wicked

Loved it, much to my own surprise. Great characters, great story, excellent prose, real moral ambiguity, real feminism and support of direct action for social justice, condemnation of racism and unfettered capitalism. Was not expecting any of that, especially not the out-and-out sexuality.

So to Katie and Anita and Hannah and anyone else I mocked 10-12 years ago for loving Wicked before I'd even attempted to read it: I'm sorry. 

the red tent and neverwhere

For some reason, the word that kept coming to me while I read The Red Tent is "cute". There's just something overly smooth and pat about the whole thing. Glad to have read it, anyway, I'd been curious about it for a long time.

Neverwhere is absolutely wonderful, I read it in a day. AK recommended it to me over my objections that I did not like the other Gaiman book I'd read, Good Omens. Will pay attention to her recommendations in the future.

what's happening at home

The Orlando nightclub shooting last night put another weight on the scales of wanting to work at home versus overseas. I'm really excited about the move to Pakistan, it's going to be amazing. But there is so, so much to be done here. Like banning assault weapons and handguns.

real estate

Kind of wishing that I'd gotten my act together this year to buy a studio or 1BR somewhere in DC. Not going to beat myself up about it because (1) that's silly and (2) everything this year has been up in the air so not only is hindsight 20/20, sight as it happened was like 20/400. But man, I could be paying off a mortgage and earning a bit of rental income while living abroad, and then have a place to move back into whenever I want to come back to DC. Blows my mind that colleagues and friends who make more than I do don't buy.

For example: At my upcoming salary I can afford up to $2000 or so a month in home ownership costs (mortgage, insurance, taxes, etc.). No need to pay that much, if I bought an apartment for $280,000 I'd be looking at $1100 or so per month. Add on $100 for a management company and $250 for maintenance and it's $1450. A nice 1BR in Columbia Heights or Lanier Heights rents for easily $2000, and it's normal to add utilities onto that, so that offsets. Conservatively, then, I'm covering the mortgage and management costs and probably earning a little bit extra. That may be overly sunny and I'm clearly not an expert but it seems like a no-brainer on paper. And it doesn't need to be a money-maker. Even if I'm just breaking even, it's appealing.

Might be something to consider once my feet are under me in Pakistan. Maybe in 2017. The only thing I'm really short on is cash for a down payment but I can save a lot in the next year. Then again interest rates will have gone up by then. Damn!

the sixth extinction

Deserved the Pulitzer it won, a masterwork of long-form journalism. Riveting, illuminating, sobering. Will recommend left and right.

aaaand i'm back

What a packed week. The meetings were a bit inconclusive, for the most part, but it was good to finally get in the room and spend some time with so many people that I'll be working with over the next couple of years. Most of them I'd met or at least worked with remotely already, but there really is no substitute for talking face-to-face, or for going out for dinner and a beer after the meetings are over. And I got some time with AI (new boss), which was great because he's hard to pin down over email.

Home now to the humid rain, so-far-moderate jet lag, and a need to go to the grocery store.

geneva

Well, after 6.5 years, they finally sent me to Geneva. I'm sitting in a meeting room on the sixth (or seventh?) floor of the office here, overlooking the lake. It's cloudy and the ceiling is low: I can't see the top of the hill across the water. The trip over was not great but could have been worse. I didn't sleep much but there were no screaming babies. Two colleagues were on the same flight, my old boss JT and a woman from our Afg office whom I'd spoken to on the phone but never met. Didn't realize we were colleagues until we got to the office (separate taxis) and realized we'd seen each other on the plane.

The meetings this morning were good, learned a few things and got to shake a lot of hands and say hello. Most people I'd met before but a few I hadn't, and in any event it's always good to reconnect face-to-face. The Afg person and I have been excluded from the two meetings this afternoon because they wanted to have a smaller group. This is disappointing on the one hand, because the themes were both interesting and relevant (the second one is about Pakistan!) and it never feels good to be relegated to the kids' table. IOn the other hand jet lag is a bitch and it's rolling over me in waves and I'm not sure I could have kept my eyes open the whole time. In here there's no one to see my lids close. And, truth be told, in a way I've kind of started over my seniority: I would have had much to contribute in my old role but this is day one in the new role and I'm in pure listening mode. So it's okay. I'm also not participating in the meetings tomorrow morning -- although I think a bunch more people will be excluded from those -- because an eminence grise (not the main one, a slightly but not much slightly lesser one) will participate and they didn't want to have a packed house. That I do not begrudge at all.

