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.

I’m not really sold on the value of theory. Particularly when it comes to the social sciences, I find it often impenetrable, frequently impossibly abstract, and generally inapplicable to meaningful situations. These objections aside, today’s anthropology discussion was actually reasonably captivating. Our theoretical drift was motivated by the question of development: why do efforts at development (meaning in this case that of the third world) consistently fail (by the standards of their own supporters)?

Now one possibility is sheer incompetence. But considering the considerable expertise going into many of these efforts, this is less than satisfactory as an explanation. Another is ill intent. But given the variety of the actors, and the motivations of many of them, this too seems absurd.

A third position is that the fault lies not at the level of implementation, or even really planning, but at the formulation and examination of the problem itself. Development is a process shaped not merely by individual free agents, but by its own internal dynamics: the discourse that contains it, and the epistemology that governs its conception. To take one example, the problem is not merely that bad statistics lead to poor project-planning, but that the way in which we think about knowledge cause us to collect those bad statistics in the first place. Knowledge (Egypt is overcrowded) is socially constructed (our assumptions about valid population distribution as drawn from our experiences and surroundings), as is our knowledge of that knowledge (how we can go about ‘measuring’ overcrowding).

This does lead one to a rather pessimistic view. Since the morning was full of Arabic which I wasn’t wholly on top on, and the evening led to snow as I read a text on Wahabbism, that seems entirely appropriate.

In the meantime, we have an unfolding internet drama pitting our homegrown theocrats against some of the best and brightest of the leftish bloggers. Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan have resigned from the Edwards campaign. The two were attacked by the Catholic League (a Christianist outfit run by William Donohue) and its deranged and abusive followers for having the gall to mock and criticize the misogynistic and patriarchal practices of the Catholic church. This their (Marcotte’s and McEwan’s) opponents called ‘hate speech’, before proceeding to threaten them with violence, rape and the like. Edwards refused to stand fully behind them, keeping them as employees, but disavowing their comments as ‘offensive’ and doing nothing to force a halt to the vicious campaign against them. Thus both have resigned.

Once again, we have a clear example that in American public life, you can be a homophobe or a racist, but being critical of Christian religion is a no-go. Until that changes, McEwan and Marcotte are quite justified in their strident criticism of the Catholic Church, an organization with an assuredly mixed record up to the present. ßGo Pandagon and Shakes’ Sis!

I hate writing. Scratch that. I find writing to be the most aggravating activity in the world (with the possible exception listening to fools, which clocks in pretty high on that roster too).

The problem is actually pretty simple. I have an idea, or an observation (often regarding an assignment). It seems decent. I want to put it down on paper (or as is the case these days, on computer). So, I try to write it out. But it doesn’t quite come it right. It gets convoluted or it doesn’t sound as clever as I thought it was, or I somehow wind up on a tangent writing about something I had no intention of discussing or…

At some point in the process, I realize I’m writing garbage. So I try again. Usually at first, I’ll just start near the end. Hoping to turn things around you see. That’ll fail. So I wind up rewriting the whole darn thing. Again. And again. And so on.

At some point, I give up. Sometimes, it’s because I’m marginally satisfied. More often, it’s because I’m sick of the whole thing, or don’t have any more time to blow on it. The result is that most of the time, I can’t stand to read what I’ve just written. I know it’s garbage, but I haven’t got the will or the means to do a damn thing about it.

Today, I wasted a good hour trying to expand on an op-ed I saw in the NY Times (Gar Alperovitz, “California Split”, Feb. 10). Good op-ed on the virtues of decentralizing the US. All I wanted to do was to elaborate on the benefits such a plan would have for the left, while simultaneously allowing us to coopt much of the right in its execution. Yet somehow, my thoughts just wouldn’t come out right.

I also had the privilege of writing something short for a class. The advantage there was that I could let my conscience rest on the issue of quality: deadlines are deadlines, after all.

Reading is fun (lots of that today). Thinking is okay. But writing? Maybe academia isn’t such a hot destination after all.

The hard thing about Sunday is that it’s followed by Monday, but preceded by Saturday. So you have a precedent going in (staying up late, being somewhat lazy) and a need for results. A rather ugly combination.

Still, things must be done, so I did… things.

Among the things done (though not necessarily planned on) was to watch the rather curious John Cusack comedy, “Grosse Point Blank.” Premise: A hit man goes home to complete a job and attend his ten-year high school reunion. The whole conception is perfect for a black comedy. Which the film would be, except they have to throw in a love interest who softens the film to the point that the blackness is basically submerged and even SNL’s Dan Aykroyd can’t quite rescue it. All that said, something about Cusack makes him just perfect for the role of hitman, particularly when he has to deadpan lines like: “Oh, I kill people for a living.” Plus, it’s 1997 and he’s using a PowerBook. “Solidarity, baby” (Aykroyd to Cusack in the final shootout).

And now, how about some Egyptian political economy, with a dash of Arabian Islamism?