repertoire

I'm coming to the end of the beginner section on Justin Guitar. Still have months to go before I'll be ready to move on, there is a lot still to cover and get proficient at. But one of the things he recommends in the last beginner lesson is to develop a repertoire. This seems like an excellent idea. Who gives a shit if someone can play parts of a bunch of different songs? Much better to be able to play a few songs all the way through, cleanly, and in time. So here's my target beginner repertoire, based on using at least one song from each of the lessons so far:

1. Born in the USA, by Bruce Springsteen
2. How Bizarre, by OMC
3. Bad Moon Rising, by Creedence Clearwater Revival
4. Cortez the Killer, by Neil Young
5. Use Me, by Bill Withers
6. Chocolate Jesus, by Tom Waits
7. Ain't No Sunshine, by Bill Withers
8. Get Lucky, by Daft Punk
9. Hey Joe, by Jimi Hendrix
10. Wish You Were Here, by Pink Floyd (with intro!)
11. Brown Eyed Girl, by Van Morrison
12. Free Fallin', by Tom Petty
13. You Can't Always Get What You Want, by the Rolling Stones 
14. La Bamba, by Ritchie Valens
15. All Along the Watchtower, by Bob Dylan
16. Dreams, by Fleetwood Mac
17. House of the Rising Sun, by the Animals
18. Song 2, by Blur
19. Smells Like Teen Spirit, by Nirvana
20. All the Small Things, by Blink 182
21. Boom Boom, by John Lee Hooker
22. Johnny B Goode, by Chuck Berry
23. Norwegian Wood, by the Beatles
24. Knockin' on Heaven's Door, by Bob Dylan
25. Jane Says, by Jane's Addiction
26. The Passenger, by Iggy Pop

The songs in bold are ones I've already started learning to some extent. Kind of neat to look back on the past six months and see how far I've come. Not as far as I might have, to be sure, but still. Six months ago I had basically never picked up a guitar. 

Will keep working on other things, of course, but this list gives me some shape and structure for song practice. 

john fahey, misogyny, and separating art from the artist

I've been watching John Fahey videos on YouTube. I'd always liked his weird, haunting music, and of course the contact high of someone of such genius being from right around the corner was always fun. But as I move through the levels of novice guitar playing, I'm appreciating him in a whole new way. The phrasings, the tunings, the attention to detail: all stuff I didn't really grok before and am starting to be able to understand now. I'm still far from even being able to attempt to learn a song like his arrangement of "Poor Boy Long Ways From Home" - still working on finger-picking "Happy Birthday" - but it's a cool feeling to know that I should be able to one day in the not-too-distant future.

So imagine my delight when I came across, in a YouTube comment, a PDF of a songbook he published in 1970. 170+ pages of sheet music/tab notation. Gold mine! It opens with a manifesto of sorts about his approach to guitar playing and practicing. There's some wonderful stuff in there about the importance of emotionality, a few digs at "middle class guitar players" (present!) who sound like metronomes and don't really listen to what they're playing (I'm not even good enough to differentiate myself yet, but okay something to avoid), his stance against practicing scales in favor of practicing chords. That last bit really stuck with me: he said he used to practice 4-6 hours a day, focusing on chord changes until he got them absolutely perfect. And that, as he was practicing, melodic lines and combinations would come to him unbidden, as if his brain was unable not to try to make meaning out of the rote repetition. It's breathed a little life into my own practice over the last couple of days, helped me start to understand and play around with the idea of tension and resolution (hello, C11*-G7-G-F-C, you pretty sequence, you). It's pretentious and nerdy and deeply felt. "If you sit and listen to yourself," he writes, "the creative act will happen." Lovely.

Then, imagine my shock at arriving at the section of the manifesto called "Homosexual guitar playing." Wait, what? Fahey proceeds with an astoundingly misogynistic and homophobic screed about the need for a guitar player to get over their fear of the guitar, that "mastering guitar is really very similar to conquering a woman," and the failure to master the guitar is like being rejected by a woman. Let me just quote at length:

When you are alone with your guitar, you must win it if you are to be a man ... Those who fear their guitars are essentially cowardly faggots ... Homosexual guitar playing is an imitative gesture of the non-essential (i.e. temporary) characteristics of women--bitchiness, frivolity, flightiness, and super-sensitivity. These superficial characteristics are not the essence of the feminine. Look at the homosexual guitarist pick up the guitar--he is afraid to touch it. He is afraid of it. He thinks it hates him because he hates it so much. He is a Nazi... He must overcome this fear of the guitar. And he can. The guitar must be his secret love, narcotic, whatever image he prefers. But, he cannot forget to abuse it also.  

Holy shit, John! Project much? The racial politics of the introduction are also a little, um, dubious, but more in the sense of being dated because the thing was written 50 years ago. He calls Black people Negroes and there's some ill-advised stuff about his mythical old blind Negro guru. But it's clear that he reveres a lot of Black players and gives effusive credit where it's due. That all seemed okay to me, all things considered. The misogyny and homophobia, though, read like they could have been posted last week on a particularly nasty men's rights subreddit. 