In other news, I took a deep breath and tried to open my work email for the first time in nearly a month. Password expired! Oops. Emailed the IT people to see about resetting it remotely. Fingers crossed.

The meetings should wrap up in about an hour and then I guess we're all bussing over to the hotel, which is in France. Evidently there are several conferences happening in Geneva right now so rooms were at a premium. Not sure what's on the docket for tonight.

kindred

The writing is kind of clumsy and obvious sometimes but it's a great story, gripping and disturbing. I read it straight through last night after getting in bed, then stayed up thinking about it for a while. No idea when I went to sleep. 

travelin' books

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was very good, reminded me of Morning and Evening Talk. Preferred the earlier stories to the later ones but all good.

After the Prophet is solid pop history in the Simon Winchester vein. Great narrative, educational, and what a story.

Endzone really needed about three more rounds of editing but what can I say, I'm an insane homer and couldn't put it down. Dave Brandon, what a sad, moronic asshole.

Call for the Dead is a trifle, Agatha Christie masquerading as a Smiley novel. Blah. 

the killer angels

Like hot chocolate and a fire in the fireplace on a cold night.

in persuasion nation

Overall okay. A couple of the stories -- the first one, the title story, and one at the end called "commcomm" -- were really good. But a lot of them just gave me the same feeling I had reading Where'd You Go Bernadette: I got that I was being joked at, but the jokes felt too obvious or heavy-handed to be funny.

mottled dawn

A collection of short - in many cases very short - stories about partition by a Pakistani writer named Saadat Hassan Manto. Unrelentingly dark, full of irony. The style reminded me frequently of Roald Dahl, and I wonder how much of that is in the original and how much is just the translation. Glad to have finally read it.

a place of greater safety

Liked it, but took me a long time to get through. It's interesting to see the seeds of the Cromwell books in the way she builds the characters and the story, almost like watching footage of LeBron as a high school basketball player. The talent is there, he's bursting at the seams, but he's unfinished, unpolished somehow.

And by god, the French Revolution was a mess.

Also, the book cements for me that one of Mantel's lifelong themes is that of men whose ambition carries them to the top of the mountain and then casts them down. Cromwell is obviously like that, but so are Desmoulins, Danton, and Robespierre (and the dozens of others who got guillotined during the Terror). And so is O'Brien, the giant.

The Mirror and the Light can't come soon enough.

the assassination of margaret thatcher

I will read basically anything Hillary Mantel writes. She is the queen. These stories were mostly not as memorable as the peaks she reaches with Cromwell, but I thoroughly enjoyed them. And there is the occasional "Oh!" turn of phrase or observation. Good stuff, would recommend to a literature-minded person for the beach or a trip.

where'd you go, bernadette

Clever, enjoyable, quick read, but ultimately kind of of whatever. Made me sad at parts and the only time I remember laughing out loud is a throwaway dick joke. The rest of the humor I get but just isn't that funny. Semple is too compassionate to do the Tom Wolfe thing of creating characters for whom she has total contempt, but there's a little bit of cheap-shotting that's a turn-off for me. Bill Bryson does the same thing in some of his books, like the one about small towns. 

the yiddish policeman's union

Loved it. Wonderful world-building, Chabon never overplays Sitka and consequently it's a completely believable alternate reality. And on top of that it's a really good murder mystery with excellent antiheroes and excellent villains. 

euphoria

Enjoyed but wasn't blown away. Kind of overdone ending, not all that memorable even a week after finishing it.

the name of the rose

Eh, whatever. 

strangers drowning

Interesting but oddly unsatisfying. Not sure what more I could have wanted, perhaps a bit of a deeper reflection on how cultures have viewed do-gooders or saints over the centuries and why that might be different now. That said, Macfarquhar's refusal to overanalyze her subjects was probably the right choice. Also, I appreciated that some of the people she speaks about are well-known modern-day saints, like the guy who founded the leper colony in India or the nurse in Central America, and others are not famous but struggle with the same overwhelming drive to do good for others at their own emotional, psychological, financial expense.

