also watched a movie i'd have to describe as "wierd-ass". "The Swimmer" with Burt Reynolds, midsixties arty madness. It was very long and strange. a basic psychological device stretched and streteched over tons of closeups of reynolds' wizened goldenboy face and slightly sagging muscleman body. I could not feel his pain, so it was mostly pretty funny. Also because the visual cliches have been recycled by ad after ad in the past 30 years, with all the drama nd darkness taken out, of course. weird in that trying really hard but so out there manchurian-candidate kind of way. Or like a triplepadded twilight zone episode. Joan rivers has a nice little cameo. and lots of aged swingin' sixties LA pool parties.

10/16 If you are in New England, rather than merrie olde, I suggest you head to (the link has expired but this is my cohort in crime -t.2000) right quick this Saturday. Unfortunately, due to a large body of water and several time zones, i will be unable to attend. Things are heating up. I've got a paper on the thorny question of Do Peasant Optimise? due next week. 3000 words. yagh. But the reading is interesting and back into this whole concept of rationality I was writing about earlier. To put it another way:
It's actually a dilemma about the concept of rationality. (Jorg no need to comment on this part, it's just rambling background) the way economists use it has to do with a person doing a cost-benefit analysis on something and deciding whether it's worth it to them. institutional economists introduced the idea of *imperfect information and *transaction costs--that people face constraints about decision-making, that they may not have perfect information about their options, and that there are institutions (like contracts and laws protecting them, like standardized measures and like social rules about honesty, or about family) that reduce or affect transaction costs. that along with the cost-benefit analysis is the difficulty of finding out what the costs and benefits are. This makes a lot of sense to me. rather than saying some people do not do this kind of analysis--which to me denies them some agency.
Rationality-the word is so loaded, and so powerful, that i don't know if it's worth it to really discard it, because as soon as you say that this group or that are not economically rationalizing, (even if you only mean it in a strict economic sense), you still are saying that you are limiting the potential of those people to gain power. Do you know what I mean? It's kind of like what we talk about in regard to traditionally feminine and masculine ways of speaking. I don't want to privilege one over the other, but if I want women -or those who use what could be called "feminine" styles of communication-to be able to gain power in society, they have to be conversant with the other style of speaking. Not that they have to be like that, but that it should be an option open to them. And that because of which style is privileged, traditional masculinists are probably not going to do anything but ghettoize the feminine, so what you need is people who can do both, for whom it isn't linked to gender but to the situation, who can make room for both styles.. that was the problem with seeing peasants as behaving in non-optimising ways: It echoes of essentializing them into some Other, unknowable and hard to interact with, and it's very very hard to see them as anything other than an obstacle to even the positive definitions of development -in this case i mean the potential to reduce some hardships, like access to health care, less risk of being destroyed by disease or climate.. (Although i think criticisms of development in terms of the environment and consumption are vital too).

am I making any sense?

10/25 well last weekend ws nowhere as excitingly debauched. Although I did go to a nice dinner party at NYM-and-two-ladies-i-also-met's house. A nice mix of folk, travellers and residents in london. I only knew a few people when i got there so i stayed in the kitchen and talked with NYM and one of his roommates (whom HSC is courting). Some good chemistry there. I felt a little shy in someone's house full of strangers. But some of them were friendly and asked questions and volunteered answers and conversation. And the food, when it finally came out was vegetarian and tasty. And then HSC and several other folk showed up who i know from the cafe (where I got a job on weds. and fris.) and it all became much jollier. And they live near me so the trek home was brief and painless. no nightbus vomitorium either, and i blew kisses from the top of the bus at dinnerfolk walking to THAT week's squatparty, and only NYM was looking.

So yeah, I'm back to cafe work. it's not hard, but it's hectic.more stories later cuz my wrist is doing funny things..

