Here follows some passages, a bit disjointed in parts, that just don't make the cut for inclusion in the book.

In my dreams I see two cities. First is Bukhara, where deserts and dervishes suffuse monochrome mosques and madaris with venerable nobility. Then there is Samarkand, where tree lined boulevards and rolling hills meet blue domes and slender minarets, where crowded bazaars filled with the goods from China, India and beyond dissolve into a riot of color. One is perched in the peach colored foothills of mountains which begin their rise in a high arc towards the Subcontinent only to taper off into the Bay of Bengal; another is situated on the flat plains of an oasis: the guardian and gateway to the great Central Asian desert whose desolation and sun-scorched nothingness reaches all the way to the Persian Gulf and beyond. Two cities in one country could not be more dissimilar. Yet both share something that cannot be found anywhere else in the Islamic world.

This is just unreal. Not that there are people in America who think this way, but that there are highly educated college professors who think this way. Why? Is it because far too many Americans ever leave the borders of their own country? That America is a 'world apart?' Is it some kind of sick provincialism? What is it that prevents us, in a country of immigrants, to be so intolerant of other people(s) making different choices? The real irony is that a self-described conservative--in the best sense of the word, I hasten to add--would write something so culturally relativisitc. (I'm sure Col. Lang is aware of this irony, as well.) This is the kind of writing that comes with a deep, committed relationship with the world, ideas and other peoples, and the value of real liberty and real choice.

i learned today i knew nothing about sam peckinpah, and that i badly want a copy of his director's cut of pat garrett and billy the kid.

I used to have fairly interesting dreams, the details of which I shall omit just now. Suffice it to say that advancing years and predilection with foreign policy have taken a toll. My reveries were usually graced with young women such as the one I chatted with Saturday in a bagel store on Rt 66. But last night I dreamed of a conversation with George Washington.

GW: Ever since my apotheosis I haven’t paid much attention to foreign affairs. I did for a while, right up to the Mexican War. I trust we learned from that.

Me: Hmmmmm. Where to begin. May I call you George?

GW: Certainly not. You act like that impertinent speculator Devon who dropped by unannounced to tell me of dubious land deals in Westmoreland County.

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing


click to enlarge

It's ironic that one of my favorite poets, Ezra Pound (whom I am reading a new biography of), was so intimately involved in the creation of so much of the modern 'art' that I dislike. He pushed harder than just about any American poet I know for the democratization of art in pre-War England, forcing artists like Cezanne, Picasso, Gaugauin and Kandinsky on the stuffy, upper-class 'Bloomsbuggers', as he called them--not without merit considering Lytton Strachey's habits and loves (ever see the movie Carrington? If not, rent it--splendid). Anyhow, it's just strange and ironic to me. His poetry has always symbolized a kind of youthful swagger--call it post-Victorian trash talk. And to think he had such influence on poets like Eliot and Yeats. And also that many of the writers he associated with are largely forgotten and the Bloomsbury set is seeing a renascence of sorts. Ironies abound, no?

Strange, to me at least, that I find so little of value in the visual arts of the time (and much of the present) and their subsequent development but so much value in the same abstractive values that have been applied to the written word since Pound's era.

Like I said, it's ironic.

Nota bene: Please, don't take my comments to mean I find no beauty or value in all abstract art. Not so, as I find much lush, vigorous beauty in the abstract art found in and on Islamic mosques and maddressehs. It's just that modern Western abstract art seems to lack any vitality--in the sense of it being vital and visceral. But perhaps this is part of the larger question between the decadence and decline of the Western tradition of 'representation and realism' in art versus the Islamic injunction against the same. There are certainly cycles of decadence and decline in Islamic art too--just compare a Timurid era mosque with a Qajar era madresseh! So gauche and unaffecting is the Qajar-era work and how soaring and ineffable the Timurid one.

Or maybe it's just me. I don't like the breakdown in realism and representation in painting and am conservative in my art tastes as it is, be they Islamic or Western--although much modern photography is quite captivating. And what of music, that most abstract of all the arts? I guess I could go on forever, so I'll stop.

