No Time for Space

Surprisingly enough, unlike most blogs in the world, I have not had the time to update this space very often. But I think maybe 1 or 2 people in the world ever got the link anyway, so who really cares? Probably not those one or two people. It will, by default, be relegated to use only when I'm seriously procrastinating. Like right now.

I'm thinking of designing a whole line of lame/esoteric t-shirts, such as the one on the right. Get it?

Coming soon:
Gramsci-Brand Reified Beings: Made from 100% Organic Intellectuals
Nihilism is just pointless.

Oh and um, school is good, all the books have been great except "on hollywood" which was surprisingly really boring. more on all that later.

Smacked upside the head by the invisible hand

Finishing up a paper summarizing the "Worldly Philosophers," and ruminating on the absurdity of supply and demand. Some things will always be at top demand- health and food pop to mind, to say nothing of personal security- aren't we willing to pay every last penny we have to keep from starving, suffering or being killed? So what's supplying a market-based service and what is just ransoming?
Also, theft. I know private property is supposed to be held sacrosanct above all else, but in the logic of supply and demand, doesn't theft just mean that the price the market is willing to bear is 0. I'm thinking mostly of non-essential items (the argument is slightly different if you are stealing bread to eat) like, oh, say, music. I really enjoy music and *innovation* has made it possible for me to enjoy it for free without depriving anyone else of it (as opposed to if I really like paintings by Munch and took one home). Which basically means I'm willing to pay $0 for music. I am however willing to pay some money for the physical object of a disk with pretty pictures on the cover and liner notes. So what I'm saying is, why do record companies keep trying? Aren't they supposed to dry up and go away when they, as businesses, are no longer profitable? They are essentially cranking out supply for a demand that financially amounts to 0.

more inane ramblings to come soon, but for the moment I had best get back to the graded writing.

Head feeling better, body a little worse.

Well. Week 4. I've got a cold.
Also, we're gonna kill all of the salmon. At least the wild ones. But I cannot recommend "King of Fish" enough (the cover alone is worth order a $2.00 used copy). Just a brilliant book, very very readable- learn everything from Geomorphology in North America to how salmon make trees grow to European history. Wonderful!

Also, Agroecology. Wonderful! The world will be saved by nutrient cycling and green manure.

Everything wonderful and I'm going to bed.

How to make your head hurt: Part II

Read anything by an Economist

As noted on the right, I am taking a class on globalization and labor, which I'm going to go ahead and call the most challenging class I've ever taken. Why the challenge? Because our brilliant professor (and I mean that with the deepest sincerity) believes that we enlightened and benevolent beings in our leftist ivory tower too quickly and easily dismiss our monstrous neo-liberal nemesis in the world. So the solution has been to read and discuss the likes of Joseph Stiglitz and Jagdesh Bhagwati. Two weeks ago, I thought I was going to lose some teeth to grinding while reading Stiglitz, it was the most insane and fanciful slop I'd ever had to slog through. That is until I got to Bhgwati and I thought I might lose some teeth when I blew my brains out. I'm not sure if it was the lying ("there is no scientific evidence that GMOs could be dangerous"), the faulty logic (yes, in the past corporations have been behind the murder of democratically elected leaders, but that is less likely to happen these days, now that those country have democratic leaders) or just the flat out dismissive tone (even the reasonable criticisms of globalization amount to a non sequitur) that made me want to run off and join some radical black block group. Fortunately our professor talked us down (I was not alone in this reaction) and this week we're reading some good ol' stuff of Adam Smith, Malthus and David Ricardo.... who in comparison seem like right nice chaps. We're all reading "The Global Class War" which looks to be more promising.

Significantly less frustrating, but equally head spinning, was "Traces on the Rhodian Shore," written by famous Berkeley Geographer Clarence Glacken. He began it as a dissertation and a decade and half later published an amazing volume tracing geographical thought in western great thinkers from the ancient greeks to 18th century. He died before completing the second half to bring up to the present (1960s). What life must have been like before wikipedia...it is boggling what ONE person can know (6 or 7 languages apparently- passage after passage in greek, french, latin, german, spanish without any translation). It was also written before the major explosion in nonsense words in social studies, so was a lot of fun to read. Which brings me to this weeks quiz:

Q: Governmentality?

• A. Government+ality.
  
• B. Govern + mentality.
• C. Poor phonetic translation of Gouvernementalité
• D. It's just as silly sounding when Foucault said it as some po-mo lecturer at Berkeley.

You choose!

How to make your head hurt: Part I

Do the math.

So we're going into the big 2nd week of school now, which is really the 1st substantive week, as last week was a lot of course administration along the lines of: "So, you're a grad student now.... we sure hope you're literate, cause here's a list of books longer than most of the books you've read. Just start at the top and check back next week."

This was of course what everyone tells you about grad school- that the amount of reading is unfathomable. What's strange is that it seems totally fathomable- 3 classes X 1 book a week = 3 books a week. Assume a book is on average 300 pages. That is 900 pages of reading a week. Then pretend you're only in class 12 hours a week, sleep 8 hours a day, and eat/walk/brush your teeth in front of a book. That leaves 6,720 minutes free a week to read. Easy: Just read one page on average every 7 minutes, and you may have a few moments left over to write a couple of pages in response to each book that is due the night before class.

Wanna try it out? Consult the reading lists to the right. I've listed the books by class, with links to Amazon.
This weeks challenge:

• Modern Geographical Thought
• The Geographical Tradition
• Making Globalization Work

For bonus points, try getting through the geography text books in 2 hours blocks like the ones they allot us at the library!

Why the blague?

Other than mindless self indulgence and as yet another scheme to spend more time in front of the computer without doing "work," I thought maybe a blog would be a fun way to:

• Keep family and really bored friends informed of what I'm doing with myself in grad school.
• at least keep up my promise to share my reading lists with interested parties
  
• ramble off some of "intellectual" thoughts in a form outside of the structure of academic writing.
• create a journal of what I was thinking/doing that I can come back to (and thanks to the still-not-yet-evil people at Google, I can't lose it like oh so many notebooks in my life).

So, for my own interest I'm gonna try and update weekly. For you, the probably misdirected reader, I will soon post the infamous reading lists.