“Better than the assent of the crowd: The dissent of one brave man!” - —Sima Qian (145–90 BC)Records of the Grand Historian

Haiti & History: Currently reading History, Historians, and Development Policy, and finding a need to refresh my knowledge of colonial/post-colonial isms.

“This scheme is an outcome of extreme starvation at an age when I knew only to cry when I was hungry. But for the munificence of a woman next door who extended a bowl of rice gruel to us and saved us from the cruel hand of death, we would have departed this world long ago. Such merciful women folk, having great faith in me, elected me as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. To wipe the tears of these women I have taken up this project…” - film-star-turned-Chief-Minister, M.G. Ramachandran, 1982 introducing the guarantee of one meal a day to children in government aided schools.

Schumpeter - Standing for Convictions in a Democracy: He seems to be involved in everything I’ve been reading lately, and I’m intrigued enough to give it a whirl.

Two years ago I was soaked to the bone, seated in the back of a church pulsating with West African hymns. - I spent last year pacing in the Istanbul airport, moving from Rome to Delhi, anticipating a family reunion overdue. - This year I’m at home, but alone again, with a 23 year old bottle of rum, a stack of ungraded finals, and basketball.

“Those who give food give life to living beings who cannot live without water. Food is first for all living things, made of food, and because food is but soil and water mingled together, those who bring water into fields create living beings and life in this world.” - Purananuru, No. 18, lines 18-23 - As part of my winter reading, I came across these lines from a Tamil poet to a Pandya king in the first century CE. A good introduction.

The Shop on Main Street: thinking about Havel, re-watching this film.

What Work Is, Philip Levine: On this dim winter morning, over-caffeinated and under-fed, staring at World Bank graphs and labor demand functions, I thought of Levine.

“Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.” - Joyce, Ulysses

back to school, back to work, can this go on forever?

It amuses me that I’ve found this book now, considering the Gen. unwittingly named me this when we met in August. However I’m amazed at how fresh this work remains after six centuries. - The mind’s a shortchanging Huckster with a crafty Wife and five Scoundrel children. It won’t change it’s ways. - The mind’s a knot, says Kabir, Not easy to untie.

“Our democratic forms of government offer a periodical chance at election time to check and change political administrations. But there is no practical way on earth to regulate the economic oligarchy of autocratic, self-constituted and self-perpetuating groups. With all their resources of interlocking directors, interlocking bankers and interlocking lawyers, with all their power to hire thousands of employees and service workers throughout the country, with all their power to give or withhold millions of dollars worth of business, with all their power to contribute to campaign funds, they are as dangerous a menace to political as they are to economic freedom.” - Robert Jackson, Assistant US Attorney General, 1937

“In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd ; Petals on a wet, black bough.” - Ezra Pound, who I thought of today en route home, realizing that the world still exists.

Feast Day: In my youth, in the days whenWe awaited the feast day with impatience, afterwardsI would lie awake filled with sorrow,And late at night I’d hear singing on the road,Decaying in the distance, bit by bit,But penetrating my heart just the same.

Fall Music: In a haze, lying in my sun porch, staring out at the few leaves left on an old chestnut oak.

The Post-MDG World: I normally am loathe to post news-ie type deals, but he gives a shout out to IR, and I like the way this made me think.

Plato - The Origins of Democracy: My new and old worlds collide.

“I would drink water straight from the stream. Playing among the arrowroot leaves I tried in vain to pick up the strands of frogs’ eggs, believing they were beads. But every time I put my little fingers under them they would break. Later, I saw thousands of tadpoles: black, energetic and wriggling through the clear water against the background of the brown earth. This is the world I inherited from my parents.” - the late W. Maathai - Nobel Acceptance Speech

Knee-deep in realist, constructivist, and other such -ist theory, I haven’t had much time to reflect on the sea change that has occurred the past month. It’s hard to put thoughts to paper in a coherent way, so for now I’ll leave it to the professionals (i.e. Mohamed Choukri) - An unpleasant looking man arrived, carrying some papers. He must have been the maths teacher. The headmaster asked him to take me and give me the arithmetic test. The day of judgement had arrived! I followed him to an empty classroom. He gave me a piece of chalk and dictated a list of numbers which I was supposed to write on the blackboard. The trouble was, I didn’t know how to write numbers with zero in the middle. I just about managed to fake it, though. -

