keeping track

Three-quarters of the way through 2015 and I've read 31 books. Just started number 32 (Coming Into the Country, although I may sub it out for something that lends itself to more stop-start reading than McPhee unleashed). Of those, 15.5 are by women (one co-authorship, Law and the Rise of Capitalism, I'm counting as 0.5), and nine are by people of color. Doing pretty well on the don't-just-read-books-by-white-men score.

paradise

Loved it, although I'm certain that plenty of the references and nuances went over my head. Morrison is an unbelievable writer and at times she can go word for word with pretty much anyone else, ever. The story is spooky and sad and somehow easier to understand than Beloved, which I also loved. It meanders and builds slowly and by the time I was 70 or 80 pages of the end she'd tightened the noose and I could hardly put the book down. Took longer to read than novels usually do because of the quality and density of the prose.

between the world and me

Yes. Toni Morrison is right. Brilliant. 

the warmth of other suns

Gripping and enlightening.

beach books - update

Well, it turns out serious history is not the best beach reading. I knew that and got all ambitious anyway. Replaced my planned books with some Agatha Christie and Carl Hiaasen. Much better. I liked the Hiaasen book - Tourist Season - a lot. 

beach books are gonna be

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson
Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Midaq Alley, by Naguib Mahfouz
and something else TBD

the amber spyglass

Weakest of the trilogy, in large part because it's so heavy-handed. There's an epigram for every chapter, which is absurd. And then the characters get real, real preachy at the end as Pullman drives home his points about the Fall being essential to wisdom and maturity and about the Church being bad bad bad.

Still a great story, with great adventures and full of imagination. He's up there in the top tier of world-building writers.

Also, because of the way the book ends, I've been thinking about my daemon (roughly, my inner self) and what form it would take if I could see it and interact with it. I kind of want to say it'd be a raven.

the subtle knife

Re-read in 1.5 days. Lost some sleep this weekend over it. What a story!

the blind assassin

I've run out of steam. Seems to be the same problem I have with Alice Munro: I just can't figure out how to care about the plight of early-to-mid-20th-century Canadian women to whom nothing interesting happens and who do nothing interesting. "Oh no! I was married off to a rich guy because Father's business was failing, and his sister is really mean! Also, my sister is very mysterious and a sad figure who mystifies me." SO WHAT.

However, the secondary story is still fun and interesting, so I will probably read the rest of it and just ignore the main narrative. Counting it as a half-read book when I get to the end.

EDIT: 3/4 read. BOOOOOOOORING. And badly written.

beautiful paragraphs

Someone on FB shared a Reddit thread of people posting their favorite sentences or paragraphs from literature. I don't know that I have a single favorite, but the first thing that jumped to mind was the opening of Primo Levi's story "A Tranquil Star."

Once upon a time, somewhere in the universe very far away from here, lived a tranquil star, which moved tranquilly in the immensity of the sky, surrounded by a crowd of tranquil planets about which we have not a thing to report. This star was very big and very hot, and its weight was enormous: and here a reporter's difficulties begin. We have written "very far," "big," "hot," enormous": Australia is very far, an elephant is big and a house is bigger, this morning I had a hot bath, Everest is enormous. It's clear that something in our lexicon isn't working. 

If in fact this story must be written, we must have the courage to eliminate all adjectives that tend to excite wonder: they would achieve the opposite effect, that of impoverishing the narrative. For a discussion of stars our language is inadequate and seems laughable, as if someone were trying to plow with a feather. It's a language that was born with us, suitable for describing objects more or less as large and long-lasting as we are; it has our dimensions, it's human. It doesn't go beyond what our senses tell us. Until two or three hundred years ago, small meant the scabies mite; there was nothing smaller, nor, as a result, was there an adjective to describe it. The sea and the sky were big, in fact equally big; fire was hot. Not until the thirteenth century was the need felt to introduce into daily language a term suitable for counting "very" numerous objects, and, with little imagination, "million" was coined; a little later, with even less imagination, "billion" was coined, with no care being taken to give it a precise meaning, since the term today has different values in different countries.

Not even with superlatives does one get very far: how many times higher than a high tower is a very high tower? Nor can we hope for help from disguised superlatives, like "immense," "colossal," "extraordinary": to relate the things that we want to relate here, these adjectives are hopelessly unsuitable, because the star we started from was ten times as big as our sun, and the sun is "many" times as big and heavy as our Earth, whose size so overwhelms our own dimensions that we can represent it only with a violent effort of the imagination. There is, of course, the slim and elegant language of numbers, the alphabet of the powers of ten: but then this would not be a story in the sense in which this story wants to be a story; that is, a fable that awakens echoes, and in which each of us can perceive distance reflections of himself and of the human race.

the golden compass and a poetry handbook

Mary Oliver's book is a paragon of clear writing. Makes me want to write poetry but evidently not enough to practice every day. Perhaps it's time to change that.

The Golden Compass is such a terrific story, with such vivid and wild characters. I read it in about three days this time around (I've lost track of how many times I've read it since Dad first read them out loud to us 15+ years ago) and, even knowing just what's coming at each twist and turn, I could hardly put it down. A few times, reading in bed, I said, "Oh fuck yeah!" or variants thereof, aloud to myself.

Taking a break now to read The Blind Assassin, which is okay so far if a little slow. Debating whether to leave Subtle Knife and Amber Spyglass for the beach and start into The Warmth of Other Suns and then Between the World and Me after I'm done with Atwood.

a favorite poem, which i come back to over and over

Musee des Beaux ArtsW. H. Auden About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

the remains of the day

Brilliant, a work of genius. To so profoundly inhabit the mind of an invented character that you can convey the character's lack of self-knowledge without beating the reader over the head with it, and while remaining humorous and enlightening throughout, is an astounding feat. Hard to believe the same man wrote this and The Buried Giant, which is both totally different and a messy mediocrity.

the tremor of forgery

Enjoyed. The event that shapes the book doesn't happen until well into the action so there is a lot of time to develop the characters and the scene, which Highsmith does well. And once the key event happens, the full impact takes a long time to land. Very, very subtle.

orlando

I keep wanting to type "Orlanda" for some reason. Enjoyed, more accessible than I was expecting, although that may be because the last time I attempted Woolf was in high school with To the Lighthouse. I am probably better equipped to read challengingly dense prose now than I was at 16. Woolf could write the buhjeezus out of a metaphor, a sentence, a paragraph. Not gonna go around casually recommending this to people but if someone is interested in a hundred-year-old masterpiece of gender-nonconforming art, Orlando is pretty great. 

notes of a native son

Arch, brilliant, startlingly timeless. Some of the essays could, with minimal editing, be published tomorrow as contemporary commentary on American life. 

snow white

Borrowed from C. Loved it, what a playful genius Barthelme was. His writing reminds me of action painting, in the sense that it looks easy but was (1) surely not easy in practice and (2) in fact never done until somebody came along and thought, "Why don't I try this?"

Now C and I are on indefinite hiatus and I am very sad. Weight on (in) my chest. At least I gave her the book back first. She still has a couple of mine. 

one of us

A page-turner. Gripping, horrifying. At the end of the day, an extraordinary report: Seierstad is a journalist and so she refrains from overt analysis. That's fine but I found myself wanting a little more -- I guess that's for a different book. Without saying so explicitly, she comes down on the side of those who don't think Breivik is/was psychotic. I followed the story a little at the time and so there were not a lot of surprises -- Breivik's early life was not happy, but there's no shocking revelation in there. The victims and their families that Seierstad highlights were also pretty normal in their context. One thing did take me aback, though: just how unbelievably incompetent the Norwegian police and military response to the bomb blast and then the shootings was. Seierstad clearly shares the anger of some of the victims' families that the response was botched so badly at so many points. 

good omens

Pretty funny, sweethearted. This is obviously impossible to prove but I think I'd have known it was written by two people even if the authors' names hadn't been on the cover. It feels like a collaboration, like two people enjoying themselves by going back and forth to create a book that makes them laugh. Which is, in fact, what it is.

bad feminist

Meh. Couple of interesting essays, including one about 12 Years a Slave. The rest, well, it reads like a lightly-edited collection of an intelligent and moderately funny person's blog posts. Lot of juxtaposition-as-analysis, not a lot of actual deep thinking or close observation about anything. That's fine, I just had higher expectations given the praise Gay and the book have gotten. 

the reluctant fundamentalist

Enjoyed, quick read. Probably won't stick with me very strongly. I wonder how someone who does not already accept that other people in the world have reasons to be angry at the US would react to this story. 9/11 was horrifying, but morally speaking I don't think it's that different from the CIA remote bombing a wedding in FATA. Group A has decided that Group B is the enemy, and must be attacked violently. Group A knows that civilians will be killed in the attack. Group A has decided that killing people who are minding their own goddamn business is okay. Group A is morally repugnant.