Oh, what the hell, here's some more.

Ever wonder why Europe is so wedded to its EU experiment? And also why it is so reluctant to follow the US in its neo-colonial adventures? Tony Judt provides a little necessary context:

In World War I the US suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the UK, France, and Germany the figures are respectively 885,000, 1.4 million, and over 2 million. In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., records the deaths of 58,195 Americans over the course of a war lasting fifteen years: but the French army lost double that number in six weeks of fighting in May–June 1940. In the US Army's costliest engagement of the century—the Ardennes offensive of December 1944–January 1945 (the "Battle of the Bulge")—19,300 American soldiers were killed. In the first twenty-four hours of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916), the British army lost more than 20,000 dead. At the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army lost 750,000 men and the Wehrmacht almost as many.

With the exception of the generation of men who fought in World War II, the United States thus has no modern memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries. But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead. In continental Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians. Yugoslavia recorded over half a million civilian deaths, Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million. These aggregate figures include some 5.8 million Jewish dead. Further afield, in China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.

We don't even begin to comprehend what suffering war causes.

As I near the end of my chapter on China I feel a growing sense of relief. Attempting to meld ancient and medieval China, plus my own travels and adventures there has been taxing, to say the least. Add to this the secondary goal of describing the origins of the Silk Road and the proximate cause of the trade plus the beginnings of the war between steppe-based nomads and civilization (a war that didn't end, in reality, until the Manchu conquered China in the 16th century and then were promptly assimilated--not to mention Ivan the Terrible's destruction of the Kazan Khanate about the same time) based on thin, barely discernible and always strange ancient Chinese texts has been a task I'm afraid I was utterly unprepared for.

As you all know, I am an avid reader and re-reader of Herodotus, finding something new upon each inspection. If you are curious why Herodotus should be read in the present, well, this short post is a good place to start. Enjoy.

Excuse me if I offend anyone in this article, but I would like to know what happened to the Democratic Party? I always thought of Democrats as those that supported Unions, workers, the middle-class, civil liberties and silly things like that. One thing I was also taught to do was to follow the money when it comes to whom really is supporting who in things such as criminal enterprises and of course, politics. I have been around for a while now, and I believe that I’m just as aware of what’s happening in my own country as anyone else. In fact, I believe that I’m really more aware of what’s happening than most. I am a voracious reader and I have a lot of time on my hands and I actually try to dig behind the rhetoric I hear. What I have found amazes me.

It just goes to show that some people will never “get it”. The Progressive Press has whipped up a cauldron of molten ire against George W. Bush’s statement that the war in Iraq was “worth it”. My God, how could he say such a thing? The Progressive Press remarks; “Doesn’t he know that almost 4,000 Americans and untold Iraqi’s have died in a quagmire? Doesn’t he realize that the cost of this war is in the trillions? Doesn’t he realize that we are no closer to victory than we were five long years ago?”

Sure he does. He just doesn’t really care. He feels that as long as the defense contractors are making windfall profits along with Halliburton and their subsidiary KBR, and are getting gigantic no-bid contracts, and the Federal Reserve pours trillions of dollars at interest into the economy, making the bankers rich, and as long as the oil companies can get their hands on that Iraqi oil, the world is a great place. If you believe that he sees anything as wrong or right, you have a problem with your perception.

This Bush presidency will probably be compared to the presidency of Andrew Jackson if only for the power that has been infused into it. The eight years of power that Bush held will more than likely be looked at as the strongest presidency that never accomplished anything except a misguided war in a nation we should never become involved in. The backlash will be tremendous, the American people are already tired of this imperial presidency. Just as the presidency was weakened after Jackson, the presidency will be weakened after Bush, mainly because most Americans are extremely wary of this “unitary presidency”. With Cheney and Addington (Cheney's Chief of Staff and the chief proponent of the "unitary presidency") gone, there will be few proponents of a strong presidency working in the halls of power anywhere near Washington.

