MeghanIsMe

It turns out that Meredith Russo, the author of the first book I've ever read with a transgender main character, that I read out loud to my partner as I shared the deep personal thoughts it brought to mind, and that I cried over numerous times because of the intense feelings of validation, understanding, and more, is quite likely guilty of domestic abuse against her wife.

Terrible people can create wonderful art. This has been true since the dawn of our species, I'm sure, and it will never get any easier to come to terms with.

I finished reading the architecture book and grabbed another one on the way out the door from the stack of interesting stuff that I took home during weeding. I read the introduction of Thomas Gieryn's "Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line" on the train and concluded that I can't read it right now.

This is the kind of book that was deeply important to me in my academic path. Why do people think about science the way they do? What makes it credible, or incredible, to people? How do the socially constructed elements of science affect/effect belief and, at least as importantly, policy?

But I think reading this right now is just going to make me angry and sad. I'm not up to dealing with that yet. I'm glad that I'm reading again, but maybe I should stay around the shallows for a while before jumping into the deep end of epistemology and trying to understand how people form beliefs about things that are important to me and that so many people are just wrong about.

Reading things like this hurts for numerous reasons.

So next is going to be Mario Salvadori's "Why Buildings Stand Up: the Strength of Architecture" (As well as Matthys Levy's "Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail"). I think that will be a good next step from Edward Allen on my way toward getting back to Condit's book. I'm gonna order them today!

I ate a bug on my ride home yesterday. Yuck! Ick ick! I could feel it in my throat for eight miles or so until I got home and had some yogurt. My back is still aggravated; it's fine when riding (though it hurts a little when I stop and put my foot down to stand up) but is sore while working. Bodies could really be a bit better constructed, you know?

I finally made a doctor appointment. I tried a few weeks ago, but the request interface offers you the choice of whether you prefer email or phone, and I always check email and they always call me. I don't answer my phone if I can avoid it, so the appointment doesn't get made. I managed to get setup with the online patient portal and made an appointment for tomorrow without having to use the phone.

I want to talk about beta-blockers as-needed for social anxiety, physical therapy or some other kind of treatment for my wrist pain (since the MRI showed nothing), and get a referral to a psychiatrist since the one I was seeing has moved away.

I'm going to a talk at work today about the history of the LGBT movement. That should be interesting and it includes lunch!

I was talking to a coworker a while back about Erving Goffman's Presentation of the Self in Every Day Life and how I wish I'd had a copy when I was a kid to help me understand how social interaction works. Today, I found a copy in a pile of books that someone left in the library, along with a couple of our discards that someone had apparently grabbed and then set down somewhere. If no one claims them, I'll take it home; it would be nice to have a copy to reference, especially if I ever have kids of my own.

I ordered a couple of books to read. Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built sounds fascinating; just the sort of thing I've thought about for a long time and enjoy exploring through photography of repurposed buildings. First (because it arrived first), I'm reading A Burglar's Guide to the City. A friend on Facebook recommeded it and it was a near instant buy. It's about the different ways people relate to space from different perspectives, and how cities shape and are shaped by crime.

I'm considering going back to looking at Facebook with a strick once-per-day limit. Being away has been beneficial, I think.

It's Sunday afternoon and back to the horrifying reality of endless lines of angry library patrons!

Actually, I've checked in one book from the overnight drop and put money on a printing card for one patron since getting here an hour ago. Other than that, things are about as relaxed as can be. I've *so* needed a job that doesn't stress me. I feel like I am good at, or will soon be good at, all the tasks involved, and I have time to myself for reading or studying if I start school again.

Getting here on Sunday is a little weird because not all CTA L lines are running. Instead I took Metra to downtown Chicago and biked the two miles to the library. A short ride in the morning and a long one home in the evening make me happy. I'm not even stressed that I'll be home at 10:30 or so and up again at 5 to work opening shift on Monday.

