I visited Oxford on Monday, for the first time in a good few years - pointed out the sites of various misdeeds to my wife, purchased a new supply of Plato-and-Socrates postcards from the Bodleian shop, that sort of thing. I was explaining that the idea of Oxford was that you rounded up a collection of fairly clever people, sequestered them away from the outside world, saw to their spiritual and aesthetic needs by putting them in an environment rich with natural beauty and architectural splendour, employed a small army of scouts, cooks, butlers and porters to spare them the trouble of having to tidy up after themselves, gave them access to a stonking great research library and more or less let them get on with it. What happened in practice was that the inhabitants of this idyll responded to the remission of worldly cares by filling their little artificial world with artificial strife. The needless angst! he says, angstily. The unfairness of the system is a topic for another day, but even if such sumptuous privilege could be justly apportioned - even if there really were people who deserved it, and it was possible to know just who they were - the problem would remain that it’s really not very good for most people to hot-house them in this way.

Re-reading Blake, as it seems like a good time to. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is an antiphilosophical treatise of stupefying brilliance. “Eternity is in love with the productions of time”. There are whole dissertations that could be boiled down to that. Thought of a joke, probably capable of improvement:

Q: How many Deleuzians does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: There is no need: the lightbulb is already a permanent flux of becoming. To dream of changing it is to dream of violence: a meaningless putsch that would only replace one lightbulb with another. Rather, we should seek to liberate the incandescent intensity of its illumination - we still do not know what a lightbulb can be.

Yes, well. You know what you can do with your polite laughter, don’t you?

Slightly wishing I’d done Angela Davis’s Women, Race and Class instead of Ain’t I A Woman, as they cover a lot of similar ground and Davis talks a lot more about class. Plus she has a chapter on the abolition of housework, which is ace.