The debate between Obama and Clinton last night was good enough to keep my interest for the first hour. The interaction between the two was the big attraction for me, the information that they put out was secondary. I’ve just about discounted their explanations and their spin on the way they voted in the Senate and the reasons they voted the way they did. I have finally stopped being amazed at the selective memories Americans seem to have. At every turn, the two candidates have voted to give George W. Bush every dime that he has asked for to continue his wars. The understanding that I have now is that if these two candidates are the “opposition” to the war in Iraq, we will be there in that region for a very, very long time.

Some sixty years after VE-Day, veterans of the 3rd Armored Division held a reunion, as they have every year since 1946. The guys who had spearheaded the Normandy Breakout and first crossed the Siegfried Line met in Northern Virginia, atop a hotel overlooking the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery. I attended with a neighbor who commanded a company of Shermans in the 3rd. We joked that I had been their drummer boy.


The numbers had dwindled since the first reunion; the years had now taken more than the Wehrmacht had. Some knew others there, most did not. My neighbor could find none of his “boys.” Then there were the wives, children, and grandchildren, who lately had been showing more interest in the war and its meaning. There was even a Belgian man, born well after the war, whose village the 3rd had liberated in late ’44, just before the Bulge. A band played music from the era. Several couples got up and danced, and acquitted themselves well. There was no backslapping or tall tales. Those staples of army reunions, I was told, were common enough at the first dozen or so get-togethers, but had worn thin long ago. Since then, and especially lately, the affairs were simply assemblies of elderly gentlemen, short vacations with catered dinners. No boasting, little nostalgia; just a nice outing.

The goal of this post is not in any way defending Turkey (disclaimer: I am a Turkish citizen) but attempting to make international audience understand how Turkey as a state and Turkish public see things and react accordingly. Before we come to the current incursion let's have some history and maps.

Our first map is from the Treaty of Sèvres which was signed between Ottoman Empire and the Allies after the World War 1:

Daniel Taylor | February 7

oldthinkernews.com - H.G. Wells is perhaps best known for his status as the father of science fiction and his "War of the Worlds", which was recently transformed into a modern Hollywood production. Unknown to many, Wells penned several other books and essays which were not of the science fiction genre. The "New World Order", and the "Open Conspiracy" are two notable pieces that Wells produced.

Wells wrote the first edition of "The Open Conspiracy" in 1928. This book details what Wells called the "Open Conspiracy" among intellectual elites who despise the old order of things and desire to work towards a grand world directorate, a global society in which individuals no longer hold fast to tradition, but yield themselves willingly to the world state for the good of all. The Open Conspiracy utilizes propaganda, educational and governmental reform, and other forms of influence to achieve its goals. The scientific management of the world is at the heart of the open conspirators agenda. Of course, this tight management is sold as being for the benefit of all.

Dipping into Eric Margolis's Archives from 10 years ago...

http://www.ericmargolis.com/archives.php

1998/10/making_america.php
"...Giving CIA an open role in the 'war against terrorism' means its agents cease being unbiased information providers and become foot soldiers in the Mideast's back-alley battles. Worse, by clearly aligning CIA with one side, Clinton will drag the US ever deeper into the Mideast's multi-layered conflicts and make America a bigger target than ever.

Washington | January 17

Computerworld - Pilot project with Flickr will leverage users to gather details about library's collection

As part of an effort to expand access to its photograph collections and tap the collective knowledge of user-generated content, the Library of Congress yesterday launched a pilot project with photo-sharing site Flickr to publish some 3,000 photos.

The library's new Flickr page includes collections from the Great Depression and of life in New York City during the early 1900s for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist, said Matt Raymond, the library's director of communications.

I need a bit of help. I know a few of you out there have a pretty decent background in Chinese history and historiography. And I need some help filling in the blanks on Chinese historians and histories for two separate eras: Han and T'ang.

