Fun to see a concert with my mom and dad. They had never been to that kind of venue before.. for anything. there was a fair amount of mixed-generation stuff, the Bragg fans and the Guthrie fans. Lotsa old lefties. I gotta go home for dinner now but I may ruminate on that scene further..

7/29*teaching rant* Sooo, my frustration with my calc teacher continues. He's lazy. Sure, he lectures for 2 hours a day, but check this: we get our first exam back. "By tomorrow the answers will be available in the library." The man isn't going to go over it in class? He spends the last 5-10 minutes every class picking homework questions on the spot, not having the homework assignments prepared ahead of time. He said most people did okay on the exam; most people got 7 out of ten or so. He doesn't give letter grades, so we don't know if he's scaling it, though he must be for 7/10 to be ok (that's a C non-scaled). The exam was multiple choice, we had to show our work --but he doesn't give partial credit. Because "in the real world, if you get it wrong and the bridge falls over, it doesn't matter that you got it partly right." oh shut up. There is nothing like a timed, closed-book math test in the real world. In the real world, you can look up the equation if you can't remember it. You can ask another engineer.
And THEN today he said that if we get the right answer using different means than what he wants us to use, we STILL get it wrong. excuse me? in the real world it doesn't matter how you got it. you won't take it right by unorthodox means and you won't take it partially... The man is sloppy. He also is making it impossible to figure out what the hell he wants. We have SIX WEEKS for this course. and I'm really mad because I like calculus and he's poisoning it. This reminds me why I quit math in highschool. Nothing to do with my ability or interest. The teaching SUCKS.

On another note: Green as I am with jealousy that melty got to see Billy Childish (who is indeed a fox), I'm going to see another Billly tonight. Although he doesn't quite smoulder with the same energy as mr. childish (hah!), Billy Bragg can bring a tear to my eye. He was invited to set to music the as-yet-unheard later songs of Woody Guthrie. I'm into the protest side of folk music (as opposed to the janglysweet side which tends to drive me up a tree. or into electronic breakbeat mayhem). Billy Bragg is always good for a little honest rage, in the style of the song I quoted yesterday. he also has the best lyrics about relationships. My parents and I are going to see him together. They were into folk (back when folk was punk). They saw Woody Guthrie. My mom saw him when she was young. She remembers going with HER parents to "hootenannies" in union halls and such places, where people got together and sang and danced and made speeches. It was interracial, interrethnic, kids and old people, communists and socialists like my grandparents. Ledbelly played. I only found out about these early stories from my mom a few months ago. I am panting for more. I wonder if she'll recognize any of the songs. Woody Guthrie was such a hard-ass compared to Arlo. not that I know much about Arlo Guthrie but he seemed like the harmless, selfindulgent side of hippedom. The side that dominates nowadays. You can tell Woody Guthrie knew how to fight.
7/28:-later in the day :

7/28:

They said our system wouldn't work
until we killed the surplus off
So now they look at us and say...

Plow the fourth one under,
Plow under, plow under, plow under
Plow under every fourth American boy.

