Back home, books and lots to do...

After 14 lunches of greek salad and 10 dinners of briam I am home. Sad to feel the slight autumnal chill and depressed at the thought that I am entering what, come November, should be my final year. It remains to be seen. Right now, I can't imagine that I could get everything done by then. Its a funny old process the full time PhD. Very much a rollercoaster and very much a lonely furrow to be ploughed. I did read a couple of books whilst away. Johanna Drucker's The visible word which I hate to say that I found a bit turgid in its theoretical discussions - too many long words. Maybe it was the fact that I was lying on a beach, but why say 'quotidian' when one can say 'everyday'. If it hadn't have been for that supposedly French takeaway at St Pancras I wouldn't have known what she was on about. It's good to be specific, but even better not to be exclusive.

The other thing I read was a journal type publication by Black Dog, edited by Alex Coles, Site-specificity: The ethnographic turn. I really enjoyed the first half of this - essays by ethnographers about site specific art and by artists about their practice drawing on ethnographic methods. One essay on Sophie Calle's work even had me making notes in my mobile phone about things that could relate to aspects of my work. The note says 'The gift - Mauss - freecycle is kind of gift giving... Diff community not 'small worlds of personal relationships' online changes gift giving?' What on earth was I going on about? Sunstroke maybe? What I think I was getting at was related to the ever burgeoning series of 'stuff' projects. I have begun to use freecycle and have subscribed to the Hackney Freecycle group's daily digest - I foresee a 'stuff' project coming from this 'data', alongside another about Newsagent's windows, but that's another post entirely. But theoretically I think I was making links with the type of online society/community/personal relationships brought about by social networking and such like and how this might impact on theories like 'the gift'. Not that I know much about it, bar what I read in this article. However, apparently 'recent anthropological theories of gifting illuminate the very idea of there being part-societies (moral economies) that typically consist of small worlds of personal relationships that are the emotional core of every individual's social experience.' (Kuchler 2000:103) Hmmm. Need to read more about this but I guess I was getting at the fact that online stuff enlarges these 'small worlds' and therefore enables us to exchange with a much wider range of people - Facebook is full of nonsensical gift giving applications - there's probably someone researching this very thing right now. I'm not sure if Freecycle can be shoe-horned into this idea as it doesn't seem that altruism comes into the original equation. However, things are still 'given', and often are given in terms of something being posted as 'wanted', rather than just being taken on a whim. More reading maybe, but then again, with only a year to go, I should watch out for brightly lit, tangential culdesacs...