"Do the shake and vac to put the freshness back."

This regular blogging lark won't keep up despite Will's suggestion that I must be on the old shake and vac at the moment for the sudden inexplicable burst of energy, but whilst I'm still trying to keep my New Year Resolutions in place (by rights, they should be in a crumpled heap in the corner by now), I thought I would update the blogroll again with a few more recommended reads.

Radio Active is the blog of someone I think the absolutely world of. Kara is funny, smart, honest, opinionated and she never bloody updates her blog often enough! I think her excuse is that she is too busy blogging on MySpace, where her regular blogs gets more readers in a day than this blog gets in a week, to bother with updating Radio Active. However, I'm hoping that she will finally get her finger out and start updating this blog more often.

It is Kara that I have to thank for me finally getting round to reading the brilliant To Kill A Mockingbird; discovering the wit and insight of bell hooks; actually listening to a non-eighties band for a change in the shape of Le Tigre; and who knows, if I can find a DVD player that plays my copy, of actually getting to watch Y Tu Mamá También.

She's also the reason I've always got a daft smile on my face, and my best excuse for not blogging these last few months. I'd sooner be talking to her everytime. I still, however, can't work out what her fascination with Roger Ebert's cardigans is all about, though.

See, it sometimes works to be overly obsessive with late seventies and early eighties music on your blog, 'cos it meant that the good people at Cuonago and Spaves took the trouble to blog roll me just recently when I was getting all dewey eyed about the Au Pairs and Gang of Four. John of Cuonago and Spaves himself likes to get dewey eyed about the Mekons , in amongst his musings on anarchism, football and shaming me in the books he has read by reminding me that one of my 2005 New Year Resolutions is to read more.

Speaking of shaming - ok, writing of shaming - I thought I would mention the blog Timid Maximalist , by way of hoping that he or she would once again start to regularly blog.* Drawing from a political tradition that is still, in my opinion, best explained in an accesible and readable fashion in the now out of print Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century, TM seeks to:

" . . . articulate/discover a path away from maximalist sneering ('we' have the answer, 'you' are wrong; world revolution - good, everthing else - bad), as against absurd avowals for chaos, uprisings, upheavals as it is against the quietism of pacifism or the disingenuousness of democracy, and for/towards a more humble, less masculinist, more open, way of thinking/writing against capitalism and for communism."

I know that the impossiblist tradition that I support can sometimes fall all too easily into that trap of the 'maximalist sneering', and I hope that if and when TM starts blogging a bit more, I can better understand and articulate the politics I endorse through engaging with the arguments that TM and others are articulating. No one person or tradition has all the answers on these matters.

* On mentioning the tardiness of Timid Maximalist in updating their blog to someone recently, they replied: "I've been waiting for a new installment for months. Promises the earth, and delivers nothing.Typical maximalist." Damn, I wish I had thought of a line as witty as that.