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)

Today’s diatribe is devoted to the topic of digital photography.

Let’s start with the obvious. Digital cameras let you take a lot of pictures. A lot. My Nikon D70 will do more than 700 shots on my current memory card. Unlike film, the processing cost is zero, and you can get a reasonably good idea of how the picture will turn out right after you take it.

Unfortunately, the net result is that you end up with a lot of photos. In my case, nearly 8000 over the last 2 years (this is not counting the ones I deleted immediately on the camera or upon brief inspection). If you are also, as in my case, averse to throwing things out that might be interesting/useful/valuable, this poses difficulties. A certain amount of organization is necessary. Particularly since I’ve started using the Nikon in raw mode, this organization needs specialized software because the actual picture files themselves all require substantial tweaks to look good.

Hence, I not only have to spend time cataloguing and organizing photos, but manipulating them in Lightroom. It can end up a bit much. My old-old computer (the PowerBook G4) was for tasks other than photo editing a perfectly acceptable machine. For e-mail, papers, web-browsing and web-page stuff, it was more than sufficient for the task.

So yes, digital cameras do make for good pictures, and in my case, probably far better ones than I could have produced just using film. It’s also an incredible time sink. Witness the half a day I just spent rationalizing those thousands of photos, labeling the ‘good’ ones, shifting them into a hierarchy based upon date, resizing and copying them for upload to the new Gallery photo album software and so on. I hope the results are commensurate with the effort.

Now, back to reading about the origins of anthropology as a discipline. And for those of you fearing global warming, don’t fret, it looks like the next few weeks here will be plenty cold.

My activities today were limited by two things. First, I don’t have real winter clothing. Oh sure, I’ve lots of layers. But going outside with the temperature in the low thirties and a wind howling out of the north at 25+ mph really doesn’t suit me. The novelty of the snow is wearing off anyways, so there aren’t too many places I’m keen to go to. Second, I have to get this new website up sometime, and now seems as good a time as any. The results you can see for yourselves.

My rather lazy Saturday was punctuated by news that ought to have surprised precisely nobody: Hillary Clinton is running for president. Oddly enough, while my grandfather has gone from Hillary-hatred to something approaching respect, I have gone from Hillary-respect to significant Hillary dislike. It’s not that she’s a bad person (that I know of), and as mentioned earlier, I’d dearly like to have a president who is not a male WASP. It’s just that pandering pro-war centerists aren’t really my breed. Her behavior on the flag-burning bill is exemplary. Tactically, supporting a law rather than a constitutional amendment on the topic may have been the right choice (given that the courts have traditionally thrown out such laws). But the grandstanding that she did accompanying the vote was pretty disgusting. Either she was blatantly pandering, or she’s turned into a crypto-social-conservative. Neither is pleasant, and in the former cases, it’s not merely disgusting but stupid: if she started beating up gay people in front of cameras, the Right still wouldn’t vote for her, so what’s the use? She reminds of John Kerry: the DLC establishment candidate who thinks she can triangulate her way into office. Hardly an inspiring picture.

Did I mention that it snowed yesterday? Well, it did. Enough, in fact, that on the way to my Arabic placement exam, I made a little detour into Washington Square to take pictures. First real snow of the winter here, and the novelty hasn’t worn off yet. My concerns about the test proved unfounded: aside from a few problems with spelling, it felt pretty trivial. Good, now I can find something else to obsess over.

My grandparents were downtown, meanwhile, for a doctor’s visit, so we met up for lunch, at the Afghan restaurant in the East Village. I’m constantly astonished by how we manage to find parking within easy walking distance of our destination. In this sense, Manhattan cam be more convenient than Paris.

In honor of the impending weekend, I spent the rest of the day trying to finish my computer setup and a chunk of the next week’s readings. I had the bright idea to try and install Windows on an external USB drive, so that I’d have a portable Windows installation for my Mac (that would not take up much of my already too small 120GB internal hard drive). This, it turns out, is easier said than done, and since all of the web tutorials on the topic insisted it required disconnecting the internal hard drive, I simply gave up. For now VMWare Fusion will have to suffice. Incidentally, I’m a bit bummed that the Mac only has an unpowered microphone jack. This means my headset can’t be used for Skype.

In spite of the fact that I spent most of the day locked in a padded cell somewhere feverishly muttering Arabic vocab (okay, the library, not a padded cell), today was dominated by two statesman.

First came the subject of a talk by one of Columbia’s Ottomanists, Prof. Philliou: one Stefanaki Bey. Actually, as she explained, he had about as many names as layers of identity. Which is to say, he was born in present-day Bulgaria in the late 1700s (an Orthodox Christian), spent many of his early years in present-day Romania where served in the bureaucracy, served the Ottomans in various consular and diplomatic posts throughout the 1830s and 40s (having the privilege of both weekly audiences with the sultan, and the ear of the British ambassador), and spent his last few years as titular head of what was essentially a sort of justice ministry. Here’s a Bulgarian Christian who keeps private correspondence in Greek, is a close confidante of the sultan, and ends up serving the empire from the end of the Napoleonic Wars until after the Crimean War (indeed, he was one of the few Orthodox Christians to continue serving in the Ottoman bureaucracy during and after the Greek War of independence). Fun presentation, at which I saw all manner of folks from the previous semester.

The other statesman in question is of course the inestimable Barack Obama who seems to have inched a good bit closer to declaring a run for the presidency. He is, as we’ve seen so far, a sharp guy and a great speaker. And let’s face it: it’d be nice to have someone who isn’t a Protestant white guy running the show for a change (which is why it’s too bad Russ Feingold isn’t in the race). That said, Obama has so far been long on rhetoric, short on details and results. His comments about Iraq have become increasingly equivocal, while those on Iran are deeply troubling. He reminds me, in short, of no one so much as Bill Clinton: great with words, but we’ve no idea what lies behind them. Are we getting JFK (who was after all a moderate liberal cold-warrior who had few real achievements) or MLK?

Stefanaki Bey is a good argument for why studying history can be fun. What type of political lesson will Barack Obama be?