native soil

Flying home to California tomorrow (hum Joni Mitchell lyric here). My devotion to the idea of a politics of place comes directly from my devotion to the place where I grew up. The topography of California shaped the contours of my own mind; I don't feel truly at home without mountains on the horizon and wide sky overhead.

The first time I went back to California after moving to North Carolina I flew into San Jose. Flying low to land, I could trace the arteries of the highways, knowing which freeway was which, and which to take to get anywhere I wanted to go. In short, I knew where I was. I was located in a larger system of meaning.

I've often felt rather alien in my devotion to home, to a specific place. So much of American life is geared in the opposite direction, towards EveryPlace, towards NoPlace. The nomadic life of most Americans seems not to affect them, or at least, they don't articulate the ways it might affect them. Anywhere we go now, we can get the same food, go to the same stores, buy exactly the same things. And since our identity is conflated with what we consume, we believe that we are the same person wherever we are, since we consume the same things in every place. I've never felt that way. I felt obligated to leave home, since I believed that I would be missing out on some kind of "starting over" experience if I didn't live somewhere else. There's some element of cowboy-into-the-sunset about it, that real adults, actualized men, must always be on the move, can never stay on the ranch.

I think I was mistaken about the way we start over, in our lives. While moving to a new place may, for some, mark the beginning of a new identity and a new belief about life, I think that the opposite happens. Moving to a place where we are uncertain, unlocated, we tend to hold onto that of which we are most sure--our personal identities, which become hardened and concretized as we define ourselves in order, oddly enough, to fit in. Our very motion, which we believe keeps us free, imprisons us in a world without possibilities. Constant motion limits the horizon.

As for me, I look forward to meeting myself again at home.

isn't this life sweet?

can't you taste it melting on your tongue, like liquid sunlight, like wine...

wingnuts.

Tucker Carlson: "Canada is basically like Honduras, only colder and less interesting."
Ann Coulter: "They should consider themselves lucky that we continue to allow them to exist."

thoughts for finals

Sol LeWitt was the mentor of a fantastic sculptor named Eva Hesse. He wrote this to her at a time when she was deeply stuck, in both her life and her art:

"Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, gasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling stumbling, rumbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hanging, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning...searching, grinding grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO...Try to tickle something inside you, your 'weird humor.' You belong in the most secret part of you. Don't worry about cool, make your own uncool...If you fear, make it work for you--draw and paint your fear and anxiety. And stop worrying about big, deep things such as 'to decide on a purpose and way of life...' You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO! I have much confidence in you and even though you are tormenting yourself, the work you do is very good. Try to do some BAD work. The worst you an think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell."

on parties and such

You know, I bitch a lot about grad school. And it does often seem to suck up my soul in painful ways, such as when I'm writing my 78th "reading review."

But truly, the people I've met in grad school are just amazing, and I don't know where else I would have met such a collection of strange, intelligent and funny people. Being a recovering shy person, it's such a gift to have so many people I really look forward to seeing. (Plus, several of them are Eagle Scouts, so they can always get us out of tight corners using MacGuyver-esque knots.)

Since I didn't go to meeting today, I just wanted to take time to express gratitude for all that I am fortunate to have, and good friends are at the top of that list.

What I am not fortunate enough to have is a completed paper on some aspect of welfare states. So I'm off to do that. In the odd chance that someone who reads this blog is going to be up late writing, reading or studying, and could bear company in that activity, let me know. There may be some Laurel's Kitchen banana bread in it for you. (As a side note, why does everything in Laurel's Kitchen have wheat germ in it? Salad: wheat germ. Pudding: wheat germ.)

the macro-micro problem

In the social sciences, we have a macro-micro problem. This problem crops up in all kinds of places and studies, and it's basically this: why do society-wide phenomenon cause only a few actors to shift behavior? For example, consider the problem of suicide bombers. We can look for macro-level phenomena to explain their behavior, relying upon cultural or economic explanations. These explanations often do have some weight to them. The problem is that not everyone in a given culture or economic class becomes a suicide bomber. In fact, the percentage of those who do is really quite small, almost infinitesimal in terms of probability. Thus, our macro causes can't be linked definitively to micro, or individual, behavior. We can explain either, but we can't really explain both. (In some ways this is, of course, a comfort, since we would probably prefer that our behavior be somewhat unpredictable, at least if we would like to avoid totalitarianism altogether.)
I was thinking about this issue this morning because I was reading an article on string theory. It struck me that social scientists are facing a similar problem as physicists have since Einstein. The puzzler has been how to reconcile quantum mechanics, which explains the behavior of atoms, with Einstein's theory of relativity, which describes the behavior of the universe. See? A micro-macro chasm.

Now, string theory may bridge that gap, or at least, that is it's much vaunted promise. The idea of string theory, very, very generally, is that the universe is not made up of individual points (atoms) but rather of strings. It seems to me that these are strings of probability or potentiality, so individual particles such as electrons or quarks are actually only different ways for strings to vibrate. (Posts on string theory should be written after coffee, but I wanted to get this down). This would explain why, for example, no quark is found by itself. A string cannot have only one end.

What if our human societies behave much like this? What if we need an explanation like string theory, which evolved in order to explain the strong force that binds and holds quarks together? What are our human strings? What is the force that binds us? And on what order do we vibrate? And, if, as string theorists believe, there are many more dimensions to the universe than are apparent to us, what dimensions of human society are we not registering, as observers of it?

