l'œil rougeâtre

Il y avait de ces saisons où, malgré moi:
Succombant sans émotions aux charlataneries
Délicates de la jeunesse (un doux trépas).
J'en reste pétrifié, souvent, sur un portrait.

When I wrote

I sat down last night to begin writing a paper that has been running around in my head for some time now. It's a wonderful experience, to find oneself in the presence of that simulated alterity which springs out with the pen. There's a struggle, because our ability to delude our minds is much greater than our ability to trick a simple piece of paper (or in this case, a computer screen) into believing that our ideas are well-formed. And there is a bit of terror involved because the concept, once it leaves the comfortable womb, is no longer quite yours. It grows on it's own, rambling across the pages, taking sometimes unexpected turns which might better be attributed to muscle spasms than pure intent. The concept may remain friendly, but it often becomes a burdensome companion, which must be walked patiently to its end. Its incompetence is frustrating: it was so crystalline before it emerged!

Or maybe it's a phoenix, and as it burns itself out, it beckons other concepts to existence. Their incubation may be swift - they jump out a few days later and die on a post-it - or it may be long, paced, perhaps the work of decades. The latter bide their time (watching the seasons change) and they feed on the many deaths played out before them. It is never quite clear, with them, that they will care to emerge at all.

A day at the races

Actually, just a day running around downtown Boston, which is surprisingly rare for someone living in Cambridge. I'm a little past feeling like that's too bad. I usually just constate it now.

Fenway park is pretty cool. I was there with A. for this afternoon's game against the Angels. We wandered down into the sun and snagged some seats we had scoped out. It's funny, because it's a relatively normal thing to do, and I'm an adult, but I still felt a bit naughty for it. And therefore, it was better.

The big jolt of the day was realizing that because I turned my VA license into the MA Motor Vehicle Registration to get a local driver's license, I now don't have an ID for the next week and a half. It's like 1932 all over again (this is a clumsy reference to the Prohibition, whose exact dates evade me, the archaeologist)(it's all about culture history)(sort of).

And so I'll listen to Ramble On, because what can be more true to life than departure.
...but now it's time for me to go...

Shwag

While shwag wasn't one of the great alchemistic elements, I don't think anyone would disagree with the statement "Shwag is the center of the universe" (iff shwag can take any conceivable value, including the null).

Surprisingly, no one has ever noted this simple, transparent fact.

I got the munchies

lookin' to make some tracks

So I've sent my CV to a couple archaeologists at the DAI. It's part of my bid to not get to stuck in Israeli or even Near Eastern archaeology. Ultimately I'd like to hit honduras as well (maybe I'll talk some other time about my plans to excavate Port Royal on Roatan).

Floating in the backdrop, naturally, is my conviction that studying archaeology is studying the past is studying people. Which means major interfacing with philosophy, history, linguistics, the cognitive sciences, and, while we're at it, Koi fish (which are awesome). The downside (koi fish aside) is that this all means either a lifetime commitment, or ineptitude. I favor the former.

And right now the most difficult, near-impossible, and therefore essential task is to figure out a way to reconcile the fact that the past did occur (just once), with the post-structural défi. I'm not sure my current idea (that we should extend the pragmatic epistemological approximation by which we live our day to day lives to our scholarship) will pan out. Or that it changes anything. The fact that the intellectual world is split by the positivistic/relativistic divide, and that the two sides don't talk to or acknowledge the other, makes any sort of dialectical solution to the problem improbable. It also speaks of the small, fickle, and self-important nature of the academic mind.
So I'll be working on that.

I knew there was a reason I felt conflicted about my leftist tendencies...

Here's why.

Borders

Part of the conversation in Theory tonight is worth mentioning.
In discussing landscape archaeology and issues of space and it's social construction, we fell back into the difficulties inherent in characterizing the political organization of early societies without reverting to language implying Neo-evolutionary views of political development (Band-Tribe-Chiefdom-State). It's a can of worms. Essentially by using terms like "state" you gloss over any individuating characteristics of a given society's organization for the sake of an implicit statement concerning the linearity of human cultural history.
So we were discussing this and came to the topic of borders, as we talked about the fact that it's quite probable that many early polities didn't really concern themselves overmuch with physical borders of 'their land', but rather were preoccupied with control of resources - be they human or material (this could well have been the case with the Inca for instance, territoriality having been imported by Pizarro and his spaniard chums).
Mapped over to the marginal areas of the Southern Levant, this yields that semi-nomadic groups who lived (mostly) from herding or trade would have been predominantly interested in establishing rights not to surface territory or even resource points or nodes, but rather to vectors. That is, routes from one place to another.
The concept of borders has been relatively uncritically applied to the study of ancient Israel (unless I'm mistaken). I wonder how different the borders of, say, the divided monarchies are from our 20-21st century conception.

The world is way too big for this blog to be interesting.

I suppose I'll just have to keep writing, regardless.

Process? What Process?

A little tired and down in the mouth as the week nevertheless toils on.

As usual in these energetic lulls I'm feeling a little frustrated about how to think of my work. I'm a first year grad student in archaeology. And because I've found myself more and more attracted to theoretical questions, I sometimes wonder if I should be doing history of historiography instead. Or epistemology.
It's a mess.
As a novice, should I be concentrating on practical questions, getting my feet wet in the "stuff" of archaeology, keeping my head down and leaving the abstract thinking for 20 years later?
Or should I get a firm grip on theoretical matters, enabling me to approach concrete problems with greater breadth?
How can I do "practical" archaeology if I don't have firm conceptual footing? How can I have firm perceptual footing if I'm unfamiliar with the raw materials of my discipline?

Chickens and eggs.
(I have a friend who claims to have solved that problem, on the ground that there were eggs in the evolutionary tree long before chickens. I laughed.)
For lack of a better alternative, I'm going to play it back and forth between the two. Like a ninja running up a chimney. To glory.

Roman (A. Rimbaud)

I
One is not so serious when one is seventeen.
One fine night, sick of steins and lemonade
Of raucous cafes all that bright and glaring scene
He goes 'neath the green linden of the promenade.

The linden smell good on those good nights of July
At times the air so gentle coaxes close the eye;
The wind laden with noises - the city is nigh -
Bears aroma of the vine, aroma of the stein.

II
Then he catches sight of a tiny little patch
of dark azure, border'd by a little branch,
dotted with a naughty star, which would love to match
as it gently shivers, small and very white.

July Night! Seventeen! - Thus overcome with bliss.
Sap is champagne and it seeps up into your nape...
His thoughts prance; he feels on his lips a kiss
just crouching there, a critter taking shape...

III
Untethered the heart rambles across all novels
- When lo! In the clearing of a pale street light
There passes a damsel with most charming subtle spells
'Neath the shadow of her father's frightful o'ersight.

à suivre (et à revoir un peu, sans doute)...

Incipit

Y. suggested I start a blog, and since today offers nothing but opaque german articles and watery coffee, I thought 'why not.'

I don't know how this will all turn out. Although I suppose it will take on a life of its own, the reason I'm doing this now is to have a place to toss the ideas I usually encase in a post-it, and which then rot on the wall in my room. Strangers don't usually wander around my room, which makes the chance of feedback pretty slim.

Coffee, when drunk, decides to leave after a while. Lesson #1 is that even at the margins, humanity functions under biological imperatives.