I read "nomad" and got excited. Then I came to "religion," "war machine," and was on the edge of my seat. When I read Mongol, I jumped for joy like no Deluezing reader ever has. All these issues are right up my alley and not so common in architecture. By the end of the article, however, I was at the back of my chair trying as hard as I could to figure out how he was using mathematics.

Deleuze jumps around a lot in this text. I give him immediate credit for inserting social issues but they are so watered down in all the analogies they become distracting. He compares the striation to geology, organisms, fabrics, human anatomy, composers and more all while insisting on Greek language lessons. He seems to be munching through ideas like breakfast cereal.

He is either covering way too much ground or he just can't nail down what he is trying to say. (I will recant this statement after a few more readings.)

Deleuze had some very interesting tangents. For instance, "composers do not hear; they have close-range hearing, whereas listeners hear from a distance. Even writers write with short-term memory, whereas readers are assumed to be endowed with long-term memory." Woa. He gets into some great ideas pertaining to scale, point of view, orientation. His notion of the sea also paints an eloquent picture of complexity in common notions of striation. He really has me when he talks about bearings and fabric and yet I get confused again when he brings up the Mongols and nomads. I think a discussion of this reading would do me a lot of good.

I'll read through it a few more times and get back..