The Samurai’s Garden – Gail Tsukiyama

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Stephen, a Chinese man from Hong Kong, has tuberculosis and so his family has sent him to join his father in Japan to get away from the heat and dampness. From Kobe, he travels to the small, seaside resort town of Tarumi where his grandfather has a cabin. The slow pace of life in the small town is an adjustment from the bustling city, but the mountain air and the sea are healthful. However, while Stephen adjusts to life with the cabin caretaker, Matsu, the world seems to be falling apart outside of his bubble. The year is 1937 and the imperial Japanese army is advancing into southern China.

The Samurai’s Garden fundamentally balances these two contradictory forces. On the one side there is the failing relationship between Stephen’s parents, the horrors of the Japanese campaign in China, and the associated tensions, such as the refugee crisis in Hong Kong, the lack of young men in Tarumi, and the hostility felt by some Japanese against the wealthy Chinese interloper. On the other, there is the tranquility of the garden, the shrine, and how Matsu and his friend Sachi adopt Stephen as though he is their own child.

The entirety of the story unfolds in the course of the more than a year Stephen stays in Tarumi, and the reader only meets his friends, mother and sister through their letters and his memories. Other than brief visits with Stephen’s father, on whom his opinion changes radically, the story mostly focuses on the four Japanese people he meets in Tarumi: the young girl Keiko and four older folks who have a long history together, Matsu the caretaker, Kenzo the owner of the tea house, and Sachi the leper, who they both love. Stephen is the focal point, but his relationship with Matsu and later Sachi is more important than the one with Keiko, which is more closely tied to the broader developments beyond town. There something fleeting about young life, but there is something eternal about Tarumi and the tensions simmering for decades between the older people.

The Samurai’s Garden was deceptively simple at the start, but turned into a deeply contemplative meditation on solitude, companionship, love, and loss. I admit to being a sucker for such stories, and the isolated, seaside, mountain village was a breath of fresh air I longed to visit. At the same time, issues of class, nationality, illness, jealousy, and growing up surround the story, sometimes creeping into the forefront of the narrative, but always silently underpinning its developments. For instance, Matsu is a “strong silent type,” but takes on the role of father, always leading by example and dominating the house he has lived in all these years. Yet, despite being a Japanese man in a Japanese village at the time when the Japanese were conquering China, he is still officially a servant. Stephen doesn’t treat him that way, except in the assumptions he makes.

All in all, I really enjoyed The Samurai’s Garden, but it is an idyllic fantasy. Stephen never wants for anything, with someone else paying for the house and the food, having no deadlines, and never needing to interact with anyone who he doesn’t want to see. He pines to see certain people and suffers physical hardship, but is not forced to grapple with most serious concerns. I legitimately enjoyed the book and it offered deep perspective on issues of loneliness, but I do wonder if part of my fondness grew out of the vision of a beautiful garden where the outside world can only intrude with a rain of white blossoms. There are real problems in the world of The Samurai’s Garden, but the garden is a refuge.

Next up, Louis de Berniéres’ Birds Without Wings, a love story between a Christian woman and a Muslim man in early 20th century Turkey.

Between the Woods and the Water – Patrick Leigh Fermor

Posted on by Josh Nudell

…history seemed to drop from the air and spring out of the ground.

I start with a confession: on some level, I still idolize Patrick Leigh Fermor, a British adventurer and travel writer. “Adventurer” is somewhat of an odd descriptor for a citizen of the twentieth century most famous for his travels in Europe, and yet it is the most accurate. Between the Woods and the Water is the second (of three) part of Fermor’s most famous adventure–his cross-continental jaunt in the 1930s that began when he was asked to leave school for having been seen holding hands with a woman in town. And so, at nineteen, he crossed the English Channel and set out walking toward Istanbul, picking up languages and making friends along the way. This is one of my dream trips.