Discovering the Caedmon Poetry collection CD’s in a closet of mine a few weeks back was like meeting an old friend, and the subsequent nights spent with them have been filled with an internal Rohmer-esque dialogue between myself and the work of Auden, William Carlos Williams, Philip Levine, and a few others. Of course I realize how pedantic this all sounds, but isn’t that what grad school is for? - Here is a Jersey native. - Landscape With The Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams According to Brueghel  when Icarus fell  it was spring    a farmer was ploughing  his field  the whole pageantry    of the year was  awake tingling  near    the edge of the sea  concerned  with itself    sweating in the sun  that melted  the wings’ wax    unsignificantly  off the coast  there was    a splash quite unnoticed  this was  Icarus drowning

Buffett on Rose: For all of you that think Buffett is a demi-god, this will not change your opinion one bit. Incidentally, while I don’t watch tv shows with regularity, I have a Charlie Rose show addiction.

Day two of the grad school experiment finds me willingly adhering to stereotypes - ate leftover thai food and some sort of terrible non-dairy milk beverage with granola (because it was there, and I had no desire to leave the house), drank copious amounts of coffee, and read until the lines blurred together. - Regarding the title, I wasn’t aware until today that my interest in place names in fact has a name - toponymy. My former residence was named Azrou, as many of you may know. It can mean ‘big rock’ in Tamazight. The neighborhood I’m currently in is called East Rock, which is somehow appropriate. Prior to Azrou I was in Skoura, which is a type of pigeon, depending on who you ask - and it was located on the side of the mountain called Tichoukt, which I’ve been told at some point meant ram’s horns. Amazigh peoples are pretty creative with their toponymy. - My brother and I used to play “Country, City, State” on road trips - we would go to the back of our National Geographic World Atlas and memorize the best looking flags (I was partial to Sri Lanka) and capitals (Madagascar) - and we would try valiantly (though generally fruitlessly) to find Carmen Sandiego in time. What a beautiful way for curiosity and the initial stages of scholarship to manifest themselves. I think this is called Nostalgia.

“I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade” - from September 1, 1939 - W.H. Auden

Morocco's Maternal Mortality Miracle: Thinking back to the few times i rolled into my local sbitar, I’d be interested to know how exactly this data was retrieved, (specifically in the bled), and what the incentives/pressures were to submit good numbers, but this is still a good thing.

Georgia Peaches, Not So Sweet: Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood. - A. Pope

UN Women Justice Report: Big goings on in the ever busy world of ‘reports’.

Turturro's "Passione": I have yet to see a movie in a theater since returning - and listening to a segment on NPR today bemoaning the 28 or so sequels infiltrating major theaters this summer got me thinking of all the good films I’d like to see. This review is especially effusive in it’s praise, and I have to admit that for a second I thought Turturro was the guy that played Egon (Harold Ramis) in Ghostbusters. 

I’ve recently been wading into the ocean of information out there about food prices - specifically how and why some say speculators are to blame for the current crisis and general volatility. It’s been a sisyphean task mostly, even with the advantage I have of concurrently studying macro. In the words of my 7th grade earth-science teacher, it is about clear as mud. Here are some of the more useful links I have gathered, if you have the time and/or interest to go for a dip. - http://bit.ly/jf5huO - “How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis” - Foreign Policy http://bit.ly/jOUAiC - “What’s Pushing Up Food Prices” - Guardian UK http://bit.ly/lEiz2a - “Can Food Prices Be Stabilized?” - Project Syndicate http://bit.ly/j2TUik - “World Bank Offers Farmers Money to Hedge…” - Guardian UK

“Consider a small medieval town. Out of the many economic activities that take place, one of the most important is raising sheep…” - One of the few instances of my economics book making me laugh out loud. Of course not being able to keep this to myself I brought it up with my professor who, much to my horror, felt it was a good “real-world” teaching moment and asked me to talk about in class the next day. - So this morning, in the flagrantly formal clothes I’ve begun wearing to differentiate myself from these glassy eyed youths, I spoke about the tragedy of the commons, the command & control / market incentive policies that all went wrong, and all various related ecological and economic calamities associated. Yawn.