This is what gets me about institutional oppression. It is violence. It needs to be recognized as violence. If you look at death rates for women of certain ages and races, for men of certain ages and races, you notice disproportions. Often big enough that an evolutionary biologist might say "what's killing them off?" My god, what is killing them off? If there's an ecological imbalance that leads to the death of a species or a subspecies, you don't just say "well that's survival of the fittest" you say "oh something changed the rules of survival, skewing them against (or in favor of) certain members of the population." Humans are supposed to be into discovering causes of thing --well, why is it that only boys have opened fire on their classmates, and not girls? Why were a disproportionate number of girls killed? Why are more young black men in prison than in college? and why is prison labor back in full force? What percentage of deaths are due to injuries on the job? Or due to lack of health insurance? The US and South Africa were the only industrialized nations without healthcare for the SAME REASONS: groups whom those in power consider(ed) expendable. More than expendable, fuel and fertilizer to be plowed under. Dammit, what's going on in the human ecology?
And this is what's wrong with so many models-based systems (like economics): you make a model where a large percentage of population is a problem. where equilibrium doesn't require that everybody be living at or above a certain standard. Then those populations "the unemployed," "people on welfare," have to be shuffled and reshuffled around in the existing model, because there are too many of them for the model to allocate things fairly. This isn't a problem with the number of people. Its a problem with the fucking model. But the answer is obvious, if you really believe in that model. plow them under. if those people were all dead, the nobody would have to worry about them and there'd be enough for the rest. Why not just say it? Who don't Gingrich and them just say it? I think the holocaust analogy is vastly overused, and loses its power as a symbol thereby, but still, look at prison labor, and workfare, and the whole goddamn bootstrap mythology, and isn't the same bitter irony of "Arbeit Macht Frei" in full effect? It's not irony actually (another overused word), it is vicious mockery of human endeavor.
7/27 Sunday I went to my parents' house to clean the basement: books and papers mildewing in boxes for 15 years. Dad and I worked for hours. I left dazed and dusty, laden with yellow books, rediscovered clothes, a fan.. but the prize was finding boxes of my father's journals and dream journals. Dated as early as 1961, on Stanford University notepaper, other writings from when he was in the peace corps in Nepal (during the vietnam war). And a huge box of loose paper, poems he wrote. I didn't think I should just dive in but I told him he HAD to give me copies of as many of them as possible. I did walk off with a folder of poems he had submitted to the Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Foundation in 1977. Figure those are public domain already.
I've always known that my dad has written, but he's so quiet, and I haven't seen much of his writing. He's private in the way my family runs it: some things just never got brought up. Not like we were biting our lips all the time. Because I grew up in it, I never thought to ask things: why was it there was almost no alcohol in the house? It wasn't banned, it just didn't happen, so it never occurred to me that that was different from other folks. I learned years later that my grandfather was an alcoholic. Dad has been takingabout 20 pills a day for years, but I didn't think about that much.. or wondered whether other people's parents were like mine. (Being an only child and a loner in grade school probably helped too. Less chance to compare.) I always was awar that my dad wrote in his study, but I can't remember ever asking him if I could read anything he wrote. It was just something he did. Now, seeing the piles of paper in the basement, I get scared. What have I missed about him, not knowing these things? Also excited to see it, but a part of me wishes I had gotten up in his text years ago. These poems open up spaces in him that I knew were there, but never got to see inside. In one poem he talks about having sex with a woman who is not my mother (way before he and my mother were married)... very strange. I already know from photographs that my dad was very handsome, as a young man. Shivery thinking about him traveling like I have traveled: new faces, sexual tension, uncertainty. His poems are conversational, like letters. Some I think are great poems, others I am too involved in to tell. They are voices from different facets of his personality, conversing and arguing and saying hello. I am going to put up one that I am sure he won't mind about.. and wait about the rest. Thinking again about how far he has traveled in his life, from working-class childhood to middle-class youth in Texas, marching band, jazz, poetry and science fiction (when I visit grandma I sleep in his old room with books and a radio he built. drawers full of jacknives and leather tools). Stanford University, california in the sixties, music and protest . Meeting my mother, living in San Francisco. Nepal, teaching english, walking up a mountain through a rain of leeches. Being in the hospital in Kathmandu for malnutrition and exhaustion, diagnosed as typhoid. Letters and tapes across the ocean. Back to a convulsing unhomely homeland, anti-vietnam-war movement (do people nowadays realize the magnitude of that in many people's lives? the danger that was really in the air? I think that about many protest movements...). What a distance, what a way to travel. All my life I've heard stories of my parents' friends, artists, poets, musicians, photographers. My mother was teaching at UMass by the middle of the war in vietnam. This is why I majored in History, because of the way it's composed of people's lives, of stories. In these poems, my father's life unfolds and refigures itself to reveal new surfaces, tender as untouched skin, and scars over old ideals, like the ones I've grown.

