I KNOW already.

I feel the need to zing out a few comments, smiles, frowns in order to BE a part of the world, to be my TruYou/self in as much as I am defined and there fore exist through what everybody knows about me. Ok, only half way into the book, but I think I SEE what I am suppose to KNOW; it is all so TRANSPARENTLY consrtucted. A large narrative push just keeps driving me along. I like the read it is providing, but nothing is really new in this wave I am riding.  Writing is crisp, to the point, but nothing that I want to write down as a a brilliant insight into life, or just a pretty line or two. I want to ask at this point: if everybody knows everything about everybody why would anybody care what they know about everybody. Secrets become power? What know one knows becomes the real TruYou (true self)?

May The Circle be Unbroken

I am about 80 pages into the Circle. Coincidentally (yes, I am a geek) I am randomly re-reading chunks of Foucault's Discipline and Punish. I ran into this quote and thought it pretty much sums up where the Circle is going.

“…throughout the social body, procedures were being elaborated for distributing individuals, fixing them in space, classifying them, extracting from them the maximum in time and forces, training their bodies, coding their continuous behavior, maintaining them in perfect visibility, forming around them an apparatus of observation,  registration and recording, constituting on them a body of knowledge that is accumulated and centralized. the general form of an apparatus intended to render individuals docile and useful, by means of precise work upon their bodies, indicated the prison institution, before the law ever defined it as the penalty par excellence.”

--Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault, p. 231

But this is just a prediction. One of those reading skills I want my students to be able to do.

55 Books!

Ok, so I know very few read this blog, but I just counted the number of books listed on the sidebar. We are on our 55th book.  Which makes us close to finishing out 5th year, considering we spent three months on Homi Baba. Pretty damn impressive just for the quantity of books we have gone through, but the quality of the list is also pretty damn impressive. We are one smart group of guys. Or at least ambitious. 55 books: just think how many pints of beer we have consumed as we talked about the books. The Gingerman should buy us the next book.

New technologies written in The Circle that really exist.

The Future is Now.

We are Too Cool

Beer and Book Groups: we are Cutting Edge?!