Macfarquhar does discuss throughout (in chapters alternating with the essays describing her do-gooders) of the role of saints in society, why not everyone can be saints, and so on. Those parts felt tantalizing but short of real exploration or insight. Contrast with Awakenings, which is devastating.

little failure

Laugh-out-loud funny. I'm not a big memoir reader but I enjoyed this. There is something strange about reading someone's self-excoriation, a tension between what seems like real raw honesty and the self-love that has to precede writing about yourself in public. Similar to confessional stand-up, maybe.

books read 2016

1. Little Failure, by Gary Shteyngart
2. Strangers Drowning, by Larissa Macfarquhar
3. The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
4. Euphoria, by Lily King
5. The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by Michael Chabon
6. Where'd You Go, Bernadette, by Maria Semple
7. The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, by Hilary Mantel
8. A Place of Greater Safety, by Hilary Mantel
9. Mottled Dawn, by Saadat Hassan Manto
10. In Persuasion Nation, by George Saunders
11. The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara
12. After the Prophet, by Lesley Hazleton
13. Call for the Dead, by John Le Carré
14. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, by Daniyal Mueenuddin
15. Kindred, by Octavia Butler
16. The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert
17. The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant
18. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
19. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
20. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman
21. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, volume 1: The Structures of Everyday Life, by Fernand Braudel
22. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle
23. The Once and Future King, by T.H. White
24. The Givenness of Things, by Marilynne Robinson
25. Introduction to Card Magic, by Roberto Giobbi
26. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John Le Carre (nth time)
27. Managing to Change the World, by Alison Green and Jerry Hauser
28. Mr. Mercedes, by Stephen King
29. The Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf
30. Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi
31. The Trespasser, by Tana French
32. The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

i'm gonna pray for you so hard

Read cousin Halley's play, having bought it for myself when it came out a few months ago. It's very dark and painful, which I suppose I knew already. It's also the first play I've read in a long time, and maybe the first contemporary (i.e. non-Shakespeare, non-Greek) play I've read since high school. The closeness of alignment between the script and the production surprised me, although I'm not sure why it did. Perhaps because in reading a work of prose, or even poetry, the way you're challenged to imaginatively invest in a scene is much more a collaboration between the author's writing itself and your own imagination. A play script is spare. 

strong poison

My first Dorothy Sayers. There is something very satisfying about a detective story well-told. This one isn't on the level of Holmes but it was fun to read all the same. 

the gap of time

Cute, enjoyed it. Wouldn't throw it to the top of anyone's list unless they were on the hunt for Shakespeare fan fic. The Winter's Tale is a pretty fucked-up story.

SPQR

Shockingly efficient overview of Rome from Romulus and mythical early history through the expansion of citizenship to all free residents of the empire by Caracalla in the early third century CE. Very informative. Still not quite sure why I read it.

the moor's account

Amazing story, meh book. Lots of telling rather than showing and narratively convenient coincidences. And heavy-handed foreshadowing. Still, I wanted to know how it ended.

I'm now at 17.5/37 books this year by women authors. Not quite 50% but pretty close.

the tombs of atuan

Pretty good, not great. Would recommend to any teenager. Nice, thoughtful commentary by Le Guin at the back.

room

Just finished this wonderful, gripping, creative book by Emma Donoghue. It's a bit like a much darker The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, in that it's a thriller told by a child narrator with an idiosyncratic way of looking at the world. The book is in two halves, both are good but the first was ultimately more satisfying to me than the second. 

rum punch

Also, I'm not done with Rum Punch yet, but my assessment so far is that it's what a Carl Hiaasen novel wants to be when it grows up. Don't get me wrong, I love Carl Hiaasen. But Leonard was on a different level.

Makes me want to watch Jackie Brown again.

last day

I'm sitting at an unoccupied desk in the office this morning, going through a backlog of red-flagged emails from the last two weeks and waiting to head over to the Ismaili Center for the Steering Committee meeting at 2. After that's over AV and I will go back to the Serena to talk about two things that have taken a back seat in year one of the project because he's been getting everything else rolling. Those things are: (1) the trust, which is the main innovation in the partnership and which we're finally starting to grind into gear in Afghanistan; and (2) the research and learning agenda. Output-level monitoring seems to be doing alright, but we set aside money for some higher-level work and we need to figure out what the heck that's going to be.

Then either one last quick workout and stretch before I fold myself into 15 hours of coach seating, or, if there's no time before dinner, just dinner. Then pack, then a few hours of sleep and hello DYU. My flight leaves at 5:45 AM so I'll leave the hotel at 4.