It might have been wise to read the first volume about this trip, A the Time of Gifts before Between the Woods and the Water, if only to see the journey from the start, but the reader does not lose much by starting with this one, as I did. The book picks up on a bridge over the Danube between Slovakia and Hungary and takes the reader across the Hungarian plain and through Transylvania to the Serbian border. Fermor has a lively style, and shows indefatigable enthusiasm for this trip. In one moment he is daydreaming about the Mongols or eating wild strawberries, the next bathing in a river with a friend and being teased by young women watching them, the next sitting still in the mountains watching a giant eagle. He comes to wild leaps about the etymologies of the people and places he encounters, speculates about the religious connections, and fumbles through learning the languages. All the while he alternates between truly living rough and tumble, seeking shelter from the rain in pines or caves and leading what he terms a “parasitic” existence, being taken in by strangers, friends, and friends of friends. The description of the parasitic existence, including parties in Budapest that see him waken to a hangover in the late morning and dim memories of the night before, and, particularly, an excursion with his host and an unhappily married woman are tinged with happy nostalgia.

Overwhelmingly, Between the Woods and the Water is a travelogue infused with history coming from two directions. The book was composed from memories, letters, and journals and appeared in 1986, but the journey itself was in 1934 and it presents the political developments of its time as an ominous shadow, dimly recognized in the background. Thus, springing from the ground, as it were, is a first-person history observed of Eastern Europe before the rise of Nazi Germany, before World War 2, and before the Cold War. The author is aware of developments later, but the trip itself is infused with the remnants of the Austo-Hungarian empire and defies modernity. Falling from the sky is a history even older–the daydreams of Magyars, Romans, Huns, Mongols, Turks, and schismatic Christians criss-crossing the plain, sowing destruction and leaving behind their names.

Fermor has a flair for description and erudition. I would love to make a comparable trip (even on foot!), but for a brief time I was in fact swept away.

Scrivener Chronicles: Day 1

Posted on by Josh Nudell

One of my recent obsessions has been word-processing software. I have long had issues with Microsoft Word, particularly when trying to work with long documents consisting of multiple sections. For this reason, I have almost twenty different word documents that comprise the bulk of my dissertation. I would prefer to have an easily organized file that I could manipulate as a whole, but, for the time being it was easier to treat each chapter or section as a distinct entity. This came to a head recently when I was trying to work with my least favorite feature of Word, namely tables. One of my chapters needs to have five or six tables (give or take, since the total depends on how many sections the three main tables need to be broken into to fit on the page), but Word was making a wretched mess just formatting them on the page, let alone fitting them into the flow of text. So I set that chapter aside and worked on other things for a while, but also started looking around for something that might suit my purposes better than a program that I have larger, philosophical grievances with.

After looking about, I decided that Scrivener might be the best option, and it even has an extended free trial, so I spent most of today editing a chapter to familiarize myself with the program. While there are some aspects that I don’t find intuitive, but, by and large I like the interface for working. My initial reaction was that I didn’t like the references feature because, instead of defaulting to footnotes, it has a separate column for them that is not dropped into a numbered list until the document is compiled. On the one hand, I find this clumsy to visualize which reference belongs with which point on the page, but this is mitigated by having the references serve as a bookmark that is linked to the place on the text it belongs. After one day I don’t like the references feature better than good ol’ footnotes, but neither do I like it worse–each as their place.

My favorite part of Scrivener is its use as a project manager that allows sections and subsections to be visualized individually or together. But that is just the beginning. It also has a “cork-board” mode that offers for each section a notecard. While one tutorial I watched used these for a summary, I think they are ideal for a thesis. Admittedly, having a clear thesis is one of my weaknesses as a writer, but this feature offered a built-in way to clarify each section.

And yet, after one day, I am on the fence about the software, because of how it hands footnotes and fonts in the process of compilation. [Note: Scrivener is a drafting application that says in its manual that it does not handle the typesetting of references. I understand this, and am listing reasons why it may not be ideal for my purposes.] Scrivener is designed such that when it is time to submit or finish or print a project, you compile the sections you want to include and send it off, to print, pdf, Word, or a variety of other formats. However, the references (which are called footnotes in Scrivener) frequently default to endnotes, particularly if directly exporting to a .pdf file. I understand the reasons behind this, but am philosophically averse to endnotes. The second problem with compilation and Scrivener as a drafting application rather than a typesetting one is that it seems to have a default font system that it applies when compiling…which is problematic when my chapters have quotations that require a Greek font. This then brings me back to the tables that caused me to close out Word in disgust. In Scrivener, the tables look nice and are more easily integrated into the flow of the text, but the tables become again mucked up when compiled because it is a drafting tool and though that eliminates some of my difficulties, the larger ones were typeset problems that again rear their ugly heads upon compilation.

