Pass the shovel

1.5 hours writing, 4.5 hours reading / researching, 0.5 hours emailing, page count = 120

This week's monitor is Tanja Royal, in Cologne, Germany. (Sorry, Tanja, for using your maiden name and childhood city in Friday's post!) Tanja is a product designer, who's worked in designing and planning shop systems. Part of the reason she, her husband, and their two cats are moving to the Bay Area this fall is to find opportunities to design other types of products. She's starting to enjoy cooking a lot, mainly German and Russian recipes. Check out her cool website via the links on the right-hand side of the page, which features different Villagers' websites. Welcome Tanja!

Sent thank-you notes for my meeting at APSA and followed up with a former Berkeley grad student who's now teaching at NYU. I'm definitely moving into a more social phase of the writing process, where I continue to immerse myself in academic culture, for several reasons: to (re)connect with interesting people, to get ideas and feedback for my project, and to combat the double isolation of writing from a distance. Seems to be going well so far.

In terms of writing, I focused on methodology, reading one of the papers from the panel I attended in Chicago, on "critical antecedents," and considering its implications for my project. Reading-wise, I also continued to delve into the pile of books I picked up at LASA. Today's was about state formation in Central America. The argument was interesting, but perhaps not entirely useful. The author suggests that we think more about violence not as an outcome of political processes, but as a precondition for them. "Public violence" is a term he uses to include both the policing/coercive elements of the state, but also the struggles carried out by guerrillas, party henchmen, social bandits: basically anyone operating in the public arena with an intention of defending or overthrowing the existing social order. (Muggers don't count; that type of "private violence" is not directed at the social order, just at one or more individuals for private gain.) This is suggestive in that it offers a way to conceive of both security forces and irregular armed forces as part of the same game, but problematic in that it doesn't offer, at least in what I've read so far, guidance in interpreting the rules of that game. Perhaps the case studies will yield more insight.

In other news, the subtitle of the fourth Indiana Jones movie is "...and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." Really, George Lucas? The comedian Patton Oswalt has a bit about the first thing that it would occur to him to do if he had a time machine would be to go back ten years, find George Lucas, and kill him with a shovel, before he could ruin Star Wars by making the prequels. Would that be public violence, or...? Never mind! I just hope Spielberg can keep Lucas from destroying another icon of my childhood.