My guess is that many Americans, including some I know personally, would want to punch me for even raising that possibility. And most Pakistanis would nod.

Interesting to have read two books in such quick succession written in the second person (the other being, of course, Gilead). 

being mortal

A call to action at all levels, from the upper reaches of the health system to medical schools to individual doctors and health care workers, to every day individuals. I feel like it should be part of medical school curricula. C and I spent some time in the park yesterday reading and enjoying the sunshine and we talked a bit about how physicians have gone from being paternalistic deciders to informers who let their patient/customer make health decisions. This is a theme Gawande addresses throughout the book, and he confesses that he himself is most comfortable in the "informer" role. He brings up the Zeke and (??? forget her name) Emanuel piece where they describe a third way for doctors to be, in which the doctor's role is to find out what the patient most desires, and then guide the patient to that outcome to the extent possible.

System broken -- amazing the extent to which Gawande makes this case, he says outright that the medical approach to end-of-life care has "failed." Needs fixing. Fixes are simple but not easy. The end.

Written so much in the New Yorker house style. 

gilead

Finished late last night, after Duke beat Wisconsin for championship number five. Go Duke.

Gilead was wonderful, I'm not sure why it took me so long to read it. Beautifully written and so deep I couldn't quite make out the bottom. Very, very much to ponder with respect to god and religion and our place in the universe, without ever feeling pedantic or obvious. And what a device, to set the entire book as unaddressed letters from a dying father to his young son! How did she do it? More Marilynne Robinson in the future.

the buried giant

In the end, only okay. Enjoyed for a while but it kind of petered out and in the end was somehow both muddled and heavy-handed and obvious. I read James Woods's review in the New Yorker after finishing the book and while I liked it more than he did -- e.g. I didn't mind the kind of silly dialogue, which irked him -- I agree with some of his objections.

field work

Poetry is different from prose.

slouching toward bethlehem

To paraphrase myself in a recent email: Didion is an absolutely wonderful writer. The essays are so closely observed. And it's amazing to think that she was right about the age I am now when she was writing these. She seems somehow more mature and composed than a 28 or 30-year-old has any right to be. 

And boy, she sure did look down on the hippies.

Eula Biss and Didion are very different stylistically and temperamentally but Biss is also a tremendously insightful and thoughtful essayist so I'm finding it hard not to compare them. 

ghettoside

Fabulously well-reported and well-told, compelling, frustrating and sad, important. Makes the argument that black communities are plagued not just by intrusive and unnecessarily violent policing of small crimes, but also by massive underpolicing of violent crimes. Catching and punishing criminals who commit violent assaults, goes the argument, in effect creates law and order.

The state monopoly on violence does not currently extend to many majority-black neighborhoods in big cities, and so segments of those communities police themselves, as people living outside the reach of a strong state have ever since strong states became a thing. Violent gangs are a symptom, not a cause. To end the grip that gang violence has on places like Watts and Compton, the state must decide that it cares enough about victims of that violence to aggressively pursue and imprison perpetrators of major violence. It's very hard for it to do so now because its historical indifference and underattention to major violence and heavy-handed approach to minor crimes and policing, especially of young black men, has created serious and well-founded mistrust of the criminal justice system.

It would be really interesting to explore the parallel between the quasi-tribal/familial gang system in many US cities with the tribal systems in places like southern Afghanistan.

childhood of jesus

Enjoyed. Not a whole lot to say about it. 

writing poetry

Been writing bad poetry recently. Started as a way to pass the time in KBL -- figured writing a sonnet would be more fun and more fulfilling than playing Angry Birds and I was sick of whatever book I was reading. Not very good but I've been enjoying it. Today I talked with my friend Andrew about univocal writing and I figured I'd give that a shot, too. And I talked to Jack on the phone tonight, and he said something that touched me in a pretty serious way (paraphrasing): "I didn't realize you were so creative, I've really been enjoying reading the stuff you send."

I do not think of myself as a creative person, or more precisely as a person who has much native talent in the arts. But when I think about the compliments I can remember actually touching me over the past few years, most are related to things I've done, almost without thinking about them, that are creative. My friend Johanna telling me a couple of years ago, after I finished telling a story, that I'm a good storyteller, and Gabby telling me that I tell better stories than pretty much anyone else he knows. Andrew this morning saying that he really liked my univocal poem. And Jack tonight. I like writing, and I'm good at technical and persuasive writing and outstanding at editing other people's writing -- those skills are my stock in trade and I take some pride in them.

But I don't know what to do with people telling me I'm creative or good at a creative thing, I don't think I believe them. Anyway, I'm going to write more poetry. It's fun, even if I'm bad at it, and even if I never stick with any one poem long enough to make it passable.

In chronological order in which they were written, here are a few sonnets and a poem with univocal stanzas. They were each written in about 30-45 minutes. I'm not happy with any of them except maybe the mouse one. 

Topkapi
So many objets d'art, and clothing of

The sultans. Jewel encrusted everything,

Gigantic thrones of wood inlaid with love,

The spoils of war and gifts from Russia's kings.

Then crazy relics: David's sword and the

Saucepan of Abraham and Moses's staff,

Prophetic teeth and swords and bows, and a

Gold box, a letter written, stop, don't laugh,

By Abraham himself to a neighb'ring tribe.

With serious presentation, tot'lly free

Of irony. These strange, fake things alive

With power, somehow full of majesty.

Outside the ancient hall the white hot sun

Beats down, indifferent, scorching everyone.

To a mouse, with apologies to Robert Burns
Th'electric wiring in my house is not

All up to code. I fear one day a wee

Li'l mouse will chew right through a tangled knot

Of wires. A fire he'd start and like a tree

The house would catch and go all up in smoke.

The flames would lick the bricks all up and down.

I'd wake in bed, alarmed, and tumbling, choke

My way out to the street. And with a frown

I'd call the fire trucks to come and spray

Their dousing streams in through the broken glass

In hopes of saving anything. Next day,

The embers cool, I'd find that mouse, his ass

Charred to a crisp, and say, "it's okay mouse,

You lost your life. Me, I just lost the house."

Interior Sindh, with apologies to myself for writing that last line
In dark of night, a rumbling through my dream

And, groggy, I awake to shatt'ring glass.

I stumble to the bedroom door and scream

For children, wife, and mother to run fast

Outside. The ground jumps up beneath our feet

And water seeps up through the once-dry dirt.

"Impossible," I think, with all this heat

For liquid now to soak my son's nightshirt.

We tumble out into the open field 

And watch the earth crack open. Like a maw

It gulps a wall of our adobe home.

at nightmare, god, is this? I ask in awe.

At least we're all alive and bod'ly whole.

A long night waits, a dark night of the soul.

Sense of taste
Fat and jam as art,
Grant Achatz talks
a fatty past and 
alarm at a call
that appalls all: 
"C" racks la lang.

He feels decked,
wrecked even.
Yet, ever the chef,
he feeds the 
well-met herd.

Within his tiring
mind, his instincts,
lit, firing, driving,
lift his kitch.

Plods on, cold,
noon convoys no 
color to old cook.

Surg'ns cut up tung.

Stunn'd tusks chump, yum!

the girl on the train

Very fun, very engrossing, read in one sitting. Good unreliable narrators. Like a 10%-as-sophisticated My Name is Red. 

on immunity

Beautifully written meditations on motherhood, vaccination, and medical care in our culture. Kind of discursive in structure, the chapters are short and loop back on each other in an unusual way. Ultimately a little unsatisfying, although I can't really tell why. Maybe it's because I want her to be a little more strident, but I think part of her point is that stridency is misplaced a lot of the time. Good lesson for me to remember. Anti-vaxxers may be wrong, and they may be harming our kids, but their fears are grounded in wider cultural understandings and tropes that are old and understandable to some degree, and that we're all part of in some way or other.

For example, dismissing mistrust of medicine out of hand ignores the very real history that medical doctors often invented elaborate "cures" for things that did not work or were actively harmful, but which gave the illusion of the doctor as a skilled practitioner who could bill for his practice, in contrast to women who, in their traditional healer role, often just advocated patience. Biss's dad is a physician, and he has a funny idea for a two-line medical textbook, which I'll paraphrase here: "Most problems will get better if you leave them alone. Problems that are so serious as to require intervention will probably kill the patient anyway, no matter what you do."

