Helped out with a variety of chores in the morning, including changing a number of lightbulbs (Grandpa is actually a bit taller than me, but I suppose I’m a bit more limber when it comes to climbing on top of tables), getting printer paper and replacing the lost camera cable, and various other odds and ends. Oh, and I got a haircut too. I look almost conventional for a change, which is itself unconventional.

Right after lunch, Grandma dropped me off at the White Plains train station. I had exactly 1 minute at the station before the train arrived, depositing me at Grand Central barely 35 minutes later. From there, I caught the subway (again, almost no waiting), and wound up in my apartment exactly one hour after leaving the grandparents’ place in Westchester. If it was always this easy, maybe commuting wouldn’t be a bad idea…

I had a package on my desk when I got back (delayed, almost a week, by the previous week’s snow), so I had another go at disassembling the laptop and replacing its hard drive. Using the same guide as before (thanks, ifixit), but a somewhat better Philips screwdriver, I did in fact swap in the new larger drive. The great thing is that not only is it 200GB, but because it’s 4200RPM, the machine is really quiet now. Almost a little too quiet, since I have to stick my ear against the case now sometimes to tell if it actually asleep or not. And yes, I really do need the extra 80GB. The photos add up fast. Very fast.

The rest of the day was quiet, spent exploring the press in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1906-11) and the ideology of the Young Turk Revolution (1908). Good stuff. What was that quite I used to like so much? Oh, right: “There never was a good war or a bad revolution.” Edward Abbey. Certainly for a historian, the second part is true.

After my usual morning of Arabic (the typical study/finish homework, followed by class, today with the added bonus that we discussed vacations), Grandma and Grandpa came down for lunch. We went to the same Indian restaurant we’d gone to weeks before. Still unbelievably cheap. I’m always amazed that one can find parking on 1st Ave. without too much difficulty. It seems odd to say, but thank heavens for meters!

Then, Grandma went to the weekly physics colloquium, and Grandpa and I drove back to Westchester. Figured it was time to pay them a visit. We had a quiet afternoon, and I discovered something odd about my laptop: it will only connect once to my wireless router, and then I have to reboot if it gets disconnected, because despite full signal strength, it won’t connect again. Though the range on the thing (a D-Link DI-524 for the record) is so pitiful that my initial purpose of internet access from the living room of my grandparent’s place is itself unachievable.

So I read some, we bemoaned the state of the world, and had a generally quiet evening. I showed off a number of my photo albums as well, which was fun, except that when Grandma tried to print them, we discovered she was using paper for a color laser printer. Results from her HP inkjet were thus, ermm… suboptimal.

I am in a Menckenesque mood today. I had the inestimable good fortune of attending a seminar today in which instead of spending the second half of the session in a discussion, our student presenter gave us a 45 minute lecture which was not merely repetitive, unorganized, and often lacking in substance (as we have all, theoretically, read the works in question, an exhaustive summary seems rather superfluous), but full to the gills of unsupported opinions. Whew, glad to get that out of my system.

What’s interesting is that the two Islamic reform movements we examined were, in their day of rather limited importance and reach. Muhammad Abduh’s “Islamic Modernism” (as we call it, he himself would undoubtedly have used different terms) does not appear to have ever spread beyond a certain, smallish intellectual elite. Ideologically, it may be interesting, but historically, it seems pretty minor. Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s theology meanwhile remained confined to a minor region of central Arabia until well into the 20th century.

Meanwhile, during this period, we have a rash of new Islamic sects and movements, from Sufi orders in North Africa, like the Sanusiyya, to the Babis and later the Bahais in Iran, to the Mahdists in the Sudan (who, it may be remembered, disposed of Chinese Gordon in Khartoum in 1885). Smaller local movements abounded as well. All of these are in fact Islamic responses to modernity, and they seem to make for a much more textured approach than simply a juxtaposition of Wahhabism and Islamic Modernism.

I am almost, but not quite, sick today, with a major headache and sore throat, hopefully due only to the dry air. This afternoon’s anthropology discussion was challenging, not least because we seemed, as usual, to be mostly playing with abstractions. We’d read the previously mentioned “Markets of Dispossession” by Julia Elyachar. Simply put, the book is a study of the cultural practices of markets and people in a quarter in Cairo created to contain workshops. The author deals in special detail with the role played by NGOs promoting international development.

The major problem with the piece so far as I was concerned is that while the findings on the el-Hirafiyeen quarter of Cairo are fascinating and indeed compelling, the larger claims are too sweeping and general to be effectively demonstrated by one particular case study. This is a case, yes, where the development project is deeply flawed, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate that the project itself is self-defeating in all instances, that its attempts to appropriate and financialize functioning local market practices are actually effective in dispossessing the locals, materially and ideologically.

All of which is a rather long-winded way for me to say that today’s discussion largely missed what were to me all the most interesting parts (the particular market practices, the particulars of the NGOs’ intervention), in favor of unanswered and likely unanswerable questions. There is areason why I majored in history, not philosophy, and this was not it.

