Finally finished de Certeau's book. What a slog that was. Blah, social history theory with respect to linguistics and communcation practices...this is intriguing but he writes about it in such a mind-numbing way...

Anyway, last damn sentence reproduced here for the lulz value:

Casual time is what is narrated in the actual discourse of the city: an indeterminable fable, better articulated on the metaphorical practices and stratified places than on the empire of the evident in functionalist technocracy.


This man was a former Jesuit and a fanboy of Freud and...apparently through this reading, a disillusioned Marxist and identifier with Foucault's concept of the Panoptic and medicalized society. XD Homeboy was definitely perturbed about many elements of modern life and not a fan of "Science."

I THINK I got what I was supposed to get out of this. The idea that readers rent space in a text that only presupposes what is by necessity the fiction of history (ugh, and that convolution is obtuse in itself) and how we are to keep this in mind as we write social history ourselves. But, eh, class isn't until next Wednesday so I suppose I'll find out then.



The night air held a bite, the nipping chill of frost, and Shanks frowned down at the goosebumps on his bare legs. Ben was going to scold him when he got back but there’d be a warm bath and a warmer bed waiting and that made it okay. It reminded him of a poem, a fragmentary scrap in his memory about coming home, about coming in from the cold. He could’t recall it but that was okay. Ben would know that too. Shanks grinned to himself as he imagined the heat and the harranguing. Now if only he could remember where he’d docked his ship…

Half an hour behind him, Ben studied the cobblestones in the bright glow of torchlight. A faint trail of rusty red splotches wandered haphazardly to the east and his gut wrenched, cramped in a sudden wave of cold dread.


Anyhoo, off to Sonata Arctica tonight. Still gotta go to work afterwards but yay for concert fun!