EDIT:

Ended up doing a quick workout, showering, and going to the Ukrainian place with a big crew. Nice place, although for all its apparent Western-ness, they only have squat toilets and to be honest I've never shat in one of those before. It was an experience. I'm sure I was doing it wrong. But after some arranging and some bracing, I made it work. Now sleepy even though it's only 10:15. Must pack, then must awaken at 3:50. Change money first. Yes.

disappointed

The helicopter got cancelled at the last minute due to rain in the mountains, so no trip to Khorog, no opening ceremony. Stuck in Dushanbe, doing ordinary work. It's okay, I expected that this would happened, but it's still a bit of a blow. Oh well, we really did everything we could to make it happen and the weather just did not cooperate.

The last couple of days have been productive, in particular the compliance review and planning process I went through with Focus Afghanistan colleagues yesterday. They'd flown up especially to meet with me, so I'm glad it went well and that we have some concrete action items to follow up on on both sides. I'd been planning to run the session with them based on the "working with USAID" PowerPoint that CS and I developed lo these many years ago for Pakistan and that I've used several times since. But then I remembered my adult education training from earlier this year, and thought harder about what we should really be getting out of our time together, and at the last minute I completely scrapped my prep and started over with a new plan. Good call on my part.

Last night we went to dinner at Salsa, the Mexican-and-whatever-else place that's a bit farther down from the office. It was surprisingly good -- I had a smoked salmon panini with pesto and cheese, the only decent fries I've ever eaten in Tajikistan, and tomato soup -- and they had Hoegaarden! Lovely time and because we left straight from work dinner was over by 8:30. We hopped in a taxi that was just parked in front of the restaurant and in very limited and broken Tajik got him to drop each of us off in turn. Me last. We were five and he had a buddy with him, so the buddy got in the trunk (hatchback) and we went four across in the back seat. No problem, except buddy had to get low when we drove past a couple of cops at one point. Total cost: TJS 30, or about $4.50.

Now I'm going to go run a little bit and stretch, then eat lunch (famished, did not eat a full breakfast because I was rushing to get out the door for the airport), and then knuckle back down to the emails that I've been slogging through this morning.

Only big thing left is the steering committee tomorrow, and then it's home again, home again, jiggedy-jig.

the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy

Cute. Whatever.

well, then

Just finally had a call with our CEO in Pakistan. I was a little nervous as I've been thinking about it as a job interview, and we hadn't talked in a while. It was not a job interview. He's decided already that he wants me to be Director for Policy and Partnerships, overseeing a team of four or so. He just wanted to talk to me about the challenges he's facing, his vision for how to address them, and the timeline for strategy development. It's funny because a month or so ago the big-big boss told me that a job in Pakistan was in the bag for me if I wanted it, but I was not thinking Director. That's a VP-level role for us.

Now I'm sitting here just laughing and shaking my head.

Anyway, no promises from me, and I mentioned the turmoil at home and the likelihood that I'll need to stay there for a few months at least while things settle down post-MJ. He said of course, he understands, no problem. Then he asked me to start brainstorming questions to ask about structure, strategy, staffing, etc., so that we can get into all that the next time we talk. Which will be November, after his overall organizational structure and budget is approved. He wants me to come to ISB before the recruitment process is over to talk things through.

Wow.

coming into the country

A masterpiece. John McPhee is the jam. 

michigan - michigan state

It's 1:30 AM. I've watched the first quarter and a half or so and I am making the executive decision to pack it in. Work to do tomorrow. No alarm, though.

Go Blue.

back in dushanbe

After a half-fine, half-miserable 13.5-hour drive from Khorog to Dushanbe, which featured a flat tire, a splitting headache (not a migraine, though) and some nausea that peaked with me throwing up into a triangular hole in the ground in the bathroom of the restaurant where we stopped to eat dinner in Kulob, I woke up this morning feeling fine.

The days since my last post were filled with visits and conversations with people in villages along the Panj and up and down the tributary valleys. We had tea, dried fruit and nuts, and some of the purest, most delicious honey I've ever eaten with the head of a village that lost 80% of its farmland to this summer's floods. We were treated to poems, number exercises, and a dance by preschool kids in a village where we are going to help build a seven-kilometer-long irrigation and drinking water pipe. We talked to a group of women who have begun packaging and selling dried mulberries and apricots, and one woman who is putting the rest of them to shame in terms of the volume of her production. We walked through a dairy processing plant in Khorog and learned about the major supply and storage problems that the company is facing. We ate enough Tajik food to be polite along the road -- Tajiks are extremely hospitable and it's unthinkable to take up their time and then refuse tea -- and then a ton of Indian food once we got to Khorog and checked into the Delhi Darbar Hotel and Restaurant.