At the end of the first day, I like Scrivener, but I like the idea of Scrivener more than I like the program. I may end up purchasing the program yet, whether because I acclimate and find solutions to my difficulties, or because (as I suspect) it legitimately helps with certain aspects of writing, my first inclination is to say that Word is better for my particular purposes at this juncture. Either way I am going to have to wrestle with certain aspects of the system.

If anyone has their own experiences with Scrivener and/or suggestions for my particular issues, please share.

Girl With Curious Hair – David Foster Wallace

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Among my favorite writers there is no-one whose writing sometimes does nothing for me more frequently than David Foster Wallace. There are reasons for this, including that some of the stories and essays are dated such that I can’t connect with them. More frequently is that what I admire about Wallace’s writing are his powers of observation, his penchant for remarkable phrases, and a panache that flaunts convention and format. These same traits that I admire can also have the effect of making the stories alien and difficult for me to appreciate even as I admire their technical features. The second issue I have is that I often struggle to invest in short stories in the same way I do with longer works, which is a “me” problem more than his writing. This is all by way of preamble for some thoughts on Girl With Curious Hair, Wallace’s first short story collection, the second I have read.

Girl With Curious Hair was published in 1989, and the stories all in some way intersect with the worlds of advertising, media, communication, relationships. My favorite story, the eponymous “Girl with Curious Hair,” is a detached account of a young east coast man, his sexual predilections, and his punk friends on acid going to a concert in Los Angeles. “Here and There” tells of a long-distance relationship that results in both parties being tortured, albeit for very different reasons, and “Say Never” of an infidelity over the question of fit. One story that felt particularly dated to me was “My Appearance,” about an actress appearing on a young David Lettermen’s show–I liked the story itself, but I don’t understand the connection people have or had with David Lettermen, particularly now that he has retired. (I have heard from some people about how much of a revelation Letterman was, but I’ve never really seen it myself.) None of these anodyne descriptions do credit to Wallace’s curious characters who inhabit the same world we live in. The best example of this is in the final story, “Westward the course of empire takes its way,” much of which literally takes place in a clown car careening through the tall corn of central Illinois on its way to a reunion of everyone who ever appeared in a McDonald’s commercial.

Ultimately, I didn’t love most of the stories in this collection, but almost every one had striking or haunting moments. I preferred Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, another Wallace short story collection, to this one because I was more enamored of the stories themselves, which were both a little closer to my lifetime and were, in my opinion, more artfully constructed. These felt, probably with good reason, like a collection completed as part of a portfolio in a writing program, which brought their own strengths—more unified themes behind the stories, stories that were polished and tidy (albeit with the final story offering a critique of such analysis), and being kept from wandering too far into the wilderness of prose style. Of course, I prefer Wallace’s essays to either story collection.

Pious imperialism

Posted on by Josh Nudell

A recent book about the Persian Wars hit upon one of my many pet peeves with regard to discussing the ancient world. This book, which I thought was, for the most part, a fairly innocuous account of the wars between the Achaemenid kingdom and the Greek city states, had strengths and weaknesses, and I had bigger complaints about book as a whole, but one point that the author kept coming back to rubbed me the wrong way.

The author kept saying that the Achaemenid expansion (and, particularly, the invasion of Greece) was essentially a jihad or crusade—i.e. a religious imperative. He reaches this conclusion by looking at Persian propaganda that presents the king as the earthly representative of Ahura Mazda and the bringer of order to the lands inhabited by chaos. The Persian royal ideology mandated continual conquest and justified the kings’ place atop the social hierarchy, but does this royal ideology mean that there was a religious imperative for conquest that could be used to inspire followers? I think not.

To my mind, the biggest difference is that while the Persian kings crafted religion into an ideology that justified their imperialism and rule, it was, for the most part, not used to motivate soldiers. I qualify that statement mostly because an appeal to Ahura Mazda might have motivated the Persian contingents and commanding officers, but much of the Persian army in Xerxes’ invasion of Europe was not Persian and therefore it is improbable that the vision of the universe presented by Zoroastrianism would serve as a motivation for, say, Egyptians or Ethiopians. One need not totally believe that the soldiers were driven to battle by whip-wielding overseers to suggest that they religiously inspired.

