December 2010
25 posts
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Quantum of Solace
When Casino Royale came out, I could not be restrained. I thought myself a man, and as a man, I must attend a picturehouse and watch the (re)rebirth of James Bond. This was necessary and understandable. I was less motivated for the sequel.
I cobbled together a knowledge of Quantum of Solace from the weirdly clipped advertising and my friend Ger saying it was, “… really fundamentally...
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Monotremes
I have an awful habit of just opening my mouth and letting words fall from it without any direct involvement on the part of my brain. As a rule, that works out alright, largely because I know enough words not to get caught out. Sometimes, though, I say something genuinely stupid. Yesterday, I declared of a derelict room,
“Oh, I wouldn’t go in there; it’s probably all full of...
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Spongiform Encephalopathies
So, today I gave my first lecture ever, and it went quite well. I largely bamboozled people by “problematising” gift and commodity exchanges in shame cultures and then talking about questions of “agency” around Kuru, vCJD and BSE. There was a bit of neurochemistry stuff in there, but it went well enough.
People clapped. This is among the most proud of myself I’ve...
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Academic Sadness
I’ve been studying Kuru (prion-based degenerative brain disease) all week, and only late last night came to the realisation, while on the bus, that the whole connection to cannibalism is thoroughly tragic.
From my reading of the ethnography of the Fore (the tribes who suffer from Kuru), the practice of cannibalism is part of the grieving process. The logic of it isn’t described in...
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Organisational Alarm
Tomorrow, I’m going to let my friend Adam’s German girlfriend, Tini, cut my hair. She keeps telling me how fine a barber she is, and I’ve chosen not to believe it’s some kind of thinly woven blanket of lies.
No more the flopsy-headed doxy I’ve been in Tumblr photos so far.
I’m afraid she’ll simply organise my unruly head.
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Digital Man in an Analogue World
Me: I just tried to alt-tab to the book I'm trying to study from. That's sad.
Flash: I tried to embed a YouTube video in a Christmas card.
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“The Kukukuku were a revelation for Gadjusek. Despised in colonial New Guinea for...”
– Warwick Anderson, making me wonder if there’s a man alive who wouldn’t admire a tribe for those characteristics…
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“Initially, the Valentines were not quite sure what to do with their new...”
– Warwick Anderson, writing about Carleton Gadjusek, winner of a Nobel prize for his work on Kuru (similar to CJD) who would later be convicted for paedophelia.
I have to give a seminar for a Postcolonial Science and Technology class in this next week… I have never been so entranced by a...
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Speech is a lossy medium
Gaelle: I don't really want anything
Me: Nothing at all?
Gaelle: Maybe more mince pies?
Me: You want... mormon spies?
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Masters
People keep asking me why I’m doing a masters in anthropology, and one went so far as to say, “What are you even going to do after it?” These are pretty valid questions, but I’m increasingly worried by the extent to which they could be honestly answered by saying,
“Well, I was sick for my graduation day for my degree; this is the only graduation I’ll ever...
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“I must have looked aghast, but he seemed to think he had done rather well. There...”
– Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. So few things are simultaneously utterly engaging and monumentally saddening. The book is such an achievement.
Effort
Today there are coffee beans in my pockets. I stole them from a display in a chocolatier’s; I’d hoped they might tinge everything that ends up in my pockets, but I guess there was only so much my meagre stolen goods could manage. My change smells as though someone spilled coffee on it once, but still powerfully of metal.
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Subtext
This morning, myself and the brother took what is fast becoming our morning constitutional in the form of a walk to the shops through the still-accumulating snow. On the return journey, we happened upon a trail of blood, drops in tiny clusters, as they might be from a nosebleed.
I’m not accustomed to snow, much less to blood in snow. There were no real splashes or pools, just fingernail...
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“I poured a kettle of hot water in the garden today just to see grass again”
– Flash, fully engaging romanticism, less so environmentalism. I find it hard not to respect that.
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“Over the heart of a poor and primitive continent civilization has laid a finger...”
– Godfrey Wilson, providing what was perhaps the most memorable quote of my undergraduate studies.
November 2010
43 posts
