Stalling

June 26, 2012
4:55 pm

And, at the same time, trying desperately not to stall.

I have a lot of work to do and a list of things that I can race through. But during the semester when I’m teaching, I have trouble getting started for some reason on non-teaching days.

One of the personal weaknesses I’ll have to resolve before all of this is said and done.

— § —

I just called the school.

It’s such a pleasure to do administrative business (whether in person or by phone) with New Yorkers—I’d forgotten how direct, bullshit-free, and easy it is compared to the circular discussions, overwrought niceties, and incredibly slow and inefficient speech that prevails in the rest of the country.

What would have been a half our call to a Utah bureaucrat requiring note-taking and post-call analysis was about two minutes to the NYC bureaucrat, who gave me a simple, straight answer and a good day to send me on my way.

— § —

Sometimes when you start to get wild-eyed and jittery because you’ve too much work to do in too many different contexts, it’s best to just step away for a moment and get some clarity.

Take a walk.

Take a drive.

Look out the window.

Feed some goldfish.

Write a poem.

— § —

Redbox DVD rental kiosks all have air conditioning units built into their backs to ensure that the DVDs inside them remain cool even when the sun beats mercilessly down on the kiosk exteriors.

When you walk past a row of Redbox machines on a sunny day, the roar can be quite deafening.

— § —

The patterns of scratches and fractures left on the lenses of eyeglasses when run over by car tires on pavement can be surprisingly intricate and beautiful.

— § —

I used to laugh at those people that “self-enhance” with Ritalin or other drugs to enable focus, concentration, and stamina and gain a competitive advantage.

I’m not laughing any longer.

No, not taking the Ritalin either, but certainly not laughing.

— § —

I’d better get some stuff done; the day is half over already and I’m still “preparing” to work.

Global Cities

June 26, 2012
3:07 am

A Hundred Flowers — © goldbany | Fotolia

It’s tough to be an academic living somewhere outside of the Global City.

The reason?

All too well known in my circles, frankly.

There simply isn’t enough life around you, enough diversity. Smaller regional or local cities veer dangerously toward monoculture. The list of institutions is limited to one-offs in each major category, each of these also part of the monoculture due to market realities. The speed and volume of events (of all ontological kinds) is orders of magnitude less because the population is orders of magnitude smaller and at a much lower density, meaning fewer contacts (i.e. events) and a smaller sample size at the phenomenological processing level.

— § —

Let’s deploy a tired quasi-Maoist metaphor:

The global city as a field of flowers is a hodgepodge of thousands of densely packed plants and blossoms, no two of the same genetic stock. As the bees cross-pollinate amongst discrete individuals, genetic drift, hybridization, heterosis, and of course natural selection are the rule of the day, operating quickly and intensely. The stochastic nature, if there is one, of this process is subsumed by volume and diversity.

The regional or local city as a field of flowers is so many daffodils—hundreds of them in rows—of exactly the same genetic variety and stock.

Sure, it’s functional, and for the daffodils it’s probably even great.

But there’s precious little intrinsic generative power there, apart from the power to generate fucking daffodils.