10/19 To continue the story of Saturday night.. me HSC were to meet at NYM's work, a cafe, as he was leaving. Once there, gotta cuppa joe and NYM came and sat with me. Talked, with one eye on the door. This evening was made possible by mobile technology. After half an hour, NYM called HSC's mobile and we planned to all converge on a bar round the way. Collecting another person, we headed to the bar, an upstairs, darkyellow-walled, blackbeamed smoky room full of people talking over sinatra, arab music, anything really. More folk descended on us (including my future morning companion), conversation ebbed and flowed, i coughed and chewed gum discreetly. Finally at longlast, HSC arrived, and we all headed to the patry.

ten of us, walking down London streets at maybe 1am or so? tending to be in threes, or sometimes twos, fastwalkers in front, the distracted at the back, NYM running messages from group to group. As we near the street the party is on, we see a cluster of four cops and a car blocking the road. hmm.. then we notice across the street four more cops and another car. walking slower now, we see the squat, five stories, graffitti'd, windows open and head yelling out them, a crowd in front, and people in ones, twos and threes, standing across the street and here and there. more cops. Then down ahead of us we see a parking lot with at least 30 cops, 4 vans, and some riot gear. has something happened? is something about to happen? cops are walking by us in twos, some with shields, or bulletproofs, osme not. They won't meet our eyes. they don't seem excited. We stand uncertainly across the street. walk past teh building, stand some more. somehow, half the group has gone. maybe they went inside? We wait. nothing seems to be happening. So we decide to try to go in. As we get to where the entryway is, I see it's an alley with three bug vans (belonging to the soudnsystems probably) parked crosswise so that infront of the door there's a tightpacked crowd squeezed in, with only singlefile ways to get to it, you have to slide sideways, pressed by the sides of the vans. This may be what's preventing a police raid. they simply physically can't get in, with their shields and vests etc. Their indecision may be whetehr it's worth it to really bust in, which'd require moving the vans, at which many would resist. This would be ugly and violent and attract a ton of hostility from the windows above as well as bad press... anyway we finally press to the front and squeeze inside. when I look out a few hours later the streets are bare of cops and lights. not worth the trouble I guess.

On the ground floor is the Scallywag (i think) sound system, reggae, dancehall, dnb and jungle. up and up the dealer-lined stairs, throuhg rooms without light, graffitti, and occasional other osundsystems. Up to the 5thfloor attic, which rumbles with hard techno and crowds of sweaty people, some dancers, some standing and bobbing heads or shoulders, some spacing out, or kissing or whatehaveyou. I hear Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and English of all varieties. It's a bit of a sensory overload. By the end, I am back on the ground floor, chilling to the reggae and dancing to the jungle, and talking with my friend who wants to go to brick lane too, in the later morning. We leave around 8am, HSC, his date(kinda i think), and my morning companion. Got coffee and sweets at a cafe on the way, then spent a slightly delirious morning walking through Brick Lane's avalanches of junk and toys and furniture and stuff, eating candy and squinting in the sun. He ws looking for a super8 projector and me for a used bike. I found one and bought it: it's named hercules, dark red, one-speed (with freewheel), brakes okay, chain okay, the only problem is the frame is slighly too big. hope I can navigate crazy streets. Now I just need a lock.

10/18 yawn yawn yawnnnn. Friday after class couldn't reach anyone by phone and I was too cranky to commute for an hour in rushhour London traffic (thanks for the concern, y'all, re: the paddington train crash. the other side of town and I rarely take that line). So I headed to the local cafe for a coffee and the hopes of running into someone. And I did indeed. My highschool connection was there, with some other folks I met. it turns out he also has a friend who goes to my school (undergrad, though), a german with blonde dreads. go figure. There aren't many dreads at this school, but of course that's who HSC (highschool connection) knows. So we all chatted, then stood around sucking up cheapo chinese food from msg-drenched little plactic buckets. At this point there were five or six of us, enough for some serious indecision about what to do next. I just waited for options to appear, and we split up, Me and HSC and another nice young man headed to HSC's house to listen to music and maybe watch a movie. We all flopped on the bed when we got there, and HSC (who's life parallels mine in too many ways) played jungle and dnb and indian music and other stuff while NYM recorded it on his minidisk player recorder. much talk on various things. Met HSC's roommate, with curls of steam-bent wood nested in his handsesign project for school. Learned that NYM was a psychology major for undergrad. I noted a strange reaction in myself. People I've known who went to study psych often did so because they had no idead how to relate to people, had great trouble in social situations. or they wanted some kind of blueprint for 'figuring people out', or a method for manipulate people, get them to do what you want. I found myself oddly wary, a touch suspicious of NYM, although we otherwise had a great vibe. Every now and again I would think "is this nice vibe engineered? did he say that because he knew I'd like to hear that?" I didn't expect to react like that. very odd.

