books read 2012 - bump

So I don't have to go looking:


Started Annals late last year and just finished last night (January 23). Asterisk means I loved it. Hashtag means I didn't like it.

1. Annals of the Former World, by John McPhee
2. Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder
3. How to Live, Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, by Sarah Bakewell 
4. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote*
5. The Control of Nature, by John McPhee*
6. Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, by Lawrence Weschler
7. Wise Blood, by Flannery O'Connor*
8. A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O'Connor*
9. The Violent Bear It Away, by Flannery O'Connor*
10. Pakistan, A Hard Country, by Anatol Lieven
11. Awakenings, by Oliver Sacks*
12. Freakonomics, by Stevens Levitt and Dubner#
13. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John LeCarre*
14. The Russia House, by John LeCarre#
15. Hail to the Victors, ed. by Brian Cook
16. The Cave, by Jose Saramago#
17. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald*
18. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, by Jonathan Berendt
19. Skinny Dip, by Carl Hiaasen
20. The Quiet American, by Graham Greene*
21. Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov*
22. Irons in the Fire, by John McPhee (again)
23. Tombstone, by Yang Jisheng
24. The Book of Job, trans. by Stephen Mitchell (again)*
25. The White Hotel, by D.M. Thomas
26. The Monster of Florence, by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi
27. The 50 Funniest American Writers, by Andy Borowitz
28. The Leopard, by Jo Nesbo

updated reading list

This is getting out of hand. In no particular order

When Gravity Fails, by George Alec Effinger
The Animal Family, by Randall Jarrell
Gentlemen of the Road, by Michael Chabon
God Loves Man Kills, by Chris Claremont
Psychiatric Tales, by Darryl Cunningham
The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, by David Grann
A Season on the Brink, by John Feinstein
Where I'm Calling from, by Raymond Carver
Crazy in Berlin, by Thomas Berger
The Death of Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory
Underworld, by Don Delillo
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
Tooth and Claw, by T.C. Boyle
Them, by Joyce Carol Oates
Between Past and Future, by Hannah Arendt
Anton Chekhov's Short Stories
The Divine Comedy, by Dante
Faust, by Goethe
Go Down Moses, by William Faulkner
Three Tales, by Gustave Flaubert
Psychological Types, by Carl Jung
Genet
Bartleby, the Scrivener, by Herman Melville
Moby Dick
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Moral Man and Immoral Society, by Reinhold Niebhur
What Hath God Wrought, by Daniel Walker Howe
Battle Cry of Freedom, by James McPherson
Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter
Stuart, a Life Backwards, by Alexander Masters
Moth Smoke, by Mohsin Hamid
Pulphead: Essays, by John Jeremiah Sullivan
Quo Vadis? by Henry Sienkiewicz
The Translated Man and Other Stories, by Chris Braak
Levels of the Game, by John McPhee
The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac, by Freedarko
The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga
The Big Short, by Michael Lewis
Great House, by Nicole Krauss
Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville
The Reactionary Mind, by Corey Robin
Mottled Dawn, by Saadat Manto
Nixon Agonistes, by Garry Wills
Through the Eye of  a Needle, by Peter Brown

The Signal and the Noise, by Nate Silver
At Swim Two Birds, by Flann O'Brien
The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting, by Milan Kundera

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, by Paul Hoffman
The Lives of Girls and Women, by Alice Munro
The Shipwrecked, by Graham Greene
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
Jerusalem, by Goncalo Tavares
Mottled Dawn, by Saadat Hassan Manto
The Night in Question, by Tobias Wolff
Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Breaks of the Game, by David Halberstam
Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, by Alvaro Mutis
Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, by Alice Dreger
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower
Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy
Sophie's Choice, by William Styron
The Nature and Destiny of Man, by Reinhold Niebhur
Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell

On Heroes and Tombs, by Ernesto Sabato
History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides
The Nature of Things, by Lucretius
Confessions, by Augustine
Matthew, Luke, Acts, John, I Corinthians, Romans
Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
Meditations, by Rene Descartes
Paradise Lost, by John Milton
Theologico-Political Treatise, by Baruch Spinoza
Discourse on Metaphysics, by Gottfried Liebniz
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
Histories, by Herodotus
The Gay Science, by Friedrich Nietzsche
Philosophy of Right, by GWF Hegel
Collected Short Stories - Isaac Babel
Labyrinths - Borges
Other Inquisitions - Borges
One Hundred Years Of Solitude - Garcia Marquez
Correction - Thomas Bernhard
Nog - Rudy Wurlitzer
Gimpel The Fool - Isaac B. Singer
The Assistant - Bernard Malamud
The Magic Barrel - Bernard Malamud
Entire - Samuel Beckett (In other words, everything!)
Hunger - Knut Hamsun
I'm Not Stiller - Max Frisch
Man In The Holocene - Max Frisch
Seven Gothic Tales - Dineson
Gogol's Wife - Tommaso Landolfi
V - Thomas Pynchon
The Lime Twig - John Hawkes
Blood Oranges - John Hawkes
Little Disturbances Of Man - Grace Paley
I, Etc., - Susan Sontag
Tell Me A Riddle - Tillie Olson
Hero With A Thousand Faces - Campbell
The Paris Review Interviews - Various
How We Live - ed, Rust Hills
Superfiction - ed, Joe David Bellamy
Pushcart Prize Anthologies

Manifestos Of Surrealism - Andre Breton
Documents Of Modern Art - ed, Motherwell
Against Interpretation - Susan Sontag
A Homemade World - Hugh Kenner
Letters - Flaubert

The Changeling - Joy Williams

Going After Cacciato - Tim O'Brien
The Palm-Wine Drunkard - Amos Tutola
Searching For Caleb - Ann Tyler
Thank You - Kenneth Koch
Collected Poems - Frank O'Hara
Rivers And Mountains - John Ashbery
Tragic Magic - Wesley Brown
Mythologies - Roland Barthes
The Pleasure Of The Text - Barthes
For A New Novel - Robbe-Grillet
Falling In Place - Ann Beattie
In The Heart Of The Heart Of The Country - William Gass

The World Within The Word - Gass
Journey To The End Of The Night - Celine
The Box Man - Kobo Abe
Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams - Peter Handke
Kaspar And Other Plays - Peter Handke
Nadja - Andre Breton
Chimera - John Barth
Lost In The Funhouse - John Barth
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
Black Tickets - Jayne Anne Phillips
Collected Stories - Peter Taylor
The Pure And The Impure - Colette
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please - Carver
Collected Stories - John Cheever
I Would Have Saved Them If I Could - Leonard Michaels
Collected Stories - Eudora Welty
The Oranging Of America - Max Apple
Mumbo Jumbo - Ishmael Reed
The Death Of Artemio Cruz - Carlos Fuentes
The Rhetoric Of Fiction - Wayne C. Booth

job

“I am speechless: what can I answer?
I put hand on my mouth.
I have said too much already;
now I will speak no more.”

I think I'm starting to understand it.

white house, nov 6 2012

tombstone

I'm reading a book that Jen left at M&D's house called Tombstone. It's a meticulously detailed account and analysis of China's Great Famine of 1958-1962, during which something on the order of 30 million people died. The famine was caused by the Great Leap Forward.

It's a good history book, combining serious academic weight with a style that's accessible to a general reader. In that way and others, it's similar to my Western eyes to Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, which I read last year and really enjoyed. Bloodlands is better-written and more engaging on a page-by-page basis -- Snyder is a better storyteller than Yang Jisheng. But both cry out to an ignorant audience, "Look! Look at this gigantic disaster that everyone has forgotten about or never knew about in the first place!" "Everyone" in this context being "everyone outside the affected areas." Yang is not writing specifically to that audience, as Snyder was, but as I'm in that audience in both cases I feel them both in that way. It's good to be shaken out of ignorance.

