Topic: Posts

Hi Folks! I meant to post this on the 2nd of July for our weekly letter. That clearly didn’t happen. I’ll blame it on the web-host, which is appropriate in this circumstance, but at least we’re on a newer better server. In an effort to minimize the damage, we’re going to post Station Keeping on Wednesday morning, instead of Tuesday, and knitting on Thursday. Sorry about that. I’ve missed this site in its little summer vacation almost as much as you have.--ty

Good Week!

I hope this monday is treating you well. It’s been an eventful week here at the TealArt offices, and it promises to be another eventful week.

I started my job last week, and after a slow start I think I’ve found a pretty good niche and have an interesting task ahead of me. The project I’m working on, though finite, will probably not be finished before I’m through with the job, (this isn’t a bad thing, just a statement of fact). I that this will require a certain amount of serenity in the long run. The other thing that this means is that my blogging time is getting crunched a bit, I hope that i can continue to cope, but I realize that there are things I seriously need to do, in addition to knitting, blogging, and work, so we’ll just have to see.

Having said this, I’ve started a new just-tycho blog. It was around last week at tealart.com/tychoish; but now it has its own home at http://tychoish.com/. I hope you check it out and enjoy it thoroughly. I’m enjoying writing for it, that’s for sure. I’m describing it as a failed tumblelog meets my personal notebook. We’ll see where it goes.

In terms of TealArt this week; there’ll be a new Station Keeping tomorrow, this one’s a really fun installment. All of the writers have, I think, something unique that we’re interested in talking about, and I think in an interesting way, it fits. While I’ve been writing a lot of the foundational materials for the series my personal project is think about the “history of the future.” It’s too familiar an idea for it to be original, but I think it’s an interesting idea. So this weeks episode is a personal indugence, and I’m quite alright with that. I hope you enjoy.

Remember, if you want to join the SK writer’s group, drop me an email and we’ll get you set up. Also, if you just want to contribute a story, talk to me and I’ll get you access to the writer’s bible. Any Feedback you might have would be great.

The biggest news of the week, is of course that I’m going to be at a knitting retreat/event from Thursday-Monday. This means another drive to Wisconsin (I’m doing this a lot, it seems,) and a lot of knitting to do in prep. I’ll try and take notes (and pictures?) so that I can share with you afterwards. I’ll have a couple of pictures of sweaters that I hope to post soon. I’m also going to have a post on Zimmermania in the next few days so stay tuned there.

Sorry for not having more for you, I hope you have a good week.

lord only knows what was wrong… most of the time our webhost is amazing, sometimes though, it sucks, and yesterday was a definite case of the latter triumphing over the former.

TealArt isn’t back up, so we’re going to be a week behind on Station Keeping, I guess, but we’ll see.

I don’t have anything for you today but I posted some neat things yesterday before the crash that I doubt anyone read, so enjoy yourself, and thanks for stopping by.

cheers, tycho

Once upon a time a boy named tycho really hated RSS readers, they were clunky and didn’t save much time because most websites didn’t have feeds, and the ones that did had excerpt feeds.

Then tycho got a Mac and discovered NetNewsWire and by this time the internets had clicked over to version 2.0 and he started using RSS a lot, it saved him time and let him use even more of the internets at once, no matter where he was. And everything had RSS feeds and he was happy.

But he never unsubscribed from a feed--ever--and before he noticed, there were 520 feeds. Everytime he hit refresh on the reader, there were another 1300 items to read. Reading the internets became a nag, rather than a pleasure.

Something had to be done, and so he worked on eliminating feeds that he didn’t read or didn’t enjoy reading--like the ones for usenet groups, or del.icio.us tags--and slowly but surely he was able to limit the number of subscriptions to 270. This meant that whenever he hit refresh there were about 300 items to read. He was happy.

That’s more like it!

With luck I can weed a few more out and hopefully this will help me become a better blog citizen. If I’m reading fewer things, hopefully I’ll be able to read more throughly and be able to respond more often, but I’d like to be able to get it down some more.

PersonalDNA

taken at the request of wonderFriend Jo… I don’t buy it. Too many factors… reported on, for what amounts to a big 5 test.

He’s back:

He was back. The wool stealing squirrel was back.

(from Yarn Harlot.)

I think someone needs to come up with a webcomic or something along those lines….