This all prompted me to think, again, about the separation of art from artist. Fahey was a genius. And it seems he was, at least around 1970, a vicious hater of women and gay people. And he's dead. I guess where I land on it is, I still want to learn to play his version of "Poor Boy Long Ways From Home," and having a fuller picture of the person who produced it will make me think about it and hopefully play it in a different way than I would have without knowing that background. Thinking about, for example, all the poor gay boys (and girls, and trans men and women, including some I've known) who still have to flee home and it up a long ways away. It helps, frankly, that he's dead.

*My "favorite" chord at the moment, if I had to name one. I like to sit there just strumming it or, increasingly, picking it over and over. 

bad internet

For the consultancy I've been working on, I have to interview people in different countries. Some of them have really poor internet, but none as bad as the guy I talked to today. We'd been trying to talk for a week and a half or two weeks but been thwarted repeatedly by the quality of the connection on his end. Today was the best we'd gotten, so we forged ahead. To give you a sense of how bad it was before, this was the first two minutes after I started recording:

Luke:

So I'm recording now.

Abas:

Yeah. [inaudible 00:00:06]

Luke:

So, just because I don't want to lose you while I have you, can we just go ahead and start?

Luke:

(Silence)

Luke:

Hello?

Luke:

Hello?

Luke:

(Silence)

Luke:

Hello, can you hear me?

Luke:

I'm afraid I can't-

Abas:

Hello.

Luke:

Yes, hi.

Abas:

Hello?

Luke:

Can you hear me?

Abas:

I hear you now.

Luke:

Yes.

Abas:

Hello?

Luke:

Abas?

Abas:

Hello.

Luke:

Yes, Abas. Can you hear me now?

Abas:

[inaudible 00:01:38] no? Yeah.

Luke:

Okay.

Abas:

Let us try. Let us try.

Luke:

Let us try. So I'm just going to-

Abas:

You were [inaudible 00:01:49]

Luke:

Okay. So can you first just describe the timeline of your involvement with the country capacity assessment?

Abas:

Hello?

Luke:

Hello?

Abas:

Hello. You can make the phone [inaudible 00:02:16] for what?

Luke:

For you to be involved with the country capacity assessment.

home

Arrived at Dulles last night after a strange - only 28 passengers on the plane and PIA-level in-flight service - but smooth and easy trip over from London. M&D picked me up, N95 mask at the ready, and drove me home. No trouble staying up to a normal bedtime, although I was up early this morning and my body is not happy with meal timings. Think I'll force it for a couple days though, always better to be uncomfortable and adjust quickly in my experience.

This is not how or when I imagined I'd be arriving back in Silver Spring. More on that at some future date. For now, I'm grateful to have such a place and such parents to come home to. 

solidarity means taking the same risks

Che Guevara said that. Once I'm home, and quarantined, and tested, I'm going to the next goddamn protest I can get to. If it means quarantining and getting tested again after that, so be it. Time to go put myself in harm's way.

why in the living hell didn't i take up guitar 20 years ago

Seriously?!?! All I want to do right now is practice. My fingers can't take more than an hour at a stretch yet, but that's way up from the 15 minutes they could take a couple of months ago when I discovered Justin Guitar.

I'm learning so fast, it's really fun. Today I learned "Free Fallin'", which is an admittedly extremely easy song to play, but my god after about five minutes I could at least play a simplified version of the strumming pattern along with the original track. Also started to learn "Brown Eyed Girl," which is also very easy and for which I'm looking forward to learning the riff.

The tips of my left fingers can't decide whether they're sore or numb.

Feeling foolish for waiting until I was 33 to start. 

on being exasperated by people you fundamentally agree with

I'm writing an essay right now about the role of NGOs in social transformation. Overall I am going to argue that they can help effect it, in ways that are smaller than they sometimes claim but are nevertheless meaningful. One of the points I'd like to bring up as a critique of the role of NGOs is that of the racism that is inherent in much of development. This critique is decades old. A book I read last year, Escobar's Encountering Development, argues forcefully that development discourse constructs white societies as the norm against which black and brown societies are found wanting. This is painting with a pretty broad brush, and it doesn't give black and brown societies enough credit for subverting and repurposing the white/liberal/Enlightenment-normative perspective that underpins a lot of development thinking. But he's not all the way or even mostly wrong, it's a super important point. Anyway his book is almost 30 years old and so I was looking around for some more recent reflections. One I found is by a Liberian-American (seems she went to high school in DC, actually) academic currently at Oxford, writing about race as an unspoken but pervasive presence in development. Fantastic! Could not agree more that race and racism are conspicuously absent from the field and that, as she puts it late in the paper, development agencies need more "radical rabble-rousers" to shake things up.