Also, Tombstone plus the recent Nobel laureate for literature, Mo Yan, have piqued my interest in Chinese literature. Apparently Mao was a traditional literature nut, and one of the major provincial figures in the early going had crates upon crates of traditional texts that he carried with him when he was booted from his post.

Time to check out some Mo Yan and Ma Jian.

pale fire

Needs more thought before comments. Totally unique in my reading experience.

internet struggles

The internet in the AKF office and the hotel are terrible -- both have restrictions on how much you can use (Serena by time, office by MB) and cut you off when you've used up your allotment. In the Serena you can just get re-upped for free but it's a hassle. Anyway, that's why the lack of posting.

The rest of the trip went really well. This morning's meeting with a more focused group of Mission and DC people was more productive than the first one, although I left both with the impression that they're more enthusiastic about this whole business than I imagined. I should really stop having any expectations at all, I've been surprised basically once a week for the past four months.  At any rate, we left with lots of work to do in the next 2-3 weeks and a much clearer picture of what we need to address in order for the project to happen. Vague!

Got dinner with Colin last night at Taverna. I missed him before he left for his new job in Kabul (he left the day before I did from DC), so it was good to have a couple of beers and see what's up. He just started as Chief of Party of a big contract in the East and South -- kind of a hotshot job for someone his age (29?).

It's been interesting to spend more time around Aly, the ambassador. He's seriously impressive in meetings, just very easily confident and authoritative without being domineering or aggressive in any way. As MJ pointed out today at lunch, it helps when you've been giving the AKDN spiel and answering every question in the book every day for ten years.

Finally, I finished The Quiet American, by Graham Greene. More thoughts later, perhaps, but it was interesting* to encounter a character who is (ostensibly) working for the precursor to USAID, in the precursor to Vietnam (well, before we got really entangled there, but still), while in Afghanistan for meetings with USAID.

The rest of my thoughts will be self-censored for possible eventual workplace discovery purpose.

Now I'm sitting outside the gate here in Dubai, struggling with yet another shit-tastic internet connection and hoping the inflatable neck pillow I bought helps me get at least five hours of sleep on my flight. T-minus three hours and nine minutes to takeoff.

*Yes, this is a terribly useless word, like "stupid." A lazy substitute. I am too tired to think of a word that better describes what I mean.

19th-century european pop culture

First full day in Kabul went better than expected. The extra Benadryl I took last night meant I woke up with my alarm (!) but also gave me a slight headache. Nothing an aspirin and some excellent coffee couldn't fix.

I ran into Noor K on the way down from breakfast and we greeted each other warmly. FOCUS are just the nicest freaking people. Turns out FOCUS was on the last day of their annual board meeting, so were going to be spending all day in the Serena. So I chatted with him for a bit, then went to eat breakfast with Mirza. While we were eating, the rest of the FOCUS crew showed up. We met several of the board members and promised to come by their meeting in the evening if they were still there. (Makes sense, we are their biggest donor.)

We also ran into the CEO of Roshan, the telecommunications company that the Network owns, and the single largest taxpayer in Afghanistan (they contribute something like 7% of the government's annual tax revenue, which is just stupefying.) I started to narrate the wild goose chase that followed trying to get to the AKDN office (different from the AKF office) but realized it was actually quite uninteresting, even at the time. At any rate, around 9 we met up with our colleagues and headed off to the embassy for the morning's meeting with AID.

Karim, the Roshan CEO, and Aly, HH's ambassador to Afghanistan, had both mentioned since we got here that they refuse to go to the compound. It's easy to see why. They treat you're a prisoner entering prison. They had dogs sniff our cars twice and checked our ID's at least four times, including at two different guard houses within the compound, before we even got to the entrance of the embassy itself. Then they take your passport and any electronic device you're carrying and you can't go anywhere without an escort. We had to double-check to make sure it was okay to GO ACROSS THE STREET from the embassy building to the side of the street that AID is on. Bah.

Anyway, the meeting went rather better than I expected. They had some substantive questions and pushed us on a few issues, but the enthusiasm for this to work is clearly there, which was a surprise.

Had lunch with Aman and this guy Adam, who helps run the hospital reconstruction that AKF and AKHS are doing up north. Then spent the afternoon starting a meeting note, trying to get connected to the internet, and going on a grand tour of the whole AKF "office" (four separate buildings within a walled compound) with Akhtar, the AKFA CEO, and Mirza.

When we got back to the hotel, we went straight down to the FOCUS meeting room. It turned out to be a good idea. Mirza gave some extemporaneous remarks and, given that they sprung (sprang? sprung) the request on him without warning, he did well. I also spoke a bit about the donor atmosphere and how I think FOCUS would grow, and considering that they sprang that on me, as well, I was pleased to hear myself giving a cogent and helpful answer. We left after that and then, a couple of hours later as we were eating dinner, Ruby came over and thanked me for one of the comments I'd made. Apparently it played right into one of the things that she was trying to get the board to approve! Nice to feel useful.

Anyway, now I'm exhausted and I haven't even been able to write about the most interesting thing that's happened in the past week. Namely, my discovery of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Most interesting and most frustrating. HPMOR lends itself to the title of this post. It's a serial that I discovered when 85 chapters were already complete and published (online, for free, at hpmor.com). So after gorging on it for a few days I'm now panicking because it may be months before the next chapter. This must be how people in 19th-century England felt with Dickens, or the French with Hugo. Except they were used to it and I'm freaking the fuck out.

More on it later.

09/09/01

Serena Hotel, Kabul. The trip over was pretty rough but I feel okay at the moment. It's going to catch up with me today, though. I slept barely at all on the IAD-DXB leg, had a relatively pleasant 12 hours in DXB (there's a gym! that you can use! and showers!), and then slept not a wink on the DXB-KBL flight. But everything since we disembarked has been smooth and now I'm in my non-street-facing room, about to take a nap for a bit.

Apparently there was an attack yesterday near NATO HQ (the US embassy compound is nearby but was evidently not the target of the attack). No one seems much fazed here but we'll see what happens later today. It's really shitty, the kid who carried it out was 14 years old and, of course, all the casualties were civilians.

Today is the 11th anniversary of the death by suicide-bomb-hidden-in-TV-camera of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the hero of the Northern Alliance and something like a patron saint to the police and military here. No idea how he's perceived down south but in the capital and parts north his face is almost as ubiquitous as Karzai's. The Lion of the Panjshir.

More later, too tired now and need to close my eyes.

the cave

Finished Jose Saramago's The Cave last night. It was difficult to read, although to be fair that's partly because I read mostly before falling asleep and that doesn't jibe well with a book that barely breaks up sentences, let alone paragraphs. When I had time to plow through large chunks at once it sailed along.

It was ultimately unsatisfyingly (if quite consciously on Saramago's part) blunt and heavy-handed -- the cave is such a classic allegory and in the end he absolutely beats you over the head with it, as he does with all the main metaphors -- but I'm glad I fought my way through it. The characters are deep and beautifully drawn, especially the dog, if you can believe that, and there is something fulfilling about finishing a book that's rich but that you don't especially like while you're reading it.

Actually, the more I think about it the more I'm glad I read it and the more positive things I find to think about. I will probably remember it pretty well, which says something. Anyway, on to the beach and therefore on to something(s) lighter.

tinker, tailor and the russia house

The former, astonishingly good. I'm not sure I've ever read more riveting dialogue than what's in that book. The economy of the storytelling is marvelous. The characters are full and alive. It's interesting to note the subtle differences from the movie, noting also that the fundamentals that make the movie so enjoyable -- extraordinarily tight storytelling, beautiful imagery, excellent dialogue -- are shared by the book. Quite a gratifying read. The liberties that the movie takes are all in service of the form, it seemed to me. For example, Guillam as a gay man, rather than as a player, allows the movie to show, almost without words, the unbelievable tension and strain the characters were under. That's one of the best scenes in the whole movie. The book doesn't need it. The confrontation of Esterhaze on the tarmac is an incredibly dramatic scene that might not have worked so well in writing. But the book has its own tricks.