One, the Han (and Qin to a degree). Of course Ssu-ma Chien is the first and foremost historian of China, damn near contemporaneous to Herodotus. (And let me add a note that Ssu Ma Chien's chapters on the Xiongnu and the Western Regions of Bactria and Ferghana are as engrossing as Herodotus' descriptions of the Scythian's, which in my opinion is the best proto-anthropological writing in the ancient world.) So, chronologically where do the Shi Ji, Ho Han Shu and the Tseen Han Shu fit in? Am I missing other histories equally authoritative as Ssu-ma Chien? If so, why? What I am interested in is a short chronology of the major histories of the era that follow the Shi Ji of Ssu-ma Chien.

Second, I know absolutely nothing about T'ang historiography and could use a brief chronology of T'ang histories and/or historians. Can anyone help? Which histories are reliable, which aren't? (If you have anything on An Lu-shan I'd be greatful, but I do already have Pulleyblank and his biography from the Chiu T'ang Shu, which is helpful, but once you've grown to appreciate Ssu-ma Chien's excellence, well, the Chiu T'ang Shu bio is a bit of a let down.)

I'd be much obliged for any help you can offer.

Christian Caryl reviews Colin Thubron's new book, Shadow of the Silk Road, in the most recent New York Review of Books. In it he makes an excellent point on what it takes to travel the Silk Road today:

If you want to travel the modern-day Silk Road and live to tell the tale, then, it's a good idea to be on your guard against certain temptations. You'll need the gift of illuminating the achievements of the route's ancient civilizations even while deflating the myths they so easily encourage. You'll have to digest a huge, intimidating layer cake of history and cultural knowledge that encompasses the religion, economics, and art of long-dead societies as well as the subtleties and quirks of existing ones. You should succumb to the mystique of the artistic and historical fragments that remain while refusing to idealize the world from which they come. If you want to travel the whole way, moreover, you'll need a certain toughness, a bracing insistence on getting the story no matter how adverse the conditions. Command of several of the relevant languages certainly won't hurt. Be sure to stay on your guard, always ready to hold your own against curious customs officials or greedy cops. And above all, resist the urge to dismiss a messy pres-ent in favor of the traces of the past.

Many people have asked me, "why is it taking you four years to write this book?" Or this one: "why are you reading so many different and diverse books, like the Shi Ji or a History of Iran? Or the Shahnameh for crying out loud?" And my favorite: "why do you keep going back?"

Read the above paragraph again and you'll start to understand the extent of the enterprise I've embarked upon.

Tom Bissell wrote a wonderful book about Uzbekistan, one I enjoyed immensely.

He's a skilled storyteller, a natural raconteur. But his book lacked what the above paragraph calls for. Sure, he told the tale of Stoddart and Conolly, but everyone knows that one.

Why stop there when there are so many other examples, anecdotes and stories, more illuminative and fascinating and unsentimental.

As my father once said to me while we were in Shahkrisabz, Uzbekistan, the home of Tamerlame: "It makes you just want to keep going, on to the next destination, over the next mountain range, just keep going." It's a seductive place and only by traveling it do you come to know it.

I'm immensely frustrated right now. Perhaps writing out my frustrations will help. The question I'm facing right now is how to bring out the inherent drama of an event that took place more than two thousand years ago and is little known in the West.

Here's the thumbnail version: in about 200BC the newly crowned Han emperor, Gao Tzu, led a huge army north into the Ordos Loop to punish a wayward vassal and push the Xiongnu, a possibly Altaic or Turkish or Tungus or Khitan or even Indo-Iranian, tribe of nomads who some scholars believe were proto-Huns, out of territory once under the sovereignty of the Qin Empire, which the Han emperor had recently reunited.

Gao Tzu fell prey to the Xiongnu's typical nomadic, or rather Parthian tactics as we know them in the West, of falling back in feigned retreat. Rushing headlong into the breach, as it were, Gao Tzu soon found himself and his massive Han army surrounded by swarms of Xiongnu and battered by a Siberian blizzard. On these points all the Chinese sources, from Ssu Ma Chien to the Tseen Han Shu agree. As to the rest, it's a historian's nightmare. Names of the protagonists are used sparingly, Gao Tzu and Mao Tun being the two primary actors mentioned. Few others are mentioned and when they are, authors such as Edward Parker, Thomas Barfield, Burton Watson (translator of Ssu Ma Chien) and Wylie (translator of the Tseen Han Shu) use Pinyin or Wade-Giles transliterations of places and names that create a veritable Gordian Knot of horrific proportions.

