Ryan Cooper

This is the classic work from Chinua Achebe , often called the greatest African novelist. It concerns the fate of a man called Okonkwo, who is an important man in a Nigerian village of the Igbo people when the white missionaries/colonizers (from England) first arrive. It's a short book, but streamlined and poignant. Achebe does not romanticize the Igbo. They are depicted (like Europe of that time) as being deeply patriarchal. They have a great fear of twins, which are abandoned at birth. They are also somewhat violent--though their highly ritualized wars usually only have a few casualties. The book mostly concerns the idea of civilization and the clashing of cultures. One aspect of civilization as a system that allows a human society to escape the kill-or-be-killed logic of remorseless game theory--a way of allowing the culture as a collective to achieve a higher level of satisfaction than they would all alone. In this respect the Igbo are highly civilized. They have a form...

This is a book that just came out on Ayn Rand. Check it out: "For if there is one thing Rand’s life shows, it is the power, and peril, of unjustified self-esteem."

  Candles have been my friend of late, but I didn't have a candlestick at hand. This here will have to suffice (knowing me) forever.

 This, obviously, is a picture of lightning. One might surmise that I was cringing behind my screen door in fear, but I thought the cross-hatching lent some aesthetic gravitas.

It means electricity in Setswana, and it keeps going out. There was a cacophonous lightning storm last night, and with that and the wind, it's been going out almost every day. So if you don't get many updates from me for a time that's probably why.

...that this might come back to bite us in the butt: Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials. Shades of the old Nicaragua operations back in the '80s.

  Unfortunately, this one was dead. Medium sized, I suppose I'd say, and I'm not sure if it was poisonous or not. I took this picture with my cell phone, as my real camera seems to be on its last legs. The little telescoping lens part now gets jammed every time I turn it on and I have to switch it on and off while pulling on the lens to make it work. Not a good sign. On the other hand I am rather pleased with the cell phone camera. I've long thought that was just a stupid gimmick that I would never use, but you really can't get a decent cell phone these days without one, so I went ahead and picked it up. To my surprise I actually use it a lot, mainly because I end up carrying it around all the time. The camera is bulkier, but mostly I just don't feel super awkward and touristy carrying around a cell phone rather than a camera. Of course, the pictures are a lot worse on the cell phone. It's only 3.2 megapixels (as compared to 8.1 on my camera, which isn...

  Last week I was at the neighboring village, attending what amounted to a graduation party, though the 12th grade doesn't graduate until mid-December. They sang, danced, chanted, prayed, ululated, whistled, and generally made a hell of a noise. The singing here especially stands out; it seems there are dozens of songs that almost everyone in the community knows (mostly hymns I suspect). Everyone knows how to sing, and follow along with 3-7 part harmony. I tried to imagine something like this is the USA, and I just couldn't. Where in the US can you sing four notes of a song and have a crowd of 60 join in? "Take me out to the ball game," maybe. But we don't have culture like that, a shared set of assumptions that everyone takes for granted. It seems to me that US culture is more corroded--several separate influences have unconsciously or systematically destroyed our culture so that people take few things for granted, especially in the area of human interact...

Well, I didn't actually read this one, I listened to it. Audiobooks are fantastic, and I think often improve my comprehension of the work. Best to do them both if one wants to get the most out of an important work like Blood Meridian (also great to listen to), but I didn't have the text in this case. Back to business. The Bartimaeus Trilogy , by Jonathan Stroud, would probably be dismissively shunted into young-adult fantasy by a douchebag like Harold Bloom, but though the main human characters are young (Bartimaeus, on the other hand, is more than 5000 years old), I thought the themes mature and deep. More than worth reading if you're not too pretentious. The story is an alternate history, where human magicians and spirits (the spirits live on a different plane of existence called The Other Place) rule the earth in a series of large empires. The magicians enslave the spirits by means of incantations, pentacles and runes, and force them to work magic. All the mag...

Over at a college friend's blog , he's got something you just have to see . Suffice to say that it's round, large, and it floats. He's also got some pictures of a trip to a gorgeous river canyon...or perhaps I should say "gorge?" I would kill for some mountains right about now...

  Today I learned that 90% of the eighth grade thinks that the sun goes around the earth, and I spent a good hour trying to convince them otherwise. They stared at me, sullenly uncomprehending, like I was speaking Greek, and impolitely to boot. More and more I am realizing the preposterousness of the South African education system. Yesterday I went to the neighboring village to check out the high school and see how it goes. I watched Andy (another PCV) teach a couple classes (quite well, I might add). Then we went to check out the various classes, to see how many teachers there were in class. It was then that I got a first glimpse of the matric test, the test that the entire 12th grade must take. It’s brutally, absurdly hard. Most of the math was stuff I hadn’t seen in years, tricky algebra and second-year calculus. There’s a fat dollop of organic chemistry that I didn’t see until sophomore year in college, and a lot of college physics as well. If I could describe it in Ame...