As an aside, this is my favorite quote from the article, because I'd love someone to take the word "strings" out and replace it with my name: "Strings seduced many physicists with their mathematical elegance, but they had some problems, like requiring 26 dimensions and a plethora of mysterious particles that did not seem to have anything to do with quarks or the strong force." Yes, she was a lovely girl, but she had some problems, like requiring 26 dimensions...

if you must

do the whole christmas thing, here's a handy list from Alan Abramowitz, over at Donkey Rising:


With the holidays upon us, some of us might wish to be mindful of who we patronize relative to their Election Cycle political donations, as reported by the Center for Responsive Politics.

WITH US:
* Price Club/Costco donated $225K, of which 99% went to democrats;
* Rite Aid, $517K, 60% to democrats;
* Magla Products (Stanley tools, Mr. Clean), $22K, 100% to democrats;
* Warnaco (undergarments), $55K, 73% to democrats;
* Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, $153K, 99% to democrats;
* Estee Lauder, $448K, 95% to democrats;
* Guess ? Inc., $145K, 98% to democrats;
* Calvin Klein, $78K, 100% to democrats;
* Liz Claiborne, Inc., $34K, 97% to democrats;
* Levi Straus, $26K, 97% to democrats;
* Olan Mills, $175K, 99% to democrats.
* Gallo Winery, $337K, 95% to democrats;
* Southern Wine & Spirits, $213K, 73% to democrats;
* Joseph E. Seagrams & Sons (includes beverage business, plus considerable media interests), $2M+, 67% democrats.
* Sonic Corporation, $83K, 98% democrat;
* Triarc Companies (Arby's, T.J. Cinnamon's, Pasta Connections), $112K, 96% Democrats;
* Hyatt Corporation, $187K, 80% to democrats;


AGAINST US:
WalMart, $467K, 97% to republicans;
K-Mart, $524K, 86% to republicans;
Home Depot, $298K, 89% to republicans;
Target, $226K, 70% to republicans;
Circuit City Stores, $261K, 95% to republicans;
3M Co., $281K, 87% to republicans;
Hallmark Cards, $319K, 92% to republicans;
Amway, $391K, 100% republican;
Kohler Co. (plumbing fixtures), $283K, 100% republicans;
B.F. Goodrich (tires), $215K, 97% to republicans;
Proctor & Gamble, $243K, 79% to republicans;
Coors, $174K, 92% to republicans; (also Budweiser - sd)
Brown-Forman Corp. (Southern Comfort, Jack Daniels, Bushmills, Korbel wines - as well as Lennox China, Dansk, Gorham Silver), $644, 80% to republicans;
Pilgrim's Pride Corp. (chicken), $366K, 100% republican;
Outback Steakhouse, $641K, 95% republican;
Tricon Global Restaurants (KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell), $133K, 87% republican;
Brinker International (Maggiano's, Brinker Cafe, Chili's, On the
Border, Macaroni Grill, Crazymel's, Corner Baker, EatZis), $242K, 83% republican;
Waffle House, $279K, 100% republican;
McDonald's Corp., $197K, 86% republican;
Darden Restaurants (Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Smokey Bones, Bahama Breeze), $121K, 89% republican;
Mariott International, $323K, 81% to republicans;
Holiday Inns, $38K, 71% to republicans

Orwell, Part 942

In gutting federal protections for salmon, the Administration claimed that the four (useless) dams on the Snake River are "immutable parts of the landscape." That's right, those immutable, untouchable, ancient 40-year old dams. They have specified that the dams won't be removed even if it means that salmon go extinct. Which they will. They also want to count hatchery raised salmon as part of the population, thus removing salmon from the list of endangered species. These would be the same salmon that have to be injected with red dye in order for their flesh not to appear grey, since that is the color of fish who do not swim in the wild and who live their lives in rancid, pollution-producing pens.

This would all be bad news except for this: last night I was watching the Discovery Channel (now subtitled: God--Investigated!) and many Biblical scholars assured me of the accuracy of the Bible code, which "predicted" (in much the same way we social scientist "predict" things, by looking at them after the fact and concluding that they were inevitable) WWI and WWII, the fall of communism, the assasination of Kennedy, and God Knows what else. The point here is this: the Bible Code says that the Earth will be destroyed in 2012 by a meteor. (It remains unclear whether Jesus comes down immediately before the meteor, or in it's chaotic aftermath, but I guess some things need to remain a Blessed Mystery.)

So now you don't have to worry. Enjoy the next seven years.

at Quaker meeting

in subversive silence
my mind turns to water
and runs full of everyday detrius
picking up and putting down
as it goes along
small whimsies
quick violence
soft hopes
i sit, and soon
my breath sounds to me
like consciousness
flowing over rocked
riverbed of reason.

abstinence only education--sort of like not teaching your kid how to drive, and then handing him the keys

Today the Times reported on a recently released study that found--and I know you'll be shocked, shocked! to hear this--widespread misinformation (or, if you prefer non-Orwellian language, lies) in "abstinence-only" (girls-this-means-you, boys-nudge-nudge-wink-wink) textbooks. Charming little tidbits such as: Condoms fail to prevent HIV 31% of the time. Abortions cause breast cancer. And so on.

Now, this would normally be cause for re-evaluation. However, the philosophy of the Bush Administration is: this doesn't work! Let's do more of it! So, in the usual manner, they have doubled their abstinence only education budget for next year to 170 million dollars. Luckily, that's now only worth about 5 euros in today's money.

and in other news, jesus has quit

luckily, the daily show hasn't.