Packing

Hello, hello -

Some interdisciplinary flavor, here, but I sometimes wonder if I wouldn't be better off in an English department. If this is a blog about reading, I hope you'll forgive me for lacking the critical vocabulary to talk about reading-in-itself, but maybe I'll be able to talk about readings. I'm not sure what everyone is reading this summer, or if there will be a lot of overlap - my experience in the last year is that the overlaps are surprising and generative; I hope when it happens that it will be both...and if not, I'll either write notes on this blog to nobody, or write in my own blog..to nobody.

Left Berkeley two weeks ago, been at home in LA, reading less than I thought I would, and finally shipping out tomorrow night to New York, then to meet Irene in Paris, and then the rest of the summer in Beijing, with a stint in Shanghai at the end of it all. I'm in the ridiculous situation, proper to the graduate student, of packing and having more books than clothes by weight, and trying to make decisions about what to carry with me. There are three stacks of books on my nightstand at home, hastily thrown together from the books on my shelf at school.

My bedtime reading has been Tristes Tropiques by Levi-Strauss - just started it, but now kicking myself for buying the large, pretty version rather than the compact travel version. I wonder if it'll make its way into my bag.

But if anyone is down, in the last few weeks, I've been not-finishing a lot of books, jumping back and forth, reading a chapter here and there. Some ethnography, some theory, all the good stuff...

Off the top of my head:
Cori Hayden's When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico - this one is marked for the Literature and Environment group that Juliana et. al are putting together for 09-10.

Kojin Karatani's Transcritique - a reading-together of Marx and Kant. More into the Marx than the Kant

Confucius's Analects - I've been skimming it this time, trying to read it with and against Foucault's Hermeneutics of the Subject, but I'm not sure if it's working. This is part of a broader effort to try to mount a better orientalist critique of Foucault, in general...

Foucault's Security, Territory, Population.

Liberation Ecologies, which is this edited volume that's supposed to be the Bible of political ecology...which is apparently what I work on?

Derrida's Spectres of Marx and The Animal that Therefore I am. Etc.

And I picked up the Paul Virilio reader - he writes about architecture, speed, time-space, etc. Pretty fun to read.


ANYWAY, maybe some of this strikes a cord with someone. I'm scared now that I don't have enough to read for the summer...there are more books here I'm re-reading or haven't started yet...will keep them updated. But let's read together...


is this how this is to work?

jerry