Too much text

from Surian Soosay.

Urge of the demi

You
And I
Are not one.
You take for granted
That I take for granted.
But what if I know myself?
What if I know what I know
And know what I don't know?
What if the world's more duping
Than duped? More deceiving than
Deceived? What if the only true things
Are paradoxes? And the only true things
Are ineffable? But there is an extinguishing
In the blue hour, of a small and isolate thing,
When an ectoplasm struggles to exist or erupt
From the static form formerly filled in and warm.
But no, nothing. Nothing brushed my face, no moth
wing wafted my ear, nothing numinous oozed away.
Fuck death. Fuck death and dying, I'm sick of trying
To care about carelessness. The point's been much made
And death poetry will not be forgiven. But what poetry will
Be forgiven its importunate existence, time and energy eating,
Silk-lipped mouths, still toothy, pap-hungering, all glossolaling.
Excuse me if I'm an anti-edificer here respecting neither fronteirs
Nor roles. I'm not sorry. I've tipped passed the point of pardonable
Eccentricity into po-mo multiplicity, unhinged Zappaism, iconoclastic
Scribbomania, an artificer of worlds unbounded, over eager, word drunk.
I seek to hold and spellbind you and myself with my prosthetic proselytizing
and imperfect cosmos. Ingeminate me. Or spurn me. It's all the same. It's all been
stamped, felt, built, killed. Coding's easier than decoding. Bellies bloat on the immaterial.
I am one of many. We're all in mystery. We refuge in representation's ever order of the day,
Each era is overtaken in the unfathomed advance that berefts bedrock but leaves not nothing,
Perhaps interstitial nets for the networked, intersecting in n-dimensions, dew-sodden and tenuous.
I grant that I take for granted that you take for granted. But perhaps our for-granteds synergize or cancel-out and
We know that we know and we know that what we know is as nothing as everything. Our worlds and words are
Inscribed in level sand and a moth wind wafts. We are voiced and eructating and we may not be one but we are not alone.

Quatrains

-
Flipping felines yowl
"Copycat me pussy!
With sure celerity
I never fall afoul."

Re-posted here.

-
Kiss-me-quick toes,
Giantess arches,
Gorgonzola veins:
Endless delectations.

Re-posted here.

-
Fight or settle.
For what; what on?
Here I am, Salt Lake.
Move along...wait, stay Mormon.

-
Here I am, dank swamp,
Retrograde river romp.
Here I am in the ether.
I’m an eel in the ether.

-
Here I am, the womb.
I'm a parasite in the womb.
I'm a sybarite in the womb.
Can't keep me down.

-
Manifest destiny's
Logical conclusion's
A Pacific of pilgrims,
But, “We shall build here.”

-
Balustrade autarky,
Inside I'm free.
Percutaneous X,
We inter-annex.

-
Take nothing
Tell no lie
Grow towards the sun
Until you Icarus.

Economics is no physics: Reading List

Before writing, it's instructive to dredge Google to see how many people have, with more wit and expertise, already treated your topic. Blog proliferation means there will be many primaries, secondaries, and nibblers (I fit into this category). Of course, if I wrote only about the unwritten I'd sit on my hands all day. But information about quantity and quality of material may motivate a new publishing strategy.

In that spirit, instead of soap-boxing, here's a non-exhaustive list of resources supporting the obvious premise that economics/finance and physics are substantively different in method and explanatory and predictive success. Most argue that economics is harder than physics and our models of physical systems are better than our models of economic systems.

Of course, doing economics is not necessarily harder than doing physics. Comparing modeling precision between the two is like comparing field goal percentage vs. batting averages and concluding that basketball is harder than baseball. It's not. They're different. They have different measures of difficulty and success. Transposing the sets of working economists and physicists would not lead to an ascendancy of accuracy in the former, but maybe some decline in the latter. Disciplinary constraints disallow massive and rapid change.

Anyway, gadflying does little to reduce the contention that economic systems are, in some ways, more complex than physical ones because they have more intractable uncertainty. We have less epistemic access to system elements and relations. But beyond that, there persist significant differences in methodology: modeling goals, evidence, experimentation. And then there are complications of recursivity and "values." See the resources.

The Spengler (1) and my paper (6) are more about the positive-normative dichotomy in the history of economics, a debate which nonetheless turns on to what degree economics is a science and economists scientists. The Lo and Mueller (2) builds on Frank Knight on types of uncertainty as determinants of modeling precision. Fourcade (4) and Fox (5) provide comments. Black (5) summarizes. Gilboa et al. (7) are methodology-minded economists that formally model economic models as analogous to analogies.

