Hulegu's · Campaign

My old buddy Teo is now in Bishkek and drawing 'toons for the Times of Central Asia. This one in particular tickled me pink:

Hi, LJ peeps. Basically, my beautiful iBook is up on the blocks at the moment 'coz the software (OS X-point-something) had a total freakout and now I just boot to that depressing grey screen with an apple outline on it. I know how to solve the problem, and it will be solved ... by someone else. 'Til then posting will be even more irregular than usual and my moments of nerdy genius will have to remain confined to my equally-beautiful moleskine, for the time being.

Also, I'm thinking of going friends-only shortly, but will give y'all the heads up about that when it's time.

UPDATE

I've decided to go friends-only. If you want to continue reading my twitterings but haven't befriended me, comment below and I'll do likewise  ... ah, you know the drill. Non-LJ users, and at this point i must thank anyone who has linked to me from other blogging platforms, I thank you, and apologise and counter that it may not be forever.

I woke up last night with a very strange tingling in my upper lip and found, to my horror and twisted surprise, that for some strange reason it was swelling at a rate of knots. No amount of ice could persuade it to calm down, and when I woke up in the morning I resembled nothing so much as a particularly twisted cross between an inbred member of the Habsburg dynasty, and Pete Burns. I could have appeared on a putative programme entitled When Collagen Implants Go Wrong.

Fortunately, as I write, the swelling is greatly reduced.

On a more sensible note, Rory Stewart's The Places in Between is highly reccommended. Reading, that is. Replicating this walk would probably result in your death, up a rocky defile somewhere in between Herat and Kabul - the cities which top and tail his journey. Alexander Burnes is a hero to Great Game revivalists, but he was, lest we forget, murdered by the Kabul mob.

[Oh well. I think my German friend was kidding me when he said he seriously thought that England would win the World Cup. Who says Germans don't have a sense of humour?]

The Uzbek government continues its crackdown on extremists and fundamentalists (via UzReport):

"In the recent years, penalty measures applied to those who cause harm to the flora of Uzbekistan have been toughened."

Still, I think it's kind of admirable the Tashkent hokimiyat is 'greening-up' the city. In 2005-06, "35,000 young decorative plants, 122,000 fruit trees, 10,500 conifers, 765,000 poplars, and 6,000 bushes were planted around the city." Furthermore, what on earth crime do you have to commit to be fined for "damages to flora"? [Presumably, Morrissey might theoretically be clapped inn chains for gratuitous and injurious flaunting of gladioli].

Here's a link to the Uzbek Academy of Sciences Botanical Garden. Looks kinda beautiful.

Here's a selection of some things I've been reading lately.

The hard life of a coffee buyer - doubly so if you're try to be dear but fair:

'[Geoff] Watts and the founder and chief executive of Intelligentsia, Doug Zell, do not ascribe to the "buy low, sell high" business model. They buy high and sell high. In the coming years, both say they expect to pay 50 percent, 100 percent, even 200 percent above Fair Trade rates for beans so good that customers will pay $20 and more a pound retail. "On the grower side and the consumer side, we're trying to create a culture of quality," Mr. Watts said.'

A profile of uber-historynerd Simon Schama, who I'm shocked to learn is 61 (aah, the youth-inducing benefits of spending all your time indoors away from the ravages of wind, sun and rain). I remember my history teacher at school recommending Schama's works on the Netherlands and France, and I'm awfully tempted to pick up the heavily-discounted copies of Landscape and Memory in my new favourite bookshop, Judd Books.

'He was 35 when Harvard lured him across the Atlantic. By then he was doing research on 17th-century Holland -- "slightly crackpot stuff," he calls it, "a sort of anthropology of daily life" in the Dutch Golden Age. "Original" would be a better word than "crackpot": In 1987, Schama published "The Embarrassment of Riches" to wide acclaim.

Two years later, his French Revolution book cemented his reputation as a brilliant young historian who could write .

