Who Shot Ya?

Saw Mos Def at the Bowl last weekend, and reminded me of Brady's Biggie mention in his last post. Cops is trippin', everyone is trippin'. Mos opened up with a live band (some good cats), and a rambling, syncopated cover of "Stakes is High" that resonated up through the bowl like whispered prophecy. In the middle of the set he got on the piano and rocked a freestyle that culminated in him shouting "Who shot my mans, Suge?" repeating it over and over until the crowd was feelin' it.

So much going on. Just got back from Dallas where stakes is high and you just have to pretend that you're in a foreign country to get through it. However, I thought it would be only fitting to bring along the new Cormac McCarthy novel No Country for Old Men. It's a beautiful, dark little piece of work that polishes pieces of the author's subconscious with his sandpapery border ethos. It feels a bit like Blood Meridian on a noirish Ellroy vibe, but with a belief in some kind of humanity, some kind of hope--especially in its apparent absence--perhaps making you hungry to eat the kind of meals McCarthy describes. Nobody makes you want to eat a biscuit and drink coffee like McCarthy. Perhaps the line that rings in your ears throughout the whole book in various forms is: "I won't tell you you can save yourself because you can't". Ok, so there's alot more to discuss in this book...would love ot hear from anyone who is reading it.

Not to mention re-reading "Leaves of Grass" while I was in Maui...more to come.

Greider on Fogel in the Nation

I def want to see us follow up on JC's post about the Roberts nomination. Problem is, I don't anything about the guy. And I don't think I'm the only one. The American Progress Report arrived in the inbox yesterday morning with the subject line "The Nominee You Know Nothing About."

But for now, I got a UofC reference for you. I've been working through a backlog of Nation issues, so just getting through the cover story of the 27 June '05 issue:

Riding Into the Sunset: It is time for a serious solution to the problem of retirement
security.
William Greider
The Nation (June 27, 2005 issue)

The 2nd half of it repeats the usual sort of progressive complaints about corporate/free-market approaches to these issues. But the interesting part is the first couple sections, which presents an alternative to the CW that aging population and ever-increasing life spans are a "monumental problem." Instead, Greider frames his article with the themes from a recent book by Robert Fogel, "a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago and a septuagenarian himself." Here's Greider's summary of Fogel's thesis:

America, he reminds us, is a very wealthy nation. The expanding longevity is not a financial burden but an enormous and underdeveloped asset. If US per capita income continues to grow at a rate of 1.5 percent a year, the country will have plenty of money to finance comfortable retirements and high-quality healthcare for all citizens, including those at the bottom of the wage ladder. When politicians talk about raising the Social Security retirement age to 70 in order to "save" the system, they are headed backward and against the tide of human aspirations. The average retirement age, Fogel observes, has been falling in recent decades by personal choice and is now around 63. Given proper financing arrangements, he expects the retirement age will eventually fall to as low as 55--allowing everyone to enjoy more leisure years and to explore the many dimensions of "spiritual development" or "self-realization," as John Dewey called it.

"What then is the virtue of increasing spending on retirement and health rather than goods?" Fogel asked in his latest book, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (2000). "It is the virtue of providing consumers in rich countries with what they want most." What people want is time--more time to enjoy life and learning, to focus on the virtuous aspects of one's nature, to pursue social projects free of economic necessity, to engage their curiosity and self-knowledge or their political values. The great inequity in modern life, as Fogel provocatively puts it, is the "maldistribution of spiritual resources," that is, the economic insecurity that prevents people from exploring life's larger questions. Everyone could attain a fair share of liberating security, he asserts, if government undertook strategic interventions in their behalf.

Fogel's strategic interventions are modelled on pension systems such as (specifically) TIAA-CREF, calling for compulsory saving, but would be adminstered by the federal government. And interestingly, Fogel also calls for a progressive redistribution of wealth. Not the kind of thinking one expects to be coming out of the UofC econ dept. Read the piece for more details.

Arun and I were saying a couple weeks ago that it was really silly and stupid of us not to have taken a single econ course at UofC. Intellectual snobbery induced by all those budding I-bankers.

Speaking of UofC economists, I'm hoping to make it to the Commonwealth Club next Thurs for the Levitt and Dubner event. After going back last week to hear one our city Supervisors speak, I decided to splurge on a membership to the CC. Here's one speaker I'm looking forward to: the RZA in a few weeks.

One last link for those of you that stuck with me this far: a live Moodymann mix I got through the 313 list. Moodymann's known as a deep Detroit house head, but this mix starts out with some funk (check out at least the first track, a twisted Prince-like track titled "Freaky Muthaf*cka") and then segues into some live vocal jazz.

London bombings: Richard Clarke, public transit, Ian McEwan

Some thoughts following the London bombings, in brief outline:

• How is it that this hasn't happened earlier, in the US, and to a much more destructive and deadly degree? Related to that, I've been meaning to post this fascinating but horrifying article by Richard Clarke that was the cover story of The Atlanic a few months ago:
  

  Ten Years Later
  "Then the second wave of al-Qaeda attacks hit America." A leading expert on counterterrorism imagines the future history of the war on terror. A frightening picture of a country still at war in 2011
  by Richard A. Clarke
  

  
  There's also an accompanying web-only interview with Clarke:
  

  Fatal Vision
  Richard Clarke talks about his frightening scenario of an America hobbled by terrorism—and what we can do to avoid it
  

  
  My bet is that most of the American public, if we've heard of Clarke at all, think of him as a disgruntled whisteblower. But Johnee was highly recommending Clarke's book last year, calling him an American hero, if I remember correctly. The article above of his impressed me greatly--essential reading, I'd say--and makes me want to pick up the book. (BTW, if you're wondering what Clarke is doing these days, beyond writing and speaking through the media: he's chairman of Good Harbor Consulting.)
  