The problem is that the paper suuuuucks. It's sloppy, poorly written, ignores relevant literature, and makes lazy, dubious claims. Instead of nodding along and making notes to draw on later, as I'd hoped to do, I found myself compulsively picking it apart. For example, referring to how white people are still pretty much in charge in development:

Pailey claims that “one need only take a cursory look at the traditional institutions of global development (for example, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, United Nations Development Programme), their NGO proxies and international development or development studies departments even in the most non-mainstream institutions, such as SOAS, Sussex or Open University, to see this reality confirmed” (Pailey 2019: 7). But a cursory glance reveals that six out of UNDP’s top nine leaders are non-white, as are over half of UN agency heads overall. The same goes for the WTO, which lists 41 councilors and members of key committees, of whom 24 are non-white. Of the world’s four “most powerful” NGOs, according to Foreign Policy magazine (Anonymous 2008): six of eight directors of BRAC, which was founded and is headquartered in Bangladesh, are non-white; 13 of World Vision’s 25 directors are non-white; only three of Oxfam’s 12 directors are non-white but its CEO is from Sri Lanka. Admittedly, the Gates Foundation exemplifies Pailey’s point a bit better. That is not even to say that she's wrong in her overall point, just that the evidence she casually tosses in to support it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Later in that paper, she calls for development organizations to “[elevate] radical rabble-rousers who challenge and dismantle the status quo,” not just “[recruit] people of color … to fill tokenistic diversity and equality quotas” (14). But who is to say when such recruitment is tokenistic; by what standard is a hire judged to be radical enough? I suppose that, to paraphrase Potter Stewart, she knows it when she sees it. 

That's all got citations and stuff because I cut and pasted it from my own essay. Anyway I'm not going to end up using most or maybe any of it. Her paper is just so...amateurish. I don't come away feeling like I've learned anything. She sets out to argue that critical development studies and critical race theory could learn from each other, which is an interesting premise. But her analysis is below the level I would expect from myself -- a master's student with a shaky, if improving, grasp of the literature -- on a course paper. She just lays out a half-baked description of each, points to some places where each admits to blind spots that could be filled by the other, and leaves it at that. I would be embarrassed to submit something that poorly argued and poorly written for class, much less publication.

In conclusion, it is exasperating to find someone who is making a point, from a prominent place, that I think is important but swinging a pickaxe at her own foundation while she tries to put the walls up.

guitar part 2

Here are my self-assigned songs to pass grade 1 of the Justin Guitar course.

1. Ain't No Sunshine
2. Three Little Birds
3. Bad Moon Rising
4. Knocking on Heaven's Door
5. Born in the USA

When I can play each of those songs all the way through without messing up too badly, and have played at least one of them for SRB and/or the fam, it'll be time for grade 2. I've passed all the little milestones Justin suggests, now just need to keep practicing chord changes and actually learn a few songs well enough.

Also started trying to learn Norwegian Wood, which done properly is more advanced than I thought, but which will give me something different to work on while I drill the stuff I've already learned.

guitar

I'm actually going to stick with it this time, I think. 33 years old. Never too late. The trick, it turns out, was to find an online course that's actually a course. Specifically, the beginner course by a guy named Justin something or other, whose website is called Justin Guitar. Extraordinary stuff, a global treasure: well-structured, progressive curriculum with what must be hundreds of hours of extremely clear videos that break everything down into very digestible parts. So, instead of getting discouraged and lost amid the infinitude of tutorials on YouTube, I'm making steady, almost day-to-day progress.

Three weeks in and I've learned all eight chords taught in the first "grade" of his beginner course: A, C, D, E, G, Am, Dm, and Em. I'm getting better at strumming, although that remains difficult. I've learned "Born in the USA" well enough to play along with the track (badly, and the A-D change is one of the easiest, but still) and I'm working on "Eleanor Rigby" (very hard because the transition from Em to C and back is big), "Hey Joe" (not as hard, although I can't play it very fast yet), "Bad Moon Rising," and "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." And shortly I'll start on "This Year's Love," by David Gray, which I didn't know but which Justin recommends as a good beginner song to practice in 6:8 time.  EDIT: Nope, screw that, I'm going with "Norwegian Wood." Harder but also a song I know and like. Also started learning a few riffs: the "Seven Nation Army" one, "Sunshine of Your Love," the bassline for "Coming Home" by Leon Bridges (great song). And a wee bit of ear training: I've almost figured out how to pick my way through "Happy Birthday."

Long story short, I'm excited about guitar in a way I've never felt before and didn't expect after a number of false starts over the last couple years. So far I've been borrowing SRB's beloved Brunswick dreadnought, but I'm considering getting my own beginner guitar. Not that we need another guitar in this house, I'm just so stoked. And I'm already dreaming about what I could learn once I've "graduated" from this course. Need to not completely drop the piano book I bought, either, since by all accounts learning music theory is much easier on piano than guitar. And if you want any further indication of how excited I am about all this, it's that I feel like I need to start learning music theory. No rush, I can still barely transition confidently between C and, well, almost any other chord. But something to keep doing. And while we're locked in, what better time to start a hobby in real earnest?

