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Friday, September 23, 2011

Juggling: What to do?

At the moment I’ve got more blogging and blogging-related tasks than I know what to do with. They’re all piling up so bad I can’t think. Here’s an accounting, more or less, of what I’m trying to sort out.

Disney’s Fantasia
I started blogging about this film several years ago with an argument that it was a masterpiece. Then I added posts on individual episodes with no intention of doing the whole thing. But I’m now so close that I should go all the way and then wrap the whole thing in a single downloadable Working Paper PDF at SSRN.
Literary Studies
Perhaps my intellectual anchor, certainly my longest focus. I’ve got, at least, a longish post on description as the core discipline in a revised literary studies. Then I can wrap a bunch of posts into a Working Papers for SSRN.
Graffiti
I’ve had a request for more graffiti posts. Of course, I’ve got tons of photos I could post and comment on. I should probably do something on the Underbelly Project now that I’ve got a clearer focus on the graffiti site. I might PDF the posts I’ve done on the graffiti site. And there’s Juliet Fleming’s Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England; not about the contemporary movement, but useful perspective.
Latour
Need to finish ‘reading’ Reassembling the Social and PDF the series. What about the ‘Compositionist Manifesto’?
Such Stuff of Dreams
Keith Oatley’s book on the psychology of fiction, mostly empirical work. Very good. Need to review it.
In Praise of Women’s Hands
A post I’ve been planning: Disney’s inker’s and painters, Betty Busby and quilters, Japanese musicians (Hiromi!), Miyazaki’s view in Porco Rosso (“Forgive us for building a fighter plane with the hands of women.”)
Object-Oriented-Ontology (OOO)
Lots of stuff. A piece on trumpet players and their mouthpieces as a complement to Jane Bennett’s recent presentation on hoarding. Something on two books I’ve started reading: Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object, and Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. I should probably PDF a bunch of the posts I’ve done so far. And there’s scads of material I could work on. In particular: What’s the relationship between OOO and the work DGH and I did on the cognitive structure of ontological thought? How does that affect the philosophical game, if at all?

All this is a big puzzle: what to do? What’s worth doing? Don’t know.
Truth and Traditions Party
This is a project I’m working on with Charlie Keil which I blog separately from New Savanna and The Valve. The big deal there is to draft a c. 30K to 40K book that can serve as a political manifesto and campaign platform in 2012. Books I’m reading to this end include three by Walter Mosley (Life Out of Context, What Next, and Workin’ on the Chain Gang) and one by William “Upski” Wimsatt, Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs Perhaps a post on the old World Island project.
Odds and Ends
Lots of them coming in, including a book by Les Spence for review.
The Chronicle of Jivometric Johnson and the Lady Irene
Don’t know whether I’ll do this or not. Not only is it a new project – as if I didn’t have enough already in the works – but it’s a new KIND of project, and one that might well fail. It’s fiction.

It would be set in that old jivometrics universe I created back in the mid-90s. The general idea is to riff on the Exodus story. We’ve got a bunch of folks piled up on the banks of the River Jordan who’s great grandparents wanted to get ovah! But now, getting’ ovah’s mostly a dream and a topic of idle chat. Until Jivometric Johnson meets the Lady Irene. And somehow, they make real plans to cross the river, finally.

That old jivometrics universe is a whacked out cross between Jorge Borges and Lord Buckley and so has room for lots of stuff. It may be my best bet for putting all this stuff together. But I don’t know whether I can do it. At all. I did that original piece on inspiration, not craft. But craft's all I got though, who knows, maybe the inspiration will come. As they say, fake it 'till you make it.

We’ll see.
Any votes?

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