Becoming Productive, More Foucault Fun

Last night I spent about half an hour trawling the internet, looking for an application which would allow me to add annotations and more importantly underlining and highlighting to PDF files. Such files are the mainstay of much of my academic work, such as it is. Most journals are avaliable in it and a number of books are also avaliable in this format, including Hardt and Negri’s classic Empire as well as the huge collection in the recently wikified Project Gutenberg (Gutenmark is a great cross-platform program for converting the texts found here into PDF files). Much as I dislike reading on screen, I don’t have enough printer credit to print everything I’d like and besides it saves trees. I found it ironic though probably unavoidable that my course on Enviromentalism handed out vast quantities of photocopied papers, though it isn’t really the lecturers fault. Perhaps instead of photocopying, people should be encouraged more to scan the texts and put them online on one of the numerous lecture note holding webapps that universities use. Unfortunately all the solutions looked either pricey or whack. Fortunately, as I awoke this morning Lifehacker had answered my prayers with the free but lamentably Mac OS only Skim. Skim is an elegant solution to the problem that allows all manner of scribbling on your PDF file as well as a gorgeous full screen mode and all manner of other little features that make it a joy to use. All I need to work out now is how to get the Ebrary reader to work with this, or at least let me print sections of books out to PDF.

I have also recently been using Journler, another neat app, to organise all my clipping from the web, notes, thoughts and ideas. Its kind of like iTunes for notes, with a similarly intuitive interface. It will never replace the trusty and good-looking Moleskine notebook but I have none of the funds to buy more of these and you can’t drag and drop weblinks into them. Having taken Bloglines and my 178 RSS feeds off my homepage and restricted myself to an hour blogtime in the morning. While I do this Cuppa lets me know when my painstrippingly strong coffee is brewed. If I were an undergraduate I am sure I would be attracted to the benefits of the homework organiser Schoolhouse 2.

My life if a mess of petty joys and minor victories over the academic existence I have chosen.

I have spent much of the day reading John Ruskin’s critique of capitalism in general and political economy in particular Unto This Last. Doubtless posts concerning this and its relation to John Milbank’s theological economics will be posted at some point.

The Foucault saga continues, with an excellent summary of the debate so far at Foucault Blog, that kindly references my comments on the subject yesterday. At the risk of repeating everything Jeremy says there in an awful commentary upon the commentary, the reviewer of Madness and Civilisation that I quoted yesterday, Colin Gordon, hits back in the TLS letters section by pointed out inaccuracies in Scull’s own citation and to the positive response to this book by scholars noted with their reputation and soberness. As I suspected, Gordon detects a hint ressentiment in Scull’s critique, like Foucault stole all his thunder. Something interesting to note from Scull’s introduction to his own collection Insanity of Place / The Place of Insanity: Essays on the History of Psychiatry, p 4-5.

MacDonald, Porter, and I all, I think, exhibit a distinctly ambivalent attitude to the work of Michel Foucault, and yet also add that in no small measure it was probably his wide-ranging speculations that attracted us to the field in the first place.

Lets hope this one goes to bed sooner rather than later so we can all get back to our respective ghettos and ponder why an author in academia getting a bad review is a big deal. Particularly when said reviewer is anglo-american in persuasion and the author under review is continental in influence. Unless its Richard Rorty who is writing the review.

As an asside Ian Hacking certainly cuts a interesting figure in the whole post-analytical thing. He likes Foucault see. I first encounted him in his discussion of how Pascal’s wager was an early form of game/decision theory.

Giles Fraser over on Comment is Free tells us why penal substitution isn’t all that hot and the Guardianite commentators show their general theological ignorance in the comments.

Oh and the global war on terror is apparently over. Who won again?