you shall never be mine

not all that long ago, a friend of mine and i decided upon the makings of an esoteric club
(we thought that perhaps Foucault would have been proud)

the idea of this club is that it has a fluctuating membership based upon the establishment of working groups,
none of whom have any idea of what the general premise of membership is,
and all of whom have a name for the group - none being permitted to disclose that aforementioned name to any of the other members of the group
the main organising premise being the inability or refusal of the 'grown-up'
and the guiding principle being non-disclosure.
oh, damn!

why i love what i do

initial email:

Hello all,
sorry for the tardy mail out.
Tomorrow we're going to be doing Rousseau's Social Contract.
Please get one of the many Penguin classic copies that's available in the Baillieu. Not sure which section we'll do, I'll do a bit of research between now and tomorrow.
NB, if anyone's read Montesquieu and knows which bit of the mammoth, mammoth Spirit of the Laws we should do for next week, I'd be grateful.
see some of you tomorrow, AO, 1700/1730, BYO milk of human kindness
P
PS Did you see/hear about Lockes' ghostly mansion?
http://www.theage.com.au/executive-style/luxury/palatial-spreads-kept-empty-thats-rich-20090713-disw.html
Article not nearly as cool as the headline I saw on the street outside the milk bar: Toorak's Ghostly Mansions


to whit, i respond (a mercenary contribution):

Hi All,
Anyone want to buy a spare copy of Hobbes' Leviathan off me?
$20 ono.
g******@yahoo.com
x


responses to my email:


Very Lockean and enterprising of you!
Morrisey and his band of brigands say otherwise:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zNsEvwyXwE


also:

Ha!

In the words of a friend's former tutor/lover:

"Next week we will be looking at the ideas of operaismo and autonomia. Your homework for this week is to fucking steal something and bring it to next week's tute."

and my retort:

a story in my defense:

once, when i was five, my family went to an English stately home
for some reason i became strangely fixated on a commemorative pen
my mother dismissed this as a ludicrous gift
i stole it.
then, upon returning home, stricken by guilt, i buried it in the backyard
i've never stolen anything since. ever.

the book was a purchase to replace the one i lent to a friend, and despaired of ever seeing again.
it came back to me.
i have an extra copy, that someone might like to own.

too much to do, too many conferences, too much writing (aka The Galaxy Song)

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown
And things seem hard or tough
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft
And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
and revolving at 900 miles an hour.
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second,
so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun,
and you and me,
and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In an outer spiral arm,
at 40,000 miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars;
It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side;
It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick,
But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide.
We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point,
We go 'round every two hundred million years;
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can whizz;
As fast as it can go,
at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute
and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!

Stress, I thrive upon thee

...or at least some semblance of this.
As much as the chaotic and unsettling might allow one little ease and comfort, it's turns out that the unheimlich (thanks, Freud) is the place I feel most at home. Ah, what sweeping irony, what restless and uncomfy a place as a home you are.
And yet.
Feed me discord*, feed me discontent, feed me the unsettling of routine, of ritual and tradition. That is where I sit best.
It is in these times that I find the bottom of what I really am. And it startles and amazes me.

*smile*




*okay, maybe a little of an exaggeration, but what else might a blog be for!?

Total Score.

This is me.
(Brisbane here I come!)

Doris, you put a spring in my step

...and shake my cares away.
Or was that blues?

The political power of the mundane, or; the revolution in the 'ordinary'

(Methinks there may be a journal article in this, or at least a little more than a blog post... let's see how it goes...)

There is something so very satisfying in the very fact of the ordinary.
The quotidienne, the everyday... call it what you will.
The fact of the matter is that it is the very familiarity of objects and events that creates the regularity of lives, the very steady measure of the beat of our days.
But at that same moment, they become banal, the stuff of boredom, the measure of the end of our interest and focus - these things have always been there, they will remain in our sight... Could we not see another thing? Might there not be more than that before us?

And this is where the revolutionary can become.

For these things before us were once the new puppy, the gifted birthday toy, all things shiny and new.
They were once the revolutionary, the hopeful, the difficult to encompass, the impossible to understand.

