six Iranians taken in raid in Irbil

At first i read the AP story, and thought, "There! They're doing their damnedest to provoke Iran!"

Then i calmed down a little, and thought, "Oh, well.... maybe those Iranians were indeed masquerading as a diplomatic mission, and needed to be neutralized..." until i read the story again, and realized that the "foreign force" took down the Iranian flag that was flying over the building the Iranians were operating out of.

Whether the Pentagon says the building was a consulate or not, they simply cannot do that. That's a huge diplomatic breach, flirting with an act of war.

This is going to be very messy.

at least i now know what movie they were watching

A commenter named Michael has found some details on the Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa feud:

A little googling - marquez+llosa+1976+cine - and I might have a couple of answers, though no idea whether the information I've uncoverd is accurate. The movie in question that fateful day appears to have been René Cardona's, "La odisea de los Andes". According to this site:

http://despistado.blogspot.com/2006/09/vargas-llosa-vs-garca-mrquez.html

The dispute was over Llosa's wife, Patricia, somehow. There are at least two versions of why they came to blows, or so it says. Another site discusses the incident, here:

http://www.geocities.com/awcampos/vpolemica.html

Thank you! This is one more reason why i need to learn Spanish properly, instead of the abominable excuse for it that i hate to admit that i know... which does not even qualify as pidgin Spanish. This seems to be the film in the IMDB, and yep, it seems that it was the original take of the story that wound up in American theaters as Alive.

character studies of intellectual ogres

Over on Conversational Reading, there is an excerpt from Golem Song by Marc Estrin. It made me think of Bill's ideal living space, except his place would have more jazz, and the chracter being described turns out to be Bill's antithesis. Oops. Anyway, the Darconville's Cat reference was great, as Bill was on about that book for ages. I've never read any Estrin, although i now recall reluctantly scanning both of his previous books out as voids, as i wanted to buy each of them as they came through the bookstore, except I was broke at the time.

Just working on 2007's TBR list...

and now Iran?

This whole "surge" in Iraq story seems like a crock of shit. Yeah, i know there is no real "surge," that it's just another shuffling of deployment rotations, keeping some troops due to come home there longer, and speeding up the departure of ones in the States. However, there is something odd going on. When i get up in the morning, the sky is filled with contrails of military planes. There is something amiss. Between the increase in contrails and the attack in Somalia, it feels like something else is up... just what is up, i don't have the depth to understand.

However, i have this ugly feeling that this whole "surge" ploy is not about Iraq at all, but Iran.

After reading Glenn Greenwald this morning, i feel less self-conscious in confessing my suspicions online. The old rumor was that it was supposed to happen in October, before the American elections, but when that didn't happen, the doomsayers amended their predictions to the strike on Iran being at the end of January. I fear that it's really coming this time.

Yep. I read the Juan Cole post too, which breaks down where the troops are being deployed:

Bush could not help taking swipes at Iran and Syria. But the geography of his deployments gives the lie to his singling them out as mischief makers. Why send 4,000 extra troops to al-Anbar province? Why ignore Diyala Province near Iran, which is in flames, or Babel Province southwest of Baghdad? Diyala borders Iran, so isn't that the threat? But wait. Where is al-Anbar? Between Jordan and Baghdad. In other words, al-Anbar opens out into the vast Sunni Arab hinterland that supports the guerrilla movement with money and volunteers, coming in from Jordan. If Syria was the big problem, you would put the extra 4,000 troops up north along the border. If Iran was the big problem, you'd occupy Diyala. But little Jordan is an ally of the US, and Bush would not want to insult it by admitting that it is a major infiltration root for jihadis heading to Iraq.

The clear and hold strategy is not going to work in al-Anbar. Almost everyone there hates the Americans and wants them out. To clear and hold you need a sympathetic or potentially sympathetic civilian population that is being held hostage by militants, and which you can turn by offering them protection from the militants. I don't believe there are very many Iraqi Sunnis who can any longer be turned in that way. The opinion polling suggests that they overwhelmingly support violence against the US.

Juan Cole is the Middle East expert, but I don't think deciphering the logic of actual deployment of troops has anything to do with what is happening. It would seem perfectly in character for this administration to try "shock and awe" all over again in Iran, all flashy airstrikes. Despite Somalia actually having an Al-Qaeda presence, the strike there just seemed like more saber rattling towards Iran to me, with no real substance.

Ugh.

