A rousing start for 2008. I should list some resolutions here, but the only one I can think of so far is to get my house in order. Somehow.

Oh, and to write here more often. Aim at being a bit briefer though. Good enough?

Actually, the day itself was a bit of a letdown. Kinda sick of NY. Slept late. Worked slowly. Nothing happy to say there.

Did make it out to observe the sun going down. Beginning to make a habit of going to Battery Park. Nice angle on the Statue of Liberty (the sun basically sets on it). If only it didn’t set so darn early.

Well, I see another year has come and gone. Looking back, I guess 2007 wasn’t so bad. Still, here’s hoping 2008 is an improvement. At any rate, a few comments are in order.

First, this space has been a trifle, err… stale… for much of the last year. Working on improving that. If nothing else, I can use a little distraction from more serious matters, plus I have an excuse not to hate writing (in general) quite so much. I haven’t quite worked out exactly what sort of things will be appearing (the therapeutic effects of ranting being neatly canceled out by the need not to get myself any deeper in trouble than I already am!). Since I have no idea who actually reads this stuff anyway (well technically, the server logs could help a bit there), I’ll try to err on the side of judiciousness.

A New Years’ post should by rights be full of predictions and resolutions, but for now I’d rather keep it simple: I aim to make the most of what is and to ignore what isn’t. Everything else can more or less take care of itself.

Happy 2008!

Well, yesterday’s holding pattern was a success. My Arabic presentation (more like personal monologue) went okay, and I did manage to (barely) finish all the readings in time for the afternoon’s history seminar. It was actually a pretty fun seminar, although everybody seemed a bit out of it. The theme was Constitutionalism (Young Turks and Iranian Constitutional Revolution), but it was intriguing just how differently ‘constitution’ was interpreted by the various parties. It served as the proverbial magic bullet for all manner of different causes. Some saw it as a way to strengthen the state, others to loosen its grip. Some wanted to use it to preserve the status quo, others to change it radically. And so on.

The other interesting part was the issue of connectivity. In the example of Iran, for instance, we learn of cases where leaders in northern Iran are communicating with leading Russian and European socialist figures. During the actual revolt, there are numerous cases of revolutionaries in the Russian domains crossing the border to help fight in Iran. The Iranian Constitution was modeled on the 1876 Ottoman Constitution, and at the same time, the Young Turks were taking some of their cues from Iranian Constitutionalists, a number of whom were initially operating from exile in Istanbul. Hopefully, I’m smelling a potential paper topic somewhere in there.

This is one of those days where the most important thing is just to hold things together. The Arabic class and homework. The anthropology response, paper topic and discussion. The summer Arabic application. The history readings for tomorrow. The Arabic presentation for tomorrow. Nothing deep to say. Barely anything at all, in fact.

Yesterday’s snow has turned, almost entirely, to slush. It’s incredible how fast it has all melted. Meaning everything is wet. The rain in the evening probably did not help. Because I was getting almost no work done in the apartment, I went to the library in the afternoon and got, well not a lot of work done. The book I’m trying to finish, Harri Englund’s “Prisoners of Freedom,” is somewhat uneven. As a result, some chapters take hours, some take fifteen minutes. A bit jarring, and the theory heavy sections make me drowsy.

Like last week’s book, this is a localized study combined with a grand theory. Both are actually pretty neat, but again, the connection is a bit difficult. Englund studies the role of ‘human rights’ and NGOs in Malawi. The paradoxical title is a reference to the idea that the ‘freedom’ that activists and NGOs have brought to Malawi, via the vehicle of human rights, have actually limited and in fact ‘imprisoned’ (at least discursively) the Malawians that it is supposedly helping.

The good news is that I finished in time, and Dad in fact make it home (with a full, one-day delay). The bad news is I’m dog tired and tomorrow morning is only 5 hours away.

So apparently, it snowed a lot in Washington today. By the evening, it was snowing a bit here too. This matters mainly because Dad’s return flight from Paris (where he’d stopped, on the way back from a business trip to India) stopped in Washington this afternoon, and the connection never left. Thank you, United.

I suddenly had the brilliant idea that I needed to start seeing about summer plans, which right now appear to be studying Arabic. Well, beginning a few weeks earlier would have good, it seems, since one of the best programs is now full, and another one of the good ones has its deadline this Thursday. Still, a few hours of research and I now have a rough idea what the world of intensive summer Arabic looks like. In fact, given the way it’s looking, I might simply just stay here. What I want to know is how is it that a 12 week program and an 8 week program both nominally cover the same amount of material, particularly since both meet 5 days a week, 5 hours a day?

In the evening, I read a neat little article on the creation of human rights. The author makes a convincing case that human rights were in many ways a compromise, and a way to avoid recognition of minority rights that had proven so troublesome prior to WWII. Indeed, he points out how Hitler made political use (indirectly) of minority rights, when it came to Germans in eastern Europe (Czechoslovakia and Poland). The problem is, of course, that if minorities have inalienable rights (particularly political ones) by virtue of their collective status, then all sorts of things become problematic (the Jim Crow South, Catholics in Northern Ireland, much of western Russia). Human rights by contrast relegates these problems to an individual level, and indeed, the UN’s Universal Declaration was very carefully crafted to prevent the creation of an enforcement regime.

It was cold this morning. And I do not mean cold as in 30-degrees-cold, I mean cold as in temperature-in-the-high-teens-with-gusts-of-wind cold. So my 15 block trip to Trader Joe’s reminded me what it’s like not to have ears. Yesterday’s haircut may not have helped either. Nearly as disturbing was the fact that when I got to Trader Joe’s around 15 minutes after opening, there was already a line half way around the store. Somehow, I just can’t win.

My second task of the day was to get a new phone. Yes, I know I only had the last one about 8 months. But I’ve decided to replace my cable internet with a ‘tethered’ cell-phone with data access, since the price isn’t too different (except for the phone itself). The phone in question, a Motorola RAZR V3xx is better in almost every way than the old one. Sound quality is better, startup time is better and of course, data access speed is 3G (so up to 1.8mbs, if Cingular ever gets their network up to spec). Only the size, and the ringtone options are not as good (I wanted something low-key and generic). I did in fact cancel the cable service after using the phone as a modem, with the help of a surprisingly pricey piece of software. So now wherever I have cell service, I have internet access.

In the evening, my friend E- came up from Philadelphia. Originally, it was to have been me, E-, Q- and another friend from Stanford all meeting up in NYC, but the last two bailed (Q- had an important meeting regarding funding for his research, the other friend was incredibly busy). So it was just me and E-, and tickets to a piano concert at Carnegie Hall by one Piotr Anderszewski. The music was great (Six Bagatelles by Beethoven, Metopy by a composer I’d not heard of previously called Szymanoswki, intermission, and then ’33 Variations on a Theme by Diabelli’ by Beethoven again), and it was fun to see Carnegie Hall again (hadn’t been there for quite a while). Afterwards, though, we had a dickens of a time finding a restaurant for dinner, finally settling for a Mexican place with incredibly annoying music (but also the virtue of being open after 11PM) near 59 St. and 7th Ave.

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.