My plan for world domiation proceeds apace even as my CV grows to fullness. I’ve just been granted cash money to fly out to San Diego to use the Melanesian Archive at the University of California San Diego. I am super excited - it is perhaps my own particular peculiarity that my idea of a good time is flying out to sunny SoCal and then spending 10 hours a day inside reading books. Last year the Melanesian Archive puchased a rare carbon copy of Jack Hides’ report of his 1934 Strickland-Purari patrol after they got the tip off from me that a copy was available for sale. Now I hope to have my picture taken with it. I already have a picture taken of me with John Black’s 1939 field diary from the Hagen-Sepik patrol. I might start putting up a gallery of Me With Famous Patrol Reports on my website. Anyhow San Diego has one of the coolest librarians around, as well as a number of Kind Melanesianists, so I’m psyched to be going out there and - hopefully - giving a talk. And best of all, they’re so accomodating they’ll actually fly me back in the library when I’m ready to return to Chicago. Go UCSD!

Syracuse University scores big, manages to bag Graham Leuschke. Other universities wail and gnash their teeth.

White House responds to Dick Clark’s accusations by threatening to release recordings of Clark. “First we will release tapes of Clark during his time with our administration,” reports Condi Rice, “and if those don’t work, we’re going to rerelease the tapes those guys Negative Land made of him on that one album”.

Ousted Liberian dictator and moral philosopher Charles Taylor secretly controls his former country via cell phone from his office in McGill. “Modernity demands a different understanding of authenticity and ethics,” says Taylor, “and after a quick keynote to that effect at NWU I will return to Liberia to crush all in my path. Jurgen Habermas will lead my puppet regime in Sierra Leone, and Seyla Benhabib might just get Burkina Faso if she treats me right.”

I went to the store this evening and purchased a six pack of beer and four rolls of toilet paper. I did this for two reasons. 1) I was out of beer and 2) I was out of toilet paper. The man in front of me bought three bottles of Andre Pink Champagne and two boxes of condoms. This is one of those times where maybe reading the mind of a stranger isn’t that hard. Still, two boxes indicated an optimism that I thought was, perhaps, misplaced.

Vice City is not a great game, it’s just a nice place to spend your spare hour or two.

Metaphors make a badly-understood phenomenon comprehensible by comparing it to something already well known. As a result there’s always an sort of revealing opacity to good (Ricoeur: ‘live’) metaphors since they always take you a little farther along than you were before. If they didn’t puzzle you a little bit before you got them, then they wouldn’t be insightful. But, as Roy Wagner points out, on the other end of the scale they can grows so cryptic that you can’t interpret their meaning at all. I delight in sort of stringing metaphors out until they become enigmatic. Particularly when they are hopelessly academic. Hence: “I’m gonna download her dissertation if you know what I mean, heh heh. And then I’m gonna go home and eat a couple of microwave burritos, if you know what I mean heh heh.”

I actually have free time, and have actually begun reading books for pleasure once again. Here, for my own quick reference and (?) your edification, is my list. Tell me if any of them are suck/non-suck.

Altered Carbon
Reality Dysfunction
Voice of the Whirlwind
A Case of Conscience
Cassini Division
Dispossesed
Life Along the Silk Road
On the Silk Road
Silk Road
Hard Travel in Sacred Places
The Anubis Gates
Titus Groan
The Water Margin
Dispossesed
Rise of the Vulcans
Silk Road
Wallet of Kai Lung
Fifth Book of Peace
Creek Country
Code
Towards and Anthropological Theory of Value
Papua New Guineas Last Place
Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography
The Beast on the Table
The Grifters

Fellow UofC anthro Yari now has a blog. Except unlike me, she is blogging from the field. I’ve never heard of anyone doing this before. I barely know her - I think we met at a party and I answered a question she had about Human Relations protocols at the UofC - but wish her luck in her twin roles as blogger and fieldworker. Go Yari!

What a week of transitions hither and yon in my life. Some highlights:

The City of Chicago celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of Ned Rorem day.

Please join me in congratulating the parents of the superbly named Maxwell Fearless McCullough as he enters this world to begin his journey through life.

The ownership of the Porgera mine has changed hands once again - in a serious and important way, as far as I can tell in Chicago - with the acquisition of a full 10% share by the Enga Provincial Government.

The Department of Anthropology makes official a series of new appointments - Judith Farquahar and Karen Knorr-Cetina are now officially members of the department, and Danilyn Rutherford has received a tenured appointment which she richly deserved.