Wall Street Shenanigans, Bollywood Style: “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud.”

Guardian List: Top Nonfiction: A lot of obvious choices here, and I generally loathe lists, but some of the books I had not heard of I will gladly investigate for addition to the vault.

Naoroji - Poverty and un-British rule in India: The e-book world was still in it’s infancy when I left for Morocco. Though by no means my preferred medium of reading anything, it is glorious that this and a few other such books are available at no cost. - A related note: I’m a little worried about what will happen when my unbridled post-return enthusiasm for mental stimulation meets that cavernous library in New Haven.

I may be the only student born in the ’80s. I am the only student who’s attire could pass for the professor’s. I am the only student with less than 10 numbers in their unintelligent phone, and probably the only one who longs for the days of the Nokia with flashlight. I am most certainly the only student who’s Google Reader contains the blogs - Foreign Policy Passport, Project Syndicate, or Food Politics, amongst others. I am most likely the only student who’s side-reading is Postwar by Tony Judt and Late-Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis. I am definitely the only student who’s social life consists of solely of reading the aforementioned books and blogs religiously, along with the occasional baking of cakes. What do I have in common with the young folks? An inclination to have a beer after class - only I’m probably the only one legally able to purchase them - and then drink them, by myself, in my basement, while getting angry about the Texas oil-sands pipeline.

Beach House - Norway: I’m behind the times, but I like these folks.

Sim Sala Bim: Fleet Foxes - apparently a big deal these days.

My service is ending much as it started, in the constant company of others, discussing the future and what it has in store for us. In a funny way the discussion is the same as before; food, friends, work, language. Much like two years ago we think we have a vague idea of what is in store for us across the ocean, and much of this will assuredly be turned on it’s head by the whims of life. - I’m feeling excited, restive, hopeful, uncertain, and most of all hungry (thirsty, too). As the ‘final-…’ rack up I have yet to really reflect, and I don’t think I’ll be able until back in the states. So instead I’m extending my cafe visits, hiking to places I haven’t before, buying a few souvenirs, and essentially trying to keep my body and mind busy prior to the jarring change I’m about to experience.

Dreams of Pakistani Grill and Vada Pao in Manhattan - Krishnendu Ray: a lengthy paper on the immigrant discussion of taste

PepsiCo’s Deal With Mexican Farmers Is Good for Business - NYTimes.com: Opinions vary.

“Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead” - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

I have no pictures, no daily writing, and very little in the way of material to share from my month-long sojourn in India. Suffice it to say that my purpose was to absorb the familiar and familial. I would find myself at times sitting on a sofa in my cousin’s house and silent for a half-hour just listening to the din around me, pouring my cha from mug to saucer. I felt my two years of solitude deeply, and so I tried to hold tight to the warmth from kith and kin. I rode in rickshaws with my brother, laughed with my sister, listened to my father, and shared chiki with my mother. This mundanity was my nourishment. I felt like a parched man taking a deep draught of cool water.

Jim James & Calexico - Goin’ To Acapulco (via noambason) a little something for a blustery winter’s day.

“Underneath his hand her shoulder felt cushioned in a way that his wasn’t. There was her skin. There was her muscle. There was her bone, her blood and all the blood’s attendant particles keeping her alive, particles whose names he’d never know.”

Book Review - Saul Bellow - Letters - NYTimes.com: “Bitter melancholy” is “one of my specialties,” he tells Edward Shils in 1962. About “the power to despair,” he writes to a friend in 1961 that “having myself felt it, known it, bathed in it, my native and temperamental impulse is to return to sanity in the form of laughter.”

Recipes for Pies and Tarts - Slide Show - NYTimes.com: I’ve looked at this slide show far too many times than is healthy.