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2008. “Build Your Virtual Office: Ten Great Online Tools for Writers”. Byline Magazine #320 (April 2008): 8-10. Describes the various kinds of online web applications that writers might find useful, and gives recommendations of the best one or two in each category. Cover story. I’ve just posted information at Savage Minds about the conference I will be presenting at later this month. Rather than repost the whole post, I’m going to direct you there to have a look. Update: The website for the Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency conference is now live, with a schedule, attendee listing, and abstracts of both the panels and the papers to be presented. The UK-based Socialist Review has just posted their review of Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism and the CIA.
In the end, she says,”For [readers] interested in Marxist theory and history it is a fascinating study in the political nature of ideas, and the terrible consequences of mechanical and deterministic approaches to Marxism.” That pleases me to no end! Read the review: Penny Howard, Review of Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War It’s the most wonderful time of the year! The time of year when educators (like me!) get 25% off nearly everything at Borders (some exceptions apply: periodicals and Sony e-Readers excluded). April 2 – 6 this year. The best is to go in on Friday and they treat you like you’re important to society. Remember: nobody else ever will, so enjoy it while it lasts. More information on the Borders Educator’s Savings page. There’s a reason I’m up at 2:30 in the morning. I’m trying to wrap my head around a concept I came across in my research for the paper I’m presenting at the Chicago conference on anthropology and counter-insurgency. Here’s the quote that’s got me all worked up:
The “settlers” are the colonial powers of which anthropology has traditionally been a part. What concerns me here, though, is this idea of “non-knowledge”. The definitive take on the concept of non-knowledge is apparently the surrealist George Bataille (whose work on the subject are collected in The Unfinished System Of Nonknowledge. As far as I can tell, the idea is this: all knowing consists of selecting parts of the whole as “things” to know. In constructing knowledge, therefore, we automatically simultaneously construct non-knowledge, things which are not known as knowledge. To take a basic example, if two dogs are standing before me, in order to know them as “dogs”, I have to ignore all those differences that don’t fit into the category of “dog”. And there is no level of detail at which all the details can be known and still be knowledge — once I descend to the level of individual difference, categorization becomes impossible. (And there goes science! Which is, of course, a fancy way of saying “knowing”.) What’s important here is that the non-known is purposely non-known. It’s knowledge (or information, or data — language fails us non-surrealists!) we could know, but exclude from being knowledge. For Gwaltney, then, anthropology in the act of constructing knowledge must exclude that-which-becomes-non-knowledge, and those exclusions are necessarily produced by the anthropologist’s status as a member of a settler culture. What becomes non-knowledge, then, is the native’s system of logic (or the natives’ systems of logics). I think. I’m pretty sure that we’re not really allowed to know what nonknowledge is :-). But to me, this idea of non-knowledge sidles up pretty close alongside Laura Nader’s “Phantom Factor”, the factors imagined as external to anthropology that molded and trimmed anthropological knowledge-making in the Cold War years. And it starts to speak to my concern in the paper I’m preparing for the conference: when anthropology is directed towards counter-insurgency (the ultimat settler orientation) what kinds of non-knowledge are beign automatically simultaneously created? This morning I launched The Writer’s Technology Companion, a new blog covering the tools of the writer’s trade. This is a project I’ve been working on for several months, now — I wanted to make absolutely sure I could keep it up for the long haul with everything else that’s on my plate. So a lot of planning went into the site, with several dozen posts written and “in the can” so I don’t have to worry about running short on content anytime soon. From the site:
If you’re a writer, I do hope you’ll check it out, subscribe to the feed, tell your friends, link to stories, and name your children “Writer’s Technology Companion”. (Hey, in this day and age, you need all the promotion you can get!) Here’s that link again, in case you don’t feel like scrolling up: The Writer’s Technology Companion For some reason there’s been an especially high level of spam lately. A lot of it’s for ForEx (foreign exchange) schemes, which makes sense with the dollar tanking — a small investment in Euros or Pounds a couple years ago would have made a nice return. I’m not sure teaming up with the guy that’s spamming you about it is really the best way to enter the field, though. But the spam that’s really getting my attention is the stuff with totally made-up words. This morning, I submitted spams with titles like “intercalative parafloccular” and “jager nomistic fipple”. I mean, how gorgeous are those phrases? A science fiction writer could name an entire galaxy of futuristic devices, new worlds, and extraterrestrial characters from what I delete from my spam queue every morning! “Scotty, is the intercalative prafloccular drive holding up?” “Aye, cap’n, she’s absolutely fantastic, ‘ummin’ like a wee kitten!” “Excellent! Sulu, set a nomistic course for Jager. Fipple, bring me my coffee!” And so on. Someone needs to write a web-based program to capture spam, extract these words, and create a reference for authors with writer’s block. I’ve been invited to speak at a conference next month of anthropology and counter-insurgency. Details are still sketchy; all I know so far is that the conference will be held at the University of Chicago on April 25-26. That means I have just over a month to write something new and meaningful. I’m thinking of surveying the history of anthropological involvement with the military, and closing with a list of fundamental incompatibilities between military practice and anthropological practice. More info to come…
I consider myself pretty well-informed about geography, and I had very few perfect 10-point answers. If you’re entirely off-base (I thought Sunshine Coast was on the west coast of Australia, which it’s not. At all.) you lose a “life” — lose them all and the game ends. Given how terrible most Americans are at geography, this seems like a great way to start building some awareness of the world beyond our borders. Give it a try!
I’ve been anxiously waiting for University of Michigan Press, the American distributor of Pluto Press’ books, to send me my contributor’s copies, and they finally arrived today. The envelope is sitting downstairs; I’ve decided to open it at dinner so I can (finally!) share the acknowledgments page with my family, who I dedicate the book to. I think the kids, especially, will be excited to see their names in an honest-to-goodness published book. |
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