Archive: Slapstick

May 3rd, 2007

Slapstick

I’m thinking about where to start this blog. It’s basically an attempt for me – now that I have quit Temple’s PhD program (so to speak) – to keep writing intelligent things, so that I do not end up playing Mario Sunshine twelve hours a day while I snort and stamp my feet in delight like a morlock. I mean, I guess if morlocks would have had video games, that is how they might behave. Like morons. I don’t know. It’s been a while since I’ve read The Time Machine. Maybe they were smart and I’m misremembering.

So, I started off my summer today by applying to some writing and teaching jobs, and also reading a lot. My large-scale summer project is to gain a better understanding of complexity theory by hitting the big names in evolutionary complexity. Mary Jane West Eberhard’s mammoth tome Developmental Plasticity and Evolution. To prepare myself for this, I started off today with Abrahamson and Weis’ Evolutionary Ecology Across Three Trophic Levels, which looks at a very tiny ecosystem that revolves around the Goldenrod plant and a parasite that lives off of it called a gallfly. Gallflies basically induce these plants – and there are other gall inducing insects too with other plants – to form these tumor-like growths which they then live inside. Complexity comes about very quickly because of all the relations between the gallfly, the goldenrod and all the enemies of the gallfly and all the animals that have some kind of relationship with the goldenrod. What this means in the longrun, I’m not sure as I only just started the book.

All of this is part of a larger project of mine that will go on for quite a long time past the summer which is dealing with how to use complexity to analyze symbolic systems and then how to probe those symbolic systems for weaknesses. What does this mean? I’m not really sure yet. It’s an attempt to figure out actual and beneficial ways one can resist dominant culture – at least the harmful parts of dominant culture (I’m no high brow snob). My musings are all rather naive at the moment. I’ve got a little Bourdieu under my belt (I will be reading quite a bit more this summer) as well as Marx and Wallerstein and some Frankfurt school stuff (very little for all of those people – again, part of my summer [and beyond] reading project), and I assume that the idea of resistance is much more developed in their work, or, well, I know it is more developed. Anyway, I have some basic ideas that hopefully will morph and mutate as the year progresses, and as long as I don’t hang myself or drink some Drano or whatever, I think something worthwhile will probably come out of this project.

Hi ho.

I started reading Slapstick yesterday again. After Vonnegut died, I really wanted to reread it but had to wait until the semester is over. It is good; as good as I remember it, but it is definitely more a part of late-high school era me than it is part of me now. Although I still really love the plan for no more loneliness. Also on my plate at the moment is Ben Marcus’ Age of Wire and String, Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories and the second volume of Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol run.

Hopefully next time I write one of these entries I can explain what I mean by my project about symbolic systems and complexity theory. I just wrote a paper dealing with it kind of, but it was a bit rushed since it was the end of the semester, and I don’t think I thought through a lot of the repuscussions of what I was saying yet. Again, naive musings for the moment. Let’s see where it goes.

Filed by andyb at August 27th, 2007 under Uncategorized