Doing Up

Work, work, work. I am only these days recovering my capacity for grinding out serious material. A colleague of mine refers to it as 'doing up the tables' – the hard work of looking at stuff and structuring it so that it means something more important than just the sum of its words.

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In other news, I've been listening to Annie Lennox again. The Medusa collection is really one of her best. I wrote about one of the songs in that collection last year — almost exactly a year ago! It was a coincidence that I wound up listening to it again today; but as one of my ancient colleagues once said, "We talk about coincidences a lot, but we never ask 'Who makes the incidences co?' "

Ha. Anyway, here is a link to one of her live performances, 13 years ago in Poland. You should really think about those lyrics while you listen to her smoky, chilling voice burning your false-consciousness away. There's a much better recording here, but without the live performance, audio only. Enjoy!

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Back to the idea of work. A colleague at the Institute showed me this wolf-writing and said, "Do you think you can work it into your matrix?" I hesitated at this. I mean, look at the list: it has gulags in it!

I don't think that the American fascism described here is quite the right metaphorical construct. However, single-party states do have many things in common. And as another colleague pointed out today, educational institutions do tend to be authoritarian rather than authoritative, and they very strongly defend their right to be that way. This is not true of all of them; rather, places where this is true venerate the relics of what some of us call Fordist position. Like Henry Ford's customers, clients of some educational systems can have a car of any colour – provided it is black.