His goal in "Citizens" had been to create compelling narrative history that also made an argument -- in this case, an anti-revolutionary one. He portrayed the descent into terror as "the essence of what revolutions do." A Washington Post reviewer called the book "brilliantly readable." George Will and Charles Krauthammer sang its praises. A liberal colleague lauded "Citizens" as well, Schama recalls, but warned that it would make him "all the wrong friends."

Never mind. This was a writer who didn't want to be bored, and he soon took a risk most academics would never dream of. Swept up in "a dangerously self-indulgent ecstasy in the pleasure of pure writing," he produced a book that deliberately blended fiction with fact.'

This article's about crosswords - and it's not; it's also about the cursed Su Doku. Of course, we're talking American crosswords here, specifically the NYT crossword, as opposed to British-style cryptic crosswords.

Ok. The 24-pass goal against Serbia-Montenegro was good. But, hey, Argentina have a no-mark midfielder who can control a flighted cross with his chest, let it drop and then let rip with his left foot on the volley. From an angle. From 30-yards. And nobody knows who he plays for. Juan Roman who?



The Germans have Ostalgie. What do the Russian have? That seems to be the theme of Alexei Yurchak's book, Everything was Forever, Until it Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, reviewed here in the Moscow Times. Often in classes I have heard professors urging caution when some student or other loudly condemns Soviet rule, which is fair enough when you consider the tools of repression and the purges, but Yurchak points out that for many sovoks life was simply banal. The reviewer notes:

'It was not the norm to be a dissident, heroically facing up to the lies of the regime; nor, by contrast, to be an "activist," following Party protocol to the letter. Activists risked the public's deep suspicion, even ostracism, while dissidents were widely considered "irrelevant," or viewed, according to Joseph Brodsky, as "a convenient example of the wrong deportment." The right deportment, Yurchak suggests, involved a far greater measure of detachment, even for those who worked in the Party hierarchy. Most turned a blind eye to the more superficial aspects of their ideological environment, while also investing heavily in others, among them, Yurchak posits, the communist ethics of creativity, collectivity and non-material values.'

Meanwhile, I'm not sure it's the wisest idea to have Theodore Dalrymple to review a book on Islam (in this case Islamic Imperialism: A History, by Efraim Karsh), as he is the Daily Mail and Spectator's angry Doctor of choice, often loudly berating the failure of namby-pamby liberals to face up to rising crime and militant Islam inter alia. So, here goes:

'Islam is inherently an unsettling and dangerous factor in world politics, independently of the actual conduct of many Muslims.'

No surprise there, then.

Most of the time I love cricket. Some of the time, however, my team is on the wrong end of a real shoeing. Saturday was one such day. The oppo scored 308/2d (i.e. declared). We scored 47 all out i.e. 10 of us couldn't get anywhere near to making up what it had taken merely 4 of the opposition bastmen to compile. Still, we were playing at a lovely ground, very bucolic, with a great bar. (natch).

The poverty of my performance can perhaps be explained by my return to the pool, now that I can afford to be a member of the ULU-subsidized gym again. Frankly, I was beat by Saturday PM, and merely content to return home and catch up on the highlights of a pretty hair-rasing day at WC '04. I mean, Ghana 2-Czech Republic 0, USA 1-Italy 1, and Portugal 2-Iran 0. Only the last of these games went to script: Ghana upset one of the torney faves bigtime, and Italy-USA was a wince-inducing slugfest, with three red-cards, one own-goal and one disallowed goal. Ian has written about the effect of this match on a passionate and committed American soccer fan.

Jonathan Steele got very worked up today in the guardian in defence of President Ahmadinejad of Iran and what he may or may not have said last year in a speech about the State of Israel (clue: it wasn't complementary). This debate has already been eagerly chewed over by the press-pack and blogosphere, none more so than in the semantic catfight between Professor Juan Cole of UMich and Christopher Hitchens. For the record, here is the Farsi text of Ahmadinejad's speech (and MEMRI's English translation).

