Today’s anthropology discussion was kept veering off into dangerously abstract territory. I think I made one useful point the whole time. Granted, I thought it was a pretty good one, but it hardly suffice for an entire 2 1/2 hour discussion. I have discovered that our section is divided, more or less, into 3 categories of people. We have the contrarians, who will find basically find anything examined unconvincing. Their skepticism strikes me as partly a lack of imagination: if the author didn’t include persuasive backing for each point made, their point cannot possibly be accepted. The accomodationists on the other side attempt to forge common ground and linkages between everything. While nice, this will often lead to making claims that are very hard to see in the author’s original work. Finally, there are the folks who aren’t really too sure, and vacillate back and forth, like myself.

The other main item of the day was preparing a presentation for the history class tomorrow on reform in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century. It was a group thing, and so me and my partner had a short meeting to hash out the details. What fascinated me is that while my partner was quite well prepared (vastly better than me), she was also substantially less sure of herself. Leaving aside why that is (unanswerable by me), I was particularly surprised that she seemed slightly intimidated by last week’s presentation, as beyond her grasp (which she took to be her fault). From what I gathered, the presentation was mainly notable for its lack of clarity and poor organization. That is to say, what my partner took for profundity, I took as sloppiness. I could, of course, have completely missed the point altogether. Maybe. But I do begin to suspect that a lot of what passes for sophistication, intricacy and brilliance may simply be stuff that isn’t being explained well. There are undoubtedly bona fide complex ideas, but more often than not, I’d say fancy ideas are really just simple ones explained badly. That message from our in-house reductionist.

Once again, rather deal mostly with my decidedly conventional day (study, Arabic, lunch, procrastinate, read, dinner, more procrastination, write a response paper), I’ll focus on one of the ‘exciting’ news items of the day: Windows Vista is officially out.

I gather I should be feeling excited, but in my case it’s more of a sort of listless boredom. None of the features Vista offers promise me anything. The new security architecture could be useful, but to date, I haven’t had my Windows box compromised. And since it’s a VMWare virtual machine, even if it were compromised, it’s pretty easy to restore directly from backup. Vista’s eye candy is surely of no use to me. Rather, I’m irritated that they decided to move or rearrange everything. This leaves people like me having to relearn various normal tasks. I’ll be the first to admit Windows XP has many flaws. However, gratuitously rewriting its GUI hardly strikes me as a productive way of dealing with these. So hello Vista. I hope we won’t have to meet again for a while.

I would like to talk about the fascinating day I had, the exciting things I did and so forth. It would be fun. No doubt somebody had a day like that. Unfortunately it wasn’t me. My day was spent in the library unsuccessfully trying to decipher the core of Foucault’s conception of biopolitics, and Agamben’s revision thereof. Slightly more successful were my efforts at reviving parts of somewhat neglected Arabic vocabulary. Still, when all was said and done, today was kind of a bust.

Indeed the highlight of the day came from a web-bulletin: namely the news that Tennis player Roger Federer triumphed (in straight sets) at the Australian Open. Whether or not he’ll win the French Open this year is anybody’s guess, but at his rate, Sampras’s record is not going to stand for very long. In contrast, yesterday’s women’s final seems to have been an error filled match in which an out-of-condition Serena Williams crushed an even more off-kilter Maria Sharapova.

I am perpetually behind on correspondence. Even e-mail, the simplest of communication methods, somehow can be hard to keep under control. So I finally hunkered down in the morning to take care of my outstanding greetings. To anybody who’s sent me a card in the last 2 months, this ought to square us away. I did discover in the process that the new computer does not produce very good photo prints from my printer, so I had to buy postcards instead.

My celebration for this, and the fact that I survived the walk to the post office was to stay indoors pretty much the rest of the day reading. Albert Hourani’s History of the Arab Peoples is a very informative book. It has, however, the liability of reading like it was drafted by committee. I finally gave in to drowsiness and watched a movie in the evening: The Illusionist. Not quite a classic, but enough to keep me awake until the hour was respectable enough to go to sleep.

Continuing in the technological question rut, I had another one of my good ideas. I listen to music and (internet) radio a fair bit on the computer. What would be really nice is a wireless headset that I can use to listen from, oh say, across the room in the kitchenette where I eat. Well thanks to the wonders of Bluetooth technology , this should be pretty easy (range is 30+ ft., more than enough). At the same time, I use Skype on occasion, not to mention I’m trying to finally get Dragon Naturally Speaking working. So rather than just headphones, a headset would be ideal.

