Lauren is off to Germany for ten days to visit the family. (That’s the halfway point between her mom, stationed in Iraq, and the rest of the family.) My priorities for the next ten days include: cooking lots of Indian food; significant progress on my dissertation; and get everything ready for the class I’m teaching in a few weeks (twenty days from tomorrow! yikes!). At least two of those things had better happen by next weekend, or my goose will be cooked.

Meanwhile, I’ve finally finished Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts. I’ll have more to say about that “soon,” but here’s another lovely excerpt until then:

“In southern Africa the 1888-89 drought forced tens of thousands of farmers from their land, a tragedy that was welcomed as a godsend by European planters vexed by persistent labor shortages. Thus in 1889 John Peter Hornung wrote to his brother … about the windfall of desperate drought refugees from outside the district that were allowing him to proceed on schedule with the poppy harvest on his new opium plantation in Mozambique. Hornung, a leading narcotraficante of late Victorian times, managed the so-called Mozambique Produce Company for Jardine Mathieson, the giant Hong Kong firm ‘whose existence was historically wedded to the sale of opium to the Chinese.’”

September 3rd, 2009 | Category: uncategorized | Leave a comment

Me again. Two days in a row! Tomorrow? We’ll see. For today, a photo:

(May Day, London, 2008, photo from flickr)

And if you enjoy that, please to be visiting the African Activist Archive. Amazing collection of photos and posters and so forth.

September 1st, 2009 | Category: photos, politics | Leave a comment

We meet again.

Obviously I haven’t been writing here much lately. It’s a combination of most of my time taken up writing about serious stuff taken up trying to write a dissertation (getting there, by the way, though the more I do the more it seems I have still to do), and posting the quicker stuff to facebook instead of here.

I was considering making this an official hiatus for a while, but Lauren nixed that idea immediately. So I’m going to try to lure myself back into writing here. I think I’ll try just posting some poems and pictures for a while, take the pressure off, and hopefully that will lead to writing some more here again. Will it work? Time will tell!

So, here is poem. This is a short poem written by Li Bo about Jingting Mountain:

众鸟高飞尽，孤云独去闲。
相看两不厌，只有敬亭山。

In English:

The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,
Until only the mountain remains.

The English translation (by Sam Hamill) is not so literal, by the way, but I think it captures something of the beauty of the original.

August 31st, 2009 | Category: poetry | Comments (3)

… because you never know what strange treasures you will find. At BookBuyers in Mountain View this weekend I saw the “Manifèst del Partit Comunista.”

Just glancing at the title, I assumed it was a Catalonian translation of the Manifesto. But no! This is the (one assumes the one-and-only) Occitanian translation of the same. Including appendices on “Marx and Engels and Occitania,” and on language minority rights in Vietnam, for some reason.

Needless to say, I bought the hell out of that book. Who am I not to have something like that?

August 17th, 2009 | Category: bibliophilia | Comments (1)

I’m still reading Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts. It’s a really amazing book, essential reading about how imperialism and colonization turned the great El Niños of the late 19th century into famines and bouts of pestilence that claimed the lives of around fifty million people.

Hopefully I will gather my thoughts together to write a little more when I’m done with the book. Until then though I’ve been putting together a list of meteorological terms that would make good band names. In no particular order:

• The Cold Tongues
• Southern Oscillation
• North Pacific Oscillation (possibly a successor project to SO?)
• The Chimu Floods
• La Niña
• The Maritime Continents
• Orology
• Jetstream

And I think a gothic death metal band could do worse than naming itself “Late Victorian Holocausts”.

August 12th, 2009 | Category: bibliophilia, music | Comments (1)

And boy are my arms tired. Not to mention my legs, my back, my head, my neck, and especially my feet. Gevalt.

August 8th, 2009 | Category: uncategorized | Leave a comment

Some photos from our trip to Asia (so far!). We came to Singapore to present a paper at a subconference of ACL, the major computational linguistics conference. Some things we’ve seen on the way:

Sky over Guangzhou

Customs form in Singapore

Palm forests, on our bus ride through Malaysia this afternoon.
We rode from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, and saw basically nothing but palm trees as
far as the eye could see in every direction; very few people.

Food at a rest stop, Malaysia

Graffiti in Chinatown, Kuala Lumpur. ISA is the Internal Security Act, a law passed
during the crackdown on the Malaysian Communist Party but still in effect forty years later.
The law allows the government to detain people with no cause for long periods of time.

KL was apparently all but shut down last weekend by huge protests against the ISA.
The newspaper today had a lot of stories about the aftermath of that (and a lot of crazy
pro-ISA editorials), but there wasn’t much sign of it in the city as far as we could tell.

Less political graffiti, Chinatown

More political graffiti. I’m not sure exactly what DSA is.

Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur. These were the largest buildings
in the world for six years or so. They are still indescribably huge.
Silhouetted in front is Justin, who’s co-presenting our paper at ACL.

People taking their pictures in front of the Towers.

Tomorrow night we fly back to Singapore. More pictures to come, but who knows how long it will be!

August 4th, 2009 | Category: photos | Comments (1)

photo from Nepal, via Flickr

July 8th, 2009 | Category: photos, politics | Comments (6)

Here’s an image I just made for this morning’s lecture on writing systems of the world (and specifically why we know so little about the Mayan writing system):

July 2nd, 2009 | Category: linguistics, photos, politics | Comments (2)