And I read a book over Wednesday and Thursday. I read voraciously most of my life, but I hadn't read a book since leaving grad school. Trying to sit and read gave me anxiety; I felt like I had to tear through it as fast as possible. But on the commute, I was able to relax and read "Freakonomics". I've heard the radio show on the way home from the shelter on Thursdays, and I'd picke dup the book at a thrift store because the interviews and discussions were so interesting.

I liked it a lot. Levitt has some really interesting insights. Of course, it's all quantitative and speculative. Very insightful speculation on quantitative data, but still speculation. I'd like to see some qualitative work based on some of his hypotheses.

Anyway, today I'm staring on Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." It's not as popular-audience oriented as "Freakonomics," but it's not a thousand-page door stop either. If the whole book comes down to 'sometimes you break your scientific paradigm and have to build a new one', it at least won't take me more than three or four hours to find out.

As I noted earlier to Danae, it also doesn't help one get through one's readings more efficiently when said readings actively inspire anger at your government. Jill Nicholson-Crotty and Sean Nicholson-Crotty make a good case that US states with more negative social perception of inmates have lower funding for inmate health programs and have statistically significantly higher rates of diseases like HIV and tuberculosis in prisons. It seems that certain units of government, influenced by public perception that inmates are not worthy of care, fail to adequately fund healthcare for a population that is already significantly marginalized, often outside of prison as well as in it.

This is not surprising, sadly, but it is indefensible. And it suggests that our (that is, the United States' public's in general, not ours like yours and mine specifically) belief that prisoners are undeserving of basic levels of care may lead to prisoners failing to receive basic levels of care. So yay democracy, huh? I'm sure private, for-profit prisons will address this issue somehow (he says, rolling his eyes).

My computer has been randomly disconnecting from the internet. And just now, I realized that the clock on the computer was four hours slow. Surprise! It's eleven o' clock, not seven. No wonder I'm tired. And here I thought I still had time to finish reading, play some games, and talk to Miriam online....

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"When it comes to politics, noted Schattschneider more
than fifty years ago, “an amazingly large number of people
do not seem to know very much about what is going on.”

Oh, how true that is!

I'm really looking forward to reading E. E. Schattschneider's "The Semisovereign People." I ordered it today for my poli-sci class. It contains another phrase, one that I'd heard before but didn't know the origin of:

"The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent."

I've been reading James Scott's "Seeing Like a State", partly on the suggestion of my undergrad advisor. It, or at least the first two chapters of it, are an overview of how modernist principles of control (largely in the interests of efficient extraction of value, whether from productive resources like forests or from citizenry in the form of monetary value) are applied by the state.

Scott's discussion of the creation of maps as a way to exert control, while not new to me by any means, is interesting to contextualize with my experience with maps while working at the archives at UW-Parkside. There are occasional irregularities in those maps; farms that existed before the original cadastral survey by Hathaway in the late 1830s, or entries in 19th century tax rolls that listed parcel owners as "unknown", yet still showed paid taxes. I see these as hiccups resulting from the early stages of the implementation of this new form of land-tenure. In North America though, it was much easier since the creators of the system were in a position of power that let them simply ignore, and in fact, negate, existing local understandings of land use. ("Clearly this land belongs to us by right of development; the locals [who were in fact managing the land in complex ways] aren't doing anything with it."

Reading Scott has also helped me be more conscious of the idea of maps as analogous to varying theoretical perspectives. Maps, like perspectives, are created to address a particular issue, to form a particular kind of understanding, or to advance a particular agenda. They are useful for understanding a particular set of things for a particular purpose, or even for creating a particular reality. But they are only one approach; multiple approaches much be synthesized to move toward something like a full understanding of an issue. I'm so glad that GIS makes this so much easier than it once was! Still, maps are only as good as the data being analyzed and the creativity of the cartographer. I think you have to be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that the data you're working with is all of the data. It never is. If you're careful, it can be enough to be useful, and that's about the best you can hope for.

