Over the last couple of days . . .

David Graeber's Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. A lot of his work feels like a rehashing of basic anarchist ideas. And I always want him to complicate his critique of the academy. I keep thinking oh, I know there are anarchists in the academy and there are people who even if they are not, at least understand what it is. But then I saw him give a talk at UCSC earlier in the year (and he was one of the main reasons that I wanted to go to this Other Globalizations conference) and he was almost I would say hectored at the conference (which is unusual academic conference behavior). His talk wasn't that great at the conference; I think the hectoring audience made him really nervous and he got all flustered. CW, who went with me, wanted to walk out but I told him he should stay to see the academic response to the classic anarchist position but he said he had seen it too many times before and it just made him depressed. So I guess maybe the academy still needs all this basic stuff.

This piece has a little more depth but goes over the basics. The importance of getting rid of borders. The refusal of anthropologists to give any credence to anarchism despite the fact that many study perfectly functioning anachist societies. Etc.

To look up . . .

Paul Virno
Paul Lafarge, The Right to be Lazy
Lauren Leve

Annoyed at the lack of a works cited or footnotes or anything in this Prickly Pear book.

Then I also read Gail Holst-Warhaft's Dangerous Voices: Women's Laments and Greek Literature. Allison Cobb had recommended this to me. We were discussing on subpoetics-l the Michael Moore film. She was complaining about it being too individualist and overlooking collective response to the war. And I was agreeing but also saying that I felt that the lamenting women in the film were a sort of chorus. And she mentioned that she had been reading this book. I got it also because I thought it might help me with this stream poem that I keep working on and need to have done soon and it did. I loved the examples. And I loved the historical data on lament, which I didn't know that much about.

In the middle of reading it I developed a fantasy of doing a sort of world forms of poetry course that would be more cultural study than aesthetic study.

This lead me to Steven Feld's  Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. He is hero of mine since he left U of Texas at Austin but more on this book later. I read the first twenty pages and then got caught up in  Ileana Rodriquez's Women, Guerrillas, and Love: Understanding War in Central America  this afternoon but still not done.