And now they lie beside us, asides of the fascinating, and the cast-offs of the things we call 'news', resigned to the mundane and the 'ordinary'.
But this in itself is politically powerful.
For the very everydayness of these things that once challenged and made heads shift to encompass them is proof of its power.
Surely we need no more proof of the old maxim that old revolutionaries become new conservatives when the revolution happens?

Which is why, when friends refuse to go to see Drag Kings perform because they're not sure how those performances do anything anymore - they're stale, old, boring... surely they could find a way to be more challenging, more political?
Why then, I smile, and go to watch the ordinary occur.
The revolution has happened.

extradition

Question of the day:
Will you be extradited for a crime should the action not be considered a crime in the country from which you are to be extradited?

This train of thought started with an amusing customer-waitress banter with a mother of three, who had arrived for lunch sans children.
"Sold the kids for scientific experiments, then?"
- "No, no, if I'd done that, I wouldn't be here. I'd be off, far away, on a plane probably... on my way to a country with no extradition treaty."
"Any particular one? The Bahamas? Is that even one of them?"
- "Perhaps China? Would that work?"

And so the ponder began?
Without including China, and its 'One Child Policy' in a kind of strange Orientalist hand-waving in which all countries in a block of the 'exotic other' become capable of all kinds of 'savagery', such as the abuse or slavery of small children, and can therefore be utilised by the Occidental evader of just punishment as imposed by their own nation and its citizens, who simply attempt to impose the trappings of their self-determined semblance of 'the good life'...
If we were to consider that it is possible that there may be a country in which the selling off of children for experimentation, scientific or otherwise, is not contrary to any law in that sovereignty.
Then, and only then, might we consider the above question that commenced this train of thought.

Would this mother still be likely to be extradited, should that imaginary country - regardless of judgements of the relative (de)merits of her mothering - have an extradition treaty with the nation to which she 'belongs', for the crime which is only a crime in one of the two nations...?


While I am aware that, with a few key pieces of mailing, or even a decent web search, I might resolve this dilemma once and for all. I can't help but also become aware that this is in fact, more of an intrigue, more of a piece of wondering about the working of the social world with its open-endedness intact. Don't find out the answer for me, world. The seeking to know, the awareness of the possibility of discovery... that's the more valuable of the options for me.

Break my heart

There's just no way of explaining how much this particular rendition of this particular song has the capacity to break me apart, and put me back together again in just a few minutes of Ms Frances Gumm.

Why don't you watch it, maybe you'll get it too.



Creeps up on the inside, huh?

Necrophilic

So my question of the moment:
Is it still necrophilia if it is two dead who are making sweet, sweet love?

The general response to this astute, and somewhat confronting question (oh yes, let us unravel those deep, dark, desires you uncovered while watching Buffy) has bewildered and confused at many a social gathering.
Why spoil the moment with such ponderings of such things dark and - well, let's face it - unsanitary? (Clearly, this particular train of response has very little of use to add, considering that sexual acts in general tend towards the leaking of various bodily fluids to much pleasure, and has very little to do with the sanitary.)

So I have put this very question to a number of people and the responses seem to lie in one of two categories, namely:

a) No, of course not! If two dead people are getting it on, they can't possibly be indulging in such an illicit act - it's consensual! Why, just remind yourself of zombie love subplots the film-world over - such sweet undead commitment, such undying passion!

and then there's (and this response I myself tend to favour):

b) Well, of course it is. Just think of the etymology of the word itself - Necro-, the greek prefix meaning death; and philia, to love or a lover of. Why all this word requires is that one loves or is the lover of one who is dead (undead being simply a subcategory of the dead) - anyone in that position, dead, living, human, or otherwise... all of these are Necrophiliacs, and well they should be, haven't you too felt a little (gay) zombie lust boil up within you after watching a Bruce LaBruce film?

And this train of thought returns us to Buffy - she who has been twice in love with a vampire - and her sexual proclivities. (Although, to be more precise, her tendencies only include actual consummation with one vampire - the other being eternally denied his moment of bliss.)

Which makes one ponder further*:
Is it still Peadophilia if two kids are doing the loving?
Is it Bestiality if two animals are going for it?

Food for thought.



*thanks due to Tim Williams for bringing these further items to my attention.