I should say something nice about President’s Day. Well, I could (and did) use the rest. Slept late. Admired the continuing presence of snow from almost a week ago (black snow is a pretty sight).

My more useful hours were spent at the library where I finally got ahold of an article I’d been trying to get for almost a week. It was a bit of a disappointment in that regard, as it seemed a rather straightforward biography of Muhammad Abduh (whom I’ve seen other, better written, pieces on). Reading the translation of one of his key works was, on the other hand, not only interesting at the level of content, but a curious commentary on style. Here was, after all, a fellow trying to make a case, mostly to traditional clergy, about how they could and should modernize religious practice.

In attempting to undercut the traditional practices, Abduh is forced to use their forms of reasoning and argumentation. It is a curiously constraining situation, made somewhat obvious by the fact that both the old and new traditions he is arguing over are slightly alien to the reader. Still, one can see why in more contemporary instances, structural critiques can be so difficult: dismissing a system of thought often requires one to partially accept it in order to make the argumentation intelligible. This in turn can only weaken the argument being made.

Everybody up relatively early for breakfast. F- has an excellent waffle maker, which she made ample use of. My kitchen seems significantly understocked and underdeveloped by comparison (not to mention undersized). I guess that’s our difference in philosophy. I’ve tried to stick with minimalism, they’re living comfortably. I always thought it would be really nice to be able to live out of 3 suitcases, and be to leave for anywhere or anything at a moment’s notice. This does however cut down on certain niceties (to be fair, I don’t think I could fit all my stuff in three suitcases now either, the printer’s too big, as is the kitchenware).

So yes, we ate breakfast, chatted a bit, said goodbye, and I was off. Indeed, I was so lucky with the subway and finding my way back to the bus terminal, that I had to wait almost half an hour just to board the bus. 11AM Sunday is a lot more popular than 7AM Friday. En route, we actually had a substantial amount of light snow going through Connecticut. Once again, we had a stop about midway through. Now that the weather was gloomy and I’d been down the route once already, the scenery was a lot less interesting, so I dozed, listened to music, and avoided finishing the class readings I’d dragged all the way up with me. Once again, ambition met reality.

Reality became particularly annoying coming over the Brooklyn bridge into Manhattan. We admired the back of the same semi-truck for almost half an hour as we inched across that bridge. I was back at my apartment at 4PM, happy to discover my hard drive upgrade for my laptop had arrived, but that the tools necessary for it had not. I wound up walking around lower Manhattan in search of a hardware store and a T6 torx screwdriver for a good while.

While upgrading the RAM on a MacBook Pro is easy, upgrading the hard drive on an MBP is not. You have to not only take out the battery, RAM cover and RAM, but also about 20 screws in order to remove the upper case. The upper case was not especially cooperative, and it took a great deal of fiddling and cajoling to open it up. Worse, there was one screw holding the old hard drive in place (ironically, a philips) that I absolutely could not remove. Defeated, I put the laptop back together (and shockingly, did not lose any of the screws in the process) and moved on to the more productive pursuits of catalog the trip’s photographs (not as many as I’d planned on taking), answering some outstanding e-mail, and finally starting some of the reading packets I’d dragged up to Boston with me.

Chinchillas are, as I was unambiguously reminded last night, nocturnal animals. I slept well, but not deeply enough that I didn’t wonder, on more than one occasion, whether one of the Chinchillas had succeeded in upending his/her cage. The guinea pig (loose) who liked to site and bark under my bed was by way of comparison only a minor distraction. As I was the first awake (aside from the still active rodents), I had a few hours to quietly manipulate camera settings and read Arabic.
Around 10AM, I left to meet up with another friend (Q-) at Harvard. This being my first time actually in Boston, let alone at close proximity to the definitive ivory tower, I suggested we just walk around the area. Fortunately my 4 or so layers, my gloves and the periodic sun meant that our rambling through Cambridge and the Harvard campus could occur at a leisurely rate (aside from occasional rapid acceleration and deceleration courtesy unshoveled sidewalks). Certainly, by the end, I had a proper appreciation for the fact that but for the weather, Cambridge has Palo Alto beat in just about every significant metric (save dot-com yuppy density). A very nice town, complete with all sorts of random hole-in-the-wall type establishments (like the little yellow cafe we had lunch in). As for Harvard itself, we had a good time launching snowballs near the Semitic Museum and watching kids ice-skate by one of the cafeterias.

I headed back to Z-‘s in the afternoon, where everybody, including the chinchillas were having a relaxed time of it, especially when they got to have a dust bath. Z- and F- were also in the process of planning for the arrival of no. 15, as well as a chin show, to be held out in Pennsylvania in April. For dinner, I saw Q- and this time N- as well (before today, I hadn’t seen either since graduation, last June) out at a Malaysian restaurant, where I ordered something good, exotic, and puzzlingly expensive. Everybody seems to be getting along nicely (should I have gone to Cambridge too last fall? Hmm…). Was tired enough to call it a night shortly thereafter.