Of course, any sensible person comes to the conclusion: how on earth can 'wiped from the pages of time' be any "better" or less bellicose than 'erased from the map.'? The aspect of the debate that really sticks in the throat is the sight and sound of avowed socialists (such as Steele) standing foursquare with the Tehran regime. Rather wants to make one tear up one's membership card for the Real Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Maoist National General Command) ...

Hmmm. Maya Jasanoff grudgingly praises Robert Irwin's counterpoint to Orientalism in her review for the LRB. She writes:

'Factual purists will be delighted by his pot-shots ... He corrects several inaccuracies concerning the medieval and Renaissance periods, and disputes Said’s representation of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt.'

'For Lust of Knowing is indisputably erudite.'

'Irwin’s systematic attention to Oriental studies across Europe does much to counter Said’s contention that Orientalism was the product of the ‘three great empires – British, French, American’.'

And yet. And Yet. Jasanoff doesn't give the impression of being overly impressed by Irwin. She reckons that, 'Irwin’s factual corrections, however salutary, do not so much knock down the theoretical claims of Orientalism as chip away at single bricks.' She didn't give the impression that she knew much about Irwin, his novels or his his scholarship. She very much epitomises the po-mo concept that the medium is more important than the message:

'Surely Said’s most enduring legacy has been to embed in a rising generation of Western scholars, many of whom are now contemporaries of Orientalism itself, the awareness that their work has political substance and ramifications, whether or not it might appear to be political a priori.'

I guess I'm just being defensive of scholars I experienced and studied before I'd ever heard of Said.

This from Boise Weekly - a review of Tengir-Too, a compilation of Kyrgyz music. Actually, having googled that I find Tengir-Too is an ensemble or collective, rather than merely a name for a compilation.

Meanwhile, over at Registan, Nathan assesses the culture wars in Uzbekistan between traditional music and hip-hop, which the latter appear to be winning, at least among the young. I have to agree that a lot of CentAsiaPop has evolved into an identifiable genre, blending oldstyle instrumentation with modern beats. My personal fave is Yulduz Usmanova.

There's definitely some kind of klezmer vibe in all her music ...

It's an interesting development: refugees from one Caucasus hotspot being relocated in another. This is the fate of Abkhazians rehoused in Batumi, Ajaria, who are now being paid $7,000 to move on by Kazakh investors hoping to cash in on Ajaria's hoped-for revival as a Black Sea resort. I think I'm right in saying that Batumi et al has previous as a resort of repute (in addition to being an important port) - Stalin summered there, I think, as did subsequent generations of apparatchiks.

Would you want to spend time in a hot, cramped space, with a big, fat, angry, hirsute Italian-American? Bill Buford does/did.

" ... Buford was smitten by Batali's larger-than-life personality and considerable talent, a "crush" that not only landed him in Babbo's kitchen but led him on an increasingly obsessive nearly four-year odyssey that included stints with Batali's former teachers, indentured servitude with the crazy but gifted butcher of the subtitle and long hours learning Italian and poring over 15th-century manuscripts in an effort to find out when egg yolks replaced water in pasta fresca."

There's almost something Plimptonesque (see Paper Lion) in attempting to master skills it takes a chef years to learn. Actually, make that nuts.

Furthermore, like me you probably don't have that much time to see that many movies, so you rely on film critics to tell what stinks and what doesn't. Problem is, many critics these days are unlikely to have made it into this compilation of film criticism. Clive James has reviewed it with typical sly, perceptive wit:

"It took a theory to work the switch, and the essence of the auteur theory was that the director, the controlling hand, shaped the movie with his artistic personality even if it was made within a commercial system as businesslike as Hollywood's. This fact having at last been discovered, film criticism in America came of age. It's a neat progression, but this book, simply by its layout, shows it to be bogus."