Everybody quotes Richard Feynman (at a Caltech graduation):

“Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings!”

But Joseph J. Spengler preceded him by a long shot.

1 Joseph J. Spengler, "Have Values a Place in Economics" 1934.

However the economist defines economics and its problems...he is dealing with relationships of man to man and of man to natural resources. The physicist, on the contrary, is merely dealing with waves, rays, protons, etc., per se. The geneticist is dealing with chromosomes, genes, etc., per se. Neither is dealing with the manner in which human communities employ rays, waves, genes, etc. The economist, therefore, faces what the physicist and the geneticist do not face, namely, questions impinging upon the value-scales which characterize modern society. For as the late Allyn Young remarked, "Every occurrence in the contemporary life is...a scientific datum, which has to be fitted  into the ordered scheme of social processes. Every such occurrence has its own immediate and concrete significance, and has to be accorded its due weight  in any system of social values...Of social  processes we reserve the right to approve or disapprove."

and later

"To postulate an opinionless economist is to postulate an empirically impossible creature (331)."

2 Andrew Lo and Mark Mueller. 2010 (draft). "Warning: physics envy may be hazardous to your wealth!" simplified in the talk and blog post.

"Physics envy... this desire to explain 99.9% of all economic phenomena with three laws. That's what physicists do. In fact, we [economists] have 99 laws that explain 3% of phenomena." (from the talk)

3 Marion Fourcade (sociology). "Paul Krugman: the wicked economist?"-- short.

4 Justin Fox. "Physicists don't love economists and other revelations." -- short, comic.

5 Dan Black. (power point) "On the intrinsic differences between the physical and social sciences." -- Nice introduction with formal example.

6 Turner, Bradley. 2009. "The economic dichotomy and investigator behavior." -- college essay.

7 Gilboa, et al. at the Penn Institute for Economic Research. "Economic Models as Analogies"

"Indeed, there is no reason that it would be easier to predict stock market crashes than it would be to predict earthquakes. In fact, the opposite is true: because people react to theories, predicting human behavior has theoretical bounds beyond those that are shared by the natural sciences."

Id for ideas? (no Freud at all)

Do ideas excite you?
Do they drive you
like a bullock whip
Or pull you
Like a magnet?

Are ideas internal
Possessing intrinsic
effervescence, velocity?,
Personal vectors
Of being and doing?

Are they social fodder
For connection
And contestation,
Lubricants of the day to day.
Are we ideational men and women?

Are ideas higher or more
Than other things?
More vital, noble, profound,
Unadulterated or distilled,
Disconnected?

What are ideas anyway?,
If anything at all,
What do they touch?
Where do they fit?
And what are they not?

Ideas are not deities,
(But maybe vice versa),
Nor material or palpable things,
Like viscera
And stock options.

They could be science,
After our knowledge alembic,
But may be more aesthetic,
Like bird's songs,
Possessing singular transience.

Ideas are probably relations,
By virtue of binding,
And almost definitely information,
Bits, that is, guiding
For instance, geese to migration.

Ideas might be
more like instruments than songs
For a role in achieving.
Or perhaps ideals
Infinitely reaching.

But do ideas excite you?
Or does some other thing?
Baser and simpler
Impulses and incentives,
With which we're all familiar.

Money is motivating,
Profane and material.
But without nutrition,
Vacuously instrumental,
For what, for what?

Maybe hedonism helps,
Ideas with directives:
All voluptuous things.
But lamentably tempered
by treadmills and falling returns.

We'd shelter in
Basic needs satisfaction
If it weren't so human
To want more and higher
Forms of gratification.

What then are these more-wanting
and demeaning returns,
If not ideas as natural laws?,
However contingent and uncovering,
Are ideas also governing?

Whatever it is they are or do,
Do ideas excite you?
Are you even excited?
I won't blame you
If you're not.

Quotations: invention, imitation, transposition

Randy Cohen: What is benign in one setting can be toxic in another. (Chainsaws: useful in the forest, dubious at the dinner table. Or as Dr. Johnson put it in a pre-chainsaw age, “A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden.”) (*)

Malcolm Gladwell: "I have two parallel things I'm interested in: collecting interesting stories and collecting interesting research. What I'm looking for is where they overlap."

Jean-Luc Godard: It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.

Jonathan Lethem: Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul--let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances--is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks? "The Ecstasy of Influence" Harper's Magazine, Feb. 2007, p. 68.