A nice calm evening. Headed home on a bus which was not technically a "night bus" (being before midnight), but had a quintessential nightbussy experience. One the top level (twostory buses very common here) a blind-drunk guy trying to sleep by resting his head on the seatback of the seat in front of him. every now and then he'd try to rest his head on his outstretched right elbow, but since it was resting on air, he'd start to fall sideways and return to the seatback in front. He stayed quiet except for forgetting about the not-resting-arm-on-the-air thing for most of the way, but about five minutes before my stop a noise jarred me out of my evedream. He was throwing up, without moving, between his feet, head still resting his head on the seatback in front. The bus behind him evaporated. His little world of misery retreated as I headed down the stairs, as the bus pulled away. I know that's gross, but the image uinfortunately stayed with me.

Saturday I stayed out all night at a lunatic squatparty --four floors, four soundsystems, easily several hundred people-- with HSC and three NYM's (including the psych guy) and had a lovely morning with another nym at Brick Lane. I'll describe that later cuz I gotta go to class.

10/15 Okay so the midweek is a little hectic. I just finished writing a 500 word commentary on a question regarding Southeast Asian Economic Development. The untold story is that about a third of the work isn't doing the reading, it's finding the reading. the library here is in a temporarybuilding (only for the year that I'm here, of course) and it's a shambles. the computer system of holds and renewals doesn't work reliably, books are unavailable or there's only one copy of a required text for the whole class, blahblahblah. And the library isalament configuration of colossal proportions. There are nine stairways, which only go from SOME floors to SOME floors, some rooms on a floor are cul-de-sacs, so you have to go all the way back to the entrance to get to another room, or in one case a stairway takes you down into ONE part of the basement, but there are other rooms in the other part, acessible by a diffrent stairway. grrr. But the up side is reading James Scott (Moral Economy of the Peasant and Weapons of the Weak's good writing on fascinating subjects. He's an anthropologist/historian and his books (especially the second I mention) are really useful for understanding why poor people make the decisions they do. He's proposing ways to understand behavior as rational, which, if we keep too many assumption from our own situations in front, we might see as not rational. Right on!

On that note, I'm wavering about the whole use of the word rational. As in 'Rational Behavior.' I think I like the idea that there are different kinds of rationalities, rather than that there are some folk who behave rationally and others who have other modes of decision-making (mystical, for example). It's partly because there is such a value-judgment in the world rational, I don't want people to think it's about good/intelligent/articulate reasoning vs. bad/inarticulate/emotional reasoning. There's a tendency to discuss peoples whose language we don't know as inarticulate. This is misleading. One has to learn HOW they articulate what they mean. A great deal can be learned if we assume that people behaving in a 'non-rational' manner, have their own reasons for doing so, does this imply that we are assuming rationality? What other word could bestow such a halo on their actions?

For some economists, rational behavior implies that there are certain factors one does NOT take into account, that are not relevant. J. Scott's example: peasants live on the very edge of subsistence. They do not have leeway in which to take many risks, so they are extremelay wary of much innovation, because they cannot afford the possibility of failure. Their behavior could be characterized as risk-minimizing rather than profit-maximising. Many economists consider profit-maximising to be part of the definition of rational behavior. So are these peasants behaving as rational economic actors?

10/13 Some errata: In an earlier entry below I mixed up the tables of data from the World Bank and from the UN, both were tables of statistics relating to development which we looked at in a class last year. Both are really interesting.

more later