Letters from a brass watch man

Friday, finally got down to Tri-C to return two books that I had out. They were only overdue, err, by about two months. The fines were, uh, hefty, but better than I had expected. Since I never like returning a book without at least trying to read it, I spent part of this week working my way through After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives by Edward Said.

I only managed to get about halfway through before I hit the point of no return on Friday. I've been meaning to read something by Said for a long time, being the most well-known figure of Palestinian academia. I chose this book in particular - as opposed to, for instance, his most famous work, Orientalism - because I thought that as a personal/poetic photo-essay, it might give me a more direct answer to a question I've been trying to figure out for a while*: who are the Palestinians when they're not fighting Israel?

It's a pretty big question - and one that I think might be key to the whole balagan that is the endless conflict/peace process. I'll discuss why in a moment.

So who are the Palestinians? Again, I only got partway through. Thus far, though, it seemed that Said didn't have any more answers than I do. He mentioned one or two details in passing that stuck out to me - that karate and martial arts were extremely popular among the Palestinians "in the interior" - i.e. in West Bank and Gaza - as I've heard they also are in Israel; and the overabundance of photographs and decorative objects Said noticed in Palestinian homes, which he suggested was an attempt to make up for a void in their lives (i.e. one caused by their dispossession, I assume).

Other than that, though, Said talked a lot about how fragmented, inconsistent and impermanent Palestinian identity is. He made their history sound like a series of disasters, or maybe the same disaster reenacted over and over again, to the point that he describes the ramshackle buildings in a refugee camp as 'ruins waiting to happen.' He also commented that the major form of Palestinian literature is (as I understand it) basically Post-Modernist in mode. A few lines I copied down:

The striking thing about Palestinian prose and prose fiction is its formal instability... our characteristic mode, then, is not a narrative, in which scenes take place seriatum, but rather broken narratives, fragmentary compositions, and self-consciously staged testimonials in which the narrative voice keeps stumbling over itself, its obligations and its limitations (38)

I guess none of this should surprise me, given what a mess the politics and the history of the region has been for the past hundred years. Especially in the period where Said was writing the book (the first edition was published in 1986, around the same time as the War of the Camps. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that incident.) I don't know. Maybe that's just the nature of trauma - once experienced or in progress, it doesn't tend to leave room in one's life for much else.

I have a tendency to look at the Palestinians' situation through the lens of what I know about the history of my own people (though I'm sure neither of them would really appreciate the comparison). Like Palestinian culture, Jewish culture across the past two thousand years has been fragmentary, contradictory and inconsistent, a mishmash of different influences at different times, as one would expect when the participants are spread out over thousands of miles. What's weird is that, in a strange way, I think we somehow made it work for us; even if the formal definition of our identity is famously complicated, even if we believe completely different things at times, there's always been something there that can't quite be put into words. I think we had a few things going for us, though, that the Palestinians didn't. First up was a central tradition of some sort - the Tanakh, the Talmud and the Mishnah - that no one ever quite really broke with entirely. The Palestinians don't; unlike the Jews, they don't have one single religious tradition or philosophy (Said, for instance, came from a Palestinian Christian background, unless I'm mistaken). The second was a sense of narrative, of our particular place in the story - where we were from, what we were about, (for some) even a sense of where we're going. The Palestinians don't have that either, at least from what I can tell so far. If they have a central narrative, it's the narrative of their dispossession by the Israelis.

Getting to the point, though - why is this a massive issue, at least in my mind? Imagine for a second that your entire identity - who you are as a person - was more or less entirely tied to resistance (peaceful or otherwise) and continuation of a particular conflict. How would you ever be able to stop? Call it Patton's Dilemma - who are you once the war is over?

It's something I'm worry about - both about the Palestinians and the Israelis, to be honest. I guess that's the thing about wars and conflicts this long. In the case of the Israelis, though, there's at least theoretically a tradition and a culture to fall back on when and if the bullets ever stop flying; some place to go back to. What do the Palestinians have to define themselves if they do wind up making peace with Israel? Or even if they actually do win? Even Said admitted at one point that he wasn't sure if getting the land back would be enough to get what the Palestinians truly want - I believe the way he put it was 'restoring ourselves to ourselves.'