Reading la malinchista
's lovely writing today about her grandmother, I have to say it. I think I'm scared and angry because I'm afraid to think about my father's death. (I erased that line three times. I can't stand to see it.) Here are whole new stories and I HAVE to know them right now. Because of the contant unquestioned illness in my father's life especially, I am protective of him. He is still elusive in my life, because his presence is steady and familiar. There aren't many things that we DO together, besides dinner. We go book shopping together. And talk about books. He's into semiotics and I try to get him to explain it to me, or just listen and absorb meaning.

7/21 Tonight I'm going to dance. Contact Improvisation. A danceform that's only about 25 years old. People: shoeless, easyclothed, improvising with giving and taking weight, balance, rolling. following a single point of contact, neck to neck becomes shoulder to waist and weight echange sends one flying airborne, twist into a spin around the shoulders and roll down to the floor to explore a slide and take weight. continuous breath, momentum and sliding. nice thing about it is that you can't have a leader-follower relationship for it to flow... you trade and share roles, play with them and have nobody be in chanrge, and the dance leads. Often done without music, the room fills with thumps and whispers, laughing and breath. Interesting development in movement and community. My relationship to it as a scene is ambivalent. a source of true pleasure, physically: I tend to avoid the social background of the scene. Dancers are a funny bunch. Sometimes much clearer about boundaries than other folks, sometimes much much more fuzzy.

And boundaries are a big issue, of course. This is contact, physical contact, shock of reality, smell, clashing body image signals safety...carrying other people's weight. Trust is implied by the scene, but you can't take it for granted. You do build it over time with dancers as you move with them. There's an etiquette to it. Some still take advantage. I'm pretty confident, physically, so I don't worry that way. But I am always always furious at the folks who remain unaware of their physical presence. Regardless, I need to do contact once a week or so. Comforting physically, to be able to touch other people with trust, and to feel myself strong. If anyone is interested in this dance, there is probably a place to do it, I recommend it on so many levels, as long as you are openeyed. Ok I'm off to go.

7/20 Well I had a luuuvly weekend. Went to the beach with a friend I haven't seen in a while, my roommate and her boyfriend. came home sundrunk, and sat at outdoor tables with a buddy, watching people go in an out of the big indie/rock scene club/bar/restaurant. Two idiots tried to shoplift shots of jagermeister under their frilly babydoll tank tops. Our friend who waits tables had to chase them down. They spent the rest of the night trying to sneak back in through various entrances. Sheesh, some people are just morons. Public ridicule is the only answer. Sunday, brunch with a good friend, her sister and another. Calc homework all afternoon. Saw "North By Northwest" in a theatre full of Hitchcock fans.

I'm working on compiling a bibliography of feminist economics articles and books. When it's finished I'll put it up. When it's finished. Heh.

So calculus, so far, is interesting. It's kinda fun, even. I can really see the relevance to economics. Beyond that, I can see how it's useful in relation to a concept I wrote about in my productivity rant. This is a concept that economics and physicist and chemists use, that really helps unravel a lot of so-called evidence. It's a kind of thinking which can help you figure out the right questions to ask. Marginal value. This may be scary sounding to those of you non-economists, but you probably think like this anyway, at least to some extent. It's just a question about relationships between different factors. If a newspaper says, for instance: "The average american is 10% more productive than twenty years ago." That may sound pretty official, but there are many factors to be unpacked from that statement. If americans are working more hours per week, the overall level of productivity may be higher, but how much is added by each hour of work? You need to know how productive is that LAST hour worked. It may turn out that, per hour, americans are less productive, they're just working more. The value of that LAST hour is the marginal value. Calculus has a lot to do with how you figure it out if you are given certain information. whew. I wonder if that's interesting to anyone. This kind of stuff helps to sift through the inordinate amount of bull that gets thrown at you every day. Except. --and this is a big "except:-- once you've taken apart the data and mooshed the numbers around as much as possible, you're still left with the question of "how was the data obtained?" And this is the biggie. For instance, it may be more useful in the earlier example, to ask: which americans are working more? how do you measure productivity? What about reproduction-- If a mom prepares lunches for three kids, picks them up from school, and cleans the house, is that productive? If a student quits school to get a full-time job to take care of his elderly parent is that production? Is he more productive in school or at the job? Is school production or consumption? hmmmm.. I wonder what people mean by these words anyway?