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Looking at the steps taken by nation-states to impose order makes me think of the same kind of actions taken on both large, international scales, and on small scales such as on the factory floor. Using a language of 'legibility,' Scott argues that the state needs to make its entire territory equally legible. That is, the state must impose a common 'language' of policy and procedure on systems like land tenure, resource valuation, taxation, weights and measures, and so on. Otherwise, the state is unable to extract value from its populace in the most efficient way. Relatedly, 'illegible' systems -local land use practices, local variances in measuring units, confusing systems of non-rectilinear streets- have been a source of resistance to state power.

On a small scale, this takes the form of high modernist attempts to scientifically regulate the practice of workers. Each worker must do the same job in exactly the same way to make the best use of company time. Workers are dehumanized, made into pieces of machinery. This increases production of course, but at the cost of significant quality of life. I would argue that productivity is high enough that this kind of regulation is not ethical; it is not justifiable.

Does that observation extend to the state level? Is it ethical to impose a universal system of land tenure, as has been done to Native Americans or First Nations people in North America, or to the people of formerly colonial nations in Africa or Southeast Asia? What about to a state's own people, as Scott explains was done in France and other European nations during the Enlightenment? And if it is not ethical, how would it be reversed? In the modern era, we've entered a multi-national scale that all states are essentially being forced into participating in. Can a nation remain a viable entity without imposing external standards onto its people? The US has managed to do so with it's tenacious grip on the imperial system, but nearly every other country on Earth has fallen into line with metric.

That's largely a good thing, isn't it? It's a reasonable system that makes trade more efficient and prevents disastrous errors like the Hubble telescope lens. Have we lost anything due to this global standardization? Is it anything like what we lose as languages become extinct? Does it result in less capacity for resistance to externally imposed control like the practices engaged in by the World Bank or the IMF? Certainly abolition of local land-use systems in favor of Western-style ownership of land parcels has resulted in significant land alienation for many people who are victimized by these internationally-legible practices that, to people familiar with local practice, are completely unintelligible.

Though he hasn't discussed this directly in the first one and a half chapters, Scott's writing is making me think about arguments for and against this kind of modernist standardization. I think there's an argument to be made on the scale of a factory that increasingly highly articulated structures of control result in increasing dehumanization of workers. People deserve a certain level of autonomy over their time. Time to take a short break, or chat with a co-worker for instance. The system needs to provide an area that, perhaps paradoxically, exists outside the system. Can this be done on a national or international scale? Are nations locked into a system of control that they can't get out of? And if so, would it even be beneficial to get out of it? Beneficial for whom?

I talked with Danae about those concepts in the kind of wonderful conversation I'm really going to miss having with her on a regular basis. I said that I see an anarchist argument proceeding from these observations. Increasingly articulated control structures become increasingly oppressive. She countered with the idea that a socialist state would still want to have generally the same kind of deep information that Scott is discussing, and that modern capitalist states are compiling. They would just use it differently.

That makes sense to me. But socialist states can be just as dangerous and dehumanizing as capitalist ones; we have a few examples of that to look at. Economically, I believe capitalism is a critically flawed system in terms of our obligation to pursue quality of life for all people. I think much more socialist economic policy would begin to address some of the problems that exist. But aside from capitalism versus socialism, there's another axis here I think, of highly articulated forms of control versus a more laissez-faire approach that allows regional and local autonomy. On that front, I don't really know where a good balance is.

I finished reading "Rebel Cities." I guess I was hoping for a sort of direct plan of action for creating resistance to neoliberal trends in an urban context. It's not really that, at least partly because, as Harvey notes, there's isn't a simple plan.

Discussion of the tension between cities as fungible commodities vs cities as unique sites with unique resources was interesting. He discusses the the way "monopoly rent" (that is, rent or value related to uniqueness) is important to capitalist practice, and that cities are being positioned (or positioning themselves) as sites of authenticity and uniqueness in order to be attractive. But when authenticity is commodified, it undermines itself. These sorts of cracks, he says, are where anti-capitalist resistance can make room for itself.