The Russia House, on the other hand, was good but more just pulp. Very readable, of course, and the dialogue! There's almost no action except meetings of various kinds but it hardly matters. But the story is more boring, somehow, the characters flatter. A solid beach read but not much more.

freakonomics

Well, after finally getting home on Sunday evening and taking yesterday off, I'm back at work, trying to catch up. So far, so okay. Tomorrow and Thursday are going to suck, though.

Also, I kind of hate The Charterhouse of Parma, so I stopped reading it. In DXB I bought Freakonomics, and read the entire thing in the first two hours of my flight home to LHR. My reaction is, "Oh, that's neat." It's like Gladwell but Levitt and Dubner actually seem to know what they're talking about. At one point, maybe in the original NYT story Dubner wrote about Levitt, which is appended, some noted economist says (paraphrase), "I can't find anything wrong with Levitt's work for the life of me. But somehow I still don't believe it." I agree. It's somehow too neat, too self-consciously clever. Still fun and easy to read.

Now I'm finally, finally reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

lol heathrow

If there is an all-knowing, all-doing god, s/he really does not want me to get home. The kicker came while we were over Europe this morning: a lady on the plane had a medical emergency. Don't know what but I overheard something about tachycardia and they set up an IV drip for her even before we got diverted to London so that she could be taken to a hospital. Because it's a long flight to begin with, regulations about maximum consecutive hours worked by a crew forced everyone off the plane. They rebooked it for 9 AM London time...Monday. So as soon as they let us off the plane I hauled ass to baggage claim and through immigration and got in the "fuck no, you're not taking my ass to some hotel, I'm trying to get home" line. As an aside, I was amazed in the end by how few people picked that route: well fewer than 100 out of our ~300 person flight. At any rate, I'm on the next United flight out, at noon. So instead of arriving home at 6:20 AM on Saturday, I'll be home at 3:20 PM on Sunday. Unless, you know, something else happens.

UPDATE: Also, United gave me 10k free miles or a $250 credit on my next booking with them. I took the latter, thinking to use it on something that I'll earn miles for anyway. I'm closing in on Premier status but those miles wouldn't have helped -- only actual flight miles do. I wonder if I'll be credited for the full DXB-IAD amount and the LHR-IAD amount. First world problems. And United's customer service has been pretty excellent from Friday on. So I have to hand it to them. Still, it'd be nice to be home already.

and i'm off

The rest of today went off without a hitch. Picked up my bags and put them in storage, met up with Jenny at Mall of the Emirates, had a couple of beers and a pizza next to the ski slope, shopped around a bit, checked back in for my flight, and now I'm back in my room getting everything together for the final leg. Can't wait to be home.

slightly better

Things off to a slightly better start today than they ended yesterday. I slept in. The rest calmed me down. I apologize for yesterday's rant. Feels good to do that every once in a while, though.

The Marhaba lady told me I could store my bags in lockers outside the hotel so I don't have to pay the $84. Also, even if I wanted to I couldn't because they don't transfer bags for people on my flight. Whatever. Bought some reasonably-priced (!) socks and a pair of boxers, showered, and I'm ready to go. So I'm going to get my stuff together, leave it in a locker, and see something of Dubai. Plan now is to meet Jenny at Mall of the Emirates, where the indoor ski slope is. Then I've got to come back 5-6 hours before my flight to allow time to check in. Apparently it's a madhouse in the evening.

Anyway, T-25 hours or so until I touch down. Almost there.

fuck united, fuck dubai

Basically the only thing that could have gone wrong on my trip back to the US went wrong: my flight from DXB-IAD was cancelled after I changed it from Sunday to Saturday. The travel agent who'd booked the KBL-DXB flight was out on Thursday so I couldn't change that flight back to Saturday. So now here I am with basically 24 hours in Dubai. Fine, I've only spent a tiny bit of time here, surely I can find some way to kill the day tomorrow. Plus it turns out Jenny, the AKFA director of education, is also going to be here this weekend so we planned to meet up and do something. Fun.

But no. That one major blip, the flight cancellation, has precipitated a bunch of other god damn motherfucking blips that are driving me up the fucking wall and causing me to hate this god damn corrupt hideous greedy shit-eating country. First, I made a reservation at the airport hotel here, because it was extremely last-minute and that seemed like the easiest thing to do. I'll come back to that.

Got to the airport in Kabul, no problem. Flight was a bit delayed, no problem. Got to DXB. Problem. I can't get my bags because the United counter doesn't open until three hours before the flight. There's no way to leave the airport and return, because I can't get my boarding pass until 9:10 tomorrow night. The airport hotel, where I've made my non-refundable reservation, is, as you might guess, in the airport. Therefore, my bags are in storage and I am here paying out the ass for a room in the hotel, with no change of clothes. I can't even go to the gym, because I have no sneakers or shorts or t-shirt. There are loads of hotels outside the airport. Fucking loads. But I can't stay at any of them because I've already paid for this room. Oh, and did I mention it's by the hour? I hadn't realized that, and it's unclear that that's the case when you're making your reservation, so if and when I leave the airport tomorrow, I'll have to check out of the hotel but will still be paying until 11 fucking PM. At which point I'll already be by my gate, waiting to board. Awesome. Oh, and unless I want to lug my bags around with me all day, I have to pay the airport $84 to transfer and store them for me. Courtesy fee, don't you know.
 
In short I'm spending $400 (hotel cost plus luggage transfer fee) to stay at a glorified Holiday Inn in the godforsaken greed capital of the world, all because I was sick and eager to be home and decided at the last minute to change my plans.

Now, the money I've spent will be paid back to me. But on principle it angers me to be gouged so openly, and I'm dreading filling out the expense report and being forced to justify these costs.

And if I hadn't fought for the change, I'd be in Kabul right now. Everything would be fine. That, in the end, is the most frustrating thing of all. I had to work to get the flight pushed up a day. I was so excited to come home early, to see Claire and everyone and my bed and to be in a place where I'm sure the next thing I eat won't prolong my diarrhea. Instead, at almost every turn, something has gone wrong. I'm back on my original flight from Dubai, but much more stressed out and frustrated and disappointed than if I'd never tried to change the ticket at all. To put a, um, dramatic point on it: from "Tragedy: The Basics" (Grand Valley State University):

Tragedy depicts the downfall of a noble hero or heroine, usually through some combination of hubris, fate, and the will of the gods. The tragic hero's powerful wish to achieve some goal inevitably encounters limits, usually those of human frailty (flaws in reason, hubris, society), the gods (through oracles, prophets, fate), or nature. Aristotle says that the tragic hero should have a flaw and/or make some mistake (hamartia). The hero need not die at the end, but he / she must undergo a change in fortune. In addition, the tragic hero may achieve some revelation or recognition (anagnorisis--"knowing again" or "knowing back" or "knowing throughout" ) about human fate, destiny, and the will of the gods. Aristotle quite nicely terms this sort of recognition "a change from ignorance to awareness of a bond of love or hate."

I don't know about noble hero, but the powerful wish, the hamartia, the will of the gods, flaws in society. It's a god damn tragedy in miniature. Not in the sad, "woe is me" sense, although I'm complaining like a champ right now, but in the original dramatic sense. I'm still waiting for the anagnorisis.

There are other, nicer things to report about the last couple of days. But those will have to wait. Right now I have to take a few deep breaths and go buy some socks.

sorry for not posting

Monday and Tuesday were productive, although I was sick very badly on Monday and still getting over it for most of the day on Tuesday. Gross. Feeling better this morning (Wednesday) although I again did not sleep enough last night and my head/neck hurt this morning. Can't wait to get back to my own bed.