  My neighbors over in the next village have a blog, you should check it out! It's on the blogroll. They had a recent post about the water tower at the college where we had training. Well, I've got a picture of the very ladder he had to climb up, so I thought I'd share. Go read!

This is the classic work by Matthew Josephson on the famous monopolists of the nineteenth century: Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gould, etc. I'm a real fan of popular history like this (Cadillac Desert, for example), and this was no exception. Well told, and well organized. I quite enjoyed it. One thing that stuck out for me was the diversity of attitude within the barons themselves. Jim Hill the railroad man was inclined toward engineering and built his roads solidly, while Jay Gould basically sucked the money and life out of anything he touched. The work had a distinct Marxist character, which is typical for the time--1934, right in the midst of the Great Depression. Russia was on the upswing, and the last 140 years had been the worst kind of confirmation of Marx's historical predictions about capitalism. Still, Josephson keeps this kind of commentary to a minimum and focuses mostly on the gritty awful details of the barons. Great work overall, highly recommended.

  This is a picture of my village, maybe the best I can get. It's from one of my constitutionals down the riverbed. I keep accumulating the various things I think I need to live; the last major item I've got down is a bike. Unfortunately that means my room keeps getting more and more cramped, with no wardrobe or table. I still have semi-regular attacks of spoiled-rotten feelings, especially when I think of others I've known that did the Peace Corps in the past. If I'm bored I've got two dozen books to read, or the entirety of The Wire and Star Trek: TNG, or surfing the internet. I had an idea of living in Africa (or at least the bits that the Peace Corps would send me to) in a very primitive way, forced to interact with a native culture that is totally estranged from my own. Here, most people speak some English, and are saturated with (somewhat garbled) American culture. Times change. I've been teaching basically every day, though I do plan to travel to t...

Check out this bit of pop-psychology thrashing . My favorite quote: "Mr. Miyagi didn't teach the Karate Kid to believe in himself. He taught him how to kick people in the f__king head."

  I found this little guy on the walk down from my favorite vantage point on my downstream riverbed walk. I pestered him for a while trying to get a good shot, but I trust he recovered in the end.

  A few weeks back one of the house dogs had a litter. They're starting to get adventurous, and they're awfully tempting to play with, but they have to have terrible fleas. Still, there's always something interesting going on, even if it's just the animals.

I'm just reading a book on the robber barons called, strangely enough, the Robber Barons. It's the famous old Matthew Josephson work. Surely they put modern capitalists to shame as far as sheer brutality. When financial/boardroom intrigue was not enough to secure their business aims, there was always dynamite. But I think the one thing you've got to respect about that era of American history was that these men often took real risks. Sure, most of them stole vast piles of currency or land from the government, or invested taxpayer dollars while protecting their own, or wasted huge treasury sums because it would be slightly cheaper for themselves thusly. But these men were playing for keeps, and often as not they would end up crushed and ruined by their capitalist brethren. Every 10-20 years some doofus's land scheme or gold-cornering ploy would collapse like a ton of bricks and lay the whole stock market out for a couple years, and rich men would suffer catastroph...

  This from my walk home today. I do enjoy a bit of clouds sometimes after the endless empty blue.

  Today I attended a graduation for the grade 12 at the neighboring village. Style means something slightly different to these characters than in my own personal dictionary. I had some more thoughts, but I think it shall have to gestate for a day or two before I can get them down.

Warning: some mild spoilers ahead. Yet another huge, complex work, rambly and dense. My initial impression was that it is a good book that I didn’t like, but I suppose it should be broken down a little more than that. First, the good. The prose was excellent, I thought: “She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter’s dreamscape.” Wallace has a way of intermixing the colloquial and the highbrow that works surprisingly well (even throwing in “like,” in the valley girl sense), and he’s often hilarious (though some jokes are repeated a few too many times). I’m fairly amazed that anyone could churn out this much original writing, and make it fun enough that I enjoyed most every page. There is much wisdom in the book as well, a lot of well-researched content, and I especially agree with the contention that what many people crave in this connected, cynical, ironic time is earnest, unselfconsc...

  Here you can see my full setup now. A bit cramped, but frankly I think I'm pretty spoiled. All I'd need to be really fixed up would be another table for my stove. Well, that and a wardrobe. I cropped out the massive pile of clothes on the floor (but it's not really my fault, since I have literally no where else to put them). I'm still stunned by the whole technology business on a semi-regular business. Due to cantankerousness I missed five or six generations of cell phone technology, and I'm still amazed that I can look up HTML-rich Wikipedia at a moment's notice on a two-ounce device in my pocket. In the midst of rural South Africa, where the water is on about half the time. Hell, this is a lot faster than the dial-up I remember for years back in the States. Next to the computer is a hard drive with 1 TB capacity. I think in the US you can get those for about $100 nowadays. On it I can fit something like 1300 movies, depending on the compression. S...

