Friday Essay

Hello friends, it's good to talk with you.

I've had a week that that can only be described as weird. I once again, put off writing my friday Deleuze essay until Thursday night, which was predicated on the assumption that I'd get some free time during the week to read it, not to mention the fact that I'd be able to deal with focused thought by this point in the week.... Alas I'm not.

However, after drafting 74 words of pathetic blogging, I realized that I wrote, last weekend, a post for today. Aren't I the prepared blogger? Ok, guilt-fest over, I'll post that this afternoon, although I will note that I promised, in that essay, to write a post later that day. In the project of total honesty, I'll not edit that out. I will, however, write a few notes that I've been thinking about and pondering this week. Because really, bulleted list blogging is really awesome.

• I'm doing the radio show on Sunday morning from 10 am to Noon on KDHX FM 88.1 in St. Louis. I had hoped to play an episode of one of my favorite fiction pod-casts, but I haven't heard back from him. Luckily I have the next three weeks, so maybe it'll come through. In any case, I'm planning on playing side one of Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick. Because I can, damnit. You should listen, it streams and is archived on line if you misss it.
• I think part of the reason why I'm feeling so fried, is that thanks to an eager undergrad, I was able to start working on different projects at work. This meant that I could listen to podcasts again. The downside, I did a lot of thinking, and apparently that's a semi-finite resource. Note to self. Listen to more music. Also, while I find many podcasts to be refreshing and inspiring, I cannot listen to people talking and write or even plan things to write.
• My moleskine, which I've been toting along with myself for some months, is almost full, but not quite, but the spine is starting to fall apart. I want to finish out to book before I start the new one, but at the same time, I don't want it to fall apart, because I'd like to keep the book, mostly intact for archival purposes. Also I'm kind of excited that my new book, that I've had in store is a reporter notebook (so bound like a steno pad) and doesn't have lines. The left-handed guy in me really likes this prospect.)
• I listened to one of Cory Doctorow's podcasts, which was his posting of an interview that "Oort Cloud" did with him, and I quite enjoyed it. There are a few topics that I think I'll probably be visiting here in the future. One, he was able to talk about false consciousness in a straightforward and appropriate way, which was delightful. Also he talked about habitualizing writing as opposed to ritualizing it, and although his argument is pretty sound, I think the example he gives isn't quite right, particularly in my case.
• Also Cory talked about his method of podcasting, which is to use it as a motivation to finish writing stories in a very barebones, low-editing sort of way, which I think is still really good. Anyway, this lit the podcasting bug under my ass, and while I don't quite have the computer power to start at the moment, [1] at some point I'll get my ass (and computer) into gear and get started.
• I have a personal/theoretical piece planned out about how "gender" as a location for analysis, for the kind of social science that I'm interested in, doesn't quite work. While as I'm trying to explain this argument, I've realized some interesting ways of approaching this question, my main project in this planned essay was to explain explore why I (and probably some of my cohort) came into college with an interest in gender studies, but have left college with projects that are related, clearly, but quite distinct.
• I'm teaching a knitting class this Saturday. You probably don't care much, but it meant that I had to write a rather extensive pattern/instruction handout. While I quite enjoyed this writing, and I think it will be a useful piece to have in reserve for future projects, it was a lot of writing by anyone's standards, and understandably that took a lot out of me. Ironically, though most of my fiction and tealart writing time was sucked up by knitting, I haven't gotten much time to knit; fortunately the knitting is helpful in refreshing me, I find.

That's about all I have for today. I hope you enjoy, Talk to you soon.

Cheers, tycho