To make said 7AM bus (from Chinatown to Boston) required me getting up around 5, having a very hurried breakfast, trying to finish stuffing all my stuff into a smallish backpack without waking my roommate, and going to 6th Ave. to pick up the first C-train of the morning. A near-mishap on the ice between Grand Ave. and the bus later, and I was sitting in a mostly empty bus, with about 15 other folk. The bus route took us over the Brooklyn bridge, up the Bruckner Expressway through Brooklyn and Queens, over the Triborough bridge to the Bronx, and finally onto I-95. What would normally have been drab scenery became much more interesting with the addition of a few inches of snow.

The ride itself wasn’t too exciting. Aside from a few folks chattering on cell-phones, everybody was either asleep or quasi comatose. We stopped briefly at a Roy Rogers somewhere in Connecticut for people to grab coffee and use the bathroom (too late for me, alas, I had to use the horrid one on the bus). Two chapters of Markets of Dispossession (from Anthropology) and three albums of The Clash later, we were coming up on Boston’s suburbs. Slightly after 11AM, the bus deposited us in South Station.

Pausing to admire the ‘no photographs in the terminal’ sign, I wound up at the Boston subway (T), which proved both much cleaner, and much smaller than the New York one. Getting off in Cambridge, and triangulating via cell-phone with my friend Z- with whom I would be staying, I managed to stay upright on the icy sidewalks long enough to arrive at her place. She had unfortunately not been as lucky, having slipped and sprained her ankle the night before.

The afternoon was one of introductions. To Z-‘s enormous apartment. To the 14 chinchillas, 2 guinea pigs and 1 other human (hi F-!) therein residing. To some very silly British TV comedy. To an astonishing collection of movie posters (which were in some cases more memorable than the movies themselves had been). A nice relaxed afternoon, out of the wind and cold, finished with Indian takeout and a ridiculous movie making fun of uptight born-again Christians (and Jews, and just about everybody else featured in it).

Yesterday’s snow was mostly still here, although the roads are mostly passable now. Arabic class proceeded apace, including a diversion into the intersection of marital practices and language (or rather, why ‘became engaged to’ is only conjugated in the third person feminine form in our text). Grandma is recovering from a cold, so our Thursday lunch programme required some revision.
Instead, I spent my afternoon dealing with two disparate topics: hard drives and Wahhabism. Having read Hamid Algar’s polemic against Wahhabism earlier in the week, I had the pleasure of examining Natana DeLong Bas’s apologia on the same topic. I’m very much not certain I know more about the essence of Wahhabism than when I began, but I have a rather clearer idea of the sorts of arguments partisans on either side make.

My hard drive experiment was more about trying to create a fast, effective backup system. I benchmarked the time required to transfer a 1GB file, both from internal to external drive, and duplicating to the same drive. Results were less than impressive: 8MB/s duplicating, about 14MB/s internal to external (and vice versa), and 22MB/s when using 2 drives as a striped RAID array. I’d say USB 2.0 isn’t my favorite interface for data transfer. Despite the fact that booting from an external drive is subjectively much slower than from the internal one, my tests didn’t see much of a difference there. Odd that.

The final portion of the evening (starting after dinner, at 11PM) was packing for tomorrow. Perhaps taking the 7AM bus wasn’t the wisest idea.

So it is officially winter in New York. Double officially. NYU sent out a nice message last night warning us that although the university would not close, some operations might be impacted. When I got up this morning, the snow was coming down lightly. Going to class was rather exciting, what with the half-blocked streets, partially buried cars and whatnot. Walking in the snow was actually much better than walking on the sidewalks that were cleared, as the latter were quite slippery and gave no traction whatsoever.

I returned to my nice warm apartment for lunch (particularly warm because we’ve been keeping the window closed, and haven’t figured out how to turn down the heat). Evening class was cancelled, not on account of the snow, but because the professor was sick, so that left me plenty of time to ponder and read. It finally stopped snowing right around sundown. In the grand scheme of things, 3-4 inches of snow seem hardly an adequate explanation for the muted, nearly tranquil atmosphere around Washington Square, but there it is.

Among the more pleasant diversions of the afternoon was an article by Matt Taibbi on alternet: “Time’s Joe Klein: A Supreme Suck-Up.” The thing about Taibbi is that he has a complete lack of respect for the Washington establishment and its consensus. Moreover, while the topic was a bit pedestrian (a three year old could eviscerate Joe Klein given half an hour on Google), Taibbi’s polemic has such poise and style that you’d read it even if it was talking about monkeyfishing.

One of the things I find supremely irritating about blogs, particularly since Billmon and Michael Berube quit, is the writing quality. Most of the time, it sucks. It’s formulaic. It’s boring. And it’s repetitive as all hell. The politico-blogosphere basically feels like an echo-chamber of third rate hacks (with a few notable exceptions). If you want to know what the libloggers are up to, read Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein and maybe DailyKos and you’re good. If you want to know what the wingnuts are thinking, have a peek (if you dare) at Glenn Reynolds. There, done.

Finally, it’d be really nice if everybody stopped calling liberals leftists. They’re not, and it’s an insult to real leftists, not to mention political speech.

Happy Valentine’s day. Snowstorm made my day. Hope something made yours.