(no subject)

So I'm having fun with the readings for Problems of Globalization, even if (alright... because) they make me angry. The Global Class War is in some places shocking, even for me (apparently this is to be expected, as the back cover says "The most cynical Americans will be shocked by the sordid details..."). And Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat is an absolutely GODAWFUL book. It's not even remotely scholarly. It's terribly, terribly written: he repeats his little catchphrase about world flatness until the reader is beyond sick of it, and he talks about what's going on in Bangalore, India like Bangalore is the entire rest of the world outside America. He doesn't define his terms. He throws around simplistic Cold War rhetoric like it's self-evident fact. He randomly advertises things, and he uses ill-advised exclamation marks. And the books is eight hundred pages long. I think most of the general tangents and obfuscation are precisely in order to make the book eight hundred pages long, because globalization is immensely complex, so he figures he needs a long book to give it credible treatment (not true--the No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization fits in my pocket), but there really aren't eight hundred pages worth of good things to say about globalization.

In other news, English class today contained way too much Greek. This made sense, as the class was about Aristotle's theorizing on tragedy. I was mostly happy about all the geeky etymological tidbits; on the other hand, I've never studied a word of Greek in my life and I don't know the writing system and I tend to find it just a bit disconcerting to copy down a bunch of symbols and be like AHH I HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT I'M WRITING. I guess I'm used to being the dorky one and studying all sorts of trippy writing systems, and so am unused to writing stuff in alphabets before I know what the symbols stand for and are supposed to look like. But very very interesting all the same; the Greeks are bloody weird.

Tangentially related: I made myself a Tengwar cheat sheet, so now I have the whole system on one sheet of paper. Yay, I'm a nerd.