Today was pretty grey outside, which matches my disposition pretty closely. Attempts to engage with next week’s course readings dovetailed with my visit to midtown to pick up computerish stuff: a case to replace the one that doesn’t quite fit (which I returned) and a USB hub to so I can finally stop juggling cables. It’s impressive really: I regularly need 5 USB ports (printer, headphones, keyboard/mouse, hard drive and cell-phone charger). I feel a bit ashamed given how much they cost, but assuming I keep them as long as I plan on keeping the machine, it seems justifiable. The store, conveniently located right by the New York Public Library, claimed to be the biggest computer store in Manhattan. Guess I’m kinda starting to miss Fry’s Electronics.

One of the articles I read for next week was a fascinating discussion of the experience of Cambodian refugees in the American healthcare system. On one side, the system was clearly designed to assimilate the immigrants into western medicine, and force them into a certain kind of relationship with the state. And yet the immigrants, while not openly fighting back, effectively subverted the system at many junctures. In one case, they claimed symptoms in order to gain state-support, while avoiding the medicine which they did not approve of. Passive-resistance if you will, and surprisingly effective.

In other news, I tried making a new kind of pasta today. See, my life really is exciting sometimes!

The substantive part of the day centered around Arabic. This was followed by lunch with the grandparents, who were down in the area for yet more medical tests.

In the afternoon, the red plastic case I’d ordered for my MacBook Pro finally arrived. It’s supposed to keep the case from getting scratched or banged up. While this appears likely, the cutouts for the ports on the right side of mine don’t match up right. This despite having explicitly advertised compatibility with the latest model MacBook Pros. Oh well. At least it’s pretty (I had a choice between transparent and red, and red seemed more appropriate.

The rest of the day was devoted to dropping by the post office, getting groceries, doing some bank stuff, and helping my roommate upgrade the memory in his laptop. Happily the laptop still works fine, although the performance increase from the new memory (upgraded from 256MB to 768MB was less noticeable than hoped for). Meanwhile my own laptop has been demonstrating a bit of instability. I ran a memory test, but it didn’t show anything. Hope I don’t have a partially defective machine.

Finally, some sad news today: Molly Ivins, one of the best columnists in the country, died yesterday as a result of breast cancer, at the age of 63. Ivins had the rare gift of being able to be both incredibly funny and deeply serious at the same time. She was a constant reminder that Texas has produced far more than merely bible-thumpers and smog.

Today was rather sketchy. And by sketchy I mean blurry.

The morning was mostly occupied by Arabic. But I also had to finalize my fellowship application, which meant crafting that statement of purpose. What I really hate about writing a statement of purpose is that it makes me sound as if I bragging. Despite what many people no doubt think of me, I really have always preferred understatement to overstatement, and yet this is a case where understatement doesn’t work. At least not any more (the transcript isn’t quite what it was back in the halcyon days of high school). Nonetheless, I did pull together something, and turned in all the requisite materials to the office, on time.

An unfortunate side-effect of this was, however, that not only did I not start out writing my presentation until late, but I cleverly managed to quite without saving. So I spent the first half of the history seminar nervously trying to compose my thoughts and an outline as the professor detailed the transformations wrought by colonial powers in Algeria and Egypt during the 19th century. These, not coincidentally, were exactly the same examples my adviser used in a course I took almost 2 years ago in Paris. The presentation itself was reasonably smooth and clear, if not exactly polished and engrossing. The ensuing discussion actually worked pretty well: we remained within the realm of hard facts, avoiding meta-level digressions.

Feeling I had earned some sort of reward, I spent the evening musing about MacBook Pro expansion options (mainly storage related) and eating a large chunk of pie.

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.