Biss's compassion and frank uncertainty are humbling. 

faster, higher, stronger

Covers a lot of familiar territory, given how much I read about sports science as it is. Still, some fun anecdotes and interesting people whose work I should follow up on. Would recommend to someone who is curious about this stuff and doesn't have much background, very accessible.

grendel

Holy moley, what a book! I thought of Cormac McCarthy when I was reading it, just because of the exuberance and occasional inventiveness of language, but this is way better than anything I've read by McCarthy except maybe The Road. Even just on that score, the little words Gardner invents here and there, the lightness and ease of it puts McCarthy's plodding gothic laboredness to shame.

Anyway this note shouldn't be all about a writer I dislike, because I really liked Grendel, a book and a character I will need to come back to. Magnificent, funny, lots to chew on. I should probably re-read Beowulf at some point. Gardner is on record as saying that the monster in his book is basically a vector for poking fun at the moral horror of Sartre. But man he's an appealing horror show. 

the talented mr. ripley

Wicked fast, awesome and creepy title character, suspenseful almost to the point of being hard to read, liked a lot. 

books read 2015

1. The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith
2. Grendel, by John Gardner
3. Faster, Higher Stronger, by Mark McCluskey
4 Law and the Rise of Capitalism, by Michael Tigar and Madeleine Levy
5. The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins
6. On Immunity: an Inoculation, by Eula Biss
7. The Childhood of Jesus, by JM Coetzee
8. Ghettoside, by Jill Leovy
9. Slouching Toward Bethlehem, by Joan Didion
10. Field Work, by Seamus Heaney
11. The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro
12. Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
13. Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande
14. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid
15. Bad Feminist, by Roxane Gay
16. Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
17. One of Us, by Asne Seierstad
18. Snow White, by Donald Barthelme
19. Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin
20. Orlando, by Virginia Woolf
21. The Tremor of Forgery, by Patricia Highsmith
22. The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro
23. A Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver (second time)
24. The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman (nth time)
24.75 The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood
25. The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman (3rd(?) time)
26. The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman (3rd(?) time)
27. The Clocks, by Agatha Christie
28. Tourist Season, by Carl Hiaasen
29. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson
30. Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
31. Paradise, by Toni Morrison
32. Coming Into the Country, by John McPhee
33. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
34. Rum Punch, by Elmore Leonard
35. Room, by Emma Donoghue
36. The Tombs of Atuan, by Ursula Le Guin
37. The Moor's Account, by Laila Lalami
38. SPQR, by Mary Beard
39. The Gap of Time, by Jeanette Winterson
40. Strong Poison, by Dorothy Sayers
41. I'm Gonna Pray for You So Hard, by Halley Feiffer

books read 2014 - final

I think this is the complete books-read list from 2014, not including books started but not finished (lookin' at you, Michael Chabon: Telegraph Avenue was unreadable).

1. Postwar, by Tony Judt
2. Stoner, by John Williams
3. The Giant, O'Brien, by Hilary Mantel
4. The Aleph, by Jorge Luis Borges
5. The Maker, by Jorge Luis Borges
6. The Swerve, by Stephen Greenblatt
7. Devil in the Grove, by Gilbert King
8. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
9. A Delicate Truth, by John Le Carre.
10. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, by bell hooks
11. A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin
12. The Gifts of the State and Other Stories: New Writing from Afghanistan, ed. Adam Klein
13. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Chandler
14. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky (ongoing serial, third time through to date and I skipped and skimmed a bit this time, counting as a full book because it's hundreds of thousands of words long by now)
15. Murphy, by Samuel Beckett
16. The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. LeGuin
17. God Loves, Man Kills, by Chris Claremont
18. Shadow of the Torturer, by Gene Wolf  
19. Claw of the Conciliator, by Gene Wolf
20. I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan, ed. Eliza Griswold
21. The Animal Family, by Randall Jarrell
22. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, by Alan Moore
23. The Map that Changed the World, by Simon Winchester (audiobook)
24. Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, trans. Philip Pullman
25. The Blood Telegram, by Gary Bass
26. Sword and Citadel, by Gene Wolf
27. A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle
28. A Wind in the Door, by Madeleine L'Engle
29. A Swiftly Tilting Planet, by Madeleine L'Engle
30. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors, by Susan Sontag (counting the two together as one book)
31. The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
32. In the Freud Archives, by Janet Malcolm
33. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin
34. Notes from No Man's Land, by Eula Biss
35. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
36. Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel (second time)
37. O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather
38. The Secret History, by Donna Tartt 

o pioneers!

Sent to me by Bill as part of a huge set of books by women authors. Very quick. Stylistically not my cup of tea, but a really rich portrait of a particular time and place and of a strong woman. Feels like a primary document, if that makes sense, like reading someone's journal even though it's written in the third person. Very different in that way from Stoner, which is also an exceptionally rich portrait of an actually rather similar time and place (Great Plains, about a hundred years ago), but which looks at its characters and their surroundings and actions from a remove.

wolf hall (second time through)

Good lord, what a book. What a character Mantel has created with Thomas Cromwell! The supporting cast -- Eustache Chapuys, Thomas More, Wolsey, Anne Boleyn, Henry himself, Walter Cromwell, Thomas Wriothesley, Cromwell's daughters and nieces, the Wyatts father and son, Mary Carey, Cromwell's cook whose name escapes me at the moment, Hans Holbein, and on and on -- is wonderful and rich but they're no match for the man at the center. Mantel just refers to Cromwell with third person pronouns: "he," "his," only bothering to identify him by name when there might be some confusion about the reference, and then it's, "he, Cromwell." What a touch! What a writer!

I'll re-read Bring Up the Bodies next year, before The Mirror and the Light comes out. Now I face the difficult decision about what to spend the rest of the year reading. Bunches of options. 

training

Talking for multiple hours in a row is tiring.

Beloved joins the first two thirds of Mantel's Cromwell trilogy among the best novels I've ever read.

The third volume of the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, is coming out next year. I am beside myself. Also, this book will join my list of things with awesome names.

My training today at Focus is going well so far, I think. People were really engaged this morning, asking lots of questions, cross-talking about specific problems or examples, good stuff like that. The contrast with the mostly glassy eyes I addressed in Tajikistan is pretty striking.

Today is the last real working day of my trip. I'll have plenty to do tomorrow, including crashing Focus's board meeting, but the biggest milestones from the trip will all be complete as of tonight. Feels good, this has been a really productive trip. Lots more to do, but that's okay.

Just had pizza from Afghan Fried Chicken, the makers of the worst cheeseburger I have ever eaten. It (the pizza) was actually pretty good. A bit spicy, even!

Part two of the training, commence.

two hours...nine hours

The Dushanbe-Kabul trip is brutal, mostly because you have to wake up at 2:20 AM to make the flight to Dubai. And then it's six hours in the air, plus layover, for what should be a one-hour flight. The car wasn't at the airport to pick me up and my supposedly universal SIM wasn't working, despite showing full bars and the name of one of the local MNOs. But it was okay, I got a driver from Save to lend me his phone and then to call our dispatch, and then the car came in 15 minutes. 

Security at the hotel is notably beefed up. And it's not like it was easy to get in before, even in a diplomatic car. It's also pretty empty compared to last year, when there was lots of bustle and many guests. 

Last night I grabbed an early dinner with LG, who's halfway through a month-long trip, and then fought to stay awake until 9:30 or so. I was wiped out and nursing a headache but I was also gonna be damned if I fell asleep too early to wake up at a reasonable time. As it was I got up at 6:30, plenty of time to shower and chat briefly with C before heading down to breakfast with the head of our unit out here. Nine hours of sleep -- and I slept like the dead -- was so necessary after just two the night before.

The two were because we got taken out by the PE crew for our last night in Dushanbe, to a night club called (in Persian) the Hunting Lodge. Lots of taxidermy, lots of fake trees, a TV showing an Animal Planet special on African big cats. And that apparently typical Central Asian mixed dinner entertainment: belly dancers, a singer, a band, traditional dancers, a pair doing weird duets. The volume during the performances is ear-splitting and actually really unpleasant. But I learned that the reason they do it that way is so that you'll eat and drink more, because you can't talk. Not my cup of tea. The breaks were nice enough, though, good conversation in bits and chunks. Food bad. Oh well. We got home late and then I had to pack. Et voila, two hours of sleep.

