After talking with tj about how much I enjoy this book, I'm rereading The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Leguin. Sends me on my rant about climate and destiny and language. I'll try to summarize, like I did for him:
Did you know: 1. in the finnish language, there is no future tense. 2. in the finnish language, there is no gender.
So my thinking ran: in cold climates, where the religions tend to be harsh and fatalistic --lots about being helpless before the whims of fate/gods (even the gods being helpless before fate), just as one is helpless before a blizzard-- it doesn't do to get to hipped on the future. You have to be very aware of the present. Also because of cold, gender as an external identifier is not as important on the everyday because you're wrapped up to your eyebrows most of the time, so "he" or "she" doesn't have much meaning unless you're actually in the process of um 'getting down.'
Left Hand.. is set on a very very cold planet, and the way they measure the date is that it is always Year One, with previous years being counted back, and the future counted forward: a year before now, a year after now" etc. No future. AND, people there can switch gender. They are neuter most of the time, unless they go into season (sort of like animals that go into heat), but get this --they can be either male or female, and they can both impregnate and bear, at different times. When I read this I knew ursula was on my train of thought, or I was on hers. Very kool.
Of course what makes it all work is that she is a great writer, with serious insight human systems of understanding. It's a serious book in a lot of ways, but exciting. The woman is no fool (to put it mildly). It's from the p.o.v. of a human sent to Gethen (the planet) to einvite them to join a sort of league of planets, and about how this person deals with the social codes and political situations of the planet and its peoples. Whew, enough of a blurb. Go read it. Oh and teach me some Finnish, please.

10/21Class went well last night. Once again, giving some kind of support for statements I've made based on my sense of the world. A rather Keynsian sense of the world, I'm finding. One of the best things last night was the way the prof talked about Keynes. was describing a bit of him as a person, as a personage: brilliant, energetic, interested in philosophy and economics and ethics, a fan of the arts, and bisexual. Now my prof didn't focus on his sex life or anything, but it was amazing the effect on me it had, when he mentioned that in passing. Sure, some of you might think "what's the relevance? his sex life has nothing to do with his observations of economics" to that i have no answer. those kinds of generalizations are for the biographers and voyeurs (like me) who sometimes want to go there, to explore. It may have relevance after all, but that's a debate in itself. But the moment was bigger than that. It was about the atmosphere, the air we breathe, the assumptions. Because me too, my assumption was that this guy --and most people that historians talk about, especially economists-- was heterosexual. But that assumption has nothing to do with economics either, it has to do with (not) recognizing the reality of the world, which is that all kinds of sexualities abound. And it felt so good to hear an authority-figure accept that, calmly, without fanfare.

10/20. angsty Feeling straange and weepy today. Anxiety, caffeine, lack o sleep. But also inspired by this site. holy moly. Sent me on a flashback to a class I took in college, "Autobiography and Performance." Which became relevant to all my other classes, especially labor history.
tangent/background As my economic history writing is currently blocked, bigtime, and my mind resists being bent into 'thinking like an economist' (as my prof said. but not harshly, indeed self-mockingly, I know what he means, that I have to tolerate what is per for the course in this tortured field), as much as I need to master, or at least walk around in that robot suit. there's something structural going on here. Consciously, I know I need to learn this but do I feel it? no. frustrating. probably has something to do with the weepy achy ness. so hearkening back to one of those times when everything was informing everything else, pulling together, dividing and subdividing but as an entity...
So that class was the best of what I hope for from performance theory. An example: we read Isak Dinesen's short story: "The Blank Page." now a favorite. The story is of a noble family in a castle, on whose walls are enshrined the wedding-night sheets of the daughter of each generation. the telltale stain. At the end of the corridor is a sheet with no stain upon it. this blank page is what disrupts the narrative of the earlier sheets. All assumptions are in disarray: what happened that night? what happened the other nights? shivers=vibrations=resonance=So historians have tended to look at poor folk (if they looked at all), especially peasants, as voiceless, needing interpretation and representation. A blank page , on which they can inscribe their take of the situations. takeover of the situation. (elementary feminist stuff percolating ) the blankness is a voice of its own, the litany/melody/cacophony of questions emanating from it, listen to them. they have something to say (sashay, chante).

And I think that's my problem now, trying to "think like an economist"--to come up with a topic. I'm supposed to formulate a hypothesis, and then do the reading afterwards. But I keep wanting to listen, not lecture, not perform. I'm trying this on for size, but it's like dreams where I try to write my phone number and the pen won't go where I'm pushing. I focus as hard as i can but when i stop and look: unreadable. scrawl. I don't want to try on this phallic power, take up this space, i want to hold it. grrr. i'd rather cut apart something else, something that infuriates me. critical me. Here is my performance: economist.