… or t-shirts. I’d totally get a tshirt.

(this post was brought to you by a lack of a nap. lord I want a nap)

/tychoish, this blog, will have its new home at http://tychoish.com in a few days.

I’m kind of excited about this. If nothing else it means that I’ve committed, in at least a minor way, to doing this blog for the next year.

This has been an interesting weekend for me. I have a short week and then knitting camp ahead of me, which is exciting but I realize that I have what can only be described as a crapton of work to get done before then.

While I’m taking the weekend off of blogging this week, I think it’ll be hit or miss. generally I think blogs need to be active during the work week, and because tychoish, isn’t quite as structured, (and it’s a lot of fun) I can see posting on the weekend, but I’m undecided. We’ll see how things work.

cheers!

note to self: remember that your intention for this site was as a place where you could write notes to yourself. look how you’re now trying to write a blog? what up with that?

more note to self: write something about attention spans, reading media, length, and the internet.

note to readers: have a great weekend!

So I totally got a comment from jared over on TealArt, I think mostly trying to recruit me for his Deleuze blog-carnival (which I’m totally onboard with), but it was nice. He has a good blog, for those of you who are interested in the Deleuze¹ ;)

Actually I’m really impressed with it, and I kind of want to steal him and make him write for TealArt; the scary thing is that I’m only half kidding about that. We’re going to be at the same institution next school year, which would be cool.

The internet can be a small place sometimes.

oh dear.

Until this point in the series, my titles have been somewhat more… creative, “primitive territorial machine” is simply the title of the division of the book that I’ve selected this weeks’ quotes from. This larger section is about, I think, the development/emergence of “oedipus” (and capitalism, too I suppose) but really it’s all about the development of culture and civilization. That’s my read anyway.

While this isn’t exactly chicklit, or all purpose op/ed writing, I think there’s something interesting here, and it’s my hope to make this pretty accessible to everyone. So if something isn’t clear, call me on it. If you want more resources, ask. If you completely disagree with my interpretation of a quote, I welcome it. My selections only reflect what catches my eye, and I claim no impartiality.

I ran across this piece on Lavral Subjects called “Schizoanalysis in Practice,” and I think it is helpful in situating Anti-Oedipus in the appropriate intellectual context.

With all that said on to this week’s attempt:

The first quote I have is kind of pithy, but it reiterates a concept that I talked about before:

“..it is in order to function that a social machine must not function well” (151).

The idea that functioning is dependent on not-functioning. It’s a cheep shot, but I suspect that we can account some of the enduring popularity of Freudian theory itself to this basic principal. Somewhat more seriously, on an ethical level, as Foucault instructs us to read this book, the theme is about enduring contradiction and all that.

As I wrote the above words, I realize how incredibly pomo and 1990s this all sounds. Which I suppose is the point. While I still believe it, I think it’s interesting how this sort of sounds dated, or at least tried.

On to less pithy sections:

“The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned the belief in the possibility of capitalism’s natural death by attrition. No one has ever died from contradictions. and the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way” (151; emphasis added).

I think this passage speaks for itself, so I won’t bother, and I think this point is well made. I add the emphasis, not because I think it’s a particularly powerful conclusion, or central to the passage, but simply to highlight the ways that this book can induce a chuckle here and there.

Lest you think that AO is all fun and games, and relatively low on trips through psychoanalyic land, don’t be fooled by excerpts, I’ve chosen well… So if you get a copy of the book and start following along with me, don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.

“…And isn’t that also what Oedipus, the fear of incest, is all about: the fear of a decoded flow… It is the thing, the unnamable, the generalized decoding of flows that reveals up a contrario the secret of all these formations, coding the flows, and even overcoding them, rather than letting anything escape coding” (153).

I talked about this passage a few weeks ago, and after I had prattled on about “flows” and “decoding” for a few minutes I paused to take a sip of water, and promptly realized how absurd it all sounded. At the same time, while I’m convinced, I’m not sure how directly applicable I can make this out to be, and that was my initial goal of these essays. I think that it speaks to our propensity to make meaning, to over explain coincidence, and to construct representational models based on insufficient data. In away they sort of say that Oedipus is about needing a good story to explain this disorganized “schizoid” series of events and situations.

That’s my gloss anyway, what’s yours?

Cheers, tycho