Leila Josefowicz tonight!

This time at the Minnesota Orchestra!! Program notes here.

Soccer Posts now at OleOle.com

All,

Since my soccer posts have started to outpace my other posts here, I decided to separate them out. I have a site at oleole.com called Soccernomics. Bad title, or worst title ever? It’s definitely the former, because it, sadly, was the best thing I could come up with. Everything else was too long or too obscure. I’m going to write primarily about institutional behaviors in the beautiful game and I couldn’t think of anything that conveyed that in the title and was also short.

Anyway, if you like my soccer posts, go there. If not, they are gone from this site, so rejoice.

Signed,

The Management

If you are among the very Jung at heart…

I’m thinking of trying to put together an undergraduate political psychology course as a proposed junior level seminar for ‘10-11.  It occurred to me that I have never read anything by Jung.  So, while out at the bookstore the other day I picked up Portable Jung.  I have read Joseph Campbell’s introduction, and already I feel that there is a mixture of hypotheses that are intriguing and some moments in Jung’s autobiography that make him sound as crackers as the people he examined.  I am both excited and weary about what I might find in these pages.  

My general strategy for trying to understand someone’s thought is to approximate an immersive  contextualization for a while.  When I start, I go too far, overemphasizing the value of the contribution, only to have it (hopefully) burn away over time until I keep a good amount of the good thoughts without going turning myself into an “-ian” (as in Kantian, Foucaltian, Hayekian, etc.)  I apologize in advance for those moments when I will be over-doing the Jung thinking, I’m sure it will wear off as it does with everyone I read.  

 

Also, anyone who has traveled the pages of Jung already, I’d be interested for any words of advice (and caution) you ay have.

Palmer House Blues

I am writing this from the lobby of the Palmer House. The hotel is the setting for the MPSA conference. The hotel is also the setting of an early scene of Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the Day.”. Industrialist Scarsdale Vibe meets Inventer Extrordinaire, Heino Vanderjuice and offers him a massive amount of money to eliminate the usefulness of inventions of colleague Nikola Tesla.
This theme of cancelling out runs through the book as Pynchon’s fictional world spirals towards the cancelling out of humanity – which we call World War I in modern parlance. As I look around the lobby one hundred years after the fictional encounter in Pynchon’s story, I see so many colleagues, and I wonder how much we cancel one another out for money in similar, more subtle ways. I wonder what the proportion is, in terms of new ideas, between what gets built and what gets destroyed.

MPSA: Preliminaries

Palmer House Lobby:

Name Tag, Membership Card, Program:

MPSA Blogging

I’m in Chicago for the Midwest Political Science Association.  I had to get a photo of the sign welcoming MPSA participants at the airport, because I’ve never had that happen to me before… More on the conference once registration starts at 4.