In contrast, the Platonic ideal of a crusade (as it were) is a religious imperative, not just on the part of the leadership, but on the part of all followers, to wage a war of conquest for religious reasons. [This is true under one definition of jihad, too, but the issue is somewhat more complex.] Leadership can manipulate the impetus for conquest and benefit from it. Eventually religion will justify conquest if they are successful, but it is religious fervor that opens the door for conquest. In the Persian example, the step of using religious fervor for conquest is skipped.

Ultimately, the most damning fact with regard to the religious imperative of conquest is that the Persian kings gave up invasions of Greece after Xerxes’ invasion in 480. They continued to be involved in Greek politics to the extent that they can plausibly be said to have conquered Greece without an invasion, but the wars of expansion largely stopped and yet the dynasty continued to exist for another hundred and fifty years, seemingly satisfied to be a beacon of light for the territory they already possessed. There are mundane reasons for why the expansion was curtailed—dynastic infighting, rebellions, difficulties of managing such a large territory, etc—but one would expect at least one additional attempt at expansion if conquest of the entire world was a religious imperative the way this author presented it. What is left is a royal ideology that justified Persian rule as the representative of Ahura Mazda and thereby sanctioned conquest, which was not at all unusual, in the ancient world or otherwise. In fact, this sort of propaganda is hardly different than more recent justifications for invasions, bringing light to dark places in the world.

Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler

Posted on by Josh Nudell

At the end of my review of Water for Elephants I wrote that, perhaps, I might need to take a break from reading books that are studies of evil or the brutality of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. My reason was that they are unrelenting and depressing and there reaches a point at which yet another book on the subject doesn’t add anything new to my understanding of the subject. With Darkness at Noon, a novel about the show trials of high-ranking party members in Moscow, I was pleased to be wrong.

Darkness at Noon, originally written in Hungarian and published in 1940, is the story of Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov, a high-ranking member of the Soviet Communist Party and a veteran of the revolution. He has been arrested in multiple countries and never betrayed the cause, serving as a diplomat and executor of the party’s will. Now he is arrested as an oppositional thinker and placed in solitary confinement. One by one the old bolsheviks have been sacrificed to Number One (Stalin), and it is Rubashov’s time. Darkness at Noon is one of those stories where you know the end even before it starts, but the question is how does one get there.

The novel is broken into three hearings, each of which corresponds with an interaction with one of his two interrogators, his old friend Ivanov and the junior administrator Gletkin, who is described as a member of the party born without an umbilical cord to the revolution. Rubashov is given the time to think because the state wants his confession to be genuine and voluntary. Along with the two official interlocutors, the imprisoned is also able to talk with the other prisoners, including his neighbor, an unnamed Czarist officer who pines to touch women. However, other than flashbacks and brief scenes with the porter in his building, the reader stays in prison with Rubashov.

The point of view of Darkness at Noon is its greatest strength. Unlike, for instance, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, which gives a panorama of a Soviet purge (including of old revolutionaries not unlike Rubashov), Darkness at Noon keeps the focus on the suffering of a single person who is reaching out for human contact. Nevertheless, Gletkin weaves his narratives, correct in their essential points, around Rubashov, making him into a different person. President Clinton used this example to describe the modern media circus during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Orwell, in his essay on Koestler, said that the author saw “totalitarianism from the inside,” as someone who knew what it was like to be the victim. On Darkness at Noon in particular, he wrote:

The implication of Koestler’s book, however, is that Rubashov in power would be no better than Gletkin: or rather, only better in that his outlook is still partly pre-revolutionary. Revolution, Koestler seems to say, is a corrupting process. Really enter into the Revolution and you must end up as either Rubashov or Gletkin.

Rubashov has been in this position and does no differently. Orwell also speculates on the reasons behind Rubashov’s confession, which Koestler posits as the logical conclusion of the events. Despite the ambiguities in the story (as Orwell notes) and the pervasive issues of someone breaking under intense interrogation, Koestler falls back on an older narrative–he builds Darkness at Noon into a religious allegory wherein Rubashov is sacrificed to take on the sins of the communist party, that the revolution may continue. He is promised that his sacrifice will be made known in time. As Orwell puts it, “justice and objective truth have long ceased to have any meaning for him”—what is left is his blind faith in the revolution. The cause has replaced religion.