I think one of the reasons the peace process has failed so far is that it keeps trying to address the real, tangible facts of peace - who gets what land, water rights, who holds what military power and how much - without looking into the problems like these - the ones that are much, much harder to really affect, but which are, I suspect, equally important to the conflict and why it keeps on continuing. All I can really say for sure is, I really hope there's someone Palestinian out there who's at least trying to work on this.

* yes, as a cultural outsider, yes, without knowing how to speak or read Arabic -- two things that I'm sure doom any efforts on my part to futility, I just thought I'd try anyway.

So. Uh. All of a sudden, I have a job. Just got it yesterday. I start a week from Monday

Also, that gig that I've been talking about vaguely on Facebook? It came through.

:D

So I'm sitting on a bench outside of Borders at Crocker Park about an hour ago, writing some stuff down, when this middle-aged/50's woman I've never seen before in my life abruptly pulls up in a blue Ford Focus with her windows lowered. "Hey," she says. "Hey. I've got something to say to you."

There wasn't anyone else around. "Yes?" I say, sort of automatically.

"Fuck you," she says.

"I'm sorry?" But she had already started to drive off.

Uh. Okay. Come to think of it now, I might have seen her when I'd been in Brueggers' a little while before, getting a refill. She was over in the corner reading a book; I glanced over to see what the title was. "American Massacre," I think. Maybe she thought I was staring, or something?

Anyway. People are weird sometimes.

This is akin to telling people they can't drive on a public road unless their car cars are 2005 or later models. Programmers who add bells and whistles just to prove they can,without asking whether consumers perceive any value, are on ego trips...

I'm going to explain this as clearly and as simply as I possibly can. You know what you're looking at? The page right in front of you? -- It looks the way that it does because, somewhere a mile to a thousand miles away, there is a piece of code somewhere that tells your browser what exactly the page says and how that page is supposed to look. With me so far? Okay.

The problem with IE6 is that it doesn't read the code that tells the browser how the page should look in the same way as all the other browsers do. Its layout engine is completely different from every single other browser in use at the moment - yes, up to and including Internet Explorer 7. And that makes supporting IE6 a massive headache for every web designer and developer out there. It doesn't matter whether you're trying to do something simple or something flashy - it gives everything an added layer of complexity. It's like sending an Indian fifth-grader who's just started to learn English to an Oxford literature conference - no, it's not impossible to deal with, but do you really want to spend half of your time translating stuff into Hindi? Not to mention making sure the poor kid understands exactly what's going on?

Or let's go with your metaphor - it's not really like requiring all cars on the highway are of a certain model year. It's more like requiring that all cars have, say, wheels. (Or maybe seat belts, if you want to go into IE6's various security flaws.)

My house is 30 years old. My wife of 45 years is 65 years old. I have an electric saw that is 40 years old. Got a 965 El Camino that has run all its life on propane. All of these items work fine.

Sure, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that you're not writing that little missive on a Macintosh Classic, or on a Commodore 64. I'm sure we'd all like to live in a world where one computer every twenty years works just fine. Unfortunately, that's just not the way technology works. Just as soon as you've got something out of the door, someone's figured out something better - or figured out that you've just made a really horrible mistake, and there's really a much better and easier way of doing something. That's just the way it is.

In conclusion - for the love of cheese, everyone, will you please just give Firefox a shot?

Now, most of you reading this will probably have already seen this video or would have been there in person. For the rest of you, my friends Stewart Martin and Karen Singerman were married about two weeks ago. I was fortunate enough to be there - and to be there to see a live performance of this song by my good friend Peter Catlin, who composed this song just for the occasion. As for the subject of the song... well... why don't you just listen for yourself. Words can do the genius of this thing no justice:

Needless to say, both the couple themselves as well as most of the audience are big Jonathan Coulton fans. Not that a song that features references to mad science and Calvin & Hobbes needs much of a pedigree to get into my good graces. Give it a listen, everyone. You won't be disappointed, trust me.