Bless you, Justin Sandercoe (remembered his name!). I'm only sad I didn't discover you years ago.

a dream about anthony bourdain

Last night I dreamed that I was watching "No Reservations," a scene in which Anthony Bourdain goes spearfishing. It was visually very dramatic: a throng of men holding spears over their heads and periodically throwing them down into the water, backlit by a brilliant orange-red sunset. All of a sudden, a spear flew from off-screen and hit one of the fisherman in the chest. He went down. And Anthony Bourdain intoned, "Sometimes, when you go spearfishing, you accidentally kill a guy." He'd killed the guy!

This is day 22 of self-isolation for me. I spent the first week -- before the official social distancing rules came into effect -- voluntarily staying home because of what seems to have been a light cold. Then everything shut down. Things got much easier once I no longer felt sick. The weather has been sunny for the most part and it's starting to get warm, so I've been running and going for walks. Short grocery shops are a near-daily event because we almost always need something that they didn't have in stock the last time one of us went. About a week ago Sainsbury's marked places to stand and wait on the sidewalk so they could keep it to 15 customers inside the store at any one time.

Schoolwork proceedeth apace. We were supposed to have an in-person exam last Monday, which was replaced by a take-home essay task. Much easier and less stressful! I also made a bunch of progress on one of my term papers last week, after finishing the exam faster than I thought I would. The other term paper is now creaking back into gear. It's hard to do them in parallel, partly because the topics and readings are so overlapping, and partly because momentum seems to matter for me when I'm working on something intellectually engaging. That was rarely a problem at work because most tasks are so collaborative, so I had no choice but to work in fits and starts while waiting for input or feedback. Anyway I have to keep myself on task with both: It would be bad to suddenly find myself without enough time to do a good enough job on the one on which I haven't made as much progress. Shared outline for the first one with the professor today, so I've been kind of able to switch my brain off about it.

As I think many people are discovering, it has been nice to reconnect remotely with some people whom I otherwise might not have called or might not have called me. I organized a game of Beyond Balderdash with some friends from Michigan/Chile/DC last weekend that was really fun. And SRB and I have both now organized little events within our apartment building: she gave a concert the Sunday before last, and yesterday I ran a pub quiz. It'll be interesting to see how much these new kinds of engagements stick after everything starts to return to normal.

Enough for now, back to work. 

the mirror and the light (1)

Pages 249-250, with line breaks added every 10 (sometimes 11) syllables, a break when it shifts from third to second/first person, and a few words removed (marked in brackets). Blogger's formatting functions suck so I used periods to space out the end of verse one and beginning of verse two, which together form a 10-syllable line. Just to see what it looks like in verse form.

She's still got it.

Don't look back, he had told the king, yet he
too is guilty of retrospection as
the light fades, in that hour in winter or summer
before they bring in the candles, when earth
and sky melt, when the fluttering heart of
the bird on the bough calms and slows, and the
night-walking animals stir and stretch and
rouse, and the eyes of cats shine in the dark,
when color bleeds from sleeve and gown into
the darkening air; when the page grows dim
and letter forms elide and slip into other
conformations, so that as the page is
turned the old story slides from sight and a
strange and slippery confluence of ink
begins to flow.

........................ You look back into your
past and say, is this story mine; this land? Is
that flitting figure mine, that shape easing
itself through alleys, evader of the
curfew, fugitive from the day? Is this
my life, or my neighbor's conflated with
mine, or a life I have dreamed and prayed for;
is this my essence, twisting into a
taper's flame, or have I slipped the limits
of myself -- slipped into eternity, like
honey from a spoon? Have I dreamt myself,
undone myself, have I forgotten too
well[? M]y sins seek me out; even as I
slide into sleep, my past pads after me, paws
on the flagstones, pit-pat: water in a
basin of alabaster, cool in the
heat of the Florentine afternoon.

blood on their hands

The more I read about the US response to covid-19, the more convinced I am that Trump and company are about to have hundreds of thousands of people's blood on their hands. Every member of the cabinet who decided not to Article 25 him out of office is in that group. We're talking mass manslaughter. For secret service agents, it's the trolley problem: do you let the train barrel forward and kill countless people? Or do you shoot the driver (and maybe the vice driver, and probably get yourself killed) so that someone who isn't utterly divorced from reality can redirect it down a track with a lot fewer people on it? Time's running out.