2,000 year old Pazyryk mummy in Altai mountains

from mosnews.com:

Russian archaeologists have uncovered the 2000-year-old remains of a warrior preserved intact in permafrost in the Altai mountains region, the Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily reported.

The warrior was blond had tattoos on his body. He was wearing a felt coat with sable fur trimmings and was buried in a wooden frame containing drawings of mythological creatures with an icepick beside him, the paper said.

Local archaeologists believe the man was part of the ruling elite of a local nomadic tribe known as the Pazyryk. Numerous other Pazyryk tombs have been found in the area.

"This is definitely a very serious discovery. It’s incredibly lucky that the burial was in permafrost so it was very well preserved," Alexei Tishkin, an Altai archaeologist, was quoted as saying.

first impression of Imperial Life in the Emerald City

The Bastard of Istanbul was not there, so i checked out Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City instead. I'm far from finished with the book, but every page has made me cringe with just how many mistakes were made in planning and executing rebuilding Iraq after the removal of Saddam. There are a few heroes, but only tragic heroes, Cassandras who warned of the consequences of the lack of foresight and gross mismanagement, or selfless martyrs who undertake Sisyphean tasks to be undermined by their superiors.

It's a bitterly funny book though. I've burst out laughing several times, even though i feel kinda dirty afterwards. It would be the darkest of satires if it was not actually documenting real events.

One of the less monstrous fuck-ups (meaning that living people were not directly hurt by the mistakes) that amused me was this one regarding the oversight in securing several high priority sites during the fall of Baghdad:

Even as the impact of the looting was becoming clear, ORHA could not prod the military into action. When Barbara Bodine, a veteran diplomat and Arabic speaker who was to become the interim mayor of Baghdad, got word from an Iraqi contact that looters were perilously close to breaking into a vault under the Central Bank that housed a priceless collection of Assyrian gold, she fired off an e-mail to the U.S. Central Command. The exchange, as she and a State Department official in Washington who was copied on the messages remember it, went something like this:

BODINE: The Assyrian vault under the Central Bank is in immediate danger of being looted. We need to get on this.
CENTCOM: What's in the Assyrian vault?
BODINE (thinking of the "Who's buried in Grant's Tomb?" line) : Assyrian treasure.
CENTCOM: What's an Assyrian treasure?
BODINE: Go read the early chapters of your Bible. It's old stuff. It's really really valuable. We need to save it.
CENTCOM: Okay. We'll see what we can do.

Well, it amused me anyway. To ORHA's credit, the Central Bank was at the top of its list of sites to be secured and protected. Unfortunately, ORHA was neutered by Rumsfeld excising any personnel that he regarded as a threat from the State Department, replacing them with less qualified political hacks, and then not providing them with the material support that they needed to do the job.

The further i get in, the more cringes i get rather than laughs. I knew of many of the mistakes from articles that i've read the past few years, but to have them woven together into a larger tapestry, it is still jaw-dropping.

More later, i hope....

Casablanca and Other Stories

Maud Newton points to the Dirda review of Edgar Brau's Casablanca and Other Stories, and a magic word is said... Borges. Amazon has some works in Spanish, but Powells has it now. According to the Michigan State University Press site, he'll be signing books at the AWP Book Fair 2007 in Atlanta, Georgia.

thirty years of feuding

The Literary Saloon posted a story about Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa ending a thirty year feud. Apparently they actually came to blows at a movie in Mexico in 1976.

Yeah.... i wanna know... what movie was playing?

Their political differences i was aware of. Vargas Llosa wrote a book about Garcia Marquez, and had it published in 1971. I've been searching for ten minutes, and not turned up why this happened.

more on Turkish literature and Article 301

I was reading the list of Most Anticipated Books of 2007 from the Boston Globe , only to run across another Turkish book that i forgot was coming out, Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul. Actually, i don't think it comes out in March. Amazon has it listed as released January 18th, and i could swear that i shelved this book in the past two weeks. (I was in a hurry, and don't examine closely every book i shelve.) When i turn in Tales from the Town of Widows today, i'll see if it's there.

