Seth's profile

19 ratings | 18 reviews
avg rating: 3.84

Seth's bookshelves

read (16)
currently-reading (3)

to-read (7)
school (5)

cloud shelves | see all bookshelves »

Seth is currently reading

	02/07 Seth gave to: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Paperback) by John Perkins bookshelves: currently-reading	my rating:
	recommended for: appropriately skeptical people; not Oliver Stone Seth said: "if you are not familiar with this book, it is the memoir of a purported "economic hit man" (he says people of this profession call themselves that) who has seen the error of his ways and wants to alert the world to a vast corporate conspira...more " see all 2 comments
	10/21 Seth gave to: A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (Hardcover) by Flannery O'Connor bookshelves: currently-reading	my rating:
	recommended for: fans of: tom waits/raymond carver/ernest hemingway/william faulkner read in October, 2007 Seth said: "o'connor runs a funny path in her stories. the themes are a sort of crypto-southern gothic with spartan sentence structure and diction. but that is what gives them a piercing sense, as well: with everything so barren, a two-sentence description of th...more " add a comment
	07/01 Seth gave to: The Human Condition (Paperback) by Hannah Arendt bookshelves: currently-reading, school	my rating:
	recommended for: people who feel aware of a human condition read in October, 2007 Seth said: "i have only gotten through the first few chapters of this book and yet already see how it will most likely seep its way into many aspects of my work. if you can get around Arendt's femme hard-on for the Greeks (I need a better word for that, but stic...more " add a comment

Seth's recent updates (rss)

July 01

Seth gave

to:
The Human Condition (Paperback)
by Hannah Arendt
bookshelves: currently-reading, school

my rating:

recommended for: people who feel aware of a human condition
read in October, 2007

Seth said: "i have only gotten through the first few chapters of this book and yet already see how it will most likely seep its way into many aspects of my work. if you can get around Arendt's femme hard-on for the Greeks (I need a better word for that, but stic...more "

add a comment

Seth gave

to:
Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered : 25 Years Later...With Commentaries (Paperback)
by E.F. Schumacher

my rating:

Seth said: "have to say, i have a hard time getting excited about this. i think it is good medicine for working your way out of an ideological corner, but the breadth of his moral brush strokes i found sometimes to be itchy. helpful if you are starting to think ...more "

add a comment

Seth gave

to:
Escape from Empire: The Developing World's Journey through Heaven and Hell (Hardcover)
by Alice H. Amsden

my rating:

Seth said: "this is a very funny book. clearly alice is having fun playing historian. this is not to diminish its seriousness or importance. but she has an impishness to her writing that tells you this is her shooting from the hip. her conceptualization of moder...more "

add a comment

April 15

New comment on Jess's review of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

Seth wrote: "DFW 4EVA!!!!! "

reply to this comment

March 04

New comment on Seth's review of An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World

Seth wrote: "he picks it up at various points in the book, which can be interesting, but it leads to a disappoint...more "

(see all 3 comments)

March 03

New comment on David's review of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Seth wrote: "chapter XXXI. "

reply to this comment

Seth gave

to:
An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (Paperback)
by Pankaj Mishra

my rating:

recommended for: people who want to buddhism through the buddha

Seth said: "ok, finally came back and finished this.

what's good:
--historical consideration of the milieu of the buddha. mishra read across different sources to try to get a good biographical picture.
--a good reading concentrating on things the budd...more "

see all 3 comments

February 08

New comment on Seth's review of The Best American Essays 2007

Seth wrote: "i am sure you're right. i guess i just needed to vent at the anger that arose in my as a response to...more i am sure you're right. i guess i just needed to vent at the anger that arose in my as a response to a) his intro, and more importantly, b) his essay choices.

here's a piece of evidence from the intro:

"That is, in return for some pay and intangible assets, I am acting as an evaluative filter, winnowing a very large field of possibilities
down to a manageable, absorbable Best for your delectation. Thinking about this kind of Decidering (2) is interesting in all kinds of different ways; (3) but the general point is that professional filtering/winnowing is a type of service that we citizens and consumers now depend on more and more, and in ever-increasing ways, as the quantity of available information and products and art and opinions and choices and all the complications and ramifications thereof
expands at roughly the rate of Moore's Law."

The numbers in parentheses are footnotes. Apparently he thinks that it is clever to use a lot of footnotes that cheekily present irrelevant facts the same way the main text does. I mean, is what earns him the Macarthur grant the fact that he can snidely reference both George W. Bush and Moore's law in a sentence? What is he even communicating? Since when is the effective winnowing of available information necessary for a consumer society? And what "intangible assets" is he receiving in return for editing this book? Talk about a tease.

The essays carry on with the tone of the intro, which to my mind is kind of a "gosh, writers are really cool people," sort of a theme. I know I'm carrying on now, but the disappointment is mainly because I've seen some much better editions of this. The volumes edited by Susan Sontag and Louis Menand come to mind. (Menand actually has an essay in this, but it's a trivial piece he did in the front section of the New Yorker about the cell phone ringtone that largely only young people could perceive. I can imagine his quizzical expression at being told they wanted to include that one.)

In the end, I shouldn't spit venom, though, because the joke is on me: I bought the damn thing.