By nature, I am not a worrier. But I'm worried about people back home. 

suddenly worrying about work

I have been lucky to be in pretty much constant employment since I was 16, and to have had a steady and steadily increasing paycheck every two weeks from age 21 to 32. That, despite graduating from college as the global financial crisis was peaking in 2008. I gave up that stability last summer so that I could become a full-time student. But I was sanguine about the prospects of getting a job as soon as I finished. Suddenly, the economy looks headed for an even worse hit than the bankers caused 12 years ago. And suddenly, for the first time in my adult life, I'm worried about getting a job.

I've started to enter my CV into various companies' talent pools, both for consultancies and for staff positions that may open up. And I'm going to start emailing former colleagues soon to let them know that I'll be looking for consultancies from as early as June or even late May. Or maybe earlier if it's a part-time thing. Arrogantly Cockily, I had been expecting to be able to be selective in what I applied for, even to avoid applying for straight-up business development jobs. Looks like a wider net will be necessary.

(EDIT: Trying not to be so hard on myself.)

school reform

I read an article in the Post by a champion of "school reform" about why it failed. It astounds me that people can be so well-meaning, so well-educated, so evidently bright, and yet so deeply wrong about the root of problems. The failures of NCLB and the charter movement failed because they are liberal and neoliberal, with their focus on individual freedom and individual responsibility and their utterly misplaced faith in the market and the ideal of "competition." A charter advocate has a "gee golly we should have focused on the funding gap" moment at the end of the article. That is just exasperating. How did you miss the structural problem, lady?! Schools are embedded in society. They are a public good. The idea that you could fix the problems of poor and minority-majority schools by making stricter and narrower standards and then punishing poor performers is just nutty.

It reminded me of something Jonathan Kozol said when I saw him speak at Michigan in ~2005: "People say to me, 'So what are you saying, we should just throw more money at schools?' And I say, 'Yes! Yes, exactly!'" Also, bring back busing. I should ask Gabby about this, he worked in charter schools and now he's assistant principal of a public school. 

the other shoe

So far, the government here is talking basically just pleading with people to do the right thing with social distancing. But people aren't, so they finally closed pubs, restaurants, gyms, etc. on Friday. And today the mayor of London put out a message saying they might get the police to start enforcing social distancing. It feels like past time, given how things have gone elsewhere. People still aren't taking it seriously. SRB and I went to the Olympic Park today to get some sunshine and there were lots of people out and about. That would be fine, as far as I understand, if everyone stayed in little pods limited to the people they live with. And most seem to be that way: parents with kids, obvious couples, singletons. Maintaining plenty of distance. But there was a group of 15 or so doing a boot camp-type workout and they were periodically getting into little circles and doing sit ups much too close together. Separately, I saw a guy pick up an errant Frisbee that a couple were throwing back and forth. I wanted to yell at them all. Weird impulse.

A helicopter was hovering overhead for a while, I wonder if it was monitoring how much mixing was going on below.

The boot campers weren't even touching each other, as far as I saw. But still it seems really irresponsible to be gathering in a group at all, especially outside. And I wonder if SRB and I ourselves are being too blasé, even though we kept good distance when we do go outside for a walk or run and haven't had any in-person social interaction with anyone other than each other since Sunday for me, Monday for her. I was self-isolating even more strictly for the past week because of my cold. Went to the grocery store around the corner yesterday for the first time and even then I didn't interact with anyone and held my breath passing people in the aisles.

A friend from Islamabad, who's now posted in El Salvador, texted a group we're both part of that the government there just imposed a 30-day quarantine, Wuhan-style. One person at a time can leave to buy groceries, any other outside journeys severely curtailed, necessary sectors continue working under strict conditions, payment of bills suspended for three months, financial assistance for low-income families, restaurants can do deliveries. Police are patrolling and anyone caught violating quarantine will be sent to a government camp or detention center of some kind of the rest of the 30-day period. And, unbelievably, my reaction to that is, "Well, seems a bit harsh, but fair enough." Something similar going on now in Kazakhstan, another group member said.

It's amazing to me how quickly my brain adapted to the idea that what is essentially martial law could be sensible, how quickly I've accepted that people need to be protected from themselves and their own stupid behavior in such an extreme way. It is hard to imagine that ordinary social interaction with apparently healthy people could be harmful, even with the media telling a consistent and alarming story about it. It is hard to change behavior so fast. Coming back to SRB and me: I don't want to believe that my being outside in public, alone, is too dangerous for society at large, regardless of whether or not it is. But I don't really know. So I'm sympathetic to people who draw the line a bit more self-servingly than I do.

I suppose the quarantines are a bit like a temporary and very extreme form of seatbelt laws or drunk driving checkpoints. Especially in countries where the health system is really not prepared for a heavy onslaught, even more so than places like the UK or US. But then again, detention centers? Charging people with a crime? I still don't like that. Plus detention centers seem like they'd be incubators. 

elinor ostrom

I'm only a chapter in but I think Elinor Ostrom's book Governing the Commons is going to be one of the best things I read this year. (I'm saving The Mirror and the Light for the weekend and glorious guilt-free uninterrupted pleasure reading hours; I started it last week but it's unsatisfying to take sips.) The tragedy of the commons always struck me as an overly pessimistic assumption, and I'm sad that it took so long for me to come across such a trenchant and concerted attack on the idea that it's an inevitable outcome of leaving people to manage resources without imposing private property rights or central planning. 

how to survive a plague

Current circumstances bring that title to mind, if not the content of the movie. Good documentary, very illuminating for me as a person who was generally aware of the early history of the AIDS crisis but didn't have a real appreciation for the intensity of it.