Breakfast with MB this morning was good, she's nice and I appreciated her taking the time because she is totally swamped and most certainly does not have time for me during working hours. She wanted to get a bit of a rundown on the DC office, and also to talk about jobs. They don't have anything open right now that's terribly interesting to me, I think to MB's disappointment because they need help, but they might mid-next-year. I've got to get overseas eventually, damn it, and so it's good to start putting those feelers out in person. 

Today and most of the week I'm with my humanitarian/DRR colleagues at Focus. And honestly their Executive Officer made a soft pitch to me on coming out to work with them next year as Deputy EO. Unexpected. Many of the readers of this blog may not enjoy hearing me say it but I'm seriously considering a couple of these options. Would be silly not to. 

Readers may also not like hearing that I'm more glad to be back in Kabul than I expected to be. Doesn't mean I'll move here necessarily but it's a good reminder that I do like it out here. 

This blog is blocked in the hotel (for adult content?) and it's shaping up to be a busy week so I'm not sure how many entries I'll get down. I'll try to write a few around lunchtimes, like this one. Lunch was delicious, by the way: a thick rice and beans concoction and fresh bread. Hopefully it'll all sit well, knock on wood.

without a hitch

My nerves calmed down over the course of the day yesterday, as AV took over making sure all the arrangements were made for today's event. This morning the big boss arrived and was in a chipper mood at breakfast. So the nerves turned to butterflies. Everything this afternoon went about as well as it could have. Even my small speaking role, I surprised myself with how fluid and self-assured I sounded, to myself. Usually when I have to talk a lot in big meetings, my real-time perception is that I'm talking too fast, or that I sound like I don't know what I'm talking about. Not today. Maybe that means I came across like a complete fool, but I actually doubt it.

Also, I've said it before and I'll say it again: ICD is an incredible place to have an event. It's just beautiful.

After everything was over YF drove us all to get traditional soup called ugro (noodles, meatballs, potato and onion) and shashlik (grilled beef) with french fries, and he and MJ went off to meet with the Brits while AV and I ambled home.

Now I'm back in the hotel and ready to do all the work I couldn't this morning because the internet in the office was down. Yeehaw.

diplomatic protocol

Good lord diplomats get people all wound up. Today was a reasonably productive one but I seriously underestimated two things:

1. How much work I would personally have to put into ensuring that all proper protocols are followed, and into all the planning that goes into making sure things are set up correctly, for the signing ceremony on Thursday.
2. How anxious people would be about the logistics.

My counterpart at AID called me like eight times today, three times to ask the same question about who would be speaking from our side in which order. He's a competent guy so I'm sure there is some reason he's so wound up about something so seemingly, well, insignificant isn't the right word. I don't know, everyone shows up, we know when the ambassador is supposed to speak and then when everyone signs the papers, and then other people are gonna say a couple things, no big deal. Oh, how naive I am.

We have to make sure there are four identical pens.

We have to make sure there are the appropriate number of flags, all the same size, and that they are arranged properly on the table. We have to decide whether or not to also use large flags, and if we do, where they'll go.

We have to figure out where the signatories are going to sit while each is speaking in turn. Will it be at the signing table? Or in the front row of the audience, because at the end of the thing we may need to do a brief PowerPoint? Do we need a PowerPoint?

We have to establish who is opening the event, then who is speaking after the ambassador, then who is speaking to describe the project. Not just that the project will be described, but the name of the individual who will do the describing.

And on and on.

I don't know, it'll be a hoot and a holler and I'll get some good stories out of it I bet. Whatever.

--------

Tonight AV and I went out for dinner with two generations of fellows. Turkish spot. Delicious shish kebab. It was nice.

That's all for now.

saturday-sunday

It's a beautiful day out, so I have the window cracked in my hotel room. A little while ago a procession of some kind moved down the market street that's just out of sight behind the hotel. Lots of drumming. It faded after about 15 minutes but some drum beats still float in through the window from time to time. I guess when the wind blows this way.

Yesterday AV and I walked over to the National Museum, where we met up with our colleague B and her husband (G) and niece. They are German, American, and German respectively. The museum was fascinating in a totally unintentional way that sparked the latest installment in my (and seemingly all expats') interrogation of what the hell is up with the half-assing of everything around here. The museum is huge and grandiose, but ugly, covered in the same cheap-looking colored glass as many other newer buildings around here (and in Afghanistan and Pakistan). The art collection on the top floor could most generously be described as modest. There are a few interesting and somewhat accomplished paintings, among a pretty wide collection of very bad paintings and drawings. And there is a puzzlingly random selection of other European art: a couple of 19th-century German and Austrain vases, some German military knives and decorative swords, some Danish (or Dutch?) coins from a few hundred years ago. What the hell is all that stuff doing in there? No explanation is even attempted, not even in Russian or Tajik. The captions are, as in the antiquities museum, printed on colored paper and haphazardly affixed to the picture frames or display cases.

The second floor hallway is identical to the floor above, but the doors to the galleries are closed.

The first floor has something much more engaging: a sweeping collection of artifacts and art purporting to tell the grand history of the Tajik people, from Neanderthal times onward. They've had to do a lot of nation-building from scratch here, and the history that they're cobbling together is interesting if sometimes hard to follow. Zoroastrianism figures in, as do the Achaeminids. There are at least explanations on the wall here that form a rough chronological narrative, but they're poorly-designed and cheap-looking. And while I can't comment on the Russian and Tajik wording, the English is poor and full of errors.

And that brings me to the confused-expat question: why? Why go to the trouble of building a huge museum in a prominent part of the capital -- right next to the presidential palace and the world's second-tallest flagpole* -- that is clearly meant to make an impression on visitors, and then do such a crappy job with the arrangements and language and presentation? You've already done most of the work to build the building and get everything in one place, why not curate a little better? For $10,000 I'd happily rewrite all the English captions, import the foam board, and redesign and remount everything myself. That isn't that much money! The thing must have cost millions of dollars to build! G told us about a book that's supposedly tells the national history, the English translation of which is "worse than you'd get on Google translate." Why not hire someone who can write coherently in English to clean it up? It's of a piece with the weird resort I stayed in last year with the Norwegians where they hadn't emptied the trash can in the bathroom after the previous guests. Paying attention and doing something really well, as opposed to halfheartedly going through the motions just doesn't seem to occur to people.

G and B have been here for 15 years and, if it's not already obvious, completely concurred with my and AV's impression of the place. I feel a bit patronizing saying all this but man, as G said, who's going to want to come here and open a factory, or spend their reputation organizing a tour group, if you can't be sure anyone is going to do their work properly? It's not just me who's thrown off by it.

That's enough for now, I need to do some more work. Showtime tomorrow morning, as the workshop begins in earnest. No idea how it'll go, but seems like it at least won't be a catastrophe.

*The Saudis built a taller one last year. Jerks. 

day 2 jet lag is the worst

Slept like a champ last night, thanks to my little friend diphenhydramine hydrochloride. Nine and a half hours of deep, deep sleep. I dreamed about buying rare books.

Today was productive, lots of meetings and some progress on various documents. We're going to be flying a bit by the seat of our pants next Monday and Tuesday but we've got a much firmer grip this evening than we did this morning. Being in-country is essential -- it's MUCH harder to make sure logistics are being taken care of over email. Instead of several days of back-and-forth emails and uncertainty about whether everyone is on the same page, you can have a thirty-minute conversation and all is fine.

I hit a wall about 4 PM, though, and I'm still hitting it 2.5 hours later: still feel awake but my brain is just moving so slowly. Going to the gym in a few minutes to keep myself awake and get the juices flowing and then I'm calling it a night. So much to do this weekend but it can wait until I'm compos mentis. 

that post-travel shower

It's raining and foggy in Dushanbe. You can't even see the hills behind the Serena from the elevator, just an off-white backdrop behind the gardens and low buildings. AV and I arrived this morning after what was all-in-all a pretty smooth trip over. There was the matter of the screaming baby with what I really have to admit is admirable stamina -- I can't imagine being that miserable for that long and telling everyone about it the whole time. We ran into NR unexpectedly in Istanbul, which was a treat. She's on her way to Kabul and her layover wrapped around ours so we hung out for a bit before heading on.

Something about travel just guarantees BO and greasy hair, and I always look forward to the first shower and floss and tooth brushing after arrival. Teased it out this time, though: We got to the hotel about 5:45 and I made myself unpack everything carefully before jumping into the hot water. Then stretched and watched BBC a bit (crazy about the shooting in Ottawa!) and called the front desk for a 9 AM wake-up call. And then I slept beautiful sweaty drooly sleep.