And I am certain the DFW does enjoyable stuff. I just have a hard time seeing how this is one of them. Not like I have any intangible assets to offer to him anyway, unless you count that one thing......less "

(see all 2 comments)

February 07

Seth gave

to:
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Paperback)
by John Perkins
bookshelves: currently-reading

my rating:

recommended for: appropriately skeptical people; not Oliver Stone

Seth said: "if you are not familiar with this book, it is the memoir of a purported "economic hit man" (he says people of this profession call themselves that) who has seen the error of his ways and wants to alert the world to a vast corporate conspira...more if you are not familiar with this book, it is the memoir of a purported "economic hit man" (he says people of this profession call themselves that) who has seen the error of his ways and wants to alert the world to a vast corporate conspiracy that enslaves us in a vicious cycle of global economic hegemony, debt and warfare.

i should say that i think the basic structure of his observations is true - that is, i believe the events he describes, and more or less in his observations of chains of action. but it gets a little dicey once he tries to weave his experiences together into an encompassing narrative. this is primarily for two reasons: the author is a) a bit of an underdeveloped manchild whose favorite recollections are often of ogling exotic women, and b) a very mediocre writer.

the purported events of his own life suggest that he is highly intelligent. his interior narrative kind of doesn't. he has emotional/intellectual epiphanies that oddly don't match up with the trajectory his career is taking, and he also makes himself out to be too naïve when perhaps a less forgiving admission of his thoughts, motives, and actions lines up much better with the scene he is describing. (example: he falsifies data for economic reports not because it is simply the selfish and convenient thing to do, but because he has a confabulated notion that a scheme he already knows will be deleterious to a developing country is better than nothing, or some abstract alternative.)

nevertheless, i think this is a good book overall for a popular audience. i largely believe that he was in the places he said he was. it makes sense to me that someone with these kinds of quirks and delusions could actually be a successful consultant in developing countries. i know many people who are much smarter that do such work, but they also don't spend thirty years mucking up their lives in this shit before they go hippie, write books about the powers of lucid dreaming, and then cash in on a saucy tell-all volume.

i'll reiterate: i'm glad he wrote it, and i'm glad i'm reading it. where it goes astray is in his rationalizations of his own role, and his rationalizations of how the whole global economy works. i already discussed the former, so i'll just say a bit about the latter. in a phrase, he puts too much intentionality into it all. he believes that american corporations rule the world nearly absolutely, and that they intentionally structure the global political economy to work by coercing people into hiring them to do big contracting jobs in developing countries wherein debt spending in the developing country assures that government's pliability in years to come (this is the role of the hit man - to shill out these golden manacles around the world). the only exceptions come when a maverick national leader flouts this idea, whereupon the "jackals" (the cia, of course) will try to underhandedly assassinate the offending parties (cue the oliver stone director's credit). if this fails, then it is time to bring out the full military to invade the country.

these things do happen (more or less, in the broadest of strokes), but they are not nearly the whole story. there are far too many kinds of corporations, institutions, and economies for it to play out so neatly. a quick example: the companies he names who dictate the rules of this game are the contractors made famous by our current iraq debacle: halliburton, brown & root, etc. halliburton is the 100th largest corporation in the us, about 1/15 the size of wal-mart, which is #1 in terms of revenue. granted, halliburton is party to some nasty things (and so is wal-mart, though not so much regarding contracting third world infrastructure), but it seems manifest that only a simplistic mind would imagine a world in which a few guys could sit around in a room and scheme up what we see happening across the globe in about 200 countries. while he has quick and interesting accounts of u.s. fuckups like iran, they don't come close to doing justice to the kind of complexity we see out there. to perkins, things look the way they do because someone wanted them to. to me, they look the way they do because power has a way of finding the path of least resistance to its accumulation, and as such, people can have amazingly disproportionate power without holding a fucking clue as to what is going on, and odd, unscripted things happen much more often than perkins' james bond theory of global economic development allows.

i've now taken too long examining a somewhat facile argument. suffice to say, it's an interesting document, also with a lot of unintended humor. if anything, it just goes to show how fallible many of the people are who perform crucial work in structuring economies around the world.

note: i have only read a portion of this book. but i do feel qualified to comment. i will elaborate if i find anything else of note as i go along....less "

see all 2 comments

Seth gave

to:
The Best American Essays 2007 (Paperback)
by David Foster Wallace, Robert Atwan

my rating:

recommended for: people who like to collect witticisms

Seth said: "david foster wallace is a dipshit. man what a waste of time. "

see all 2 comments

see all 16 of Seth's books »

Seth's friend comments

(add a comment | view all)

No friend comments yet...

block this member ?

Seth's friends (35)

	Jennie 160 books 32 friends
	Nicole 134 books 23 friends
	Jon 123 books 38 friends
	Jason 75 books 67 friends
	Jess 24 books 15 friends
	Thacher 13 books 30 friends
	Megan 38 books 33 friends
	Dmitri 23 books 29 friends
	Emirate 3 books 12 friends
	Tucker 22 books 8 friends
	David 35 books 22 friends
	Giuliana 6 books 4 friends
	MJ 149 books 25 friends
	Dawn 98 books 24 friends
	Rio 14 books 16 friends

see all 35 friends »