-dock and to reconstruct it there out of the best materials.”

Quine: “a boat which, if we are to rebuild it, we must rebuild plank by plank while staying afloat in it”

So I don’t forget the whole reason I looked for the quote(s) in the first place: I want to play with the metaphor in relation the ‘building a ship’ column I wrote a while ago. Must get back to that eventually.

Rehashing stuff from (tangential to? and yet, if so, ironic, because probably some of the only kernel there worth popping) this earlier post and from some email exchanges, mostly just a note to self to come back to this. Rock climbing would work just as well as music does for the type of metaphor I want here. (more…)