Monday was the England-France Euro2012 match, which I for some reason decided I wanted to watch. So Aman, Malashree, Aleeza and I went to a place called Design Cafe, where Aman said he'd seen a TV -- most restaurants don't have them and obviously there are no sports bars in Kabul. Turns out they did have a TV. It was about 13 inches across and ancient, and they brought it out and put it on a stool next to our table. Then the waiter plugged in some rabbit ears and started messing around trying to find a signal. That didn't work very well, so he plugged in his cell phone charger instead! A bit of repositioning and damned if the signal didn't pick up well enough to watch the game. We were all flabbergasted. Note to self: if attempting to watch broadcast TV, cell phone chargers make good alternative antennae.

Tuesday talked to Mom and Dad and Jack in the morning and went to dinner with Aleeza and Raha (from AKFA) at Le Jardin, which was nice. Everything in between was work and emergency bathroom breaks.

Now it's Wednesday and I have the last of my necessary meetings at AKFA at 2 PM. Plugging away at other things, too, and very much looking forward to being home.

some site cleaning

Just revised the link list to the right. Took out some stuff I no longer look at, added a few new things, most notably Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose blog at the Atlantic is truly awesome.

UPDATE: Also, in doing some research yesterday about SMS-based early warning systems, I found and began geeking out over the work of a guy named Patrick Meier and an organization he's affiliated with called Ushahidi. I'm still just learning and trying to wrap my head around it but long story short: crowd-sourced mapping of crises. Links added to the right. I want to do THAT.

flu? or just the food?

Went to bed tired and frustrated last night for inability-to-work-out reasons. I did end up stretching for 30-40 minutes in my room, which is good but not a substitute for the real thing. Fell asleep around 10:30 having muddled my way through a few more pages of The Charterhouse of Parma and woke up at...wait for it...4:30 in the damn morning. For an emergency bathroom trip. Spent the next two hours trying to go back to sleep but mostly unable to because of a combination of getting up every 30-45 minutes to visit the toilet and generalized whole-body discomfort. I say whole body but it's been focused so far mostly in my hips (???) and head and neck. I don't think I have a fever but this feels like more than just food/water poisoning.

Oh well, gotta suck it up and try to get on with the day. Talked with Claire for half an hour or so, which was nice but I was too out of it to be much of a conversationalist (sorry Claire). Then ate breakfast -- the yogurt I picked up yesterday was an excellent, excellent choice -- and now I'm here at FOCUS. Going to leave in a few minutes to register with the Ministry of the Interior Foreign Affairs, which Gul Ahmad and Aziz and I laughingly realized yesterday I haven't yet done. Oops. It was cool to spend some time with each of them yesterday: Gul Ahmad on my errands and Aziz later on as we waited for the car to come back and drive us home. Aziz in particular has quite a life story, although not a terribly uncommon one by Afghan standards. To give a glimpse: in the late '90s he and his family fled to Karachi and lived in a tent for a year and a half. He spent his whole late childhood and teens in Pakistan before coming back to Afghanistan six or seven years ago.

Later on this morning I'll go over to AKF and try to sort out the rest of the week from their side. If I still feel like garbage I might go home early and try to rest. No sleep though. Not trying to fuck with my sleep schedule any more than strictly necessary.

kabulabulabul

Things going well so far in Kabul. Hung out with Tameeza for a while in the courtyard at the PP and who should walk by right after we sat down but Aman, ex-CHF and ex-AKF Mozambique. He was on his way to check out a house, as he just moved here three weeks ago. But he stayed for a bit and then hung out some more after looking at the place. Tameeza had dinner plans so Aman and I ended up at a French place owned by real live French people. It showed, the food was good.

Woke up at 6:45 to a surprise alarm on the phone FOCUS gave me. That was good because the car came earlier than I expected, so with the early wake up I had time to shower and eat a bowl of cereal. The FOCUS office is unchanged other than some desk/office rearranging, and I've spent the morning going through emails and reviewing with Aleeza the feedback we got on Friday on our proposal. Seems straightforward for the most part. We'll have a conference call later this afternoon to figure out a few of the thornier issues.

At lunch today Gul Ahmad, one of the admin guys, took me to buy a jump rope and some yogurt -- I left my rope in Islamabad and the breakfast cereal at the hotel needs help that the room-temperature parmalat-style milk can't provide.

Time to get back to work, I'm still going through emails from last Friday. Pleased that I resisted doing any work yesterday, though.

sweet, bitter baby

Ruby is now head of FOCUS Afghanistan. Apparently one of the first things she did was to evaluate and rectify the caffeine situation in the office. There is a proper drip coffee machine and proper ground coffee. It's Starbucks, but oh man am I ever not complaining about that for once.

Hallelujah.

yesterday's post

=== Posting from FOCUS offices ===

Writing this from my room in the Park Palace guest house in Kabul. There wasn't any space in the AKF guest house so they shifted me over here and, despite my apprehensions, it's fine. Judging by lunch, the food is marginally better than the AKF guest house. But that's a pretty low bar and I will not be ordering the cheeseburger again. Also, Nescafe. One of mankind's greatest abominations against god.

Yesterday was Caryn's birthday, which we got started an hour early or so, with beers on the odd little deck outside her room at the Serena. I was, lamely, too tired to make it to midnight for a proper kickoff. But no worries. Yesterday (Friday, I have to remind myself) was a kind of a microcosm of the trip. Productive meeting with the OFDA rep to start things off, which covers the productive nature of the trip. Then ran into Rebecca, Andwele, Andrew and some of the other AKFA crew who were in ISB to attend Kevin's wedding. Did some work then went over to the PHF office to meet with Claire, PHF's Coordinator. Got back around 3 feeling a bit queasy, which covers the off-and-on slightly-out-of-it-plus-vague-

digestive-discomfort feeling of the trip. Lay down for a bit, ate a pizza -- tasty but too cheesy -- and then Caryn and I went out to Super Market for some shopping. She needed gifts for some family and I just kind of went along to see what was what. Importantly, I found a perfect suitcase for the stupidly large picture frame I bought the other day. The thing is very wide and can be expanded vertically by zipping or unzipping various zippers. Made packing a heck of a lot easier.

That paragraph was boring but necessary.

Caryn's birthday dinner was nice if a bit odd: we were joined by a friend of a friend of hers, to whom Caryn had brought a specific kind of dental floss. It ended up being a nice dinner but just a little awkward to have the two of us dining with a complete stranger. The hotel brought some cake to the table at the end, my first positive experience ever with coconut creme.

Then packed, slept very little due I think to nerves over making my flight, woke at 4, and made it to the airport in plenty of time. The flight was fine, just one notable thing: A guy got on with what I presume were his three wives. All three were evidently young, judging by their hands and eyes, which were the only parts they had uncovered, and the eyes only on two of them. At least one spoke quite good English, judging by the fluidity with which she pronounced, "I won't sit next to a man." The man's seat was next to mine, so I and two other guys on our row moved in order to let the quartet have that row to themselves. This is, needless to say, not something you see every day, even in Afghanistan. I've got to repeat that I don't know whether that's what this group was. It could have been father, mother and two grown daughters. The one I took to be the most senior -- she had a rather beautifully decorated niqab, contrasted with the plain black of the other two, and sat next to the man while the other two sat across the aisle -- had very different coloration and eye shape from the others, for one thing.

My ignorance of family relations in a polygamous family is absolute and based on assumptions and nothing else. Makes me want to learn more about polygamy in Afghanistan and the Muslim world more broadly.