I'm curious as to how big the subplot about the Armenian genocide is. In comparison, i noticed in just the first chapter, Livaneli made a reference to it. He doesn't call it genocide explicitly, but it's hard to miss:

The old farmhouse, which was large enough to accommodate all the members of the family, had originally belonged to an Armenian named Johannes, who was remembered affectionately by the villagers for his willingness to lend a helping hand. One day soldiers had come and ordered all the Armenians to collect whatever belongings they could carry and assemble on the outskirts of the village. Frightened and weeping, the Armenians obeyed and were led off, casting backward glances as they trudged away from the village. Not one of them returned. According to rumor, the soldiers had taken them to a distant land, yet nobody dared to say this aloud. Some of the Armenians had entrusted their valuables to their Muslim neighbors, hoping to come back to retrieve them. Decades has passed, and no one had ever returned.

I guess that it's okay to write about the deportations, and the ultranationalists charging people under Article 301 only react when the killings are explicitly acknowledged.

Jack and George

So here it is, a long suppressed photo of Jack Abramoff and George W. Bush from December 2003.


It took long enough for this to come out. We knew that the men met. They managed to keep this photo secret for this long. What is the important stuff that they are hiding? How does the White House have the legal or ethical standing to decide how information is classified that may be damaging to itself? Arbitrarily deciding that documents belong to the White House or to the Secret Service according to how it suits them is a matter of for the courts, not presidential decree. Please let these bastards crash and burn.

Snagged it from the CREW site.

plagues of 16th century Mexico may have been native

Picking this up from ArchaeoBlog. It sounds familiar. Searching for Rodolfo Acuña-Soto turns up the actual paper Large epidemics of hemorrhagic fever in Mexico 1545-1815 as well as a Discover article from February 2006. Even the Aztecs did not think that the epidemic of 1545 was smallpox, which they were already familiar with, identifying it as zahuatl, while this later plague was called cocolitzli, and was recorded as having significantly different symptoms. Cocolitzli started in the highlands and not by the sea. Curious.

first impression of Bliss

Livaneli's Bliss was up last night. The first chapter is so unrelentingly grim that it made me miss Cañón's earnest humor and optimism, but Livaneli's imagery and tone suits my tastes much better. Livaneli ain't Pamuk though... despite all of the accolades that Pamuk gets for struggling with Turkish identity, i connect with Pamuk's writing on a very personal level, as his games with memory and history stir something quite deep. I'm not getting that feeling so far with Livaneli, who has a more socially conscious, externally focused nature.

Tales from the Town of Widows

Nope. Not my cup of tea. Tales from the Town of Widows is a nice enough book though.

This is not like my reaction to that charlatan Pessl. That was disgusting, pretentious hype. No, my problems with Cañón are something else altogether. His writing is sincere, well-intentioned, and seems to have a lot of promise. Unfortunately, it was a first novel. The debt to Marquez is enormous, although i wonder if the more appropriate comparison would be to Allende. He probably deserves every bit of praise he can get right now, and the reviews had me quite excited. Unfortunately, they do not ring true for me.

The characterization of the women made me wince, as they are unlike any other women i've known. It took them years for them to build a new society after all of the men of their village were shanghaied into soldiering for communist rebels. I could accept this as part of the nature of the genre, but the mix of gritty reality with exaggeration of fables did not sit right for me. Violence and absurdity can easily be accomplished, but violence and whimsy? That's Lewis Carroll and that does not seem to be what Cañón was striving for. Neither did the hare-brained escapades didn't blend well into the agrarian utopia that they nearly spontaneously development later.

The guy can create eccentric backstories quite easily, but too often they don't seem to have any point other than being entertaining grotesques.

I just don't know. I probably would have enjoyed the book a lot better if i had not just finished The Echo Maker prior to it. Sorry.

Pamuk edits the Turkish newspaper Radikal for a day

The Guardian article calls Radikal, "a major Turkish newspaper." This CBC news article says, "While Radikal has a circulation of only about 30,000, it is a highly regarded political paper," and notes that its regular editor-in-chief Ismet Berkan had similar charges to Pamuk brought against him last year. The paper was devoted to free expression of artists and acknowledged a 1951 article denouncing the poet Nazim Hikmet. He offered himself as scapegoat for anything in the paper that the readers took offense to, and directed any praise to the regular staff of Radikal.

I wonder if he's going to get into trouble again?

Human stem cells found in amniotic fluid

They're still not quite as good for research as embryonic stem cells, but still offer opportunities that have been closed off by the superstitious folks in the White House since 2001.

