Books. And communism. And communist books. SQUEE!

Attention political friends: If you are not reading brownfist's LJ lately, you are really missing out. He's just returned from India, and he's been posting a ton about the Maoist insurgency in Nepal and the movement in India. Fascinating stuff.

The eye-watering colours and layout that works on my computer but probably not on yours are actually my fault, but they'll be fixed soon.

In particular, check out this post, which addresses a problem that both brownfist and I have been facing lately, and one that I'm sure affects many of you, namely: How does one organize one's library?

It is impossible to create stable categories based on an essential truth, rather all delineation is arbitrary. There are consistent slippages from within these categories, and the categories are inherently unstable. Should the library thus reflect this? Should the library itself always be re-ordering itself according to the unstability of its own categories? However, within this post-structuralist rambling we return to the arbitrary ordering of my library. Should Com. Shibdas Ghosh sit besides Paul Gilroy, a man that Shibdas Ghosh would call a revisionist and anti-revolutionary. Should my library reflect the sectarian nature of the current Left, whether it be local, national or international? Or should it privilege certain features over others?

This is serious business. My problems are more prosaic: Does my second-edition copy of Emma Goldman's Living My Life go under Biographies and Autobiographies or Anarchism? Does Wobblies! go under Graphic Novels or IWW/Labour History?

This has been a shameless ploy to get more people on brownfist's friends list. And to mention my library.

Books. And communism. And communist books. SQUEE!

Attention political friends: If you are not reading brownfist's LJ lately, you are really missing out. He's just returned from India, and he's been posting a ton about the Maoist insurgency in Nepal and the movement in India. Fascinating stuff.

The eye-watering colours and layout that works on my computer but probably not on yours are actually my fault, but they'll be fixed soon.

In particular, check out this post, which addresses a problem that both brownfist and I have been facing lately, and one that I'm sure affects many of you, namely: How does one organize one's library?

It is impossible to create stable categories based on an essential truth, rather all delineation is arbitrary. There are consistent slippages from within these categories, and the categories are inherently unstable. Should the library thus reflect this? Should the library itself always be re-ordering itself according to the unstability of its own categories? However, within this post-structuralist rambling we return to the arbitrary ordering of my library. Should Com. Shibdas Ghosh sit besides Paul Gilroy, a man that Shibdas Ghosh would call a revisionist and anti-revolutionary. Should my library reflect the sectarian nature of the current Left, whether it be local, national or international? Or should it privilege certain features over others?

This is serious business. My problems are more prosaic: Does my second-edition copy of Emma Goldman's Living My Life go under Biographies and Autobiographies or Anarchism? Does Wobblies! go under Graphic Novels or IWW/Labour History?

This has been a shameless ploy to get more people on brownfist's friends list. And to mention my library.