Letter to Suresh Caganaraja, part II.

Dear Dr. Caganaraja or that one guy who was looking at my mailbox:

As you note several times throughout Geopolitics, the very act of writing presupposes cretain conditions: a clean, non-sticky surface, light and adequate warmth. In the developing nations that constitute the "periphery" of scholarly work, access to these utilities is frequently interrupted by conflict or natural disaster (see p. 187). While my community potentially enjoys full access to these utilities, we usually pay for them on alternate months. Frequently I am able to wipe off my desktop in September, read in October and pull my hands away from the space heater long enough to write something by mid-December, when papers are due. Which brings me to the topic of electrical fires caused by circuit overload: in the unlikely event that I were able to have all of the utilities running at once, 5660 Cabot would burn to the ground due to a short circuit and whatever I had written would be irreplacably lost. Not "my file crashed" lost, but "my file liquefied and ate through the floor", lost.