A Simple Request

Adrenal glands, do you have to be so productive? Does there have to be so much adrenalin? I mean I'm only proofreading Hyperobjects here.

Pacifica Interview Today

This was an awful lot of fun. C.S Soong is a genius at his job. It airs at noon pacific time.

Against the Grain on Pacifica Radio airs on KPFA 94.1 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, and on KFCF 88.1 FM in Fresno and California's Central Valley. It also broadcasts worldwide via kpfa.org.

Proofs Checked

The random citation check indicated that everything was as perfect as it could be.

This book is semiotically the shortest I've ever written at about 76000 words. But it won't be physically the shortest. With the color insert and index it will be about 220 pages. The press has nice big margins too.

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International Perspectives on Feminist Ecocriticism

Just out! With an essay by me on Barad, Irigaray and objects.

If you want to get into trouble, do write about Irigaray!

Karl Steel on Genes

This is very good. It gets to the heart of the matter, which is that DNA is a physical and a semiotic entity, a strange loop moreover in which the boundary between physical and semiotic can't be drawn in advance.

Hyperobjects Proofs

They have arrived. Extraordinarily, this book is going to appear, and on time too.

What I'm going to do today is drive to school with my small people and print it up. This also gives me a chance to do my ritual: the random citation check.

When I get proofs I choose at random several citations to check. If they are correct, I assume that the others are correct: they have of course been doubled and triple checked at previous stages.

Evening Walk

And now it's time for our evening walk, which consists of a block or so to the Menil Collection, past the Rothko Chapel, and into the University of St. Thomas. There is a very good labyrinth there, and it's good to do walking meditation on it.

MBV AUG

That's right. We happen to be in Denver in August after the Wordsworth Conference in Cumbria, and My Bloody Valentine are playing at the Ogden Theater. Haven't seen them since Glastonbury 1992 when they headlined. Of course one thinks that they are the most special band ever.

Irigaray

What is it about Irigaray that winds some people up so much? I must remember to use her work much more.

The International Social Science Journal

I'm just copy-editing my essay for the excellent Tom Ford, for that journal. The topic is "states of theory." I think Jameson will be in it. The issue was held up because of a funding controversy, involving UNESCO, the parent of the journal. Tom has been so patient.

"If It's Depressing It Must Be True"

Isn't that a nice line? It's by my friend Jeffrey Kripal. He is talking about the trouble with thinking in modernity.

Snowden Speculative Judgment

So the Ron Paul libertarian has ended up--as a gift to the Chinese.

"A popular Communist Party-backed newspaper...has urged China’s leadership to milk Snowden for information rather than expel him, saying his revelations concern China’s national interest."

Quantum Smell

Although the scientistic scientist took offense at my citing the essay on which he or she had worked--in the draft that I revised (deleting the citation) before publication--I do insist, there is scientific evidence that smell operates at the quantum scale.

Never mind though. The objection is largely irrelevant to my argument in my essay on ecofeminism, which is that quantum type phenomena are now observable in rather massive entities, such as fullerenes.

"Most researchers think a molecule's odour is determined by its shape, with smells triggered when the molecule enters a suitably shaped receptor in the nose, like a key entering a lock. Luca Turin of the Fleming Biomedical Research Sciences Centre in Vari, Greece disagrees, because some molecules with different shapes have similar smells.

In 1996 he proposed that a smell receptor would only fire when a molecule vibrated at the right frequency. These vibrations provide enough energy to trigger a quantum tunnelling effect, causing an electron to pass across the receptor and trigger a smell."

A Scientistic Double Bind

1. Humanists are useless drones who don't talk about science.

2. Humanists are useless fools when they do talk about science.

3. GOTO 1.

Instant Bardo

I highly recommend you make your way to one of the James Turrell retrospectives. You will get a little taste of

Maitri Space Awareness (look it up)
What it's like to be dead, Tibetan style

The only trouble are the police like guards, who insist you not walk near the boundary of the work. It's like having someone poking at you at a concert, insisting that you be silent. It's private property gone mad. It has nothing to do with the nonconceptual immensity of Turrell's work, and Turrell himself is an enormously good humored man.