Grumpy

 I have woken up grumpy today.  I took this picture to use on my blog as I like the idea of barefoot tracks in the snow.  It was Sunday and I was happier then even though I was getting cold feet.  The snow has gone now and even the slush is more like mud.  I feel frustrated about something but can't actually put my finger on it.  This morning I went to look at the job at Highfields Adventure Playground I have a feeling that this practical work in the cold may be what I need to snap myself out of myself. I have sent some work off to Laura and Kate to read. I liked some of the writing and it feels like a start of sorts but as I did the final read through it really wasn't as good as I had hoped. 

I had the same feeling reading through a paper I have co-written with Kate about doing research-creation on a project in school, the feeling that it wasn't as good as it should be but that it was good enough and actually nobody really cared.  These are all symptoms of feeling a little fed up, coupled with the finishing off of lots of things and not knowing what to do next.  I want to write about my lazy eye but can't think how to fit it in. My inability to understand punctuation seems to get worse as does my use of the wrong words or at least the incorrect spelling which makes it the wrong word.  Source and sauce for example which are just the same word for me even now after it took 5 minutes to actually write them down using spell check they just look like the same word - completely interchangeable like soup and soap.  

I have a supervision next Monday and I sent an email with some writing and a list of some of the positive things I've been up to in relation to my PhD.  It read quite well really, I come across as a good student I hope.  I have decided that there is something to think about in terms of ethos and a potential to work with research -creation to explore this.  I also feel like I need to build a body of work at the playground that really explores how we work there and has a focus on play and the young people and again think through what research-creation can do there. As intervention or method or approach as of the event.  This may give me some content to write about in a way that makes sense of the playground and a bit more sense of the work and that is in some ways less difficult.  I think this is a problem now of lock-down putting everything on hold and the work-around I built that was working actually not working anymore.  Perhaps its time to stop worrying and put certain things on hold until I can actually do them .

Undisiplined

 

I have started the new year.  I've persuaded Kate to start the process of writing an ESRI book called undisciplined. The idea came from the fact that we seem to struggle choosing a prefix for work that flows across disciplines be it inter, extra, cross, between or multi.  In the bath I just decided that the problem wasn't the prefix or the difference between a hyphen and a backslash the problem was with the word discipline as it suggests something with edges and stringent rules to follow. 

In the ESRI book we would all write chapters that generated a field of ideas an actual Deleuzian active assemblage within a plane of immanence.   As I still feel an outsider my gut tells me that this would be a good thing to do especially as could recognise the moment which we are clearly living in.   I liked this idea as I think it might give everyone a slightly tilted or slant genre to work within and if done well it could be the kind of book I would find helpful in making sense of things without having to go back to Kant.  

I finished my piece of writing about research creation on Friday.  I went through Massumi and Mannings 19 proposition for research creation one by one.  In the book Thought in the Act the propositions emerge from thoughts and experiences from actual projects.  I find it refreshing to see these complex ideas pulled through the dirt of the world.  Most of them do not come up smelling of roses but without this worlding they would just feel like random abstract statements. It took me a while to write this document and I'm hoping it's a move forward.  Two good things happened firstly I stopped doing performative writing to make it look and read like a PhD, or what I thought a PhD should read like. Secondly although I don't think its sloppy writing I think I allowed myself more words to say things.  I will spend tomorrow on the document and check it makes sense and is referenced properly.  My feeling is if an interested person were to read it closely they would learn something real about research creation which was the point of writing it. 

I also spent some time on a book chapter I'm writing with Kate. I think we have got somewhere interesting but at the moment it feels like an impasse, like Brexit negotiations where the writing needs some kind of backstop in the Irish sea.  It will be interesting to see what grows out of this work. I can feel a strong link to  my literature review where I somehow square the circle of all the reading I've being doing.  Talking of which I'm not getting on very well with anti-Oedipus, only managing about 5 pages a day, I may need to give up for a bit and murder my father and sleep with my mother instead. 

We decorated the front room and hung some new pictures.  Kim asked me if we had any string.  I wasn't sure what she needed and asked her what kind of string she wanted.  She said 'normal string'  to which I said I have some waxed jute twine that might work.  I am not sure if Kim thought I was taking the piss although she does know her string and twines possibly as well as anyone. 

I told this story to Tim in the cemetery about the idea that there is a standard or a normal in terms of thought or string.  The assumption that there is normal string isn't the same as thinking there is a normal person, neuro and bodily typical or a normal way to think though it does make a point.  Asking for a ball of normal string isn't like asking that an applicant for a job should be normal.   In research though there does seem to be an idea that there are practices and processes that are normal and these are constructed with a scientific worldview that aspires for the acceptance of a singular truth.  I am worried that in this time of Covid we will look for the normal string of science to tie up the threadbare ends of our lives. It's useful, it solves so many problems, most of the time we don't have time to consider the merits of less popular strings. The hemp, the double braided twines, the cotton imported from India.  As they say in mouse hunt 'a world without string is chaos'. I have rambled about string for long enough - here is the art we hung with it

A Merry Christmas and Tracks in the Snow

 It's five o'clock I have submitted my tax return, checked all my emails (3) and had a meeting with Kate.  I have also scraped some paint off the wall and moved the telly, bought some paint, cooked a Cesar type salad. Then I got worried I hadn't done any PhD work so read a strange article by Anna- Hicky- Moody that covered new materialism and the Post Human and Deleuze in educational research.  Anna hated the Deleuze bit as it didn't give credit to people like Maggie and Liz St Pierre (and probably herself). This made me wonder if this is actually the point of Deleuze, you discover him first hand and apply him naively to the schema of your thoughts.  Better this than to find him second hand and try and apply him according to someone else's schema.  We need to try not to be like the seagull who has to partially digest fish and then sick it up into her squawking chicks mouths.  Perhaps Kate is right to have her daily  (sometimes hourly) epiphanies.  I always felt that an epiphany should come once in a generation like a referendum or Covid  but perhaps it is the newness that Deleuze affords, the robust cut through how we think we currently think, that is the essential thing- the cut, rather than what it reveals. The cut for me is to stop seeing my edges and to think of flow, to enter into a different relationship with my time, to strangely be less concerned with my own death.  To really wonder why more of these conversations are not actually about taking drugs and how they change your relationship to everything.   It is easy to say these things and to write them as a list, without bullet points. The big thing, the major thing at stake is that all these things and thoughts do not change who you are they change the possibility of what you can become.

I have not got up to speed yet and although its now nearly 5.30 I don't feel like I have done enough today although I have probably accomplished the start of a gradual switch back on.  Tomorrow I think I will try and write and finish my piece on research creation.  In my mind it is quite good so it will be hard to read the rubbish bits.  It is not sloppy writing though it has an intensity of thought that is a moving on.  I finished reading Bentos Sketchbook and here too Berger applies a good intensity of thought that helps us to move on, he gives us enough of Spinoza for it to do some work. (only just enough. )

This is why Berger is so readable for artists, we have politics, poetics, philosophy but they reach out to the world.  A ripe plum on a branch, a dying leaf, a cold crisp moment. like an Haiku they hang as a drawn poem, a visual movement of presence.  Berger does not overdo Spinoza he opens a window for anyone willing to pass through onto some fragments of Spinoza that are held in the texture of rich plum jam.  The words are to knowing what honey is to summer.  Stored in a layers of hexagonal wax combs so the hive can survive the cold winter.  The best words are  honey that holds the summer in the winter months.

The new year starts and where shall we go?  tomorrow I should write and then  read Anti-Oedipus  this is the plan for the day I am not sure if it will turn out that way.