AV and I just had breakfast and now are back in our rooms to catch up on email before we head to the office this afternoon. Gonna be a busy trip. Here goes.

illness as metaphor and the handmaid's tale

Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors belong in that Eichmann in Jerusalem or The Death and Life of Great American Cities category of staggeringly clear thinking and argumentation that has the voice of rigorous academic authority without needing to bother with academic evidence. The Sontag pieces are dated, although to be fair she predicted that they would be. In fact, the temporariness of the metaphors is part of the point: Things are scariest when we don't understand them, and once we do their power as metaphors dissipates. Cancer is less frightening than it was in the 1970s, and AIDS is less frightening now than it was 25 years ago. They are both still terrifying diseases, but cancer in particular carries less moral weight than it used to.

The Handmaid's Tale is a work of genius. Beautifully written, gripping, terrifying, insightful. I said this on FB the other day but it's almost hard to believe it's by the same author who wrote Oryx and Crake, which is, by comparison, clumsy and clunky and not all that interesting.

telegraph avenue and madeleine l'engle

I liked Kavalier and Clay and Maps and Legends was okay, but Telegraph Avenue I had to put down. I wish I meant that in the put to sleep sense. It's a bad book: overwritten, boring, and forced in the way I thought Empire Falls was, just more so. Empire Falls was okay.

Following that unceremonious dumping, I have begun my quest to read nothing but women authors for the remainder of the year by re-reading the three childhood classics that make up Madelein L'Engle's Time trilogy. They're terrific books, imaginative and strongly moral without being preachy, clearly written for children but not patronizing. Meg Murry, the heroine, is an ordinary child: good at math but not much else, stubborn to the point of stupidity, prone to tantrums and sulking. At one point in A Wind in the Door I actually yelled at her, out loud. But that makes her all the more appealing. She's not superhuman, but she's brave and she struggles even when the going gets very, very tough. I'll finish A Swiftly Tilting Planet in the next couple of days and then move on to either The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas or The Handmaid's Tale (I'm not usually that taken with Atwood's writing but the opening line of this one is EXTREMELY promising).

the blood telegram

A fantastically well-reported and well-researched account of a forgotten dark moment in post-WW2 US foreign policy. Dark in the sense of fraught with evil and tragedy, but also in the sense that the moment was murky and full of ambiguity.

Above everything else, it's an enlightening portrait of the mechanics of highest-level foreign policy: how important personal relationships are, how dependent policy and even war between giant nations can be on whether two or three or four individuals trust each other. And also, how easy it is to put blinders on and do a bunch of bad stuff when you have a huge goal in mind. Nixon and Kissinger end up looking like callous, racist assholes, but throughout the book you can see their reasoning. And it is not fundamentally bad reasoning, in its way. They wanted the opening to China, and they settled on General Yahya Khan. Nixon liked him and hated Indira Gandhi, despite the fact that Yahya was a brutal moron. And Yahya played his role well. The opening worked and was a high point of Nixon's presidency. The fact that working toward that end helped set the US firmly against any kind of intervention or even light pressure on Pakistan to stop systematically massacring hundreds of thousands of its own citizens entered Nixon and Kissinger's consciousness only as an annoyance.

Meanwhile, the astoundingly-named Consul General Archer Blood and his eponymous telegram are a window into what can be done -- and what can't -- by individuals with a very different set of values and a very different perspective from the big guns at the top.

I haven't even gotten to the fascinating peek into Gandhi's government. Suffice it to say that I learned a lot.

i am the beggar of the world: landays from contemporary afghanistan

A collection of landays, a traditional form of poetry written or recited by Pashtun women. They're always two lines long and have a specific syllabic structure, although it's basically impossible for that to be translated. The editor's commentary was usually interesting and non-invasive, and some of the poems were really thought-provoking and occasionally beautiful. The book is divided into thematic sections, and by far the biggest one is "Love" -- although that often seems to mean sex! Because the poems are by women and for women only, they're often incredibly frank about, say, masturbation. Really cool to get that small peek into a world that is very, very closed off to a Western man.

shadow and claw

The first two volumes of The Book of the New Sun are The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator. Gene Wolfe came highly recommended by my old friend Josh. I'd never heard of him but I enjoyed these books a lot. Wickedly imaginative world, good writing. Not going in the pantheon for me but very enjoyable, well, summer reading. I bought the third and fourth volumes (they're bound in sets of two) for the beach. 

the lathe of heaven

Backs up its wonderful title by being a wonderful story. LeGuin manages to have very strong moral messages without overtly moralizing (well, usually). That's true of A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness, as well as this book. The depth of her imagination helps, and her compassion for her characters. The villain in Lathe is not evil but tragic, in the classical sense that he is hubristic to a fault. And the protagonist, as in A Wizard of Earthsea, comes to his heroism and strength by way of modesty and wisdom rather than a great capacity for action or leadership.

***SPOILER ALERT***

Just one example of LeGuin's prodigious imagination and ability to recast old tropes to tell new stories: Her vision for an alien invasion of Earth, in which the initial alien attack on human bases on the Moon is a mistake, an attempt on their part to communicate before they understand that our communication with each other is verbal. They land on Earth without weapons, truly coming in peace, and we freak out, bombing everything in sight and even nuking Mount Hood to the point where it erupts. But the aliens are basically indestructible, and only once they figure out that they have to communicate with us in spoken words and then invent a way to imitate our speech are they able to settle us down. Eventually they just quietly integrate into human society, walking among us and owning small shops and other businesses. Awe-inspiring.

murphy

By Samuel Beckett. I didn't get it. I understood the plot and a few of the jokes but throughout I had the sense that there was a lot zipping right over my head. Beckett's prose is beautiful and poetic even when I don't understand the meaning. And sometimes I didn't even understand the superficial meaning, let alone what he was actually saying! The vocabulary alone is dizzying, not something I say often.

will you please be quiet, please?

Pretty brilliant, although to be honest I could have done without a couple of stories. Chandler gets predictable at times, with the way his characters behave and what he wants you to understand about them. That said, the bright spots in this book are incredible. I think my favorite stories are the first and last. The first, which I think is just called "Fat," just woke me right up. I'd just put down The Gifts of the State and the gap between his mastery and theirs was just so apparent from the first couple of pages. And the last story, for which the book is named, is beautiful and sad. A lot of the stories are, I suppose, but the title story is just the most poignant.

In fact, if I had to choose a single word to describe the book, I might go with "poignant."

I didn't enjoy it as much as Appointment in Samarra, although they're not as similar as I was expecting. O'Hara's great themes, to me, are solipsism and even narcissism and the way those can cloud our view of the world around us and our place in it; our smallness in the universe; and the damage that we can do if we don't manage to step back and understand who we are and where we are. Chandler's stories are all about self-discovery, and how brutal that process can be. His characters are smaller than O'Hara's, wrestling with subtler demons. 

Still, I'm drawn to the comparison. Maybe it's just that both men wrote about middle-class semi-urban Americans in the mid-twentieth century, and that both have a bleak outlook. 

the gifts of the state: new writing from afghanistan

This is a collection of stories by Afghans under the age of 30, written in English under the guidance of a guy named Adam Klein. They are very affecting, sometimes strange, sometimes horrifying, often but not always sad. I just started Will You Please Be Quiet, Please and already it's easy to see how much greater Carver's genius is than that of these writers. But that's not a fair comparison and it misses the point: The Gifts of the State is awesome because it humanizes and provides the kind of deep context for Afghanistan that's probably only achievable through fiction.

a wizard of earthsea

Read in like two days. Such a wonderful story. Will read Tombs of Atuan at least later this year, I don't think I've ever read it. 

book update

Feminism is for Everybody was a good read. Not much that I didn't know or believe already. For the most part hooks doesn't concern herself with evidence, sticking with unqualified declarations. That's fine for the most part -- it makes the book easy to read and comprehend, which is a big part of her stated aim, and many of her observations are common-sensical enough not to need much backup -- but she makes some questionable assertions. These are irritating because they rarely do anything to strengthen her arguments, even at face value, and they serve to weaken the book by causing even a very sympathetic reader to doubt her.

Now I'm in the midst of reading The Gifts of the State: New Afghan Writing, a collection of short stories by Afghans under 30 years old, which came out of a series of workshops held in Kabul by an American writer whose name I forget. So far, they are wonderful. More on that when I'm done. I'm also going to start picking my way through a collection of landays, traditional Afghan poems, called I Am the Beggar of the World, as I continue to work my way through the Auden collection next to the bed.

Yesterday, I took off work and did a bunch of stuff. Among that stuff was going to Kramerbooks while waiting to get my hair cut, and buying four books. So I'm now re-reading A Wizard of Earthsea, because it has been too long. Frankly I'd forgotten a lot of it. I was going to pick up the second and/or third book(s) in the trilogy but decided I should reacquaint myself with Ged first.