The weather was cool and crisp and the valleys are gorgeous, green oases beneath the steep brown mountains. Poplar trees are everywhere, turning from green to bright yellow. Then the weather turned on us at just the wrong time, as we were supposed to fly back to Dushanbe on Friday but switched to Land Cruiser at the last minute because the flight had been cancelled. It doesn't take much for that to happen, unfortunately, just low clouds through the mountains. And because the weather is supposed to be spotty through the beginning of next week, our return trip to Khorog for the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the cross-border transmission lines that is one of the two anchoring events of my trip had to be postponed again. Our AID colleagues can't do the one-day drive that we do all the time because of security regulations, and they're not allowed to fly commercial on the Dushanbe-Khorog route. So AV and I (mostly him) spent some time in the car trying to figure out what the hell to do and playing phone tag with the key players on each side. Mobile phone service is not great in big chunks of the Panj valley.

In an hour and a half AV and I are going to meet with the owner of a fruit bar processing company whose Khorog facility we visited the night before last. Then I'll go to the gym, eat lunch, and get cracking on the work that's piled up over the week.

Here are a few photos from the trip.

Breakfast with a side of bodybuilding in Kulob

Hundred-year-old graves exposed when this hill washed away in July's flash floods; the black line was the former level of the ground

A waterfall across the Panj River in Afghanistan

School kids on their lunch break in Yazgulom village

A typical Tajik lunch, for guests anyway, in Yazgulom; lunch is served on a topjan, a raised platform with cushions on it that are ubiquitous in the Tajik countryside; boiled goat and turkey not shown (the goat was surprisingly delicious but I did not sample the turkey)

Dried fruit storage facility under construction

This is what 12.5 metric tons of dried mulberry looks like

The awesome promotional poster for Delhi Darbar in Khorog

Dairy processing plant in Khorog; I sampled some strawberry yogurt, which was delicious

Replacing a flat somewhere between Khorog and Darvoz

feeling more chipper

Looks like I'm going to be able to come back to Dushanbe on Friday instead of being alone in Khorog over the weekend, which is good. I can get on the day trip (helicopter-style) back over to Khorog on Monday. That means both a less lonely, less logistically complicated and burdensome to others, and likely a more productive weekend ahead. Good.

Also, today was fun. We drove around -- AV, Parviz, and I, along with Ahmad the driver and Jeonjon the regional market development guy -- to visit people all over Kulob and Shuroobod. We went to a micro-lending organization; a business development service center, where we heard an oddly unambitious business plan (more on that in a sec); and a couple of common interest groups, which are like proto-coops: one for honey and one for apples and pears. I got some stuff on video and took some photos but will need to be more proactive tomorrow about getting good quotes and keeping stray hands and shoulders out of the shots. And it's nice to talk to people about the work that they do, and what they appreciate about the help we've given them, and what more they need to expand or solidify.

About that business plan: The director of this BDSC told us he plans to start a sewing workshop with 12 women who have been trained at the BDSC. He plans to pull in revenues of 62,000 somoni a year, which is less than $10,000. His profit he expects to be about 23,000 somoni, or about $3,700. We pushed a little to try to make sure nothing was getting lost in translation, but it seems not. And then AV, Parviz, and I puzzled over it for a long time afterward. The math doesn't make sense. After figuring in equipment costs, taxes, and all that, you're talking about paying your employees something like $600 per year. This is a poor country but that is really, really low; the median per capita income here is just under $3,000. So he's talking about roughly the equivalent of paying someone $4,500 a year in the US.

Anyway, I'm wiped out now. Going to try to stay up a little while longer just to make sure I sleep through the night. 6:50 wakeup tomorrow and we're on the road again.

frustrated

I really didn't have to come this week at all. The anchor event that was scheduled for this week got pushed at the last minute. That is frustrating. All the riding around this week will be fine and dandy, and I'll get to film some stuff that will be useful for comms and that will be appreciated. But overall the planning for this trip has been haphazard and last-minute, and that's partially my fault. Didn't have time to think about it with all the turmoil in DC. Once I found out that the opening ceremony had been postponed I should have changed my ticket.

It's still a privilege to be out here and it'll be cool to talk with people and look around. And I surely have plenty of work to do and will try to find some other ways to be useful while I'm here. Maybe I'll try to take a day trip out to the hot springs next weekend or see if there are any other day trips to be made. Or maybe I'll go to Afghanistan, if I can get a visa. We shall see. 

sunday

Body decided to wake up a little before 6. Not ideal but miles better than 4:30. That hour and a half is the difference between functionality through to a normal bedtime and light misery. I spent the first couple hours of the day gleefully reading recaps of Michigan's destruction of Northwestern and wishing that I'd been able to watch the game.

