the trenches of the everyday

Grim title I know, and totally unfitting for what I am about to pronounce: I love Keele. It has taken a while, but today I suddenly have those butterflies in my stomach that are the surest sign of such things.

Why? Well you can never fully answer that question when it comes to love, but the events that immediately preceded the butterflies suggest some elements that might fit into the answer, and once again these events took place in the KPA, as all the best things (procrastination, dancing, drinking, footsie, you name it) do (1). I had just finished 'saving the day' for another defenceless civilian (in this case my sister; yesterday it was my girlfriend; what can I say, I am superfantastisch) and was celebrating with a cup of Earl Grey (trying to stay off the coffee, not because of the earlier top-up exposé (1) but because I've already had 5 cups today and I'm steaming). (I'm now going to cut down on the bracketed asides, as they are cluttering up the text of this blog post).

So there I was with my Earl Grey and the newspaper. I stood outside to enjoy the post-rain air. The barman came out for a smoke and we chatted about my girlfriend, the fat cats who live next to the KPA, and two kids fighting on the bus. I finished my tea and returned to my work. And that's when I got the butterflies, because I suddenly realised that I have been working at Keele for barely 2 months and already it feels like home and as if I am part of the circuit/scene, whereas in my own college of the University of London (which I intend to anonymise in this blog) this has never happened, even though many of our bar staff were pretty damn hip, cool and eccentric... in fact I think it never happened partly because they were pretty damn hip, cool and eccentric and although I was quite definitely eccentric (or at least I imagine myself to be), I was not pretty damn hip or cool.

Ok, so why does this blog post have this stupid title? Because I am thinking today about vanguardism, Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas, and approaches to struggle (2). Gramsci's notion of the 'war of position', a kind of 'cultural trench warfare', the long struggle for, among other things, hearts and minds (3), and the anarchist notion of 'Temporary Autonomous Zones' (4) are what I have in mind when I think of my interactions with the barman as a kind of political act, as a creative performance of the type of spaces that might belong to a world 'to come' (5), a type of world that we might hope to create. Simply put, these kind of interactions don't seem to happen as much in central London, where bar staff, waiters, shop assistants are more likely to be in a hurry to serve another customer, are less likely to have 'regulars', are less likely to feel a tie to the place they work or the locality within which that place is located. Right? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Anyway it's an idea I have, and an element in a rationale for a new love.

References:
1. Mambotango (2009) "I read the news today...", a blog entry in the Never Settle blog, http://mambotangoneversettle.blogspot.com/2009_06_01_archive.html
2. Subcomandante Marcos (2003) "I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of this planet", a communiqué from the EZLN to ETA, http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/ezln/2003/marcos/etaJAN.html
3. Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence & Wishart
4. Day, Richard J.F. (2005) Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements London: Pluto Press
5. Patton, Paul (2007) “Derrida, Politics and Democracy to Come” Philosophy Compass 2/6: 766-80), available online