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Clumsiness
March 17, 2024
I had wanted to offer a follow-up to my note of last week — my thought was to start with the image of RiffRaff, the galah outside Brisbane who gets CBD oil...
The Second Law
March 9, 2024
This edition is overdue, but I must confess I’m feeling a bit stumped for a theme. Spring has come early to Berlin — rather, we kind of skipped the second...
Field Shirt Arbitrage
February 24, 2024
The past two weeks, I’ve had two things on my mind, or two things that warrant comment. I ask your forgiveness, for both come from the New York Times. The...
The touch of the real
February 11, 2024
Today, because I’ve been at the end of my tether and this note is eight days overdue, once more we’re going to try something new. I’m writing this off the...
One morning early in our acquantaince
January 27, 2024
One morning early in our acquaintance I came out to find Taslan Poplar in t-shirt and drawstring trousers, practicing a kata in the clearing in front of the...
Spec course description, part 2
December 30, 2023
How Many Kinds of Persons Are There? This course, convened via seminar and intended for students who have had at least one previous course in anthropology,...
Spec course description
December 23, 2023
Spec course description, January 2022: Eating, Drinking, and Smoking: The Anthropology of Food and Medicine. Ingestion—the introduction of foreign matter...
Resembling our own
December 16, 2023
In July 2022 I gave a seminar on the theme “ignorance as a political strategy”—topical enough. Among the things we read was Yōko Tawada’s novel The Emissary,...
The having just one
December 10, 2023
The uncanny allure of therianthropes, as the Hohlenstein–Stadel Löwenmensch (Lion-person), discovered in some two hundred fragments in a limestone cave in...
Made to patina
November 29, 2023
In 2015 I purchased a pair of pants, cut with a five-pocket dungaree-style pattern in the upper block, close-fitting, made of a texturized high-tenacity...
Coloring us in
November 23, 2023
just as, in the experience of gravity, range of motion, the contractile activity of the heart and gut, and the distensive pressure of ingesta on the gut...
Killing it, pt 5
November 16, 2023
“But you’re not really ascribing interiority to a shirt or a bottle of vinegar—these are interactional gambits” —say, in the case of the shirt, a compliment...
Killing it, pt 4
November 9, 2023
22. (a) I was delayed by the rain. (b) I was made late by the rain. (c) We were delayed by the rain. 23. (a) The village was destroyed by the fire. (b) The...
Killing it, pt 3
October 30, 2023
Part of what makes (1c) and (5c) interesting is how characterization serves as an invitation to play. The speaker is practically obliging their interlocutor...
Killing it, pt 2
October 25, 2023
Let us call what we’re doing in (1c) above (see “Killing it, pt 1”) characterization—here I am borrowing from the linguistic anthropologist Shunsuke Nozawa....
Killing it, pt 1
October 21, 2023
Consider the following: 1. (a) The rain made me late. (b) The fire destroyed the village. (c) That shirt is just killing it. The expressions in (1) are...
Standing, squatting
October 17, 2023
Conversation with the editor of Waking Paralysis in the comments on what was to be the final pre-copyedit draft: he suggests I consider cutting a line that...
Empty boxes
October 7, 2023
Almost anything was possible except, of course, the actual. Murnane again, from “Land Deal” (1978). [W]e had always clearly distinguished between the...
Sugar gyoza
October 2, 2023
Fragment of a note to a friend, late 2022, after we’d been speaking about the future of breakfast cereal—this was for a proposed project for one of the major...
Scrubbing a pan
September 27, 2023
A month before the thing with my hands I had an unusual experience sitting one morning: 2020-5-21 Awakening to not being awake … sitting, I feel myself...
Familiar, unfamiliar
September 22, 2023
I’m not kidding, each of them looked like they had 10 or 20 parent-hours in them. They looked like architectural models. Without exception, they looked...
I looked down to find my hands
September 18, 2023
One evening early on in this project I looked down to find my hands were no longer attached to my body. From my journal: 2020-6-23 Yesterday evening around...
Thigmotropes
September 13, 2023
When I lived in Los Angeles I often went running on the ridge above our neighborhood, and my route included a fire trail that faced west toward the sea. Some...
The idea for this book
September 8, 2023
The idea for this book came to me at the end of August 2017, halfway through an artist’s residency at Shiro Oni Studio, Onishi, Gunma prefecture. The monsoon...
The constructional view
September 3, 2023
[Amazonian worldviews] have a strong “constructional” dimension. Amerindian constructivism is particularly salient in mythical accounts narrating the...
Held captive
August 29, 2023
Is it surprising that a people who could use against stubborn wood and pliant grass and bloody flesh nothing more serviceable than stone — is it surprising...