Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

I recently starting posting to my Flickr account , which I've had for the longest time but never really used. Above is something I posted.

I did some digging and I found a series of old essays I wrote during High School and just after published on the che-lives.com e-zine (i.e. a blog, but we were going for a digital analog of zines put out by activists and anarchist collectives).  One of the last ones, " The Concepts of Alienation and Surplus value, A brief look ", was my first or second sociology essay for Open Foundation at Newcastle Uni (alternative pathway into Uni). I seemed to have liked situationlists,  Cyril Smith , and Non-leninist Marxists.  Here is my ealiest collection, under the pseudonym euripidies. And here is a second collection, later, under the name Monty Cantsin.

                    From The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan and  Quentin Fiore.

Lyric from  Bob Dylan's 'It's Alright Ma (I'm only Bleeding) '.

  The thought of all dead French theorists weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

I printed off a copy of my honours thesis , Discerning Knowers: An Exploratory Study of University Students' Perceptions of Knowledge Claims ,  today with a view to reread it and give it a final edit before I let people read it (and to see if I can get a research paper or two out of it). I thought I'd take a picture of the acknowledgement page and post it up here in appreciation of those who, though named and nameless, know who they are.  For those who can't make the snapshot out (click on it to expand it), it reads: "I would like to thank Albert Camus for letting me know: if there is a sin against the thesis, it lies perhaps less in despairing of the thesis as in hoping for another thesis, and in evading the implacable grandeur of the thesis we have.    Or perhaps he meant life, I can’t quite remember. I would also like to thank the proof readers, participants, fellow honours’ students, supportive friends and family, and my supervisor Dr Karl Maton ."...

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.” ― Jorge Luis Borges.

Standing nude (c.1912) by Amedeo Modigliani. Despite the injunction against photographs and the watchful attendants, I took this picture at the National Gallery of Australia.    With the instant nostalgia that is only possible with photography, I captured the moment I first laid eyes upon a piece by Modigliani.     

An engaging documentary on the life and work of Vladimir Nabokov . It contains a lot of archival footage of interviews with the man himself and covers topics from lepidoptery to Lolita.   The narrator Stephen Smith interviews Martin Amis and contemporary literary critics to identify the character of the man and the underlying moral message of his Magnum opus .  Though I enjoyed it, I'm not quite sure if Nabokov would have approved : there is a heavy strain of criticism as psychoanalysis, art as didacticism throughout the film.

 In short, he so busied himself in his books that he spent the nights reading from twilight till daybreak and the days from dawn till dark; and so from little sleep and much reading his brain dried up and he lost his wits.   -  Miguel De Cervantes.

'There is no wealth but life'   -  John Ruskin.

  Or, how to deal with writing the literature review chapter of your thesis . 

- Allen Ginsberg

Henry Miller, author of The Tropic Of Cancer , at dinner with Brenda Venus in 1979 discussing literature, life and food. -----Also on A Night OF Dostoevskian Smiles and Sadean Excesses : - Henry Miller Asleep and Awake . - Nabokov on "Lolita" . - The Logic of Existential Meaning .

Of course, Hitler didn’t live long enough to rub shoulders with supporters of foucauldian discourse theory, feminist-standpoint epistemology or any form of ‘post-modern’ sociological analysis and the parallel does not invalidate their position. But, Rob Moore’s use of the quote in Towards the Sociology of The Truth was a delicious if somewhat cheeky deployment of the dictator’s views to attack epistemological relativism, which is self-undermining and damaging to the discipline of sociology if taken too seriously. As of now, I’m only a couple chapters into the work but I’ve found nothing to quibble with and find myself nodding and agreeing - perhaps, that’s a fault in and of itself but I’d recommend it to anyone interested in the sociology of knowledge, science or education.

Tom Schiller's documentary on Henry Miller, the author of The Tropic of Cancer , and the intricacies of his bathroom walls.

And then the day came, When the risk to remain tight In a bud Was more painful Than the risk it took to blossom. - Anaïs Nin.