VanderMeer suggest twelve overlooked books

Jeff VanderMeer has a list of twelve overlooked books of 2006. It's a good list, but some of the books come across more as art objects than books to be read. (He also cheats, as more than one of these books fall outside of 2006.) The Darkening Garden looks like a fun book, but i just cannot bring myself to shell out $45 for 165 pages, no matter how pretty the packaging is. It may be philistine, but i weigh page count against price quite often when experimenting with fiction new to me. It doesn't mean that i'd prefer The Stand to The Street of Crocodiles. I simply cannot afford to fuck around on vanity pressings.

The Wizard of the Crow has already been on my Must Read list for months now, but yet another nudge is going to push me into ordering it today most likely. Don Webb's When They Came fits my criteria of price and page count, the Lovecraft comparison is a plus, even though Lovecraft himself is a little tedious even for me. The literary zine Fairy Tale Review catches my fancy as well.

Katrina is still fair game

Maybe impeachment is off the table, but it would be pragmatic and appropriate to pursue a probe into the mismanagement of the post-Katrina disaster. It looks like the Democratic-controlled Congress is considering it. I want blood.

Only a couple of weeks ago, i had to walk away from a customer (an upper middle class white woman) at the bookstore because she was insisting that everyone who stayed behind in New Orleans got exactly what they deserved. She wanted a coffee table book of the disaster, but apparently not one with too much human suffering. She just mourned the buildings. I tried to tell her the story of a coworker of mine from the other store, who was stuck on her roof for days with snakes, waded through sewage water and dead bodies, and sexually assaulted... but she was not interested. Monster.

evidence of war waged in Syria 6,000 years ago

It was the Uruks of southern Iraq versus the fortified town of Hamoukar in Syria. There is a clipping over at Stone Pages, but this is a very slightly different story:

Archaeologists in Syria claim to have found the site of the first war in the world in the ancient city of Hamoukar.

Thousands of small clay balls have been found during a dig on the Syrian border with Iraq, suggesting that invaders from southern Mesopotamia had besieged the ancient city.

An excavation has been underway in the north east of the country for more than three years and German archaeologist, Clemens Reichel, has described the latest find as evidence of "humanity's first war" between those in the fortified town of Hamoukar and southern attackers, the Uruks.

The archaeologist claims that the 2,300 clay balls, believed to have been used as ammunition nearly 6,000 years ago, were used in the world's first offensive war and Uruk pottery found at the battle site further supports the theory.

He told Die Zeit weekly, "It was not a little skirmish which took place here", adding that the discovery indicated that the site had been a "combat zone".

The dig at Hamoukar for the University of Chicago is expected to provide important information about the beginnings of humanity.

Go Fighting Uruks! Gilgamesh! Nimrod!

Phung Nguyen tomb in Vietnam

The Stone Pages clipped this article first.

Vietnamese and Chinese archaeologists have recently unearthed an ancient tomb at an archaeological site in Vinh Tuong district, northern Vinh Phuc province (Vietnam). The 1.7 metre-sepulchre was said to belong to the Phung Nguyen culture dating back to 3,500-4000 years ago.

During the second excavation at the 200-square-metre Nghia Lap archaeological site, hundreds of stone tools and thousands of ceramic objects belonging to the Phung Nguyen culture were also found, including axes, graters and jewelry like necklaces and earrings. The remains and objects unearthed are currently preserved at a local museum for further research, said experts.

Sources: VNA, Nhan Dan (6 January 2007)

There is a progression of the early cultures of Vietnam here.

Technorati profile

Technorati Profile

Yes, after all of this time, i realized one these Technorati profiles just might be handy. Unfortunately, embedding a link into the sidebar doesn't seem to be working with this beta template blogger nonsense.

reading the first week of January 2007

A few days ago, Richard Powers The Echo Maker finally made its way back into the bookstore. It's been on backorder for what seems to be at least a month. I never saw anyone buy the original copies that came in, but someone bought them before it was awarded the National Book Award. Hammond is not much for literary fiction, so i'm curious as to who these people are.

I read the book last week, but it's too early to post about it. I'm still digesting it.

While i still have time, i'm trying to run through as much new fiction as possible. Ed Champion said great things about The Echo Maker, and gave the thumb's up to Danielewski's Only Revolutions. I trust the guy, so i gave it a shot... only to find Only Revolutions to be unreadable dross. Three nights i tried it, but each time it only made me want to scrub my eyes.