  
• To what degree are we (or should we be) willing to sacrifice our civil liberties in order to deter attacks like this? I'm thinking in particular systems of surveillance like Britain's CCTV--which makes the state closer to Big Brother, but in this case turned out to be essential to finding the perpetrators. There was a NYT Mag story about CCTV, published one month after 9/11 (not coincidentally, I imagine). Thanks to Google, I found the full text here--on the City Pages site, ironically (CP was my first alterna-weekly, as a teen back in the Twin Cities). That piece ever so briefly cites Bentham, Foucault and their concept of the panopticon.
  
  I was independently obessessing about public transit in the week before the London incident--spurred by the near-BART strike we had up here on July 6. Got much I want to write out on this topic (anyone for a high-speed train between downtown LA to downtown SF, with a 2.5 hour travel time??) For now, I'll just post this Sarah Vowell column from Sat July 9's NYT op-ed page: Our Faith-Based Train Rides".
  
  Well, I'll also put up the SFCityScape link, which I've been digging through in the past couple weeks--fascinating stuff. The plan for a high-speed train from SF to LA is mentioned in passing in an article
  on there about the much-anticipated Transbay Terminal to be built downtown SF: "Now imagine this: Caltrain will keep going past its current southern terminus in Gilroy to Salinas in Monterey County, two hours south of the city. High-speed tracks will have been laid up the Peninsula, alongside Caltrain's, allowing passengers to board a train at downtown L.A.'s Union Station and arrive in the Financial District two-and-a-half hours later — or vice-versa." Got to cite Matt Smith of SFWeekly on this as well--my other main source for SF transit, planning, & development issues. Check this column of his from last summer about the political battle over the development of the Transbay Terminal.
  
  
• Finally, anyone up for reading McEwan's Saturday? We got a copy that Anj's dad left with us last month. Here is McEwan's essay that ran on the NYT op-ed page on Friday July 8: "The Surprise We Expected".



• With any of the NYTimes links above, let me know if you want to read the full text. By now, they've disappeared into the paid archives. But I've been using Yahoo's new MyWeb feature to store local copies of the html pages on their servers.
  
  Similarly for the Atlantic links--the full texts are restricted to subscribers. So if you want to read them, let me know and I'll e-mail the full text to you.
  

Why aren't we writing?

Can't sleep, so here I am doing a post. It's been quiet again up in here. What's the problem? I know the primary problem is that folks are busy--significant others, jobs, kids, etc. I got none of the latter, and am seriously unfocused on what I do have of the 2nd category, which perhaps explains why I find the time to get on here once in a while.

But I'm sure it's not just a lack of time--I know we're all finding time to read random sh*t on the web and watch random sh*t on TV. Maybe it's a lack of desire or ability or self-discipline, to sit down and write out some cogent thoughts. I'm finding that hard to do--to set aside some time and mental space to really write something out. Case in point: I've been wanting to write up something about our trip to Ukraine and Istanbul. Nothing serious or deep or insightful, but just something to communicate and record where we went, what we did, and what we thought of it. But here it is a month and a half later, and I got nothing.

Part of the obstacle is setting the bar too high. With my travel log, I feel like it should be deep and insightful, which stops me from getting started. It may be a similar case with the paucity of posts up here--we feel like we got to have something "official" before we show it to the world, or even to each other (b/c there's not anyone else getting over here, are they?)

But I feel free to put up these stream-of-consiousness rambling posts. Better than nothing--I tell myself.

Another piece of writing I'd been meaning to do and post up here is a "currently reading/recently read" account. Something that we floated over e-mail a couple years ago--if not actually a book club, at least a book bulletin board. I've been maintaining a recently-read list over at my old geocities site. When I'd started the list, I'd even included a few sentences recording my impressions of the book; but that soon puttered out, so all I had was a list of books and dates that I read them. Better than nothing.

Again, I'd been meaning to work in more about what I'm reading into this blog or my other one, but it hasn't happened. It's partly due to the reasons given above--reasons that are personal failings. But it may also be a failure of the format. A blog is what I want--a log that I'll keep on the web--but this linear format we're stuck in here may be holding us back.

With respect to our team effort, maybe what we need is some sort of forum software--an interface and format that allows the back-and-forth that we had, and still occasionally have, over e-mail.

With respect to the idea of a BookLog, I've got a new tool: TiddlyWiki.

Came across the URL a few weeks ago--via del.icio.us, actually, now that I think about it. But I didn't take the time to play with it until today. In fact, I actually worked with it--after playing with it, me and the grad student I'm working with on this model decided we're going to try to collaboratively draft a paper using it.

While putting our outline into a TiddlyWiki, it occured to me that non-linear personal notebook is what I need for a BookLog. So check it out a first draft here.

Just start clicking on the links, which open what are called "tiddlers"--small bits of (hyper)text. Figure out how to close them too, and that's all there is to reading a TiddlyWiki. There's no particular place to start or to end, no particular order--just jump in and around. Just like the web itself.