Rick Perry 10 billion dollar cut to education

Just a memo to myself: Rick Perry and his allies are cutting $10 billion to the education budget in Texas. In September, the STARR tests--a more difficult version of the current TAKS; STARR applies to students' GPA-- will be implemented for high school students. In other words, teachers in low-scoring schools are screwed. More students, more pressure, less money. I've lost my appetite.

Dunkin' Brands Group IPO

Their Initial Public Offering opens tomorrow at 16-18 dollars. Dunkin' Donuts that is. This IPO occurs as I am writing a chapter on embodiment, the multivalent ways in which food and food images affect our bodies. Doughnuts, to say the least, affect bodies, or at least mine personally, in potentially dangerous ways that I can only express in the phrase, "I'm glad I don't own a doughnut shop." Pigging out would be on the mild end of my eating habits. But Dunkin' Donuts has sold as much coffee lately as their succulent sweets. And coffee, of course, is equally affective and, in my case, indispensable for the daily routine. Freud's addiction to cocaine pales in comparison.

I actually think Dunkin' Donuts' hedonistic undertone resonates nicely with Isabel Allende's Aphrodite, a memoir of sensory indulgence. She may appear high culture, but her book is as gritty and polluted with sucrose lines as the most hearty eclair. Homer Simpson understands her book better than I ever will.

Glencore

The world's largest commodity trader, Glencore, is going public today. Al Jazeera article accurately describes how Glencore, among other speculators, takes advantage of instability. Tenuous political situations equal maximum profits. Again, complex systems, those far from equilibrium states, prove central to understanding global economics.

Displacing Stereotype

Stereotype, according to Bhabha, "is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always 'in place', already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated" (Location 95). What is more 'in place' than gender and sexuality? But heteronormativity, an anxious repetition if ever there was one, acquires a fluidity and openness as it iterates over different cultures. Repetition and difference. It repeats, and not only reproduces, but also transforms.

When, in Aphrodite, Isabel Allende eloquently describes aphrodisiacs, a term she illustrates through various heterosexual relationships across different cultures, she arguably displaces--albeit unintentionally--heterosexual desire and stereotype. Instead, she reveals the affects behind sexuality. Affects flow across bodies indiscriminately. Only stereotype, acting as a screen or membrane, limits the affective stream. But when stereotype is no longer always in place, when it crosses cultures into a new social-material matrix, anxious repetition becomes transformative difference. Those differences, e.g., between Allende's relationship with her husband and a Taoist monk's relationship with his wife, testify to the movement of affects across multiple times and places. Bodies come and go, but the capacity to affect and be affected only intensify through the medium of aphrodisiacs.

Gathering a sense of the affective flow, the forces that bring bodies into relation, we imaginatively  produce an embodied place where we are inseparable from the environment. The exotic, sometimes Orientalist, images Allende describes positively feed into each other, and, interacting with our imagination, produce an emergent embodied foodscape. Here, our bodies are the environment. That is, we are always becoming the place where aphrodisiacs can draw another's body into relation with ours. A new schemata, or screen, begins to form. Such an erotic place, a place of "amorous desire" (Allende 26), both opens new relations and excludes others. But in this event of becoming embodied foodscape, we are most fiercely affected. How I might be stimulated to action is a question at its most open. I might eat, I might cook, I might write, I might...