not the motorcycle diaries

I never fail to be amazed at how the body is not the person. Your cold skin is just skin. Your stiff strands of pure white hair are just hair. I kiss your head, though it is just a head. None of it is you. The body didn’t even really look like you, without your spirit to give it your features, like your smile reflecting the years of mellowing and humbling.

I am glad for the requiem - for the solemnity, the flowers, the prayers, the hymns, the incense, the vestments, the ritual of bread and wine. The body, the casket, the tone of thankfulness and rebirth, of love and of eternity. I watch my father heft his father’s coffin onto his shoulder and hope that when I have children I will understand how all this can be borne with such grace.

Farewell, grandfather of mine. Thankyou for teaching me so much about living.

I’ve been advised a few times now by social movement academic types that I should consider the ‘recognition & re-distribution’ debate in my research. Now that the ethics approval and grant application merry-go-round is temporarily in suspension I’m finally getting around to reading some material on this - namely Axel Honneth’s on recognition and Nancy Fraser’s on re-distribution. I think I just need to be able to situate my research in this debate, rather than make an in-depth conclusion on it for its own sake. So far the debate actually seems rather dated, in terms of its usefulness for theorizing the global justice movement, as this movement operates deliberately in the tension between claims for re-distribution and claims for recognition. In this sense, the recognition/re-distribution literature is useful in that it explicates the nature of this tension, but it still seems bent on resolving it to some degree - or at least in saying that one claim ought to take precedence, albeit with consideration of their inseparableness.

It has also occurred to me to start planning my time in Brazil:

*August 20 - 28* Porto Alegre, for Latin-American Sociological Congress and general hanging out with useful people

*August 29 - Sept 4th* Porto Alegre

*Sept 5th - Sept 11th* Rio de Janeiro for touching base with research institute that I am allegedly affiliated with

*Sept 12th - Sept 18th* Research design, somewhere

*Sept 19th - Sept 25th* Research design, somewhere

*Sept 26th - Oct 2nd* Actual research, somewhere (S�o Paulo?)

*Oct 3rd - Oct 30th* Actual research, somewhere

*Oct 31st - Nov 27th* Actual research, somewhere

*Nov 28th - Dec 4th* Writing up, in Rio de Janeiro

*Dec 5th - Dec 11th* Writing up, in Rio de Janeiro

*Dec 12th - Dec 18th* Writing up, in Rio de Janeiro

*Dec 19th - Jan 1st* Holiday - coming back some time in January.

Kitchen, 9pm last night:

Housemate: “It smells …. more like sewage …. kind of … vegetative..”

Me: “Mmm. Organic … not corporeal …”

Housemate: “Yeah, definitely not cadaverous …”

Kitchen, 7am this morning:

Shavings. Shards of iridesecent poison pellets all through the cupboards, as though poison has just been nonchalantly walked through as opposed to eaten. Droppings. Gnawings.

Could it be that we have inadvertently bred some kind of super rat?

Does a diet of gleaned avocado and lentils make for the overcoming of warfarin and persistence both?

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Despite the discovery yesterday of Angry Little Girls, I emerge from this weekend completely traumatised. This is because it seems I have finally succeeded in killing the rat which has been terrorising our kitchen for the past few months.

When it first became apparent that this creature was hanging out amongst our foodstuffs, I dealt with it by either pretending it wasn’t there or pretending that it was perfectly practicable to co-exist with a rat. This fantasy was rendered impossible on the morning I discovered a half-gnawed avocado on the kitchen table, which I might have been able to ignore had it not been accompanied by 1cm droppings and the smell of ammonia in the sugar bowl. Shortly afterwards we actually saw the rat sniffing around at the top of the kitchen cupboards. It looked like a very small possum, and had become comfortable enough in our house to eye us balefully before scuppering off into the shadowy recesses of our poorly constructed kitchen wall.

As the most obsessive person in my lovely household, I masochistically took up the mantle of Rat Eliminator. I consulted my Dad about how to get rid of rats. As a long term pigeon breeder, he’s quite the authority on things like this. He said the only way to get rid of rats is to poison them so they die, and told me not to bother with any poison except Talon. I decided to compromise by getting Rentokil, convincing myself that perhaps a less effective poison would just make the rat sick for a couple of days. Consequently, it would decide that our kitchen was not such a pleasant place to build a rodent empire of food scraps after all, and it was never going to come back. Furthermore, it would share this information with all its little possum-rat friends as well, thus ensuring we would never have this problem again.

Rentokil was laid and after a few days most of it was eaten. It appeared to have had zero effect. The rat persisted, and we started being able to hear it fossicking under the floorboards and in the walls. We waited another few weeks. Nothing, except that it seemed to have set up permanent camp in a gap between the wall and our kitchen cupboards, where it would scratch at the chipboard, causing bits of it to fall in little piles on the cupboards while we were cooking.

I found Mortein Throw Packs in the supermarket. They’re little bags of rat poison that you throw into those hard to reach places. The rat is supposed to chew through the bag, eat the poison, and die. But not this rat. Two weeks after throwing the packs, the scratching continued and the piles of chipboard were bigger than ever.

Heavy-hearted, I laid the deceptively innocuous-looking Talon two nights ago. The scratching has stopped. The chipboard is intact. Our avocados remain whole, and an eerie silence has settled over the kitchen.

Rat poison uses warfarin to thin the blood of the rat so that it can’t coagulate. This makes the rat awfully sick and it usually scampers outside to find water, where it dies the horrible slow death of an internal haemophiliac. However, I laid so much bait that it probably didn’t have time to retreat outside, so perhaps tomorrow I will have a nice story about removing its decomposed body from aforementioned shadowy recesses.

I am a killer. This is worse than the time I had to drink a glass of straight gin in order to deal with an infestation of weevils.