It's a bit odd to be in the UK at this point in the covid-19 pandemic when other countries in Europe are declaring states of emergency and schools are closing for weeks. The government here is urging much less stringent measures than in other countries, declining to close schools or issuing any social distancing recommendations beyond "stay inside for seven days if you have a severe cough or fever." People should always do that, in fact it drives me nuts when they don't. The tube has been a little less crowded than usual but not too much. We did have class remotely this morning, as a Zoom meeting, which worked better than I thought it would. And UCL, along with many other universities, decided to have all classes be remote for the rest of the term (only one more week in my case).

But SRB and I are still planning to head to Dover this evening for a long-planned weekend getaway. We are both feeling fine; I'm a little congested at the moment but doesn't seem like anything out of the ordinary for the wintertime: not even sniffling. Just more attuned to it than usual. Still, I packed my thermometer.

I'm looking forward to seeing the white cliffs of Dover and eating at a restaurant up the coast from where we're staying, which a reviewer in the Guardian called "heroically wondrous." And to getting a change of scenery with SRB. It's been a tough few weeks and even months for us. We had some intense conversations last weekend that seem to have helped. And having a break from our routine, our shared space, our everyday food and furniture and views, should be nice.

In unrelated news, I have some kind of bizarre plantar fasciitis that's entirely in the arch of my foot, not at all in the ball or heel. It's fine -- no pain or even discomfort -- 90% of the time but on some runs starts to bug me a little in the first couple of kilometers and on other runs bugs me for a little while afterward. I tried to ignore it for a while because it's never severe enough to hobble me and it's usually not there at all. But it's also not going away, so finally had to concede that the only solution is to rest and to stretch feet and calves. Vexing.

piano and guitar

SRB bought a piano the other day after talking about it for years. While she was in Pakistan recently I also finally started learning guitar and have now stuck with it long enough (a week and a half) to have passed the "fingers hurt to much to keep going" stage and am moving toward the "can almost play along with 'Born in the USA'" stage. She passed out early tonight and so I plugged my headphones into the piano, loaded up a YouTube lesson on Für Elise for rank beginners, and played the melody of that piece all the way through for the first time in at least 15 years. It ruled.

I've been piddling away at card tricks, too, and even learned a couple of really basic ones. But the truth is magic is no fun to share with anyone until you're great at it and music can be fun even if you're mediocre. Now I just need to start learning how to sing a little. 

kobe

EDIT: And just for fun, here's a corrective to my use below of the term "complicated." https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/m7qbqx/kobe-bryant-was-no-more-complicated-than-anyone-else. What he said.

The original post (to be clear, I meant in terms of my position as a fan, not in terms of Kobe's character):

Kobe was never one of my favorite players. I was in high school when he and Shaq went on their historic tear through the league and I vastly preferred Shaq's exuberant dominance to Kobe's joyless drive. He always seemed to be trying too hard; that manufactured scowl he adopted later in his career verged on embarrassing. And god help anyone who tries to give themself a nickname, although to his credit he managed to make Black Mamba stick. But even though he might never have been the best player in the league -- Shaq and Tim Duncan were ahead of him early in his career and LeBron and KD late, Steve Nash probably should have won the MVP again the year that Kobe got his consolation one -- he was an undeniably giant presence, a superstar. And an undeniably great player.

A basketball writer I follow on Twitter posted today that one thing Kobe's death is making clear is that people who do not understand the emotional power of sports cannot understand why people are taking the death so hard. That's really true. SRB was trying to tease out of me the other day an explanation for why watching sports live is so important, and she concluded that it's because of the fact that watching live means a fan can share the emotional journey of the game or match with thousands or millions of other people, even if only virtually. That is certainly a big part of it, but there's more to it than that and I couldn't describe it to her in a way that landed. Sports fandom is ineffable, like fandom of any aesthetic pursuit. Why do people love ballet, or the theater, or going to watch their favorite musicians sing live? It's magical, that's why. Watching Kobe cook was, sometimes, magical.

It's especially hard to explain to someone who doesn't like sports why there's this outpouring for Kobe, who raped a 19-year-old in Colorado in 2003, when he was 24. The charges were dropped and he settled a civil suit with her out of court, but in the aftermath he said words to the effect of, "I genuinely thought we were having a consensual encounter, but after reading the court documents and speaking with her lawyers, I understand that it was non-consensual." Non-consensual sex is rape, Kobe raped her, QED.