At any rate, immigration and customs took a while. I couldn't find my checked bag, the aforementioned large accordion, and was about to get pissed when it turned up in a pile off in a corner. Whatever. After that it was smooth sailing. Karim Bakhsh met me in the building by parking lot C. I experienced a little rush of affection at seeing him again. I don't know why, because we can't communicate beyond "Hello" and "How are you" and the names of destinations, but there's just something gentle, friendly, earnest about him. Something in the way he goes about his business, something in his face -- he smiles more than most people here. Whew, getting nearer to purple territory. As I said, genuine affection. The guy was a military driver, too, decades ago, as I learned last year. So perhaps part of it is imagining some of the shit he must have seen, that he comes across the way he does in spite of that.

Check-in at the Park Palace was without incident. My room is small but fine and has the wardrobe I wish I had at home -- imagine, being able to hang shirts up side-by-side instead of front-to-back. I lay down for a while and tried to get some sleep but only managed to doze for a couple of hours. Woke up with the beginnings of a caffeine-and-hunger headache, ate the aforementioned lunch, and here I am. Tameeza's on her way over to hang out for a bit, which will be nice. It's good to know people here outside of work, because otherwise it could get awfully boring. At least the TV is more varied than in the Serena.

Oh, last thing: I finished Awakenings. It stayed stunning and masterful until the penultimate appendix, in which Sacks discusses the various film, radio and stage adaptations of the book. The section is a bit boring to begin with, and then he starts name dropping "Bob" DeNiro and Robin Williams and it just gets irritating. I skipped the last few pages and went right to the glossary. And then I was done. With that, I think I'll go outside and get started on The Charterhouse of Parma while I wait for Tameeza. The courtyard is actually pretty nice, if not without its Afghan quirks, and it's lovely out. More on the quirks when I get a chance to take some photos.

last day in islamabad and a strange song

They brought me coffee this morning. Excellent. I've got a meeting with OFDA in about an hour for which I am pretty well prepared. Been up since 8 consolidating some notes, reading Dawn, messing around on the internet, and listening to music. Very civilized morning. More on the music in a second.

There has been, in the paper, a bizarre saga over the last week about a group of girls in Kohistan, which is on the way to Skardu by road, who were allegedly executed at the hands of a tribal jirga for dancing with boys at a party -- no, clapping while boys danced at a party. This has provoked outrage and demands for an investigation but a strange lack of actual facts, including whether or not the girls were actually dead. The headline today is that investigators have told the Supreme Court, which had demanded the investigation, the girls are actually alive and safe. The story is bizarre on a number of counts: (1) that news about girls being killed for clapping at a party could be treated with anything but baffled apoplexy reveals just how fucked-up this country's attitudes are toward women, even among relative liberals; (2) that the Supreme Court can order investigations of specific criminal acts by anyone, anywhere; (3) that reports of girls being killed would make it into the paper for several days in a row without anyone actually knowing whether they were dead. On point (1), as I mentioned, the story has been met with outrage from some quarters but reported on with equanimity in the relatively West-friendly Dawn, as if this is something that just happens. Oh, yeah, a group of elderly assholes decided some girls should die for enjoying dancing. Then they followed through. That's a thing.

Incidentally, the Chief Justice's son is currently under investigation for accepting bribes from a real estate developer in exchange for convincing his father to go easy on the developer. The CJ has not recused himself yet from the case, which evidently went straight to the Supreme Court without being heard at lower levels. One of these days someone will have to explain the actual organization of the "legal" Pakistani "justice" system to me. All one can gather from Pakistan: A Hard Country and spending any time here is that it's hopelessly corrupt.

On to that music. Gabby posted the other day on his (and his friend Josie's) tumblr, which I will add to my links as soon as I finish writing this, a rather pretty, soulful song by one Charles Manson. Yes, that Charles Manson. He sounds like a talented undergraduate singing primarily to get girls and probably succeeding. But this was recorded to raise money for his defense. Listen for yourself, and tell me that your mind isn't blown.

exercise = best

Last couple of days I've felt like crap, in case you haven't been able to tell. I didn't have a real workout in me just now but I made myself walk up to the gym and do half an hour or so of jump rope, calisthenics and stretching. And now I feel better in all kinds of ways. My head is clearer; I'm happy with myself for following through on my plan to exercise, even if I didn't do all I'd hoped; my muscles are warm and loose. Go me.

no tajikistan, no badakhshan

The Afghanistan portion of my trip was briefly thrown into turmoil this week, as it turns out Noor is going to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, and then Khorog, Tajikistan and Ishkashim, Afghanistan for cross-border meetings. He suggested that I come along for all or part. That sounded fantastic and I was getting all geared-up to cram my non-FOCUS meetings into two days at the end of next week. But then he checked the dates and it turns out the Khorog/Badakhshan part wouldn't start until the day before I leave. So much for that. One of those episodes where I wouldn't have anything to be disappointed about if the possibility had never arisen. But once it did...well, silly to get my hopes up, it was obviously a long shot from a logistical standpoint alone.

Next time, I'd definitely like to leave more time for a such a trip. Well, next time I'm over here I might spend mostly in Tajikistan. Crossing into Badakhshan would be almost mandatory in that case.

Anyway, things are swimming along otherwise. Today was mostly work-focused so not much interesting to report. Caryn and I did break out of the hotel this afternoon to go to Pak Turk for some shopping, which was nice. She bought a chest of drawers! Bit more complicated to get home than even a rug.

My benadryl headache continues (it's 7:30 PM) but I'm going to go to the gym in a bit and see what I can get done. Then maybe hit up Caryn for one of her Harry Potter DVD's.

Tomorrow morning, chat with M&D!

idiot

I'm so frustrated with myself at the moment that I could cry. I got really tired around 7:30 so I closed my eyes for a bit. Napped. Woke up around 8:30, no problem. Then I got up, went to the bathroom, lay back down, and now it's 1:30 AM and I'm wide fucking awake. Unbelievable. What is wrong with me.

Took two benadryl and hopefully that'll be enough to knock me back out relatively soon, because otherwise it's going to be a very, very long day.

UPDATE

I slept from 2:30-9. OOPS. That means I slept roughly 11 hours last night, albeit not continuously. Weird. Also, Caryn has been talking about a benadryl "hangover." Didn't know what she meant until just now.

from the department of tmi

You should not click on the following link unless you are comfortable with knowing too much about my current state.

Ouch.

raptor

There was a huge hawk or falcon on the patio outside the buffet restaurant this morning while we were eating breakfast. It was cool.

museday

Now that we're not going to Skardu, we spent a good chunk of yesterday figuring out what to do with the rest of the week. Part of that was figuring out whether I might be able to go to Skardu, if just for the launch ceremony on Thursday (the US ambassador is going!), but my flight for Kabul is at 7 AM on Saturday so that's really not an option. You can't go unless you have a buffer of time on the end to get back. The planes just don't fly in bad weather or in the dark, so you can be stuck for two, three, four days while you wait for a flight. Not an option right now. C'est la vie.

So we've got some meetings, and some documents to prepare and review, and of course the normal work from home that I guess we won't be as behind on as we otherwise might have on a trip.

We were at work pretty late last night and then I went to the gym. Rest-pause is an efficient way to set up hypertrophy-focused weight lifting. You get a lot of reps in at a moderate weight in a relatively short amount of time. There are a bunch of variations but they're all predicated on using a weight that you can do for 10-12 reps, 15 tops, for the first set. The leg press here does not have enough weight to limit me to that. This is more a consequence of the equipment here being inadequate than of my strength: 190kg is simply not a lot of weight if you don't have to stabilize it. Therefore it ends up being more a muscular endurance thing, which is fine but meant that it set me up to feel a wee bit nauseous by the end of the workout. Well, it feels good to have worked hard. My jump rope skills are improving, too.