7/16 While in New York Last weekend, I saw a movie. (I guess I watch an awful lot of movies.. only good ones. tho i haven't seen Mulan yet --sorry malinchista, mimi, melty, and all other m-ladies who love mulan.) Anyway I saw Pi. As in the greek letter you see in geometry and trig all the time. I loved that movie. As the ladies above have said about Mulan, there are definite problems with the flick, when you look at it "objectively." In this case, around gender and in some ways around race. But I can't deny how much I enjoyed it on an emotional/intellectual/physical level. So, criticisms aside: a male, jewish (not religious) mathematician in NYC searches for patterns in the stock market. Because "math is the language of nature" and the stock market behaves as a natural organism, Max believes that there must be a pattern. He runs into some Kabbalistic Jews who are studying the Torah. the believe Hebrew is intensely mathematical. Not only does each letter correspond to a number, but words' meanings are closely linked to their numerical value (there's a great illustration of mother+father=child). SO these Jews are trying to find a pattern in the Torah --numerical, but which will correspond to a single, all-important word. Meanwhile, some Wall st. heavies are trying to recruit Max, so if he succeeds they can rule the stock market. There's more but I won't get into it yet. maybe later, after I've seen it again.
This movie was organized in the way I think, layers of imagery and text, and wide references in this case to mysticism, math, history, neuropsychology, codes and symbols, technology. One of the greatest references was to Archimedes the Greek. This is the guy who was set all kinds of puzzles and had to use his ingenuity and observation of the natural world to solve them. He's mentioned once, but visual references are made to other stories. Most especially this one: Archimedes had to find a way to run a thread through a spiraled seashell. After much thought: he tied a string to a tiny ant, and put some honey at the small end of the spiral. Placed the ant at the larger opening and let the ant wind its way through. Although this story isn't mentioned directly, spirals are a recurring theme visually and verbally. At one point, Max find himself on the seashore and picks up a spiraled seashell. Also, his apartment is plagued by ants, especially his computer. I love that kind of connection! And that tale is so rich with ideas on the relationship of humans to nature and technology and problem-solving...
More generally, I love patterns, echoes, between one discipline and the next. Science and poetry, dance and research, medicine and history. this movie was infused with that openmouthed excitement about correlations that make sense before you even analyze them. I think I hear music. Plus the heady rush of mental connections. I was grinning like an idiot through much of the film. Parts of it are also dark and scary, and it jumps through genres a bit in an amusing way. The soundtrack was perfect as well. not too much music, so it wasn't manipulative, but very clever use of musical themes and styles to express what was going on. Lots of jungle, and more ambient forms of beat music: beat music is so obviously mathematical, and jungle, such an urban product, a product of modern technology, has the most intensely layered beats, the greatest variety of patterns. And yet it is tied so closely to the body, so phsyical, so danceable...wow. correlations continue.

On another note, "Sylvia" in the comics today, reminds us that "the CEO of a top American firm make an average of 209 times the pay of an average manufacturing plant employee. In Japan, CEOs can make only nine times as much as that employee." Just to clarify: there is no restriction in the US as to how much a CEO can make relative to anyone. In Japan, is it mandated by law. Nice to see somebody mentioning that, even if it is on the funnies. It's not too funny, though. When Ben and Jerry still owned Ben&Jerry's, their CEO salary WAS tied to the salary of the lowest paid employee. When they decided to hunt for a new CEO, before even opening the position they eliminated that restriction, saying they wanted to be "competitive." Such bullshit. Competitive for whom? With whom? chances are higher that someone with a better-than-average sense of fairness would have taken the job if they'd left the restriction. Instead any corporate minded greed-monger could cash in. What sellouts, man. It might have been better for their employees if they'd left it, possibly better for the environment (if someone doesn't care about sharing wealth with humans, sharing with the earth might take a back seat too). More than that, it would have opened a tiny window in the huge wall of ideology which says in order to be a business owner who is competitive , you have to be an asshole. This gets into what a business exists for, and you should check out my productivity rant for more of this.