Look everyone! FeedTagger!

What to say about The Federal Budget? On a personal level, I get a bit nostalgic for the flurry of number-crunching and media releases that characterised budget time when I worked for peak bodies (not to mention the annual jostle for who would get to go to The Budget Lock-Up* - feelings of ‘you heard it here first’ superiority and fabulous cream biscuits being the equally valued benefits). Beyond this though, it’s the same old bollocks (bollix?). And seeings as, this year, I *don’t* have to prepare any graphs showing the mean impact of reducing places in public sector training schemes on 19-24 year olds with brain injuries in rural areas …. I’ve got some bigger questions.

Is, or is not, the main point of a tax system to re-distribute wealth? Is the money being distributed in the Budget public money garnered from taxes, or is it not? Why are Budgets not measured by the question, ‘have we ensured that the basic needs of our citizens can be met adequately for another year’? …. And why have a surplus? Or if we do have a surplus, what is it *for*? What’s so damn good about it? How might things be different/better under a participatory budgeting system?

Discuss ;-).

* *Not to be confused with a ‘Lock-In’ (though at least as wierd and tacky).*

1. Brazilian Google! Ah, glocalisation.

2. From my Ingles-Portugues dictionary: bollix vt confundir, atrapalhar, to bollix up confundir as coisas.

“Now I sit back and look at some of the things we did, and I say ‘what in the world came over us?’ But death had nothing to do with what we were doing. If somebody shot us, we would be dead. And when people died, we cried and went to funerals. And we went and did the next thing the next day, because it was really beyond life and death. It was really like sometimes you know what you’re supposed to be doing. And when you know what you’re supposed to be doing, it’s somebody else’s job to kill you.”

- Bernice Johnson Reagan on her 1960’s participation in actions to fight racial segregation in Georgia, USA

*Quoted in ‘Loving-Kindness’ by Sharon Salzburg, 1995, p.51*

Bloggers beware. According to an article in this month’s Investigate magazine* we are (perhaps predictably) at risk of having the long arm of the state reach into our free-wheeling, joyous spaces of debate, discussion, critique, and mundane observation.

Under a proposal being seriously considered by the Tasmanian Special Minister of State (one that will probably be introduced in the same blink-and-you-miss-it special package of draconian legislation being prepared for the oh-so-democratic moment when the Coalition gains control of the Senate on July 1), the Commonwealth Electoral Act will be amended to extend its powers of persecution against anyone who publishes any form of unauthorised political advertising. The amendment is aimed directly at bloggers who publish comment on the performance of political parties and Members of Parliament, and who can’t be identified due to our pesky penchant for publishing our work anonymously. Under the amendment, bloggers would have to register their blog and provide a name and address to avoid being charged with unauthorised political advertising.

*Investigate* suggests that this proposal has come about because of the growing influence of bloggers on electoral outcomes and policy debates (heaven help us if people are getting information and perspectives from sources other than our transparent and disinterested Government and our diverse and equitable mainstream media!). Even people like
John Howard would be in the firing line.

Hopefully this is all too ridiculous to become possible, but Coalition policy to date would suggest otherwise. Keep an eye out, comrades.

*see April 2005 edition, article entitled “Nowhere to Hide” by Jameses Morrow and Robertson.

I’ve had a number of conversations about ‘academia’ lately. These conversations have mostly centred on the linkages between academia and activism, the relative value of academic work (e.g. teaching, writing, research, public commentary), and the counter-hegemonic potential of universities (e.g. whether or not universities can increase the diversity of voices heard in the public sphere, the number of people who get a tertiary education and the opportunity to enhance their quality of life - basically whether or not universities are the bullshit ivory towers that the grumpy old men in our lives think they are).

I think we generally agreed that if universities have any such potential it is either (a) very limited in most institutions and especially mine and (b) rapidly eroding, where it does exist (e.g. how many universities still have Access & Equity Units? how many ever did?). I think this is true for obvious governmental/political reasons, but I also think that there is a lot that academics themselves can do towards this in the day-to-day approach to their work.

Just the other day I was in a lecturer’s office and we were going over some work together. The door was open and I was chatting a lot and giggling (we were working on some boring form that requires many jokes about bureacracy and many irrelevant asides to be uttered in order to stop yourself from setting said form on fire). When I left the office to collect some printing, the lecturer from the office next door walked past me in the corridor and gave me the most venomous look I’ve experienced since that unfortunate private property vandalism incident of early 2004. Later I was told that this lecturer had commented on how much I was giggling and that she thought I was being too frivolous and not taking my PhD research seriously enough, and that the lecturer I was working with should pull me into line a bit.

I think these sorts of reactions (which I have come up against more than once before) come from a highly counter-productive attitude of preciousness. The implicit and explicit power that is attributed to academics on the hierarchy of status in our society is often fiercely guarded. The sense that academic work is being not taken seriously is highly threatening to those for whom this power is important. I think some academics guard their power more fiercely than others, especially those who haven’t seen much of life outside the walls of a university and therefore might not have many other sources of personal legitimation.

I connect The Giggling Incident to other stuff I have observed, like competitively cutting each other down at conferences and the general propagation of the view that academic work should be unendingly serious, and definitely not to be laughed at or visibly enjoyed. The same applies to the pressure on post-grads to start CV-building from the minute they begin their PhD, as well as the distinct sense I get from many of my superiors that writing a thesis has to be, primarily, a hideous, isolating, unsupported slog (in order to ‘prove yourself’ amongst the rest of the masochists, I guess!).

In universities, we can’t hope to achieve any of the noble things that I mention above if we can’t re-examine our values, the way we treat people, and our health as individuals - and all of this is, Nelson or no Nelson, very much within our control at the current juncture.