The United States and Japan celebrate 150 years of diplomatic relations as the cherry blossoms begin blooming in Washington, D.C.

And a few others that I can’t now properly remember.

The stress of multiple presentations is done, the post-traume decompression is over. I’m back to normal, refreshed and relaxed. The templates are made, the styles designed, and every day I sit face to face with the last two chapters of my dissertation.

After months of honing and honing the other chapters - or rather the presentations that will become chapters without too much fuss - sitting down to a blank screen and starting on two fresh chapters from scratch means immersion in a kind of creative process that I haven’t had to deal with in quite some time. A blank screen is a whorling potential combination of words - an endless sort of infinity in which your writing could take any possible form. Every word I type reduces the possible combination of letters and phrases by orders of magnitude. Every draft limits your possibilities in a liberating way, turning your thought into one of a fixed number of forms, relieving the burden of possibility and replacing it with a text, external to you, which is utterly more manipulable than the swirling mass of potentialities within you. When you pick up a draft it is in such-and-such a form, arranged one way and not another, fixed and hence fixable. Its potentiality is manageable. Writing from scratch is something else altogether.

I am looking forward in the next couple of days to pounding out a rough draft of the pages that will become the meat of the dissertation. But even more, I’m looking forward to seeing the pages lined up, the thought externalized, and the chaos controlled. Somewhere in the heavens is that celestial dissertation, the one that perfectly expresses all of the great thoughts and ideas that you know your project deserves. The craftsmanship in writing comes in learning what it means to soldier on towards that ideal while simultaneously recognizing that it is, by definition, unobtainable. This is not a great loss - who can bring heaven down to earth, after all? It’s certainly not, as some would say, proof of the futility of writing. For me, the process of writing means turning around the pivot of unfulfillable expectations and the relief of dealing with the earthly, external text rather than the ineffable, intangible expectation. Writing well means dealing with this dilemma. I’m looking forward to it.

I had to come up with a brief speakers bio for a talk I’ll be giving this weekend. By the time I was done, I was like: “d00d - I rawk.” It’s sort of good to be reminded all your hard work has resulted in some sort of describable semi-success! So here it is, for the record:

Alex Golub is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He has conducted two years of field research in Enga Province in highland Papua New Guinea. His research focuses on gold mining and indigenous peoples, identity, ‘globalization,’ and issues in land policy, common property, and kinship. The recipient of a Fulbright-Hays research grant, Starr Lectureship, and Century Scholarship awards, Mr. Golub has spoken at institutions as diverse as the University of Queensland, Columbia University, and the Max Planck Institute for Ethnography in Halle, Germany. His first book, Gold Positive, was a not-for-profit popular history of the valley where he did his fieldwork. Gold Positive was based on extensive archival research, and was written at the request of, and for the benefit of, the community in which he lived. His dissertation, written under the supervision of Marshall Sahlins, focuses on negotiations between mining companies and local landowners at the Porgera gold mine. Mr. Golub’s second field project - tentatively being developed now - focuses on selfhood and property relations in massively multiplayer on-line video games such as Second Life and Star Wars Galaxies.

(mostly about Amazon.com)

1. Snow in March. Late March. Let me repeat: Snow. In. March. MARCH!! Grrr.

2. Call me crazy, but when I type the words ‘Islands of History’ into Amazon.com’s search box, I have weird idea that oh, I don’t know - IT MIGHT SHOW ME INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOK ENTITLED ‘ISLANDS OF HISTORY’ without me having to page through four pages of irrelevant search results. This is particularly infuriating when you type ‘ “islands of history” ‘ - which results in only three pages of incorrect answers. Is it just me, or shouldn’t Amazon be able to successfully locate a book for me when I submit the name of that book, in double quotes, to its search box.

3. Amazon lists with titles like “the complete works of Gregory Benford” or “all of the books by Robert Heinlein” especially those WITHOUT REVIEWER COMMENTS. Do you know how I would go about getting a list of the complete works of Gregory Benford out of Amazon.com? typing the words ‘gregory benford’ into the search box. And then, for extra thoroughness, clicking on one book and then clicking on his name in the listings of the book display. Folks: There is no point in making a list with no information (or value) added. Why do the work of an Akamai cache?

4. Searching for classical music on Amazon? Better have the ISBN. Otherwise - forget it.

There are more things that bug me, but I can’t think of what they are right now. Don’t worry though, I’ll let you know.