Koestler presents Rubashov’s sacrifice as reasonable. He is psychologically coerced, but comes to the decision on his own for his own reasons, with just enough description of how the narratives are twisted to demonstrate what an abhorrent action this confession is. Rubashov is sacrificing himself for the good of the collective, and Darkness at Noon is a moving, sometimes funny, portrait of this individual for whom the first person singular pronoun is an anathema.

I haven’t decided what I am going to read next, but despite my protestations of exhaustion with this type of novel, the one I have my eye on most is Klaus Mann’s Mephisto, an indictment of evil in Nazi Germany.

Water for Elephants – Sara Gruen

Posted on by Josh Nudell

It must have been five or six years ago that a package arrived from my father containing two books, this one and Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus, and a note saying something to the effect that he was glad I now read literary novels (as opposed to almost exclusively science fiction) and that perhaps I would enjoy these. I took to Dr. Faustus quickly, but this book about the circus didn’t pique my interest. It was around the same time that the movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattinson (who I still only think of as “that guy from Twilight”) was made and still I didn’t crack it open. That is, until two days ago.

Gruen launches the reader immediately into the action of a circus disaster–the animals escape their cages in the menagerie and stampede into the tent. The rest of the novel, split between events seventy years later and recollections of an old man, works its way back to that disastrous start.

Jacob Jankowski is in his nineties and lives in a nursing home, barely able to walk and his memory beginning to fade about details, but active enough to be a grouch. Particularly when people are lying. His family visits every Sunday and, this week, the circus is in town and it calls to mind events in the early 1930s when, the week of his final exams at veterinary school, he is driven to jump onto a passing train. This train, which is the property of the BENZINI BROS MOST SPECTACULAR SHOW ON EARTH traveling circus, literally sweeps him onto an adventure that both sheds light on the deep-seated problems of the early years of the depression in the United States, while also catching Jacob (and the reader) up in the romance of the performances.

Jacob is forced to begin his journey among the workers, setting up tents and playing bouncer for extracurricular entertainments, but quickly finds a job working for August Rosenbluth, the carnival’s master of beasts, taking care of the show’s animals. However, August alternates between the most charming of men and the most violent. To make matters worse, Jacob is smitten with Marlena, the star of the show and August’s wife. The slow-burn is ratcheted up a notch when the carnival adds to the menagerie a “stupid” elephant, the playful and clever Rosie. The triangle of tension that are Jacob, Marlena, and August, becomes a foursome and the plot careens toward the inevitable collision.

Many beats in Water for Elephants were fairly predictable, some because it is at its heart a love story, but most seem to be the details of Gruen’s rich descriptions foreshadowing events because my guesses did not distract. I hated and had affection alongside Jacob throughout the story, both as a very innocent young man and as an old man once again in need of escape. In short, Water for Elephants is a poignant tour of America where nearly every town looks the same from the point of view of the midway on which there are extreme risks for compassion, but where, ultimately, that is also the only way to thrive rather than just survive.

Next up, I am reading Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (yet another) novel about the brutality of totalitarian states turning on the individuals who helped create them. Already I suspect that I will need to give this type of novel a break for a while.

The Green House – Mario Vargas Llosa

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Mario Vargas Llosa’s classic early novel takes place in a Peruvian town, situated between desert and jungle, which is torn by boredom and lust. Don Anselmo, a stranger in a black coat, builds a brothel on the outskirts of the town while he charms its innocent people, setting in motion a chain reaction with extraordinary consequences.

The Green House, Llosa’s second novel, was the fifth of his I have read and it demonstrates all the hallmarks of his work: a long time span, interwoven plots, intersection of purity and corruption, and nicknames designed to allow the action bleed together, and a story that didn’t pull together until near the end. The Green House had its moments, but yet came across as a promising work rather than a masterpiece, falling short of The Feast of the Goat, The Time of the Hero, and The Bad Girl.