Also got:
- The Lathe of Heaven, which I started listening to on tape with Mom many (10+) years ago, but which I don't remember finishing. It's on the "best titles/names" list. Lathe, what a beautiful word. What can I say, I was in a Le Guin mood yesterday.
- Murphy, by Samuel Beckett. It's about time I read me a Beckett novella. Don't know much about any of them but the first page of this one was wonderful so there you go.
- Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver. Same as the Beckett: It's just time. I loved Appointment in Samarra, which is contemporaneous with Carver and which I imagine to be similar. Should be interesting to see whether my pre-formed impression of Carver as being in O'Hara's company.

a delicate truth

John LeCarre's latest, from last year. As I put it to C: JLC books are like candy to me. I'm happy to go months and months without but if you put a bag of Skittles next to me they're going down the hatch in short order. I read the book in basically two sittings: 60 pages on the MARC on Friday and 250 pages after getting home last night. Did not get enough sleep as a consequence. Moron.

It's not a great book, not on par with Tinker, Tailor or The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Lots of people can craft page-turners. I don't even think it's that hard. Dan Brown can do it. But not many authors I've read can combine the potboiler, page-turner narrative with such strong writing and believable characters as JLC.

Plus it's a book after my own political heart, a lamentation about the privatization of warfare and intelligence gathering and the hideous consequences that has.

found poetry

There's a guy on the forum where I log my workouts who is an aspiring sprinter. He is an odd and sometimes really frustrating person to interact with, not least because his grasp of English appears limited. For a while I thought he was a troll but now I just think he's young, a nonnative speaker, and preternaturally stubborn. But his analysis of each of his workouts can be a trip and a half. Here is a recent example, which is completely unedited except for the line breaks and title.

"Fast again," by seifullaah73 and LBSS (me)

It was a nice day
slight wind from north direction, which be
hitting me from the side and it was a good day as
I found
Something, which had caused to start feeling fast
during the runs compared to the last 2 weeks.
I found
out that I hadn't fully mastered the arm
Swing yet, not in the run but from start to driving out.
I found
that before I was swinging fast when I come out,
but this time I focussed on exploding out first then swinging arms
fast and I felt
fast again,
which was good.

"Grey Cloud," by seifullaah73 and LBSS

It was a sort of grey
cloud slightly sunny day
and very strong wind not
only was it strong enough
to be close to push someone
off their feet but it was a
head wind, when I was running
not only was I running
a slight hill I was running
into this strong wind getting
stronger the further I went
it reduced my speed to a jog
pace, that hard so it was
a good resisted training.

"Approach," by seifullaah73 and vag (another guy on the forum who's gotten into it)

It was again a nice hot sunny day,
I did my warm ups as usual,
my a skip and b skip are much better,
as the more you do it the more you can adjust to
what feels right.

After I finished resting before third rep,
people came in the pitch to play about,
so i was about to move to another side of the field,
until when i was about to start,

they started leaving,
I approach the normal place,
they stall a bit,
so I am thinking

are they leaving, until they leave,
they decided to use astroturf,
which people play football that go to the school nearby,
short pitch,
I rejoice

do the third rep and finish off with 2 reps,
which I do one after the other like a tempo,
120m run,
120m walk,
120m run.

devil in the grove

An enraging and gripping book about an under-remembered chapter in the history of 20th-century white supremacy and civil rights. Been thinking about white supremacy a lot recently, thanks in part to Ta-Nehisi Coates's string of wonderful pieces on the subject. This book fit right into that groove. Gilbert King is an excellent reporter and storyteller and his characters are larger than life, perfect avatars for this country's hideous history of white violence against blacks and blacks' constant struggle to assert their humanity in the face of overwhelming prejudice.

Reading this book and thinking about Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Renisha McBride, and other recent murder victims -- and about the infinite other forms that racism takes every day in America -- reminds me of that Faulkner quote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." 

thinking about retirement

One of the ideas that's seized my imagination in the past two weeks is waste management and recycling. The case for opening a solid waste management center in Khorog is really strong on paper. There's a lot of trash there right now that isn't effectively collected, and what is collected is either burned or goes to a landfill that's already full. With a modest investment (something like $5.5 million) you could set up trash cans and dumpsters, buy a couple of trucks, build a new landfill, and build a small sorting facility that splits glass, plastic and metal out from the rest of the trash. There's a huge market for bulk recycled materials in China, which is right over the border to the east. Everybody wins, like with run-of-the-river hydropower.

Doing some research on that led me to the US recycling industry and made me curious what it'd take to do, for example, household-level material processing. Why couldn't people have a little machine in their house, like a trash compactor, that cuts up their plastic and metal and crushes their glass? Or if household level is too small to be cost-effective, what about smaller plants, like the one described above, for places in the States where no one has bothered to set up a processing facility yet but which don't justify the larger-scale plants that seem to be the norm there? What's the business case there? I'm reminded of a guy who came by our office last year to talk about his company, Blue Lotus, which sets up liquid natural gas plants next to food processing factories and uses the food scrap to make the biogas.

Stuff like that is really appealing to me (I mean, who wouldn't that appeal to?), much more so than a lot of the NGO stuff that's my current bread and butter. Grass is always greener, of course, but it makes me reeeeally curious about career opportunities on the other side.

Thinking about business also made me think about my own investments, such as they are. I've got a 401k through work, to which I contribute alongside my employer, but it's limited and I'm a bit dubious about how much they're charging us. Need to find out about that. But in any event, I think I'd like to set up a Roth IRA or some other kind of index fund investment, stick some money in it, and switch my contributions to that from my 401k. I like the idea of paying taxes now in order to avoid paying them later. Using those compound interest calculators, starting with $3000, contributing $400/month (which is what I currently put into my 401k), assuming a 9% annual return (the 25-year average of the S&P 500 for the 25 years leading up to 2011 was 9.28%) over 35 years gives me $1.2 million when I hit 62. More to the point, annual interest on that is $102K. What the hell am I waiting for?

Back to work.

pacquiao-bradley

Benefit of being overseas: Pacquiao-Bradley is not on PPV, it's on the 24-hour boxing/MMA channel in the hotel room. I don't always watch boxing, but when I do, it's a fight this big. Just ended, Bradley thinks he won, I don't think he won. Neither do the judges. Unanimous for Manny. Revenge.

Yesterday ended up being nice. I did a little work in the morning and then met BS for lunch at Segafreddo -- the restaurant takes its name from the coffee brand -- and had pasta (!!!) and a salad and a beer. And two cappuccinos. Then we went across the street to TsUM, the main mall here. I was vaguely looking to buy a suzani, the traditional Tajik embroidered decorative blanket. Aaaand I found one. Here's a few pics of the mall, and my new suzani at the end. (Click to embiggen.)

Beate also lent me her movie hard drive, so I watched "The Usual Suspects" for the first time since high school last night. That movie is almost 20 years old, kind of hard to believe.

Today I'm going to write the bulk of my trip report and continue to work on the proposal. Will take a break to watch "True Detective" at some point and then at 7 NK is coming by and we're going to walk over to some place nearby for dinner and a beer. Then it'll be pack, nap, wake, plane.

The weekend has not been as bad as I feared. Turns out things get easier when you start to develop relationships with people and can actually break up the hotel room time with sustained interactions with others. Couple of other notes on the trip:

1. I am going to get a Kindle. They're just too practical. It sucked finishing one book and then having with me just one other, which I don't like all that much.
2. I get too much screen time. My attention span is shorter than it was, I'm sure of it, and there are loads of productive things I could be doing but don't because it's easier to channel flip or read articles online. Don't get me wrong, there are some great things on TV and some amazing writing shooting through the intertubes, but enough is enough. I resolve to spend less time watching TV and less time online at home when I get back to the States.
3. Here are a few things I'm excited for when I get back: "Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier"; the cherry blossoms; reading some books, including Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, Feminism is for Everybody, by bell hooks, The Nature of Things, by Lucretius, The Gifts of the State and Other Stories, by a collection of Afghan writers, and so many others; milkshakes; seeing C; seeing all my friends who I haven't seen in WEEKS.

That's all for now, better be a little productive. Unfortunately that means more screen time. C'est la vie. 

t-minus the weekend

The admin ladies don't like my beard. A couple of days ago I walked out of the elevator into the AKDN lobby and the CEO's assistant (V) was chatting with the women who sit at the front desk. V pointed at one of them and said, "She doesn't like your beard," and they all giggled. Being reminded that, much as you talk about other people when they're not there, other people talk about you when you're not there, is an odd mixture of embarrassing and thrilling.