Just ordered room service last night and watched the first appealing thing other than Al Jazeera or BBC that's been on since I arrived: the SEC track and field championships. Random as hell, but whatever. I enjoyed it. Then sleep. This morning talked to Claire, which is a nice way to wake up, and now it's time for breakfast.

food

The food is generally pretty bland and inoffensive at the Serena. But Caryn and I just went to the (new?) pan-Asian place that you walk past on the way to the business complex -- where AKF is -- and man that was some spicy-good pad thai. Nice.

The food at the Marriott, where we went last night, is still better. Cream of fennel soup, australian filet mignon, and apple crumble with red wine of some sort. One of the better steaks of my life. Like butta.

Anyway, sleep now, early morning tomorrow to see if we can get another flight. If we can't, improv.

thwarted

My third attempt to go to northern Pakistan was foiled by bad weather. It's beautiful here in Islamabad, albeit still pretty freaking hot, but Skardu is experiencing intermittent thunderstorms. We sat on the plane for an hour, then got off and sat in the terminal for an hour and a half, and finally they cancelled the flight. Better safe than sorry. So I'm back in the Serena.

It's mighty disappointing, because I was looking forward to seeing Baltistan and because it would have been nice to fulfill the second half of the training. As it is we'll have to improvise. But that can wait until tomorrow. Right now I'm going to damn pool.

some new muzak

The lobby of the Serena, when the tabla and sitar player aren't there, is filled with the soulless blowings of some anonymous smoove-jazz saxophonist playing bland muzak on an endless loop. I don't think it's changed at all since last year. Not sure what happened to the piano player from last year -- he of the three song repertoire.* In the scheme of things bland lobby music is a pretty tiny complaint.

Just got a shave at the spa, which was nice. Forty minutes and PKR 700 (including a 60% tip, about $7.50) well spent. The guy wasn't as chatty as my barber last year, mostly because his English wasn't great. Catholic, though, which is unusual. 

Seems the jet lag is not gone: I woke up at 5:15 this morning and have been awake ever since. That'll teach me: sleep aids the first three nights at least when traveling this far east. Oh well, I feel fine anyway.

A lazy breakfast spent reading Dawn was, to borrow yesterday's adjective du jour, informative. Lots of talk about the budget that the PPP -- the current ruling party -- just presented, and the drama that ensued when members of the opposition PML-N rushed the stage during the Finance Minister's budget speech. I wish there were more fights in Congress. Britain and its former colonies seem to have much more fun with their legislative bodies. There was also a letter to the editor about Pakistan's need to incorporate disaster risk reduction into school curricula throughout the country, and an announcement of two new weather stations to monitor the glacial lakes in Gilgit-Baltistan. Things to keep track of that I'd never have heard about in the States.

The most arresting piece, though, was an op/ed by Irfan Husain entitled "How Low Can We Go?"

For years, others and I have been writing about Pakistan's low standing in the community of nations.

Thanks to a recent BBC survey on how popular various countries are around the world, we now know just how low we have sunk.

According to this poll...Pakistan is joint last, together with Iran. One place above us is North Korea, and fourth from the bottom is Israel. This, then, is the company we are keeping in the eyes of the world.

...The reality -- whatever the overheated fantasies of armchair warriors and studio supermen -- is that Pakistan is a wretchedly poor, violent and increasingly isolated country.

In short, we need all the help we can get to dig ourselves out of the hole we are in. To this end, we constantly hold a begging bowl in one hand. However, we also hold a gun in the other: occasionally it points at others, and the rest of the time it is held to our own head.

He goes on,

$18bn in aid later, Americans see us as not only helping hte Taliban, but also seeking to profit from the war in Afghanistan. Even friends of Pakistan such as John Kerry and Hillary Clinton are appalled by the hysterical level of anti-Americanism they see in our media, as well as in the actions and statements of supposedly responsible politicians and officials.

...From our support of Islamic extremism to our appalling treatment of women and minorities, the world has seen a country tearing itself apart in the name of religion...Worse, we are widely viewed as the epicentre of Islamic militancy, training and motivating foreigners to commit mayhem in their own countries.

Our paranoid worldview has convinced vast numbers of Pakistanis that the rest of the world is out to get us. But what most foreigners would really like to happen is for Pakistan to just somehow vanish, together with all the headaches it is causing in the world.

Husain is angry and despairing about his own country. He's certainly right about Pakistani paranoia, which is something comes up again in Pakistan: A Hard Country, and which people talk about openly here and in the States. The piece is a very strong reminder that countries are never monolithic entities, that dissent exists everywhere. When we talk about "Pakistan", we're using the word as a kind of synecdoche for an extraordinarily complex entity. Not exactly a novel insight, that, but it's important to remember because it encourages subtlety and modesty when thinking about other countries and their people.

=== Brilliant segue! ===

It's 11:30. On the docket for the rest of the day: A bit of work, a trip to the gym, lunch, some time by the pool, and that's it.

*"Candle in the Wind," "Bridge Over Troubled Water," and "My Heart Will Go On."

training day 2

Slept like a baby last night. Thank goodness. Talked to Claire this morning for a while, which was great -- it really is incredible that, 8,000 miles away, we can see each other talk in real time.

Day two of the training was fine. We got a little feedback on day 1: "informative" was the modal adjective. Then we delved into communications, branding and marking. Deeply fascinating stuff, I assure you. But it seems that our colleagues appreciated it, and that's all that counts, really. We wrapped up the training around 12:15 and then Caryn and I did a bit of work, ate lunch, and came back over for a kind of pointless but eventually interesting meeting with a couple of USAID Pakistan ag guys.

One of them spent the whole time talking to Karim about project-specific issues. The other one got bored with that -- as, frankly, did Caryn and I -- and we ended up talking with him about a bunch of other stuff. He has an exceptionally low view of Dep. Sec. of State Nides and of Raj Shah and was franker about that than any active AID employee I've ever spoken to. It was a bit hilarious, honestly, and it was cool to hear an insider's view of how the capriciousness and ignorance of the big bosses trickles down and hinders his work.

After that, did some more work, went to the pool, talked to Mom, went to the gym, ate dinner and drank some beer, talked to Dad, and now I'm going to sleep. Tomorrow is an off day, although I do have some work to do. And stuff.

training day 1

So last night I slept from 11-3. Have you ever been so tired that you felt sad and emotionally fragile and vaguely nauseous? Well, I have. Getting snappish from undersleep is one thing but I bypassed that state today and went straight into actual distress. Luckily, we were ahead of schedule on our agenda for day 1 of the training.

We'd thought to have at least a day or two to prepare after our arrival but no such luck, so we sucked it up, spent all yesterday afternoon and (in my case) a couple of hours this morning preparing, and powered through (1) Intro to USAID, given by Caryn; (2) Intro to the Project, given by Karim N.; (3) Intro to 22 CFR 226, given by me, with many questions from the 13 other participants; and (4) review of the compliance checklist, tag-teamed by me and Caryn.

Then, at 3, jet lag hit with the force of a thousand milligrams of benadryl. (Diphenhydramine hydrochloride. Fun name. Diphenhydramine.) I excused myself around 3:40, spent 30 minutes waiting to get my weekly pass for the Serena business complex so I won't have to check in every morning from now on, came back to the hotel, and slept for an hour and a half. That's probably too long but thirty minutes was just not going to cut it.

That level of exhaustion was a new or at least unremembered feeling for me. And I've finally gotten to the thrust of Awakenings, the chapter after all the patient descriptions in which Sacks lays out his case for the treatment of sick patients as people, giving equal weight to the "objective" facts of their disease (the parts that make their "case" a case -- same word as used in law, as he points out with stunning insight) and to the metaphysical questions around their state. "How are you?" Sacks says, is a metaphysical question, one not answerable factually but only by example and allegory. Those examples, those allegories, are central to understanding patients and their response to disease. And modern neurology, and modern medicine in general (in 1972, when he was initially writing, and presumably still in 1990, when my edition came out) has largely abandoned those vital elements in favor of the brutally quantifiable. Post-encephalitic Parkinsonian patients and their reactions to L-DOPA, the description of which fill most of the book, provide unusually rich territory for exploring the necessity of treating patients as whole people.

