Jesse the K (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jesse_the_k) wrote2013-07-16 08:12 pm
jesse_the_k) wrote2013-07-16 08:12 pm
Entry tags:
Four Things Make a Post
The dire post of 26 June was occasioned by a very loud (woke up the entire house) lightning strike nearby. Many horrible things did not happen, but we suspect the bolt induced a charge in the coax cable connected to our TV and network router. This provided the opportunity to rustle up a new cable modem, new router, new DVD player, new tuner/amplifier and several yards of untoasted coax, and we're back up in the 21st century. This makes me happier.
More tech good news: I have an e-reader. While my iPod Touch is fabulously light, very few words fit on its screen at the size I need. The Kobo Aura HD has detailed type controls (tickling my inner typesetter as well as soothing my eyes) and a 6in screen affording 15 lines by 7 to 10 words. I can read each line at a glance, making for almost no headaches! Yay! Like the Kindle Paperwhite, the Aura has a very clean black-on-gray screen plus a white LED. I can toggle it on to read in total darkness with no glare. I have loaded an entire vacation's worth of reading on to its sleek 11oz (316g) form (including Etsy-made cover).
I'm headed up north to the wilds of Rhinelander, where the eagles fly and the bugs have landing lights. I'm hoping to have finished my post-WisCon post on my return, sometime in August.
I've just finished a remarkable book: history, biography, and meditation on the meaning of identity. It's Tom Reiss' The Orientalist, (Random House USA 2005 and available in all formats). It's a story so unlikely it's quite difficult to summarize: the author of a 433-page book who's met thousands of nifty facts he couldn't omit gives it a try at the title link.
I'll take a different tack: what does it mean to have an identity when the world is cracking and reforming around you? When you're born to enormous privilege at the far end of Empire, "identity" loses meaning: one gets what one wants and there's no need to discuss it. A mostly secular Jew who made several fortunes in the oil fields of Azerbaijan, Abraham Nussimbaum felt no anti-Semitism, since it was the Jews inside the Pale of Settlement in Imperial Russia who suffered for their religion and culture. In the pogrom year 1905, Nussimbaum's son Lev was born. Like other children of the aristocracy, his identity was "Abraham Nussimbaum's son": tutored at home, his life ringed about with adoring servants, skilled cooks, concerned father, and relatives. Lev was artistic, talented, a dancer, an eager reader, a fluid and fast writer. At 13 the family beats feet to escape the Red Army; he's back at 15, then at 17 leaves forever. Lev's talent for languages (Azeri, Hebrew, German, and Arabic, with more to come) smooths the way into publishing.
First he does a grand tour of post-Great War Europe, landing finally in Berlin. For reasons Reiss never nails down, Lev converts to Islam and changes his name to Essad Bey. He's the toast of Berlin, publishes magazine articles constantly, writes biographies of Stalin, Muhammad, the Azeri oil industry, and much much more. Nussimbaum/Bey witnessed thousands of deaths in the Russian Civil War, and he believes radicals on the Left are equally vile as radicals on the Right. This permits him to find a niche in Berlin until the late 30s, when he starts a frantic tour looking for safe haven. He dies from a severe case of Reynaud's syndrome in 1942, having written a popular novel Ali and Nino (this with yet another psuedonym, Kurban Said). If you visit Wikipedia, you'll learn that Azeri sources don't believe a word of what I've just learned from Reiss.
So: a hugely talented and creative central figure dancing for his life across the bitter events of 1905 to 1945. The more one knows of Russian, European, Soviet, Nazi, and Fascist history, the better one can appreciate the book. It was a page-turner for me!
Another viewpoint heard from in Daniel Lazare's 2005 review from The Nation: In general, Reiss has absorbed all too well the political line of "The New Yorker," where he published a lengthy article on Nussimbaum in 1999. This is the ideology of the golden mean über alles, the belief that moderation and reason are one and the same, that the truth lies always in the middle, and that extremists of the left and right are brothers under the skin. As a result, The Orientalist fairly oozes with the sort of old-fashioned anti-Bolshevism that has Red Army soldiers all but eating babies for breakfast.
More tech good news: I have an e-reader. While my iPod Touch is fabulously light, very few words fit on its screen at the size I need. The Kobo Aura HD has detailed type controls (tickling my inner typesetter as well as soothing my eyes) and a 6in screen affording 15 lines by 7 to 10 words. I can read each line at a glance, making for almost no headaches! Yay! Like the Kindle Paperwhite, the Aura has a very clean black-on-gray screen plus a white LED. I can toggle it on to read in total darkness with no glare. I have loaded an entire vacation's worth of reading on to its sleek 11oz (316g) form (including Etsy-made cover).
I'm headed up north to the wilds of Rhinelander, where the eagles fly and the bugs have landing lights. I'm hoping to have finished my post-WisCon post on my return, sometime in August.
I've just finished a remarkable book: history, biography, and meditation on the meaning of identity. It's Tom Reiss' The Orientalist, (Random House USA 2005 and available in all formats). It's a story so unlikely it's quite difficult to summarize: the author of a 433-page book who's met thousands of nifty facts he couldn't omit gives it a try at the title link.
I'll take a different tack: what does it mean to have an identity when the world is cracking and reforming around you? When you're born to enormous privilege at the far end of Empire, "identity" loses meaning: one gets what one wants and there's no need to discuss it. A mostly secular Jew who made several fortunes in the oil fields of Azerbaijan, Abraham Nussimbaum felt no anti-Semitism, since it was the Jews inside the Pale of Settlement in Imperial Russia who suffered for their religion and culture. In the pogrom year 1905, Nussimbaum's son Lev was born. Like other children of the aristocracy, his identity was "Abraham Nussimbaum's son": tutored at home, his life ringed about with adoring servants, skilled cooks, concerned father, and relatives. Lev was artistic, talented, a dancer, an eager reader, a fluid and fast writer. At 13 the family beats feet to escape the Red Army; he's back at 15, then at 17 leaves forever. Lev's talent for languages (Azeri, Hebrew, German, and Arabic, with more to come) smooths the way into publishing.
First he does a grand tour of post-Great War Europe, landing finally in Berlin. For reasons Reiss never nails down, Lev converts to Islam and changes his name to Essad Bey. He's the toast of Berlin, publishes magazine articles constantly, writes biographies of Stalin, Muhammad, the Azeri oil industry, and much much more. Nussimbaum/Bey witnessed thousands of deaths in the Russian Civil War, and he believes radicals on the Left are equally vile as radicals on the Right. This permits him to find a niche in Berlin until the late 30s, when he starts a frantic tour looking for safe haven. He dies from a severe case of Reynaud's syndrome in 1942, having written a popular novel Ali and Nino (this with yet another psuedonym, Kurban Said). If you visit Wikipedia, you'll learn that Azeri sources don't believe a word of what I've just learned from Reiss.
So: a hugely talented and creative central figure dancing for his life across the bitter events of 1905 to 1945. The more one knows of Russian, European, Soviet, Nazi, and Fascist history, the better one can appreciate the book. It was a page-turner for me!
Another viewpoint heard from in Daniel Lazare's 2005 review from The Nation: In general, Reiss has absorbed all too well the political line of "The New Yorker," where he published a lengthy article on Nussimbaum in 1999. This is the ideology of the golden mean über alles, the belief that moderation and reason are one and the same, that the truth lies always in the middle, and that extremists of the left and right are brothers under the skin. As a result, The Orientalist fairly oozes with the sort of old-fashioned anti-Bolshevism that has Red Army soldiers all but eating babies for breakfast.