In this sense Kobe's death and the way he's being memorialized are tied up with #MeToo and society's reckoning with the violence of patriarchy. Do we still get to enjoy public figures who have done terrible crimes? The default to canceling sometimes seems wrong, as it did with Aziz Ansari. I don't think there's a blanket answer. In Kobe's case, he spent the 15 years after the case ended outwardly doing everything he could to be a good husband and father, and of course being a basketball star. He paid the woman he raped some presumably large amount of money and admitted to what he did. As far as I know, it's the only time he was accused of such an act. He was a great basketball player, an inspiration to millions of people, an apparently genuine family man, and, judging by the tears of many NBA players as their games tipped off last night, a valued friend. And practically every time someone brought him up to me in the last 15 years, I said something about Colorado.

So I guess I conclude that any honest memorialization of Kobe's life has to include an acknowledgement that, along with all his accomplishments and good qualities, he raped someone. That it's okay to celebrate the former as long as the latter is not buried. Not breaking any ground there, I don't think. But the reflection is valuable for me as a guidepost in evaluating other public figures. How bad was the crime? That's part of it. We'll hopefully (for the sake of the woman involved) never know the details of Kobe's crime but it was pretty bad. Did the person admit what they did, accept responsibility? In Kobe's case, it seems like he did, or maybe kinda-did. Did the person seem to learn from the experience of committing the crime and to change their behavior accordingly? Seems like Kobe did, or at least was the kind of person who could: He once called a ref a "fucking fag" after being given a foul, and, in response to the outrage, apologized and started working with GLAAD and eventually scolding his own fans for using gay slurs.

I don't know. It's complicated. In any case my heart goes out to his wife and three surviving daughters, and the families of the other people killed.

...

On a completely different note, I've been lucky enough to spend a lot more time than most people riding in helicopters. it's an incredibly cool way to get around. And the pilots and flight engineers at the company I worked for were extremely highly trained, experienced, and cautious professionals. Close to 50% of the flights I was supposed to take over the years were cancelled or cut off early because the pilots had such high standards for flying conditions, especially visibility. I read an eyewitness account of the Kobe crash that made it sound like it might have been caused by a combination of visibility (it was so foggy) and mechanical failure (it didn't sound right). So I'm grateful today for our pilots' hyper-cautiousness. 

fever

Worse than heartburn. Felt fine all day until I was on the way home from school. When I got home I lay down and when I woke up: 101. An hour or so later: 102.2. Now it's up to 102.6. SRB is ministering to me but this just sucks. Taking the day off tomorrow, hate to skip class. Emailed the professor to see if there was any way I could dial in.

heartburn

It's a drag. Had it pretty bad while lying in bed last night. No apparent cause: I didn't eat anything unusual or too much, hadn't drunk any alcohol. I had a low-grade fever and generally felt like crap, but that's never been linked to heartburn for me before. It's back this evening, after eating some very bready food that SRB brought home via an app that connects restaurants who have leftover food that they're about to throw out with people who want cheap food. It was pretty bad, but again, nothing out of the ordinary. Have I suddenly developed an aversion to, I don't know, white flour? I had two PB&J sandwiches for lunch with no problem, albeit on whole grain bread.

I've tried some baking soda dissolved in water and may give a bit more of that a go in a few minutes if things don't calm down. That eventually did the trick last night/early this morning.

measurement

I haven't updated my blogroll in a while. Blogroll, now there's an obsolete term. One that I've been reading the last year or so is From Poverty to Power, by Duncan Green at Oxfam. Recently he posted a list of the blog's ten most-read posts from 2019. A couple are really interesting. One, by the outgoing CEO of Oxfam, is about strategic planning. It includes this chart, which I just love:

Another, by the feminist development scholar Naila Kabeer,* is about the blindness of randomized controlled trials in development to human agency; in other words to why interventions that appear to work, work. An extremely relevant critique especially now that Duflo, Bannerjee, and Kremer have won the Nobel.

On that subject, we read a post from another blog for Social Diversity, Inequality, and Poverty class this week about the limitations of RCTs in development. I've always been skeptical of RCTs, even when I first became aware of J-PAL and Esther Duflo 7-8 years ago (thanks Caryn). They're expensive and have little independent ability to learn anything outside the very narrow context that they set out to study. The author of that blog points out (paraphrasing) that learning something through an RCT about incentivizing teachers to show up to class in rural Kenya is unlikely to tell you anything that you couldn't already intuit through theory about incentivizing teachers to show up in rural India. And in fact, it's crazy to expect an RCT to do that! They're only good at measuring internal validity (a good new term for me).

We're going to spend a lot of time this term learning about measurement, which is exciting. I spent 10 years doing super conventional development project M&E: log frames, PMPs, baseline surveys, etc. It'll be fun to learn about those things anew and then to learn what else is out there in terms of how to figure out whether policies and practices are having the intended effects.