I'm just going to quote him at length, because, well, POWER.

There is nothing alive which is not individual: our health is ours; our diseases are ours; our reactions are ours -- no less than our minds or our faces. Our health, diseases, and reactions cannot be understood in vitro, in themselves; they can only be understood with reference to us, as expressions of our nature, our living, our being-here (da-sein) in the world. Yet modern medicine, increasingly, dismisses our existence, either reducing us to identical replicas reacting to fixed 'stimuli' in equally fixed ways, or seeing our diseases as purely alien and bad, without organic relation to the person who is ill. The therapeutic correlate of such notions, of course, is the idea that one must attack the disease with all the weapons one has, and that one can launch the attach with total impunity, without a thought for the person who is ill. Such notions, which increasingly dominate the entire landscape of medicine, are as mystical and Manichean as they are mechanical and inhuman, and are the more pernicious because they are not explicitly realized, declared, and avowed.

I thought about that today as I realized that my ailing state earlier today was clearly shaped as much by my own reactions to exhaustion in the context -- determination to finish the day's work, unwillingness to appear weak until I actually couldn't fake it anymore, and so on -- as by the fact of my not having slept very much for days and the upset that caused to my body's chemistry.

Now I'm awake and sort of ready to face the rest of the day. I actually feel alright now. Going to visit the tailor down on the first floor and maybe go to the pool for a bit. It's oppressively hot, but I think that would be okay as long as part of the time outside is spent underwater.

To conclude on a somewhat related note, here are a couple of songs I've been listening to a lot the last couple of weeks. The first one requires a hat tip to Gabby, the second I found just stumbling around YouTube and subsequently bought the album it's on.

Ambassadeurs - "M.O.P.E."

Ryo Fukui - "Early Summer"

dawn

Dawn is the newspaper founded by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who also founded Pakistan. When I filled out my little entry form last night, that's what I checked for my morning complementary paper. Glad I did, 'cause there's a bombshell of a top headline this morning: "Dr Afridi jailed for helping Khyber militants."

Shakil Afridi is the physician accused of helping the CIA run a fake hepatitis vaccine campaign in Abbottabad to try to figure out whether bin Laden was staying in the house where he was, in fact, found. The government arrested him, much to the ire of US diplomats and officials. All indications were that he'd been arrested for, essentially, treason ("anti state activities"). Helping a foreign military carry out an attack on your home soil qualifies, I think.

But now court documents have revealed that, "The four-member tribal court did not entertain evidence relating to Dr Shakil Afridi's involvement with the CIA, citing lack of jurisdiction as the main reason and recommended that he be produced before the relevant court for further proceedings under the law... However, he was sentenced...on the charge of having links with Manal Bagh." That is, he was involved with Lashkar-i-Islam, a militant group based in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. The court left open the option of trying him for treason but his trial and sentencing to date have had nothing to do with bin Laden or the CIA.

This is apparently as big a surprise to the Pakistani media as to anyone. It'll be interesting to see what people think today.

pakistan: an easy country

Just got to the Serena after a rather smooth journey. There was a caterwauling baby the seat in front of me on the IAD-DXB flight that provoked some images I'm not ashamed of.* But otherwise it was fine. Watched "Drive" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley," neither of which I'd seen and both of which were very enjoyable. DXB was its normal weird self, although because our connecting flight was on Emirates Caryn and I ended up in the special terminal. And when we got there, around 5 PM local time, there was nobody there except staff. A bit strange.

The DXB-ISB flight was great: I had practically an entire row to myself and Emirates planes are nice. Anyway, blah blah blah, now I'm in the Serena and wiped out, which is entirely appropriate because it's 2:30 in the morning. Time for bed, more tomorrow.

Edit: Hope this post answers the comment on the previous post.

pakistan: a hard country

Well, it took me a month but I finally finished Anatol Lieven's Pakistan: A Hard Country. It takes the form of a survey of contemporary Pakistani politics and social structures and the ways these are influenced by geography, history, religion, and traditional cultures.

First, Lieven provides a brief primer on Pakistani history and a more in-depth look at the main structures making up the country: religion, politics (i.e., political "parties"), the justice system (such as it is, and it ain't much), and the military. Then the book breaks down Pakistan's ethno-regional blocks: Sindh, Punjab, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa each get a chapter. Finally, he addresses the history and issues around the Pakistani Taliban, and makes some suggestions directly to US policy makers.

A major theme running throughout the book is the role of patronage. The most powerful social ties in Pakistan are still familial and tribal, and at a national level political parties are mostly not parties at all, but organs of patronage dominated by family dynasties from a particular place. The Pakistan People's Party is run by the Bhuttos and is predominantly Sindhi. The Sharifs dominate the Pakistan Muslim League, which is mostly Punjabi. And so on. At a sub-national level, extended families and tribes switch party allegiances often, or even As a result, Pakistani politics is overwhelmingly, probably incorrigibly corrupt.

Lieven presents his observations and conclusions mostly without judgment, which is rather refreshing. Usually, when I hear talk of Pakistani corruption at another (knock wood) NGO or contractor, it's from the point of view of a Westerner, who was responsible for or knew the people responsible for the management of that money in the way that Westerners think money should be managed. To have corruption in Pakistan placed in a - ahem - Pakistani context is helpful to say the least.

One last point, although I could go on for a long time about this book: The picture of Pakistan that's painted for me at work, and that I help paint, obviously places a large emphasis on the role of my employer. So it's good, very much in line with the perspective-and-humility kick that I've been on for the past year or so, to read a nearly 500-page long book about Pakistan and note that certain groups receive barely a mention. Pakistan is large, complex and very populous. Down in the weeds, it's sometimes hard to remember that.

Outstanding introduction to contemporary Pakistan.

the violent bear it away

Finished it last week. The characters are brilliant -- not in the British sense but in the sense that they practically shine off the page. Much darker than Wise Blood, which was whimsical and funny despite its bitterness, and darker even than most of the stories in A Good Man Is Hard To Find.

The tension in each episode is palpable. This is true even when the outcome of a given scene can be seen from a mile away, in part because O'Connor doesn't let on until the very end which way the main character, Frank Tarwater, will go. I feel stupid and clumsy trying to say anything deeper, although there's a lot more still churning around up there in my brain.

At one point, there's a rather startling bit of homophobic stereotyping. O'Connor's treatment of race and class and gender and mental illness and religion is so insightful that I admit to being rather disappointed as the scene in question unfolded. Oh well. On the whole, a fabulous book. Will re-read someday.

wise blood and a good man is hard to find

Flannery O'Connor was a genius, plain and simple. Picked up these two books (and a third, The Violent Bear it Away, which I'll read next) at Normal's in Baltimore for $2.50 total. They are hilarious and beautiful and strange and powerful. I started off Wise Blood thinking, "Oh, Faulkner lite but easier to understand." And then it became clear that she's not Faulkner lite, she's a completely different beast. Gothic, sure, in the fascination with freaks and monsters and the dark view of Christianity. But funny and clever and light on her feet, too.

Wise Blood is great but the short stories in A Good Man is Hard to Find are even better. The title story is among her most well-known, I think -- Claire and Dad had both read it before. But the highlight for me was "The Artificial Nigger," a story about a grandfather who takes his 12-year-old grandson into the city to "see all there is to see" and teach the boy some humility. They live alone, far out in the country, and the grandson is prideful and puts on airs and this drives the grandfather crazy, so he decides to teach the boy how awful the city is and how dependent the boy is on him. It does not go well. At the climax I felt like I got punched in the chest.

