SECT - back from the dead
i finally found the SECT webcast archives. now i just need to make the time to re-watch the talks that have been swimming in my head several months. yeah, its pretty super dorky, but i really want to hear some things again.
this process of returning is so bloody hard to to as a graduate student (or i guess ever). i always know its a good idea and returning is the moment when thoughts, inklings and suspicions come into focus. but lets not kid around, truth is i'd much rather re-read some murakami or re-watch some st:tng or re-play some zelda and so on...
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§ ¶ February 26 07 - 19:10
The SECT dregs
hearing tara mchpherson talk was a fantastic ending to SECT ... but also my greatest failing. i didn't introduce myself to her. the way she is thinking and what she is thinking about is fantastic and totally up my alley and i was unable to get myself together well enough to start a conversation. come to think of it, the whole SECT experience might mark the beginings of my feeling crazy this whole semester. alas. anyway, months later, here's my take on some of what tara talked about.
more of this...
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§ ¶ November 04 06 - 19:23
sect: last day
[tara mcpherson, guillermo gomez pena]
the last day. i was burned out, mentally and physically spent and incomprehensible. i feel bad for anyone kind enough to talk to me, but was very happy to have made a few friends. being anti-social isn't always the best approach, but i learned alot about how i approach this academic world and why i'll be happy to be a failure. everyone else was a bit on edge this day too, lots o' reasons, some having to do with the powers that be at the conference being uncomfortable with folk trying to change the last few days of the conference for the better.
more of this...
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§ ¶ October 08 06 - 17:30
sect: day nine
[flyod webb, lisa cartwright, anna everett, lisa nakamura, jerry kang, alison clark, praba pilar]
i vaguely remember this day. by this time i was getting used to my new roommates, or perhaps more accurately, spending all my time out of the room unless i was sleeping. this meant wandering around campus a lot and biking. just wasn't feeling social ... the whole thing was wearing me out, when i got home at night i just wanted to watch movies [free from “hotel uci” - finally saw “walk the line,” which made me cry, but not certain how much of it was the movie] on my my laptop. alas.
more of this...
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§ ¶ October 08 06 - 16:50
sect : day eight
[cathy davidson, peter lunenfeld, alan liu, judith jackson-fosset, marsha kinder]
its increasingly hard to reconstruct
these days in irvine. i no longer remember which ones involved
biking to into the insanity that is newport beach and finding a giant
christian school on a hilltop, complete with a school sign that
featured smiling white cherub-ish children. or when i followed some
nice bike trails to a river under a freeway overpass and found some
of the graffiti i expected, except that it appeared to be by
teenagers who were excited to write dirty words on concrete, followed
up by teenagers who like to x-out dirty words and spray crosses next
to the offending words. irvine is a trip. i think i'd have a drug
problem and write a lot if i went to school there.
more of this...
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§ ¶ October 01 06 - 17:22
sect : day seven
[geert lovink, michael naimark, ken wissoker, blogs]
so great to talk to people who care
about similar things that i care about, but come at it in totally
different ways. i can't roll in a lot of these theoretical circles,
i don't know if its just the lack of language or that i just tend to
think slow ... i never have anything to say until well after a
conversation. but it was great to talk with folk about why they
think with the terms citizen/subject/agent. i like thinking agent
now that i've talked to folk who think through “agent”
[it has a nice two fold, agent of / agency thing]. but i still don't
have a solid handle on agent v. subject. also, this day i started to
realize that after getting asked about 30 times what i do in
geography [and what i map] that maybe i should re-figure out why the
fuck it is i'm in geography. the answer i gave today that i almost
believe is that “place is a meaning maker, and its somehow different to think about place than it is to think about texts/discourse.” however, now, reading a bunch of poststructuralist stuff i'm not so certain [social]place isn't but a frequently ignored [aspect or something] of every discourse. but dang folk can be dismissive of place ...
more of this...
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§ ¶ September 29 06 - 12:56
sect : day six
[saskia sassen, norman klien]
this is the day where the burnout
kicked in ... i stopped even trying to post daily and spent much of
my time just thinking and walking. i also got two roommates,
disturbing the monk like hole i lived in. undergraduates.
undergraduates who watched football at 9am. not what i needed.
more of this...
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§ ¶ September 29 06 - 12:32
sect : day five
[judith halberstam, lynn hersham, impossible bodies]
i'm increasingly uncomfortable with
posting about sect ... which is odd, 'cause i'm pretty sure no one
reads this and i'm doing it as a cathartic writing exercise. it seem
that to be more cathartic/therapeutic it becomes important that i
atleast gesture towards the emoting/affective experience of this
thing, but thats just too complicated and always something i've
always held on to tightly. its both scary and foolish seeming to go
through this auto-confessional mode, which i guess is an occasional
part of the appeal of the blogging thing. although i don't really
consider this a blog ... its more an a-social tool that is handy for
organizing my thoughts, but damn, there's something in this process
of writing thoughts that could be broadly legible that winds its way
into the thinking process. that and i've been reading the history
of sexuality: volume one and i can't but help think about the
confessional.
anyway, day five was great.
more of this...
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§ ¶ August 21 06 - 13:03