So I find myself stuck somewhere in the freezing cold of an early winter in the Ordos Loop of China, trying in vain to decipher the Chinese Annalists of the time (no mean feat, mind you as the Chinese have a very different way of telling their history). What this means is that I lose valuable writing time and inspiration trying to decipher and correlate names, locating places and pinning down dates. Believe me, I'd much rather be writing, but heaven forbid I get my facts wrong. That's a huge no-no.

Any way, just thought I would share.

Nota Bene: Heck, I forgot to mention that the Silk Road was indirectly born out of Gao Tzu's campaign against the Xiongnu, in case you were wondering why you should give a scrap about such an obscure event.

. . . I was looking for anything on An Lu-shan a while back. Many of you made some damn good suggestions and I am now the happy owner of two books on An Lu-shan. One is a 10th century biography--translated, obviously--and the other is a survey of sorts by Edwin Pulleyblank. Damn good stuff. He's as important and fascinating as I was led to believe and a worthy character to study.

. . . review at the Guardian on Joseph Conrad, one of my favorite writers. Give it a read, I'll probably be writing about it later today.

And just in case you were unaware, the Chronicle of Higher Education maintains a pretty comprehensive site (updated daily) called Arts and Letters Dailythat highlights and links to a whole host of hi-brow ideas, criticism and debate, as they call it. Sometimes a bit too much from the New York branch of the neo-cons, but still, there is always a diamond amidst the chaff.

The creation of settled life and the extension of it on the steppes was not simply a process of wave after wave of invader displacing one group and pushing them further down the line as most scholars present it. There is no doubt that this occurred, multiple times over the millennia, but it was much more complex than a simple wave washing over the vast empty spaces of Central Asia. And though it is a fascinating and largely true description if limited to Trans-Oxiana, my journey--and my dreams--was not limited to the land between the ancient Oxus and the Jaxartes, the modern Amu Darya and Syr Darya. My journey took me from the heart of the Byzantine Empire and the imperial capital of the Turks, Istanbul, along the southern shores of the Black Sea, through the Caucasus, across the oily Caspian, into Trans-Oxiana, heartland of the Timurids, and the first transmission site between East and West of paper, through the Ferghana Valley, breadbasket of Central Asia and birthplace of the first Mughal Emperor Babur, over the Torugart Pass into old Kashgar, skirting along the northern borders of the Taklamakan Desert to Dun Huang and the Jade Gate, the end (or beginning) of the Silk Road.

A little bit more than a year ago I wrote about a small historical problem I encountered. Apparently many of the sources on Marco Polo hint at a theft that took place towards the end of his journey in the Byzantine city of Trebizond--modern Trabzon. Here's a bit of what I wrote at the time, my frustration and inability to find a source to verify the theft evident:

there is one morsel of information that I just cannot digest. In a short article entitled "Colchis Today" from the January, 1993 edition of the journal Geographical Review, author Alexander Melamid notes something curious about Marco Polo's visit to Trebizond/Trabzon on his great journey East. Melamid writes, "Marco Polo had his luggage stolen here on his journey to China." The author, happily, does cite a source (Olschki 1960, 109) for this odd and possibly apocryphal tale. It's a tale I'd certainly never heard before.

Now, I've read two versions of Polo's work; the simple and relatively un-annotated 1983 Everyman Paperback translated by John Masefield; and the two volume, massively annotated Yule-Cordier version of the great traveler's story. Both works do not include this strange story. Melamid's claim has other problems too. As far as I know, Polo visited Trebizond at the end of his trip, when he was coming from China, not, as Melamid writes, "on his journey to China."

Several days ago I began reconsidering this episode, whilst thinking about my time in Trabzon. I was irritated that I couldn't find mention of this in any of the main sources on Marco. And then I had an idea: look at the rest of the family, the family's history. And then it was easy.

More after the jump