His discussion of the need for activists on the left to look beyond horizontal, non-hierarchical organization is really interesting stuff too. I'm someone who tends to romanticize the structure of groups like Food Not Bombs or Occupy Wall Street, or even the Rainbow Family of Living Light; groups that are radically democratic and without a power structure. But of course, all groups have power structures, whether explicit and formal or implicit and informal. And without a formalized structure of power, organization fails beyond a local scale.

Harvey looks at a couple of case studies demonstrating some of his points. His mentions of the Zapatista autonomous zone was interesting to me. The fact that I've been to Chiapas, talked with some of the Zapatista compañeras and compañeros, and seen (in a very superficial way) the working of a couple of Zapatista communities helped contextualize Harvey's observations. I think I should write an email to the professor who organized that trip and tell her how much I feel I've learned from it in some very indirect ways. Anyway, Harvey points out the problems of trying to interact with the external capitalist world when, as a group, you have rejected all capitalist structure. It was a point I wondered about while in Chiapas and afterward. How can you be truly independent and autonomous while still being enmeshed in larger infrastructural systems of economy, electricity, petroleum products, and more? These things are complicated, but I feel like creating an autonomous zone can't be a permanent solution. It needs to go somewhere from there, and I'm not sure where.

Rebel Cities had a lot to say both about cities specifically, and about neoliberal economics and politics in general. It wasn't quite what I was expecting. It was worthwhile reading, but left me with more questions than answers.

Well, next I'm going to read Keller Easterling's "Extrastatecraft."

A discussion of William Jennings Bryan and the cross of gold speech elsewhere on Facebook makes me think, tangentially, of the book I'm reading now, David Harvey's "Rebel Cities."

Harvey is a leftist geographer at CUNY. Rebel Cities is a look at the place of cities within the global economy through a Marxist lens. They are, he argues, places where the creative destruction of the built environment is a sink for surplus value extracted from labor. That they have served this function, at increasing scales, essentially since the rise of capitalist economies. He uses Haussman's reconstruction of Paris as an example, which is really interesting to me because I just read Robert Fishman's "Bourgeoise Utopias," wherein he devotes an entire chapter to exploring Haussman's Paris as a counter-suburban example but doesn't talk at all about its role in the French national economy of the time. (Which makes sense, as that's not really his point; he's writing a social history of suburbanization.)

But anyway, the long and short of it is that I feel the same way about reading Harvey as I did learning about William Jennings Bryan and the Populist movement of the late 19th century and the contention over the gold and silver standards in the United States. There's more economy here than I feel comfortable with. I wish I knew more about economics. I actually kind of wish I had murstein here with me to have a mini-book club with. *grins*

Maybe I need to read some good Economics 101-type stuff over the summer. Any suggestions?

Question for you. When speaking of the varieties of ways in which a group of people tend to commute: would you say something about a variety of "transportation modalities", or is that just a grandiose way of saying transportation "modes" with no additional, worthwhile content?

When would you use modality as opposed to mode? Or is it a case like utilize vs use where, except in some highly specific situations, there isn't really a good reason to use the former?

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I wrote some of a draft paper and want to take a break before bed. I think I'm going to read something before getting sleepy. But I can't decide what. I kind of want to start on Robert Caro's "The Power Broker," which is a biography of Robert Moses concentrating on his role in New York City development. The back jacket has quotes like one from journalist David Halberstam saying "Surely the greatest book ever written about a city." (Makes me wonder whether he's read William Cronon's "Nature's Metropolis," but as a Chicago person, I may be biased.)

But this thing is a doorstop! 1162 pages, not counting end notes! I don't know if I can even hold this thing comfortably in bed! And maybe I'd want a computer running Google Earth next to me to consult while reading.

Maybe I'll go for the comparatively bite-sized "The City in Time and Space" by anthropologist Aidan Southall instead. It's 'only' about 400 pages. And it's a book about cities from pre-history to the present written by someone who's area of expertise is Africa. One can hope that will mean his text isn't euro-centric.

Geez. Maybe I need to look up some academic book reviews before I dig into things like this. And that's probably too much work to just decide on some pleasure reading before bed. I have an Ursula LeGuin paperback over there I haven't read yet....