The quote that opens the post comes from the dustcover and it is a game effort to capture some of this deeply inexplicable novel. The factual details are true, but it doesn’t capture the story at all. Even the eponymous brothel, which exists in two iterations, features as a setting with some symbolic weight, but is largely a prop in the story rather than a central feature. Of course, The Green House is a particularly difficult book to summarize because there are at least seven plots that are interwoven, sometimes overlap, and sometimes have a collapsed chronology such that the characters will be having two conversations decades apart on the same page without warning. The effect is dizzying. Llosa’s flaunting of an easily-followed narrative bleeds over into the descriptions of the locations. Simplistically, there are three settings: Piura, a town of moderate size (and growing) between the jungle and the desert, and Santa María de Nieva, a small jungle town on a river, and the rivers and native villages they border. However, in one scene a village (including Piura) will be devoid of electricity, while, the next, characters will wield flashlights and hail taxis. The colors and textures and climates remain the same, but the shapes of the towns are in flux.

“Really, Don Anselmo?” Wildflower asks. “You were born there too? Isn’t it true that the jungle’s beautiful, with all the trees and all the birds? Isn’t it true that people are nicer back there?”

“People are the same everywhere, girl,” the harpist says. “But it is true that the jungle is beautiful. I’ve forgotten everything about what it’s like there now, except for the color, that’s why I painted my harp green.”

More than setting and plot, The Green House is a character driven story. There is the criminal-cum-leper Fushía, the goodhearted and loving Lalita, the boatman Aquilino, and the pilot Adrian Nieves. However, using the eponymous Green House as the central unifying feature of the story, there are two stories that drive the novel, one from the outset and one at the conclusion. From the outset, there is the story of Bonifacia, a native girl (whose father also appears) who is raised by nuns, expelled from mission and raised by Lalita, marries, is raped [arguably more than once] and becomes a prostitute at the Green House, even while her husband is forced to watch on. She bears slights big and small and does so with infinite compassion and perpetual innocence. On the other end there is the story of Anselmo and, by extension, his daughter Chunga, the proprietors of the first and second Green Houses, respectively. These two entertain the people of Piura–Anselmo with his harp-playing and the offerings of his establishment, Chunga with her establishment and allowing her father to play–and both have their sympathies, but there is a callousness to both characters. This, combined with the issue of morality, arouses the ire of the local priest, Father Garcia, who lives long enough to see what the Green House is, why he sermonized against it, become part of mainstream culture.

I should note that I had some difficulties with the chronology that could be due to the book’s publication fifty years ago this year. It is probable that when it was published there would have been a clear terminus ante quem, as it were, a date that the events clearly took place before, which then makes the early stories fall into a clearer sequence. As it was, I spent too long trying to figure out when the most recent story was set, because it could have been 1960 or 1980, which affected how old the characters were, etc.

This issue with chronology should not distract from the story itself, which certainly has its moments, and I found the ending particularly affecting, but, for me, The Green House tried to do too much–and did too much too successfully, with the result that I suffered from sensory overload. The Green House is a difficult book to read, both for its bewildering structure that, to be honest, still has me trying to piece together things that happened in the first half of the book because the story seemed like a jumbled mess, and for its atmosphere. Even the moments of fun and levity are layered with a sense of oppression and sadness. I might reread The Green House at some point to let myself get lost in its complexity. For now my opinion is that it is a fascinating novel and one that grows with reflection, but not quite a masterpiece. Nothing about it diminishes my excitement about diving into another Llosa novel, The Way to Paradise, in the near future.

Next up, I am about a third of the way through Sara Gruen’s Water For Elephants and enjoying it immensely.

Present, meet past

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Let me begin with five loosely bullet points.

  • I am particularly wary of the adages that posit recurring pasts and arguments of immediate pecuniary or political value to studying the ancient past.
  • My dissertation is a regional history of of Ionia in fifth, fourth and early third centuries BCE. The project examines the position of these twelve majority Greek communities on the Anatolian coast and heavy islands in relation to each other and in relation to a series of imperial entities that exerted control over the region.
  • A couple of years ago I got the idea from another scholar on Twitter to set up a Google-alert for the subject of my research. Since then, I have been getting daily updates about bodies washing up on Chios and boatloads of refugees fished out of the sea around the island.
  • A few weeks back, I decided that I am going to dedication my dissertation and, if I reach that point, the resultant book, to the Syrian refugees passing through Ionia.
  • Yesterday, Turkish police raided an illegal factory that was making life preservers from non-buoyant material using child labor. Life preservers that do not float made by refugee child labor. Words cannot express how repellent this is.