This afternoon I had a long chat with my colleague BS about HR among the teams out here. Some serious gaps in gender sensitivity and general management capacity, along with the traditional (for us) deficits in donor relations. These latter are caused by the feeling that we are extraordinarily special and donors should be pleased that we deign to take their money. Won't get into too much detail but it was good to talk about, not least because I think we can help them with some of it. I think she found it a bit of a relief to just unload, which is rarely a bad thing.

Now I enter the long weekend of boredom in the hotel. It's supposed to rain all weekend, which doesn't help. Otherwise I might have tried to line up a day trip out to somewhere or other. I do have some work to do and will see about eating at least a couple of meals with other people, but for the most part I'm going to be counting down the hours until 3:45 AM on Monday, when a car will take me to the airport.

dream

Last night I had a dream, in which my colleague IS, J and I were standing at the lip of a huge canyon. Picture the Grand Canyon, but with yellower stone and formations like a combination of Bryce Canyon and Arches National Park. We realized that, because of some special circumstance we were in, we could jump off the lip and crash through the formations without hurting ourselves or experiencing any pain. So that's what we did. It was incredibly exhilarating, bouncing off rocks and laughing, breathlessly, and then jumping down to another level. We never reached the bottom.

tired

Tired.

A couple of hours from now I'm going to have a check-in call with the powers that be in DC. What I'd like to do is vegetate in front of the TV until then but I don't think that's an option. Too many emails to write and things to read. No rest for the weary. I am earning my comp days on this trip.

pushing through

Tuesday is drawing to a close. I just got back from the gym, where I got in a good workout. I've been thinking about workout planning for the spring and summer. I'm very close to dunking a basketball: a good day and one well-timed lob and I'm pretty sure I could get one down. So jumping will continue to be the focal point, but now that it's nice out I'd like to get back to sprinting. There are races in late May, June, and July, and I'm going to run the 100m (and maybe 200m) in at least one of them, just to see. Figuring out an ambitious but doable workout scheme is a fun diversion.

Today was one decent meeting after another. I say decent, I guess what I mean is that each meeting seemed worthwhile and productive, therefore not bad, but not overwhelmingly positive or exciting.

AKF USA's webmail was out all weekend and through my day yesterday. One of my colleagues in DC, bless her, called the IT people yesterday after I went to bed and everything was working this morning. I took a few minutes between meetings and then a few hours after I got back to my room to go through everything and I feel at least somewhat up to date, which is great.

Not terribly much else to report, it's 9 PM and I haven't yet eaten dinner, so I'm going to cut things off there.

 

a walk

It's cool out and I felt well enough a bit earlier to venture out of the hotel. I asked a woman at the front desk where I might find a pharmacy and a place to buy DVDs that aren't dubbed into Russian. She, very sweetly, said, "Sir, it would be my pleasure to accompany you but I am on my shift." I hadn't asked her to accompany me! She told me she worked during the week at a nonprofit supported by Counterpart and USAID that works with women, and that the hotel job she does to make some extra money and to practice English. The best stores are apparently in a mall called Tsum or something like that, but it's closed on Sundays. Her weekday office is there, though, and she suggested that I come by so she could take me to the DVD store. In the meantime, she wrote a note in Russian saying I was looking for subtitled, rather than dubbed, movies and I was on my way.

Rudaki had remarkably few cars on it, but still, as I was approaching the park a black Land Cruiser smashed into a silver Mercedes, which spun around and went crashing through the low stone wall that lines the island running down the middle of the avenue. I was about 50 meters away. This, needless to say, was loud and drew a crowd. But the cops yelled at anyone who got close and seemed to get things sorted pretty quickly. No one was hurt, the Mercedes driver hopped out right away. Still, a pretty spectacular accident.

Right by the intersection where the accident happened I found a "chemsit's" and was able to pick up a thermometer (which doesn't work, haha) and some nail clippers for $2 total. I bought an ice cream bar - vanilla with dark chocolate candy coating - a bit further down the road and went into a couple of DVD/video game stores that I knew were next to Salaam Namaste, the Indian place that's becoming my go-to for lunch during the week. I'd been in one of them before to change money. Didn't have to use the note that my helpful friend at the hotel front desk wrote out because the selection in the stores was atrocious. It was funny, though, the DVDs were clearly pirated. Most had multiple movies on them, organized primarily by star. Obviously there were pictures, but it was fun to look at the transliterations, too. Helped me figure out one of the Cyrillic letters I hadn't been able to remember: "ж." It's "zh." So the Brad Pitt DVD had "Meet Joe Black," "Troy," "Inglorious Bastards," and two or three other movies on it. There were Jason Statham, John Travolta, Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins, and Julia Roberts collections, among others. But not a whole lot that drew my interest. Oh well. Ah, one funny thing: The Johnny Depp collection said "джони деп: секс симбол," which is just a transliteration of "Johnny Depp: Sex Symbol." The picture on the front was him as Jack Sparrow.

Needless to say, I kept my money in my pocket.

On the way back I ran into my old friend Noor, who recently found out that he'd gotten into the master's program at Hopkins SAIS. I'd written a recommendation letter for him last year, so was very excited to hear about his success when he wrote me a couple of weeks ago. I also wrote him a letter for a scholarship application that'll enable him to go to DC for the program, if he gets it. It was nice to see him, his face lit up when he made eye contact with me and got past the beard, and he gave me a big hug. If I have to stay through next weekend I'll probably meet up with him for a drink or something. The next few days are going to be too busy.

Anyway, it was overcast and cool, a nice day for a walk, and it felt good to get fresh air and move around a bit. I'm still a bit out of it but I think I'll be better by tomorrow. I should do some work before bed tonight, but we'll see how I feel.

the first week

Feels like time has passed more quickly this week than on typical trips. That's partly because work has been really busy and productive: days filled with meetings and nights filled with writing and talking with people back in DC. I'm pretty tired as I write this so I'm going to keep it short, but I'll put up a few words tomorrow about the highlights.

***NEXT DAY***

So it turns out I was getting sick last night and that's why the above is a bit incoherent and stupid-sounding. I woke up with a pounding headache this morning and had a hard time eating breakfast, and it's definitely not from the two light beers I had last night with M from Geneva. Come to think of it, I started feeling woozy before I went to bed. I feel a bit better now, well enough to make eye contact with the computer screen, of course. Must have been something I ate last night, although other than feeling a bit sensitive this morning I didn't have any GI problems. It's not dehydration, as I've been drinking plenty of water.

Anyway, it's been a pretty eventful week, as my babble from last night indicates. The highlight was probably Friday morning, when I joined a high-level meeting at the Ismaili Center that started with a tour of the place. It is a spectacularly good place to introduce someone to the Network: beautiful, and grand in a way that really stands out from the tacky, cheap-looking architecture that's the norm here for important buildings. "Look what we can build, look how committed we are to this place." Meanwhile the world's largest chaikhona (tea house) is going in across the street and it is a deliriously ugly building.

A colleague (friend? she's invited me over for a group dinner so perhaps I can say friend at this point) from AID invited me out last night, to a new night spot here called the Cotton Club, but I didn't make it due to the aforementioned wooziness. Still, it was nice to get out of my room and hang out with M a bit without talking about work at all. And it was nice to be invited, gives me hope for next weekend not being pure pain just waiting to get out of here. M and I ended up talking over coffee this morning, as well, as I tried to will away my headache.

In other news, Kentucky and UConn are playing in the NCAA tournament final, a fact which depresses me slightly. I'm going to try to get out today, maybe see if I can find a couple of movies to watch that are subtitled, rather than dubbed. And I'll have to do some work, as well, writing up a meeting note and starting to put together the framework that the pieces of the proposal that I'm expecting to come in this week will hang on.

That's it for now, I guess. Still a bit out of it.

the first day

Well, first full day, anyway. Slept pretty well last night, all things considered. No trouble falling back asleep after the middle-of-the-night bathroom break. Count it as a win.

Today was meetings from 8:45 until 5:30, with a break for lunch, then work from 6 until just now (~10:30) with a break for dinner. I was supposed to talk with R but he got sidetracked and then asked an hour ago when I was planning to be done. I said, in effect, as soon as possible and that I hadn't yet eaten dinner. He stopped after that. Not sure if because I made it clear that I was tired or because he got distracted. It's hard to be polite with him sometimes.