Apparently, there some neccessary oversights, not least the omission of Anthony Lane. Ohmigod. As James puts it, "Lane, being British, isn't in the book, which is a bit like not letting Tiger Woods play at St. Andrews."

Meanwhile, More4 will be broadcasting next Wednesday (June 7th) an improbable-sounding documentary about Kazakhstani avant-garde art entitled Kazakhstan Swings. Crumbs!

Huzzah! Farsi is done and dusted. So, tomorrow it's back to the world of nine-to-five (my baby takes the morning train tum-ti-tum). However, although my thesis isn't technically due in until mid-September, it may feature as part of a panel presentation at the CESS conference at UMich in the Fall, so I will probably have to produce a working copy somewhat earlier than that (if the panel proposal is accepted ... fingers x'ed).

Double Huzzah! sarmoung has returned. Even better he has written on a topic which I had mulled upon but not really understood: the new schism in British Russian Orthodoxy. Keen-eyed readers will note that the posting in question is at Sarmoung's other LJ, radioorchestrar, which is nominally his music blog, and so should be trawled immediately for interesting sounds.

Ach! or should that be !به! به I have my Farsi exam tomorrow - and I'm actually looking forward to it. Not because I have been permanently ensconsed in the library for the past 2-3 weeks, learning all there is to know about the ezafe, direct object marker or irregular verbs - I haven't, and I'm not that nerdy, despite the appearance presented by my new specs - but because I can finally see where it might lead me.

Farsi is a "gateway" langauge to my own region of interest, Central Asia. Tajik and Dari are dialects of, I believe, Middle Persian, whilst modern Uzbek is linked through it's medieval predecessor Chaghatay, of which Mir Ali Sher Navoi is the exemplar.

Whilst I will probably have to learn Russian as well in order to examine Soviet and Tsarist archives, learning Farsi gives me greater satisfaction as it has more potential. Also, I will be in a position to assist the US-Zionist-Blairite Corporate-sponsored invasion of Iran.

Ok. I'm back at work, I have a Farsi exam next week, but the thesis bibliography is taking over my life, like that plant monster from Doctor Who.

Not content with wanting to read everything about Uzbeks & Uzbekistan, I'm widening my reading for historical, religious, politcal & social context. Items added to the list include:

Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah (trans. Franz Rosenthal);
B.F. Manz, The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane;
Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol 2.

et al ad infinitum.

CK "Bob" Brain. Osama Bin Laden. Nelson. Napoleon. And my buddy Teo.

What a strange crew that inhabits my dreams these days.

Sometimes the New Yorker surprises me. Sometimes it is genuinely informative ;-) No, seriously, I was fascinated by the article on Peter Viereck. I'm always interested in finding who is the "first" or "founder" of any given political, social, cultural, whatever school of thought.

More pretentiously, Slate's article on CabFranc was thoughtful and entertaining. But not as thoughtful or entertaining as the series on Eurovision ...

Today's match was, unsurprisingly, cancelled; so I have a free day. I was somewhat relieved, what with additional stress in my life (though I'm back at work ... ), so I'm on a rainy-day schedule: cleaning/housework, reading, surfing, hibernating ... the cat's a great help.

It's a cliché, but I'll say it anyway: wearing spectacles has made me see the world in an entirely different way: I can read the spines of books from distance (guess where I've been?), I deduce what no. bus is approaching, I know when the next train is leaving. No-one told me it would be this way.

More importantly, my concentration level has been ramped-up. I'm zipping through books without having to take regular breaks, or I feel less inclined to go a-wanderin' around the library. I look like a nerd and I feel like a nerd. I'm currently reading Suny & Martin's A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin , which thus far has disproved my theory (see entry passim) that compilations of academic articles are inherently dull. Either that, or I'm really dull.

At 11pm Mornington Crescent was awash with Converse-wearing, faded-denim sporting, ironic t-shirt garbed hipsters. And me. The Shins rocked Koko, and I was there. You can take your stinking Antarctic Chimpanzees and stick 'em up your japsie!