*Who rules, by the way. 

academic publishing

Partway through the first week of term 2, and I've just returned the final library book I'd checked out for the papers I wrote for term 1. It's Hybrid Media Activism, by a scholar at the University of Cardiff named Emiliano Trere. I found it very helpful, in fact I built one of my papers around his understanding of the ways in which social movements use and are shaped by communication practices. His analysis is rich and insightful and the cases he presents -- not all of which I had time read -- are very interesting. It's the kind of book I'd just like to have on my shelf at home. But it's published by Routledge, so it costs 120 pounds, or $90 if I were buying it in the US. Riddle me that. Academic publishing is a scam.

Term 2 is looking promising. On Tuesday we started the "citizenship" part of my two-term class called Social Policy and Citizenship. Term 1 looked at different models of social and economic policy, planning, and development. This term will be spent using ideas of citizenship as a way to understand who has access to rights and entitlements in different places, especially now in the context of globalization. This morning was the first session of my one new class, NGOs and Social Transformation. Based on the readings and the first lecture and activity, seems that it will be everything I hoped and dreamed.

It's just after 5 PM now. In a few minutes I'll head into a workshop about some research on nationalizing the Sustainable Development Goals, hosted by the NGOST professor. He strongly encouraged us to come. I haven't attended as many of these extracurricular events as I should, so figured this would be a good one to start with. Doubt I will learn anything revelatory -- contextualizing SDGs is something I did professionally. But there's a networking drinks afterward, so maybe I'll get some interesting conversation out of it. SDR may join, as well, once she gets off work.

Unrelated update: I started lifting weights again on Monday. Easing back into it: I'm so sore today that I couldn't even finish warming up on squats and had to cut things short. But I've done nothing but run for more than two years and figured it'd be good to mix things up and give my body a different stimulus for a while. Planning to give it six weeks, see how much strength I can recover (I'm VERY weak compared to where I was a few years ago), and then shift my focus back to running. 

a little royal curiosity

So big news in the UK today is that Prince Harry and Princess Meghan have decided to "step back from senior royal duties" and "work toward becoming financially independent." Generally speaking, I am indifferent to the royal family. They are an unfairly rich anachronism and a source of pride and an important symbol for many people here. Whatever. But I noticed a funny tendency on Twitter today: the men I follow who tweeted about the move shared the same sentiment, which I'll sum up as, "LOL as if royalty could ever even know what it means to be financially independent, this is dumb, who gives a shit." And the women I follow who tweeted about it shared the same sentiment, which I'll sum up as, "Yasss kween! This act of boundary setting is profoundly erotic to me!" 

As the day went on the reactions started to mix a little. But for a while there was a super stark gender divide. Kind of interesting.

ahmad jamal trio - poinciana

I have listened to one or another version of this song about 15 times today. Not sure why it slays me so.

ponte de areia - wayne shorter ft. milton nascimento

two years

Today marks two years since Jack died. I'm in London, so the time to mark is 6:50 PM (1:50 PM Eastern time), although, because there weren't any witness that I know of, that's just an estimate. M, D, Linc, and I checked in this morning for about fifteen minutes, just going over what each of us was planning to do today. M seemed to be feeling the most fragile, she started to cry a couple of times during the call. She and D are going to Sugarloaf Mountain -- to scatter ashes? something we'd discussed, but they didn't say for sure -- and she's cooking dinner for a childhood friend of mine who just had a baby. Acorn squash, something Jack liked to eat. Linc is going for a hike. And I've reopened FB for the first time in nearly two years, to look first at what I wrote about Jack in the days after his death and then to look at his profile. Later today, we will talk again at greater length, focusing on things we loved about Jack and happy memories of him.

I opened Blogger for the first time in ages just now, as well, and of course it brought back a lot things I hadn't thought about in a while: dreams I had of him -- that's something we all had very intensively in the months after he died; reflections on trying to write about him; poetry that touched me. I'd been reading Faiz, whose poem "My Companion, My Friend" seems even more poignant now than it did at the time I first encountered it. Wonder why that is. Maybe I'll read it tonight. I should also go get the collection Klein gave me in 2018, Black Aperture, down off the shelf. It's poems about a guy who killed himself, by that guy's brother. Close to home.

Something I'll bring up again on the call, as well, if I remember, is the idea of writing a biography or at least oral history of Jack.

I'm feeling okay today. It doesn't seem like the most important anniversary to recognize: two years ago today I still had no idea he was dead, and wouldn't for several more days. Blissful ignorance. The tenth, early morning, is the moment I will never forget. And of course his birthday, to be commemorated as Word Games Day forevermore. But the exact timing of an anniversary like this is beside the point, the point is to set aside time and space to remember, and ponder, and feel. I have too much work to do before class starts next week to spend a whole day on that. But I'm doing it throughout the day and looking forward to tonight's call.