Despite their length, the meetings today were actually really productive. The folks around the table had never sat down together before to discuss what's going to be a fairly complicated piece of the project - starting up a mobile money system in very rural areas - and there was a lot to discuss. Mark, who's in from Geneva to help facilitate this piece, did a very good job keeping things on track and moving along. We finished exactly at 5:30, as planned. More to go over tomorrow and there will be lots of questions as we get into the nitty-gritty details, but today focused things well.

I am the kind of person who does better on a tight time schedule. I dislike stringing work out and am much more productive when things are compressed with lots of intermediate steps. Actually, that last bit suggests a maybe-obvious but heretofore-unthought-of-by-me strategy for improving my working habits: Lots of very rigid intermediate deadlines. Food for thought.

Also, I'm reading some more Borges, a collection called "The Maker" that consists mostly of very, very short stories - a page or page-and-a-half on average, I'd say. Here's an example, called "Argumentum Ornithologicum":

I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a second, or perhaps less; I am not sure how many birds I saw. Was the number of birds definite or indefinite? The problem involves the existence of God. If God exists, the number is definite, because God knows how many birds I saw. If God does not exist, the number is indefinite, because no one can have counted. In this case I saw fewer than ten birds (let us say) and more than one, but did not see nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, or two birds. I saw a number between ten and one, which was not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc. That integer--not-nine, not-eight, not-seven, not-six, not-five, etc.--is inconceivable. Ergo, God exists.

 Love that.

Time for some benadryl, some more Borges, and sleep. Hoping to talk to C tomorrow morning.

a discovery

Came back up to my room from breakfast to find that the cleaning lady had opened one of my windows. I did not know that the windows at the Serena opened. Good news.

In other news, the trip over was unremarkable apart from me putting my benadryl in my checked bag and therefore having more trouble sleeping on the IAD-IST leg than I should have, and the most insistently loud baby I've ever been near on a flight squawking and crying and burbling for four and a half hours on the IST-DYU flight. Thank goodness for ear plugs.

In Istanbul I hung out with Mark and Mike in the Turkish Airlines lounge after a prolonged search for some wi-fi in the main part of the terminal. It was available only in the food court...for $15. Yeesh. Luckily Mark was on Skype and I asked him to let me in as a guest to the business lounge. Free food, free wine, free wifi. And quiet.

Now it's off the office for round one of meetings. Not sure I've ever had less idea what to expect from a trip.

the aleph

Borges's imagination was just on another level - not many people can pull off obvious allegories and metaphors, overtly surrealist imagery, with such gripping stories. The translation I read is very good; someday I'd like to try the original Spanish but a few of the stories would be indecipherable at anything below real fluency.

stoner

Finished John Williams's book Stoner last night. It's a mercilessly sad book, beautifully written. Not feeling coherent enough right now to write more, but it definitely made an impression.

postwar

Finally finished Postwar, by Tony Judt. Took well over a month, but boy was it worth it. The book is a clear, authoritative overview of a history I know a little bit about from my solipsistic American viewpoint. It's not going in my pantheon of favorite books or anything, but it's the kind of meat-and-potatoes reading that I feel makes me a better person.

To continue with a variant on that metaphor for a minute, it hangs some meat on the bones of what I knew about Europe after WWII. For example, I knew Lech Walesa was a major figure in the anti-Communist movement in Poland. But I probably couldn't have told you what Solidarity was, really, or that his politics weren't exactly all kumbaya. I knew Francois Mitterand was president of France at some point, but I didn't know how slippery he was, how effective he was as a politician of his own personality.

Great read.

a funny realization

MJ and RK both emailed back with comments on the draft I finished and sent around 12:15 this morning. I appreciate the quick turnaround and it means I can get stuff to the teams here before I embark on the journey home. It does mean that I have to work now, but that's okay. I'm having a bit of trouble focusing. After hitting "publish" on my last post, I watched an entire 12.5km biathlon race (just over 30 minutes), attempted to nap (just over 30 minutes) and now have spent the past hour editing the draft in extremely distracted fashion. Many breaks to check Facebook, read articles, check the start times of the NFC and AFC championship games (if I'm awake at 1 AM and can find a decent feed I'll be able to watch kickoff of the former), read other articles, check Facebook again, etc. Chalk it up to a week straight of work and boredom: my mind is a-wandering.

Back to work in a second, but I wanted to add a funny observation I made this afternoon that had eluded me until today: Almost no one here wears glasses. I took my contacts out and switched to glasses before leaving for the museum earlier and the act of putting them on alerted me to the fact that pretty much no one on the street, none of the staff of the hotel (except the manager, who's Pakistani-Canadian), none of my Tajik colleagues - nobody wears them. It's curious. Too bad I'm leaving so soon or I'd ask someone here about it.

museum of national antiquities

Well, I just figured out what's on the agenda for tomorrow. Apparently the Museum of National Antiquities is a treasure and not to be missed, and it's around the corner from the Serena. Or so says the internet. We'll see what actually happens tomorrow. But now I've got a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Cool.

UPDATE: Sunday afternoon - 19 January

The Museum of National Antiquities absolutely ruled. I was the only visitor there when I arrived. You have to take your shoes off or wear plastic booties to walk around, I guess to save on vacuuming costs. It's a pretty big place and mostly unheated, and they're very electricity-conscious. A young woman stayed in range of me the whole time, turning on lights in rooms ahead and turning them off behind me. She sang Koranic verses quietly to herself pretty much the whole time I was on the ground floor. The museum is medium-sized, certainly not small: a main hall with a little gift shop on one side and then five or five-and-a-half display rooms with many cases in each. There are thousands of artifacts on display, organized roughly chronologically. The ground floor starts about 4500 BCE and works its way clockwise to the 8th century CE, then things pick up in the 9th century CE on the second floor and end about the 15th century.

The curation is a bit strange: They don't seem to be very discriminating about what goes in the cases. If we have twenty little clay horse figurines that are all more or less the same, what the hey, let's put 'em all in there. The displays can also be quite crude. The jewelry and coins and other small items are mounted on rough blocks of packing styrofoam, some of the pottery is pretty roughly plastered together, and a few of the pieces have permanent marker right on them!

But there's also a lot of interesting information, some of it even in English, and there's some pretty arresting stuff. For example:
1. A complete human skeleton, partially unburied but otherwise in dirt, found with bracelets and other jewelry on in a tomb in the southern part of the country
2. A tiny bronze statue from ca. 300 BCE of a man playing a flute on a small pedestal, which the wall copy explained was an altar to the Marsiya, a Greek river god.
3. Many, many other items from a fort and temple that housed #2, called Takht-e Sangin. The temple was dedicated to Oxus, god of the Amu Darya River. There were beautifully carved bone and ivory flutes and scabbards next to a bunch of the nails and door knockers from the ruins. Central Asia spent a good chunk of its history as a stage in a major trade route, and the syncretism between the Bactrian and Greek cultures 2000+ years ago (and later with Hindu/Buddhist and finally Islamic cultures) is obvious.
4. Speaking of Hindu/Buddhist, there's a huge statue of Shiva, missing the top of its torso and head. Probably seven feet across at the base.
5. On the stairs to the second floor, there's a life-sized statue of a prone lion that used to have a goddess sitting on it. In her place there's a weirdly primitive painting of what she must have looked like, together with the rest of the lion.
6. Beautiful wall paintings from thousand-year-old buildings depicting scenes of people hunting and relaxing.
7. Black and dark grey toaster-oven-sized stones covered in etched Arabic script.

But the coup de grace is the statue of Buddha. In the first room to the left after you climb to the second floor, it is literally stunning - it stopped me in my tracks. The Buddha, reclining with his eyes closed and a peaceful look on his face, is 42 feet long and nine feet high at the shoulders. He is beautifully rendered, with supple folds in the fabric of his tunic and carefully carved hair. The statue was discovered in the '60s and finally restored by the government of Tajikistan, together with ACTED and some other international experts, about 12 years ago. It's all the more breathtaking because the room in is itself only about 50 feet long and 12 feet high. The statue fills and dominates the space. It is awesome.

So I feel like I got my 20 somoni's worth (about $4).

Now I'm back in the Serena, thinking I was going to be clever and download a movie to watch, but it's going to take longer to download than I have hours left in this room. Some stuff at work blew up at the end of this past week and continues to explode today. I won't go into detail, none of it is directly related to me, but it's quite embarrassing for a number of the people involved.

Guess I'll read a bit, maybe take a nap, go to the gym, who knows what-all. Pack, of course. My flight's tomorrow morning at 6:30 AM, and 22 hours and change later I'll land at 6:45 PM. The strange miracle of rapid intercontinental travel.