On the elevator down to breakfast I ran into a consultant that's visiting PE right now to help them with their insurance claim after the flooding this past summer. He joined us for dinner last night so we ended up eating breakfast together. Very interesting guy, insurance is one of those Very Important Things that I don't know nearly enough about.

I got in a decent workout, read a bit, watched a little TV (BBC interview with Edward Snowden), and have been working on the compliance training that I'll give next weekend in Khorog. Need to figure out a way to make it less dry, some kind activity for people to do. And now I'm procrastinating by writing this and doing other work-related odd jobs, such as thinking about whom should be notified of the recent management changes.

omar khayyam restaurant

Much more pleasant than the Hunting Lodge. There was moderately loud music, and then a band that was also moderately loud and smoove but not awful, and then slightly louder music. I was able to converse without quite shouting the whole time. God help me but I ate some salad, here's hoping my gut can handle it. Now I'm exhausted and gonna take some benadryl and read until I pass out. No alarm tomorrow but I'd be shocked if I sleep much past 7 AM. Here's hoping I make it even that far.

Also, I truly love David Bowie's song "Sound and Vision." It has been stuck in my head since I left for IAD on Thursday night. A good one to have stuck up there.

c

Back in Dushanbe, just got up from a non-nap (eyes closed, no sleep) of about an hour. I'm groggy but not sleepy, which isn't surprising because my body thinks it's the morning and a good time to be awake but also hasn't slept more than two hours at a stretch since Wednesday. Pleasant business breakfast this morning with DJ and AV and one of DJ's employees, who was mostly quiet during the meal. Many topics to discuss and some progress made on a couple of things, at least in terms of knowing what we each need to do on them. AV and I caught up a bit more after breakfast and then he left to do work and I came upstairs to clear my inbox and rest.

Now it's about 5:15 PM and I'm going to head to the gym to get a sweat up, take up some time, and wake myself up for dinner at 7. Would prefer to stay in tonight but DJ was insistent and it's rude to turn down such friendly hospitality. Hoping to at least be back at the hotel by 9.

Later:
Over the past couple of weeks I have missed C desperately, felt more strongly the heartache (such a physically apt word) and longing and regret and worry that I've felt since the day after Memorial Day. The intensity of that feeling is strange to me: I am not used to being unguarded, to feeling my emotional defenses being stretched thin enough to see through. But here I am, feeling just that. And also feeling that losing her is a terrible blow, an even more painful one now than when it surprised me (my willful blindness, not her sneak attack) in May.

She and I talked just now and I unloaded all that on her: the heartache; my regret at holding back from her, which I always did a little bit; my immaturity as represented in my inability to bring up concerns about our relationship with her, waiting instead for her to be the adult and bring them up herself; my desire to be intimate with her in a way that I couldn't or just plain didn't before. She was taken aback, I think, and did not know how to respond. I'm not sure what I expected, or whether I really expected anything. She said the same things she said in May, which makes sense as she is thoughtful and resolute. The difference now is that rather than being unsure of myself I am sure now that I want to commit to her, if she also wants that, and I said so.

Leaving open the possibility of an expat life -- something I don't even really want anyway, with or without C -- is not worth the cost if the cost is being without her. The itch is still there to be scratched, I have to go for a little while, but I want that scratch to be temporary if it means we can be together. It sucks a great deal that I'm only realizing this now, only telling her this now, and she pointed out how much better it would have been to say those things a year ago. But my brain and heart took their own time, and that time was long. I hope not too long. In any case at least now we've talked about it and she knows how I feel and can take some time to think about it, and maybe I can breathe a little. The sadness has been suffocating.

Now I've got to rally, get dressed, and go to dinner. I hope the music isn't too earsplitting, the last place DJ took us out to was unpleasantly loud.

jk jk jk

I fucking love John McPhee. Coming Into the Country is wonderful.

Brought that, Elmore Leonard's classic Rum Punch (on which "Jackie Brown" is based), and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which I've inexplicably never read) on this trip. Plus per usual I bought The Economist at IAD. Always good  to catch up on tidbits from random countries I never think about and to get a (Euro-style) liberal view on the dollar as a global currency and whatnot. 

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.