Objectivity as a historian is a nice idea, in theory, but is quixotic in practice. One is always going to be influenced by whatever s/he is exposed to. This can be as simple as reading good prose improving the “ear” of the writer to more complex and subtle influences such as the theoretical framework one views the world or his or her moral universe rendering judgement. Frequently, the issues one holds close draws attention to particular details in a source that otherwise would have passed by.

When we think of the connections between the Ancient Near East and the Aegean, it is common to think of the maritime trade routes that ran from Egypt to Phoenicia, Cyprus, the Aegean, and then up to the Black Sea. These routes are critically important for trade and the spread of ideas, but (to my knowledge) were not the usual way to transfer people. Travel by sea was expensive and risky, unless transporting bulk goods. Thus people were often more likely to travel by land. Ambassadors, refugees, and people who aspired to overthrow the Persian King from both the Greek states and the Persian Empire frequently traveled from the Aegean to Syria or beyond and then back by one route: a path that took them from Ephesus or Erythrae (or sometimes another polis), which were connected by road to to the Lydian city of Sardis. There, they picked up the Persian Royal road, which took them the length of Anatolia and then across the Taurus mountains and into Syria, usually to Damascus and from there to anywhere else in the Persian Empire. My source material is usually more focused on people from the Aegean taking this path toward the interior of the Persian Empire, but the road ran both directions.

The constant updates have heightened my awareness and interest in population movements, which is a difficult issue to measure in ancient Greece, and in that it is easy to demarcate (falsely or otherwise) borders between countries or between east and west, but the people don’t care about that. Rostovtzeff described the Ionian communities as fragments of the Western World on the fringe of the Eastern, but that gives the impression of an actual difference on either side. The Ionians were peripheral to Persian and Athenian systems, but throughout the fifth and fourth centuries they also served to link the two together.

A spruced-up variation on these thoughts will appear in the introduction or preface of my dissertation.

Han Solo’s Pants

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I have a theory that, somewhere in the planning of The Force Awakens, when the decision to jettison the bulk of Expanded Universe canon and not follow an established story arc (a decision I largely like, I might add) had been made, there was also a conscious decision to go through EU looking for reference points, objects, and names that have their own mythological status. Anything with too much cachet was excised from the movie. It is clear watching the film, which had to be resonant with the original trilogy, that they frequently gave a response the conversation around Star Wars as much as trying to forge their own path ahead. Sometimes, though, the choices seemed to zig in odd directions because a more reasonable solution had already been claimed by EU. Other times they just made choices and moved on without comment. This is something I noticed at several points in the film, including their choice for Kylo Ren’s given name, the designation “black squadron” and, particularly, Han’s pants.

In the original trilogy Han’s gear includes a blue pair of pants with a gold braided stripe down the side of each leg. This may be chalked up to nothing more than a sort of goofy ’70s costume design choice, but those stripes came to possess their own mythology that is bound up with Han’s past, his relationship with Chewbacca, and how, despite his nonchalance, interest in money, and eye toward self-preservation, he is actually a nice man at heart. Those stripes came to represent that Han did not miraculously develop a conscience across the three movies because he became friends with Luke and had the hots for Leia, but rather was a hero already–one who was only fighting who he was in running from the rebellion. Likewise, the stripes indicate that it was not mere nepotism or happenstance that Han became a general in the Rebellion for doing basically nothing. In this mythology, the stripes on Han’s pants explain who he is as a person and inform his character in the trilogy.

In the Expanded Universe, Han’s pants display Corelleian Blood Stripes, a military honor awarded for conspicuous bravery, and were the only military decoration he was allowed to retain after being drummed out of the Imperial navy for saving Chewbacca from a press labor-gang. In The Force Awakens, Han just has black pants, but when Leia comments about his wardrobe she only does so on his jacket. There are, of course, character reasons why Han would have discarded military decorations after going back to smuggling, but, even though the the movies err on the side of giving away nothing about the characters beyond what is shown on screen, the casual discard seems to be a conscious decision to say that the originals were no more important than a quirk of the original costume design.

I liked the decision to largely avoid direct portrayal of EU storylines, but the insistence in avoiding overlap is a shame. Some of the EU material is quite lackluster, but there is also a lot of it and there were some good ideas tossed about.