Pablo Neruda: "Writers are always interchanging in some way, just as the air we breathe doesn’t belong to one place. The writer is always moving from house to house: he ought to change his furniture. Some writers feel uncomfortable at this. I remember that Federico García Lorca was always asking me to read my lines, my poetry, and yet in the middle of my reading, he would say, “Stop, stop! Don’t go on, lest you influence me!" (Paris Review, The Art of Poetry 14)

Isaac Newton: "If I have seen further it's by standing on ye shoulders of Giants," in a letter to Robert Hooke

John Padgett and Woody Powell: Emergence of novelty is not virgin birth. Everything, even the origin of life itself, is a combination and recombination of other things in its accessible context... Understanding the emergence of objects, therefore, is a matter of deconstructing objects into the transformational flows that construct and sustain them. Viewed from the perspective of flows, objects are the folding and refolding of their context – namely, of the ecology or network of other objects with which those objects interact... For example, stability of the human body through time means not mechanical fixity of parts; it means organic reproduction of parts in flux. Viewed as chemical reactions, we are vortexes in the material life that wends through us all. (*) (forthcoming The Emergence of Organizations and Markets, Princeton U. Press)

Janwillem van de Wetering: The Daimyo : "What would I be? A good question. I have no answer. My mind is clouded by the countless thoughts with which I have identified myself and which have all left their traces." (*) (an interview)

Harrison White: You can be assured that, for each idea, quite a number of substantial, and often independent, discussions and implementations could be cited: Ideas that have any importance, any impact, do, after all, come in company, not as isolates, and the essayist is mostly a transcriber of ideas abroad in his networks" (1994a, p. 4) in Emirbayer 1997

Eric Hoffer: Total innovation is a flight from comparison and also from imitation. Those who discover things for themselves and express them in their own way are not overly bothered by the fact that others have already discovered these things, have even discovered them over and over again and have expressed what they found in all manner of ways. 1960, from his notebooks.

The Books:

Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase (spoilers)

"Sometimes I get lonely
Sleeping with you," she said.
"Just great," I said, "Just great."
I was already lost.
She was the kind of girl
That'd sleep with anyone,
I was mediocre,
But OK about it.
It was improbable
That such a person as
Myself could be living,
That such a relation
As ours could last for long.

Another girl, with an
Auricular something,
"You know nothing," she said,
"For sure," I said, "For sure."
On a wild sheep chase,
Ovine totemism,
A vital dynamo,
A fixed point in time space.
Points have no names nor selves,
Suspended over all,
Sheep have both,
A Will, a whip, a host,
Scourging blood for weakness.
"People are weak," I said.
"You don't know this thing," he said,
Gangrene rot worsening,
"That exists in the world."

"Where's the time go?" she asked,
We were close then,
Closer than ever, before the end.
"Time adds up for us," I said,
"But it does not expand,"
No, time does not expand.
Time trails off into death,
Darkness alone shifting,
Like mercury motion,
Voiceless snow falling soft,
Afterward all silent,
Inexpressible cleave.
Getting back to normal,
On a cold, concrete sea,
All alone with the dead,
And ears to hear the waves.

Note: this is "plagiarized" from the text, more of a tessellation of quotes than a novel effort.

Too much text

from Pedro Pernias

Michener's Sayonara (spoilers)

Hana-ogi:

Rroyd, Rhroyd,

When you kissed me at Bitchi-bashi,
A good punishing smooch,
I knew you were the tall stud of substance,
I had longed and waited for.

It was but the work of a moment to,
Lay your head in my lap,
Then tumble you by the Shinto shrine.
You felt millions of eyes on you,
But had eyes only for my golden glamour.

You could no more resist carnal thrill,
Than the revelation of whole to whole,
The cohabitation of one in another.
We needed no common tongue to build,
A world away, rapturous, and auto-catalyzing.

But you, you simple and lovable fool,
With your beefhead Broadway blathering,
Dreaming yourself an architect, of setting me free,

Unwilling to forsake your foundation,

Yet demanding it of me.

In the end it was eyes you lacked,
For my, our, the multivocality,
And your own home-love hypocrisy.
Japan was never a place for you,
You were a place for Japan.

And so when your friend blew his brains out,
And mine stuck a knife through her neck,
I went to Tokyo knowing the future.
A succession of small rooms and big stages,
Discipline, promotion, bellicosity,

And an end to love.

Roy Gruver:

Hayano-chan,
Lo the postillion,
Takusan-love for the tadpole on my pillow,
I'm the one's been struck by lightning,
That will never strike again.

Note: First of a series of poems on books I read.

I want clean blood

I want clean blood
Break through the scab
Shine through
Translucent patina
Smog slab
And beneath
An ocean of incarnadine.