Oddly, the closest thing to this I’ve found are the wireless headsets for cell phones (at Best Buy, no less). None boasts particularly decent audio quality for music though, and my ears are rather poorly configured for most of the clip on earpieces. There is no general-purpose bluetooth stereo headset though. I know. I looked.

I can’t be too grumpy though. Some nice person sent me the book behind the movie V for Vendetta (thanks!). So I have something fun to look at when I finally finish reading up on this Homo Sacer (that’s Giorgio Agamben’s canonical figure in his exploration of bio-politics, to be featured in Tuesday’s anthropology discussion).

So I finally came to a decision on textbooks. Originally, I figured I could check out or photocopy the ones I needed. Today is an object lesson on why this doesn’t work. For next Tuesday, I need to get ahold of a chapter of Foucault’s “History of Sexuality Volume 1.” According to our wonderful online catalog, the New School Library carries this book. In English. Good. Except for when I go, at length, to said library, the only copy they have is in French. Good for my French. Bad for my plan. Meanwhile, another book ostensibly available in our library simple isn’t present in the stacks. Whether or not it is lost or misplaced hardly seems significant. So I spent a lovely time tracking down each book online, and buying it.

Grandma came down for the physics colloquium, so we ate out. The usual Thai place. I’m reasonably unused to restaurant food, so when I eat out, I don’t get hungry for a while. Two meals in place of one. Handy.

Oh, and for anyone who’d be interested in running OS X under OS X in VMWare Fusion, for the record, it can be done. It’s likely illegal, incredibly slow and not very useful, but it does work, if only barely.

And now I’ll have another go at tracking down M. Foucault.

Well, apparently my e-mail server has been missing some of my mail. Nice of it. Not quite sure what to do.

The history seminar today treated the question of modernity in the context of the Middle East: when and how does the modern Middle East begin?

The conventional wisdom, at least up until a few decades ago, was that the decisive rupture was the 1798 invasion of Egypt by Napoleon. This paved they way for Mehmed Ali’s modernizing project, the Ottoman Tanzimat (reform) period and so forth by introducing regions of the Middle East both to European technology and to European ideas.

Unfortunately, all this leads into a question of what constitutes modernity, and, as we proved conclusively in our discussion, that leads to semantic quibbling. And at a certain point, such a discussion becomes so abstract as to become essentially meaningless.

Despite the professor’s efforts to steer us toward more productive avenues, this is precisely what happened.

Most of this week’s anthropology readings dealt with the development of the discipline. Admittedly, I’ve seen similar attempts at cataloguing the history of other disciplines. Still, one thing I’ve not had the opportunity to do so far is look at the development of history as an academic field. Ironically, it feels as if I’ve had an overabundance of experience dealing with purported analyses of the development of Middle Eastern studies as a field.

Morning Arabic was notable for a rather rude reminder that applications for the FLAS fellowship are due in about a week. Suddenly, I need letters of rec and all that. Spent a good chunk of time tracking down forms, e-mailing potential recommenders, and so forth. On the one hand, it’s pretty silly since everybody and their pet iguana is applying (aka my chances are nil). But if I don’t start aiming for longshots, I doubt I’ll get very far. The road to the academy isn’t paved and isn’t straight.

Somehow, the discussion in the anthropology course became rather heavily oriented towards deciding what count as appropriate subjects for the field, and how such subjects can be approached. Fascinating, and yet disturbingly loose. I tend to wonder whether being open to almost everything means one will get almost any sort of results. It feels dissatisfyingly sketchy and unrigorous. Now to take my unrigorous head to bed for tomorrow’s discussion of modernity in history class.

I have to say, being 23 doesn’t feel vastly different from being 22. Which could be a good or a bad thing, depending on how one looks at it.

I had a rather frantic morning, trying to finish off loose ends for Arabic. I don’t know why, but I have a hard time making out the words in the dialogues on the DVD that comes with out book. The Egyptian ‘jim’ presents additional challenges. My grandparents took me out to lunch, which was nice. Another thai restaurant, this one 18th St. Clearly somebody was listening to my last comment about parking: it wasn’t nearly so easy this time, particularly the parallel parking bit. The miniature cake was a nice touch too.

For the afternoon, had to do some reading and pack up the stuff that I just sold on eBay. All those boxes I collected last semester are finally coming in handy, and I’m looking forward to the closet space. Really, I am. I’m also looking forward to some spaghetti for dinner, just as soon as I finish this article.

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Oh, and thank you Stanford, for the reminder that you’re terminating my e-mail account there. So folks, please don’t send your e-mail to <me> @stanford.edu any more. Now could I please have my diploma? (Apparently not, as diplomas are only issued in June. Since I missed last June, I’ll have to wait for this one)