Reading Off The Syllabus

Each semester I attempt to maintain some personal reading with my course reading. I've had mixed luck in the past, but one home run was reading the Infinite Jest while in my Public Finance class. Both ultimately came down to the understanding the pursuit of happiness, whether its public goods & market failure or addiction & the junior tennis circuit.

I'm taking a class in Public Finance in Developing Countries now, and had the fortune of landing Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins from my book swap just before classes began. Confessions of an EHM is an anecdotal autobiography (with a several endnotes) on how he, as an forecasting economist for MAIN (think Bechtel, Carlyle & Halliburton) inflated estimates to convince developing countries and the World Bank to enter in huge debt agreements. A twist of how the pitch was always based on how great the endeavor would be for the county, and keeping on the low down how much more insured is the profit of his firm. While his style is over the top and didactic, its evident he really is trying to clear his conscious.

Contrast this with public finance theory, where between the lines there are implications of the winners and losers, but the text reads in a scientific neutral. The last two things to come to mind are:

1) how developing countries, whom have relied heavily on taxes on international trade, have been advised to reduce rates in order to spur growth and reap higher revenues. But now research shows that revenues have not increased for developing nations. They fail to mention how corporations are enjoying paying less in tax;

2) Venezuala keeps popping up in the news. Mostly Victor Chavez, and how he's painted as a socialist dictor threatening their stability. Pat Robertson called for his assassination. He survived a coup in December 2002. But what we don't get a sense of is a) how popular and charismatic he is, and b) how oil wealth was bypassing the country before his rise to power, and how contracts we rewritten to put more mineral wealth into the national treasury. Why is the news down on Chavez? Because he has not let Big Oil do as they please . The Documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is a great perspective on how distorted our view of Venezuala is (and can I get a shout for my man Gil Scott Heron and my favorite cut!?!).

I'm moving on to Dominique LaPorte's History of Shit A look at human waste disposal from a Marxist perspective. I'll keep you posted on how it all comes out.

And Kanye West Hates George W. Bush [Updated]

During Book Swap on Sunday, we played the clip of Mike Meyers and Kanye West, where, visibly shaken, West blurts, "George Bush doesn’t care about black people." God bless those who speak their minds, and God bless live television. NBC later deleated the clip... so God bless the interweb.

I'll admit it, I really missed the Kanye boat, but after this weekend, I've been checking out his jams, and I'm hooked. Yeah, there's some misogyny, but there's Mos Def, Talib Kweli, a huge Gil Scott-Heron sample and more. I got the new album off of iTunes, I'm glad to toss him some support, and I'm amped that the cuts are sharp.

[Update: Here's Soundcheck's podcast on Kanye]

It's, like, plastic

It pervades every other sentence seemingly, this filler, "like" that one often hears a sentence such as "This is, like, totally a tree" when referring to living breathing tree. How does language develop or devolve so ludicrously?

I've been reading Plastic: the making of a synthetic century by Stephen Fenichell lately, and came across an interesting passage towards the end:

The most depressing thing about this brave new synthetic universe was that every thing in I seemed to set off by quotation marks: trees had become “trees” and leaves “leaves.” Nothing was what it was, but some spiritually impoverished simulacrum of what it was supposed to be. (276)

By this time in commerce, there had been decades of “like silk,” “like wood,” “like glass” It’s no wonder that “like” lost much of it’s real meaning, becoming a filler one’s vocabulary. Because plastic seemingly could be made in to anything, resemblance melted away and all we have is synthetics...

There are many great stories, particularly how the Leo Baekeland first made his forturne with inventing photo developing paper, sold to George Eastman. He then when on to develop bakelite, the first real ubiquitous plastic... from ash trays to telephones.

The chapters on Cellophane and Saran are interesting for any foodie who wonders why we eat such shitty processed food. It's all about the perception of freshness and sanitation.

Fiction from Fact

It sounds political, but it's not... well not explicitly.

I started reading Jose Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. I first read Saramago's Blindness in the FoFBC, the quarterly book swap I participate in and loved it so I wanted to read more of his work, but hadn't really had time between school, love, and The Moor's Last Sigh.

What I particularly like about Saramago's style is how he uses... or expresses some statement of fact or logic which then drives the way the narrative unfolds. In Blindness, it was often some idea of human nature, which led to a simultaneously horrifying and inspiring story.

The Gospel is what it sounds like, a retelling of the Gospels set more as a historical novel. What comes out is an intriguing portrayal of what Joseph and Mary’s lives were like, with gender roles, with Roman occupation, with geographical background. A far cry from the nativity scenes and iconography we’ve grown accustom.

There are departures from the scriptures yes, but scripture departs from its context.The novel is powerful reminder that as much as people believe the Bible is God’s word, it was written by men, and translated by lesser men. It also reminds the reader that though there is familiarity with the Gospel story, there isn’t familiarity with the story’s setting, which can be powerful for anyone who begins to the study the bible not as scripture, but as literature. Therein lies the political.

Lastly, it occurred to me that as I and my friends succeed and flounder in this mortal coil, we are the age at which Jesus began his preaching. Let’s not forget the power a young thirtysomething can have on this world. Again, the political.