10/19 Whew. Quite the weekend. A double birthday party for two of my friends. In a loft in Chinatown.. And the suprise for my friends was that The Pressure Cookers played! Our mutual friend/neighbor plays saxophone and flute in this band. They play sweet rocksteady (early ska), with a full horn section. I ahd a blast. I was 5 inches taller than usual (well, 5.5 inches, actually), so when the drunken bikecourier contingent showed up, and even when the wayyy-too-drunk-older-men-whom-nobody -knew appeared, I was feelin pretty mighty. Stayed till 3 and shared a cab home. The only downside was, looking around at the crowd and realizing that I know a hell of a lot of goodlooking folks... but I KNOW them, so they're off limits. They're all my friends or dating my friends or exes of my friends. Sigh.. this scene is too small. I'll just have to wait to I get to England next year and cash in on my foreign exoticism (shudder). Everyone was having ex trauma too. various friends would run up to me. grab my arm and hiss "oh my god, HE's here" or "oh my god SHE's here." And by 2:30 there were two serious heart-to-hearts happening in various nooks around the loft. Meanwhile a particularly drunk boy was standing on the (5th floor) windowsill pissing into the street. the night was fun, but it definitely had its ups and downs.

later on friday: So I have been feeling remiss about not writing about Amartya Sen recieving the Nobel Prize for Economics. It is important. My first thought was, "oh, making up for the total debacle of those two financial/mathematical guys last time" who got it for their financial foolery. I can't remember their names right now, but it was all hedge-fund stuff, and the hedge fund stuff just blew up and those guys look like idiots (rich idiots, but still idiots). If the prize could be taken back, I think they would. So anyway after wandering down the twisted road of financial mumbo-jumbo, the Nobel folks had to make up some serious karma points. Sen focuses on issues of poverty, famine, and development. He is well respected by feminist economists, with a much more balanced view of gender in econ than most. I'll write more later, but I wanted to say that I did see him on the Lehrer News Hour last night, and when the guy asked him how he felt about recieving the Nobel Prize he said that it was a tribute to that area of economics, that deals with poverty and development and the like, and that it made him think of all the people whom he has learned from, his colleagues and his students, and how he wanted to spend more time learning with them now. Such a lovely response. He even credited his students! How many researchers and bigwigs do that?

10/16
Last night, I saw "The Apostle" -written/directed/produced by Robert Duvall. It's a well-done movie, but it made me feel very odd. It was so.....christian. Now, my mother's family was Jewish, my father's was Methodist (from the South, he went to real-southern-baptist summer camp once), but both of'em are the black sheep of the family. I grew up with no talk of jesus or god or yahweh or any kind of religious stuff. My dad meditated, my mom went to Quaker Meeting for a while, but it was pretty quiet, being quaker, and more personal and nature/spirit oriented than bible or mr. christ. The first section of "The Apostle" has the word jesus about 700 times. Segments of revivals, services, meetings, tracing Duvall's character and his charisma as a preacher. There's gospel, hymns, laying-on of hands. In my life, I haven't participated in many group rituals, apart from quaker meetings, which as unritualized as you can get, and the word jesus has very little resonance in my mind. The movie is intense, but very, very alien to me.
What I like about the flick is that it's quite perverse. the way I think Duvall is perverse. Not in a sexual way, but in that he enjoys alienating you, being unsympathetic. Not in a superior way, but like Dostoevsky where your dislike for a character grows and grows, only to be turned by a sudden act that complicates and deepens his motives, but only to feel duped as he character doubles back again into corruption. His character is not likable at all, but charismatic, intense.

Yesterday in the paper I read that they apprehended the guy who they think bombed the Olympics in Atlanta 1996. Eric Rudolph, who has also been charged with bombing an abortion clinic. this takes me back to my feelings after the bombings in Oklahoma. The persistant arab-baiting that went on until whooops, they found out it was right-wing-christian-racist fundamentalists. And for a brief moment, things were very interesting. For the first time I could remember, the big bad guys on the covers of Time, Newsweek, etc, were white men with guns. Let's face it, who causes much of the trouble in the world? White men with guns. It was satisfying to see mainstream media freaking out about the people that I always knew were bad news, rather than some rap artist.
There's a growing hype about terrorism, and it's linked to this bin laden character, to darkness and some kind of fanatacism which arabs are supposed to have a monopoly on. But did he support Eric Rudolph? Tim McVeigh? Fundamentalism is dangerous wherever it comes from. Maybe the prez will start bombing the rural south, the midwest, the michigan militia..but why isn't that likely? Watch out for white guys with guns, I tell you. Oh and one thing that was consistently left out in the hype about all the right-wing extremist groups is that 99% of them are white supremacist groups. they are not just separatists who want the government to leave'm alone, they are racist and violent, they believe in some inherent superiority of whomever they define as "the white race." No wonder this is where the trouble comes from.