Midnight in the postgraduate room. Post-It: "Eye, Ear & Nose to the Object!" So much to do, people! Organize Critical Mass, find a room or studio, read against the grain, and write 12K by late September.

Last night I watched Agnes Varda's The Gleaners and I. Gleaning: to pay attention to what others don't notice, after the harvest. The fallen and abandoned. The overlooked and shabby-looking. In the film, an interviewer compares psychoanalysis to gleaning. What other ways of gleaning are there?

I forget everything, and must cover myself in post-its and notecards, and later scratch my head, trying to glean what I can. If I cannot remember it, did I care at all when I first spied it, when it first clutched my heart? I think I can be clutched by too many things, and for the sake of my heart, I need to forget most of them except the very few images that, over the years, call, and call, and call to me.

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Dyspeptic and insomniac, I pause in Lev Manovich's account of the intertwining of computer and human logic, and wonder: When the last ounce of mineral has been mined, stripped from strife-torn lands by bloody and bloodied hands - the magic dust of coltan and the like used in this laptop and that mobile phone and whatever goes into the batteries that run the remote controls by which we steer the turgid effluent of our desires - what will happen next?




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