Can't wait for The Violent Bear it Away.

the control of nature

I've decided now, for sure: John McPhee sometimes just does not do a very good job explaining physical shapes or spaces. It bothered me from time to time during Annals but I figured maybe I was just being obtuse or that perhaps I was not well-versed enough in geological vocabulary conventions. But after reading Control of Nature, I've realized that the problem is probably in his writing. In each of the stories - "Atchafalaya," "Cooling the Lava," and "Los Angeles Against the Mountains" -- McPhee describes physical objects, or their relation to one another in space, in a way that does not conjure up anything like a clear picture of what he's looking at.

In "Atchafalaya," the best example of this problem is in McPhee's description of the Old River Control System, a network of gates and related navigation locks that governs (sometimes) the flow of water between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers in Louisiana. McPhee spends some words here and there describing how the various components are situated but I had to look up a diagram to have any idea what he was talking about. I'm still not quite sure how it all works. Despite the fact that he's failed to adequately describe the structure that is the center of his essay, "Atchafalaya" is a wonderful history of and meditation on a group of humans' attempts to arrest a geological inevitability.

In "Cooling the Lava," the problem arises in McPhee's description of a somewhat less important element: At one point he is standing on an active lava flow in Hawaii, on just-cooled surface lava, looking down a natural chimney into a tube of lava flowing beneath him and his companions. He wonders whether he is (paraphrasing) "looking into the near side of the tube, or standing over the middle and looking into the far side." I spent quite a while trying to parse that sentence and trying to figure out how a view through a chimney could be to the near or far side of a tube. No luck. This snag is doubly frustrating because it comes in the middle of the most awesome section of the essay.

In "Los Angeles Against the Mountains," the descriptive issue arises in the relationship between LA and the San Gabriel Mountains. However, here McPhee finds the solution that I found myself wishing for over and over in Annals and a couple of times in the previous two essays in Control: He draws a diagram. A perfect, single-line diagram that does more to describe the physical space of his story than do all his words. Oh well. This is also the McPheeiest essay in the book, the one in which he gets the most carried away with one- and two-sentence anecdotes, which individually are fun but which eventually become skim material.

Anyway, for all that complaining Control is a gorgeous, fascinating book. I felt the need to vent in part because I spend so much time praising McPhee's writing. But if I had a chance to ask him one question, I'd ask what the hell meant by looking into the near or far side of a lava tube.

in cold blood

Finished In Cold Blood a little while ago and moved on to How to Live, so I'm a bit late on this reaction. Consequently, it'll be short.

ICB is just an awesome piece of journalism. It's tight as a drum, nothing extraneous made it in. The rhythm and tone are perfect, like a much better-written Raymond Chandler novel: noirish because spare and because of the subject matter, but elegant. There are a few hints of East Coast condescension here and there but on the whole Capote keeps his (presumed) snootiness out of it. Maybe I'm just primed to see those because of Fox News, or something.

Best of all, Capote doesn't overreach. He lets his story unfold almost without overt comment and allows it to deepen as it goes.

strength in what remains

Finished Tracy Kidder's Strength in What Remains late last week. It must have originated as an offshoot of Mountains Beyond Mountains, because he met the protagonist of the book through Partners in Health. At any rate, it is a treat to read, a harrowing but uplifting story told extremely well. Tracy Kidder is a pretty gifted journalist. But it's not deep or revealing, really. There are none of the "holy shit I never thought about it that way before" moments that McPhee manages to hit you with every three pages.

annals of the former world

I'm going to try something new this year. Instead of just reading books and then moving on to the next once I'm done, I'm going to write a little bit of a reaction to each one. I hope that will help me get more out of them, especially the deeper and more complicated ones (The Myth of Sisyphus is near the top of my pile right now...hoo boy).

Anyway, I just finished John McPhee's Pulitzer-winning geological history of the United States, Annals of the Former World. He's a fluid writer with a near-perfect eye for the revealing anecdote or observation or metaphor. One from Annals that has stuck with me is his analogy of the history of Earth to a human wingspan. If you stretch your arms out to the sides and imagine the distance between your fingertips as the lifespan of Earth, you could wipe out human history with a single swipe from a medium-grade nail file. I got on a bit of a perspective kick last year, which Appointment in Samarra played into in a different way, and Job, and to which my every-few-monthly re-reading of "A Tranquil Star" contributes. It's humbling and challenging to be reminded of how pitifully small we are. We are conscious geologic agents, in a way that no other living creatures have ever been. But our contribution to geology is comparatively tiny -- a few million tons of sediment displaced from California mountains into a valley, a few holes dug partway into the crust -- and the consequences of our contributions will live on, as McPhee puts it, essentially forever on the human time scale.


Another great strength of the book, to me, is McPhee's ability to seamlessly weave a story about a single interesting person into a much broader narrative, best exemplified in Annals in the section on Wyoming and the geologist David Love. This is a technique I really enjoy as a reader and McPhee is a master of it.

When he's explaining the scale of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in California, he first describes the event clinically -- such-and-such happened at such-and-such a depth, causing such-and-such consequences in the rock -- but then eschews metaphor for the most part. Instead he gives a stream of short anecdotes, a few sentences each, describing how the quake affected individual people. The chief engineer for the Golden Gate Bridge, who was ON THE BRIDGE when the quake hit San Francisco. The woman living in the Marina neighborhood, whose fourth floor apartment ended up on the ground floor after the three stories below collapsed straight down. And all of that in the context of the fact that Loma Prieta was not an especially huge quake, that it was just one in a series of thousands upon thousands of quakes that are moving the Pacific Plate up toward Alaska while it pushed into the North American plate. In fact, one of the themes of the book is that geology is something that generally doesn't happen smoothly or gradually but in bursts. The creation of river canyons, for example, occurs mainly as a result of many huge floods, not of the daily trickle or rush of water.

Getting back to Loma Prieta, McPhee's love of anecdote is also one of the two main drawbacks of the book for me. Simply put, he sometimes needs an editor whose pen has a little more red ink in it. I also read The Curve of Binding Energy last year, and it had the same problem: After a while (like, three pages), those anecdotes start to lose their force and just get repetitive and irritating. Maybe that's why some of his essays are so nearly perfect: Their length just forced him to pare things down. "Irons in the Fire" comes to mind. The other main drawback was perhaps more indicative of my own ignorance of geology, but sometimes McPhee's descriptions of mechanisms or of the way things look now just didn't quite quite conjure up the images or understanding that I'd hoped for. Often, I found myself wishing for a quick illustration, but these were unfortunately few and far between. The maps and drawings, where they exist in the book, were excellent.

All in all, a book I'm very glad to have read.

running book list 2012

Started Annals late last year and just finished last night (January 23). Asterisk means I loved it. Hashtag means I didn't like it.

1. Annals of the Former World, by John McPhee
2. Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder
3. How to Live, Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, by Sarah Bakewell 
4. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote*
5. The Control of Nature, by John McPhee*
6. Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, by Lawrence Weschler
7. Wise Blood, by Flannery O'Connor*
8. A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O'Connor*
9. The Violent Bear It Away, by Flannery O'Connor*
10. Pakistan, A Hard Country, by Anatol Lieven
11. Awakenings, by Oliver Sacks*
12. Freakonomics, by Stevens Levitt and Dubner#
13. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John LeCarre*
14. The Russia House, by John LeCarre#
15. Hail to the Victors, ed. by Brian Cook
16. The Cave, by Jose Saramago#
17. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald*
18. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, by Jonathan Berendt
19. Skinny Dip, by Carl Hiaasen
20. The Quiet American, by Graham Greene*
21. Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov*
22. Irons in the Fire, by John McPhee (again)
23. Tombstone, by Yang Jisheng
24. The Book of Job, trans. by Stephen Mitchell (again)*