Tales from the Town of Widows is what i have checked out now. One of the blurbs on the back namechecked every major Latin American author, and another compared the author to Pamuk in "braininess." So far it's readable, even enjoyable, but what i'm getting is hero worship of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Ehhh... it's likable, but i was hoping for more. Perhaps it'll pick up as it goes along. It won't cause me any serious damage to continue.

Next up is O.Z. Livaneli's Bliss. I've already read a few pages on various breaks, and it's living up to my hopes.

martyring Saddam

It is practically old news now, but a few nights ago, when i was watching cable news, with shouting pundits, it doesn't seem to have sunk through into the mainstream. Aside from the fact that Shia militia infiltrated the execution, Juan Cole pointed out that the timing of Saddam's hanging could not have been worse:

The tribunal also had a unique sense of timing when choosing the day for Saddam's hanging. It was a slap in the face to Sunni Arabs. This weekend marks Eid al-Adha, the Holy Day of Sacrifice, on which Muslims commemorate the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son for God. Shiites celebrate it Sunday. Sunnis celebrate it Saturday –- and Iraqi law forbids executing the condemned on a major holiday. Hanging Saddam on Saturday was perceived by Sunni Arabs as the act of a Shiite government that had accepted the Shiite ritual calendar.

The timing also allowed Saddam, in his farewell address to Iraq, to pose as a “sacrifice” for his nation, an explicit reference to Eid al-Adha. The tribunal had given the old secular nationalist the chance to use religious language to play on the sympathies of the whole Iraqi public.

Bush's nonsense about Saddam's death, "I wish, obviously, that the proceedings had ... gone in a more dignified way. But nevertheless, he was given justice," and the photos of the execution being "revolting and barbaric" is disgusting. Someone already compared the theater we saw as making the U.S. worse than Pontius Pilate, in pretending to absolve itself of the poor judgement. Kneejerk rightwingers will feign indignation that there is a comparison being drawn between Jesus and Saddam, which is absurd. This is about a leader trying to wash blame from his own hands by using a lynch mob as his proxy.

article on Cycladic culture of Keros

AP article on Cycladic culture of Keros. The theory of the statues being smashed in ritual is still curious. I keep intending to look for other examples in other contemporary cultures of such behavior.

Jackin' Pop 2006

The Jackin' Pop 2006 poll threw me off a little bit. I was expecting something a little less... um.... rock? I quite expected The Knife to top the Album list that poll, not TV on The Radio, who i listen to more, but feel that most of my appreciation came from seeing them at ACL. That list didn't look too much different from Pitchfork or Stylus.

The Top Tracks was far better, but again... i dunno... i barely blogged about music in 2006, because i was not listening to much of anything new, either out of depression, laziness, or lack of opportunity. It's been a struggle to catch up and create my own 2006 lists, cherry picking tracks from other people's lists. There was no opportunity to wade through the undistilled ocean of music for myself. Everything has been preselected for me. Maybe in a few days, i can stammer out some stuff that stuck for me.

I'm just glad to have ILX back online honestly.

the mystery cult of Gladwellian relativism

Since i've begun using Google Reader, i've been reading an awful lot of RSS feeds. When i was test driving the thing, i subscribed the Thinker bundle. After a couple of weeks of reading Malcolm Gladwell, i began to feel unclean. I was aware of his books The Tipping Point and Blink, but I never picked them up. My district manager had urged all of his managers to read the damned things long ago, but i steadfastly refuse to consider the babble of any of these pop psychology cults. The last straw with Gladwell was when i read his praise of Milton Friedman.

Maud Newton's dismantling of Malcolm Gladwell's defense of Enron's Jeff Skilling makes me very happy indeed. However, this paragraph of Gladwell i find especially offensive:

The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much. The C.I.A. had a position on what a post-invasion Iraq would look like, and so did the Pentagon and the State Department and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and any number of political scientists and journalists and think-tank fellows. For that matter, so did every cabdriver in Baghdad.

Gladwell is an idiot. It's one thing to be a blinkered acolyte of the free market, but quite another not to be able to admit that there was never a mystery about what would happen in Iraq. It was obvious from the very beginning that the American public was being lied to. Having a "position" and having database of facts that have been objectively assessed are two entirely different things.

a brief explanation

The database on the true Orbis Quintus has been down for over a week. No attempts to contact anyone to fix the problem have succeeded. I've been aching to make some posts, as i'm quickly losing track of the items that i wanted to record for future reference. For all i know, the old blog may never return. So it goes... maybe this should be Orbis Quintus in Exile

Onward...