Holiday

I finished Desert Dreamers, and had a week off for my birthday - wait, actually the other way around, I finished Desert Dreamers during my week off, so.. anyway. There was a bit at the end about understanding networks as that which transforms (rather than transferring without loss, in the sense of the data network ideal) and actors (to do with empowerment à la Spinoza) that feels like it would be good to come back to/have floating around, but I am now onto Chertok & Stengers, A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason: Hypnosis as a Scientific Problem from Lavoisier to Lacan, and fuck me, there is some great stuff here (I'm on, like, page 5, already carried away). They quote from a report made by Jean Bailly (a secret report, for Louis XVI’s eyes only, in true Dumas style only with the extra frisson of actual about-to-happen revolution) on an observation of Mesmer’s hypnotism in 1784:

Women have, as a rule, more mobile nerves; their imagination is more lively, and more easily excited: it is readily impressed and aroused. … In touching any given part, it may be said that they are touched all over the body. … It has been observed that women are like musical strings stretched in perfect unison; when one is moved, all the others are instantly affected.

Women as music! Strings! Sexxxxx! It's got it all!

My other indulgence for the week has been planning a novel, which irrespective of any actual output is the most fun thing ever - ever! - there is structured daydreaming, and research into 17th century Venetian spies (my JSTOR access still works!) and there is writing, and it is great, and I don't know why anyone ever spends their time doing anything else, except of course money which is what one forgets about being on holiday, but still, and I have had coffee. Good! Good.