Anyone remember that New Yorker article a while back? I guess it's caused a stir: In 2005, after the execution, Texas established a commission to investigate forensic errors, and the commission started reviewing the Willingham case. In the course of its review, the commission hired a nationally recognized fire expert who ultimately wrote a "scathing report" concluding that the arson investigation was a joke. The expert was originally set to testify about his report on Friday, October 2. On Sept. 30, however, Perry suddenly replaced three members of the panel, including the chair, against their wishes . The new chair promptly canceled the hearing. More recently, Perry replaced a fourth member (he can only appoint four -- other state officials appoint the remaining five members).[...] Of course, his motive is fairly clear. Perry contributed to the execution of an innocent person. And the formal recognition that Texas executed an innocent man would trigger a massi...

Check it out. Right from my backyard.

This is a pretty good view of the riverbed that I spend so much time on. This point (which is atypically steep) takes me about an hour's brisk walking to reach. Quite the spot though, nice place to sit and think.

Life in my village is settling down to a bit of a routine—I go to school every day, and today I started teaching “for real.” The Peace Corps has a schedule that they want me to follow for the next few months, but it seems to me that their program is ill-suited to my village. There is not much need to get acquainted with the school if there is hardly any teaching for any of the classes. So I’m fumbling through some basic stuff for maths and science for 7th and 8th grade mostly, as 9th grade will apparently be taking tests for the next two months straight. I’m a lousy teacher at this point, but I figure the bottom is a good place to start. I thought we had it bad in the States as far as tests, but this is a whole new level of crazy. If I understand correctly, in 9th and 12th grade you spend literally half the year taking one massive test. I think that speaks for itself. Basic multiplication/division is still not very solid for any of the classes. That might be the first thing that...

So I finally did it. Plowed through this beast of a novel, all 887 pages in my tattered and duct-taped paperback version (I tore the cover off at one point on accident...coincidence? It can't be ). I think I read five other books from the time I started to the time I finished. Everyone said that this is the kind of novel you either love or hate, but in this as in many, many other things my principal reaction is…shrug. First let me say that it wasn’t that hard, certainly not as hard as I was led to believe. Sure, Pynchon often changes subject or narrator in mid-paragraph or even mid-sentence, he often starts a section without any lead-in whatsoever, and figuring out time is a chore (on purpose, I suppose), but that’s about it. Running through it all is a relatively straightforward plot that one can follow even with long breaks at times. There are numerous references to obscure 1940s pop culture and a dollop of engineering and chemistry here and there, but none of those are key...

This is going to be a continuing series, but I'd like to start out with just a little positive thinking.   1) I've got a very nice pit toilet. You can see it there in the back; I think it's a government pre-fab job because there are identical ones all over my village. I didn't learn my good fortune until I talked with some of the other volunteers who are staying nearby who speak of their toilets as an abomination. When I told them sometimes I would take a book with me if I knew it was going to take some time they stared at me in horror--though truly, it barely smells, and there are hardly any flies. 2) The riverbed. It makes for some really nice walking, twisty and interesting, and as long as you like. Last time I went I got greedy, went too far, and was in the stumbling dark when I finally got back. 3) The school's physical resources. There are many books (they don't use them, of course, but it's a start), and two (!) very nice copy machines that I...

This is a picture from some time back in Marapyane, right behind my host family's house. We were out there with buckets for a couple hours defending the perimeter of the property with buckets and so forth, which was successful. It probably wasn't too necessary as it was one of those cool, fast grass fires that goes out easy when it runs out of fuel, and my family's lot was mostly sand. Still, it felt good to be out there manning the barricades as it were, and it helped me integrate into the family a lot. Brush fires are quite common back there, especially during the winter/early spring where there's lots of dead growth to burn, and probably part of the natural order as not two weeks later there was a couple inches of fresh growth over the black ash. I used to see little kids starting those things practically every day. Perhaps it's too bad that the goats and sheep have gnarled down every bit of edible anything for a mile radius around my village--down to minera...

  Here's that picture I was talking about. Kind of a large river bed, ain't it? I think every 10 years or so there must be a huge flood for something like that to be so wide. It took two days of relatively solid rain to make it run at all, so I can't imagine what kind of rain it would take.

I hoped slightly that this new president wouldn't be a lying prick. Unfortunately: But even granting the significance of those first-week measures, the Obama administration has aggressively defended, justified and embraced the overwhelming bulk of Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies -- the exact ones that caused liberals and Democrats to object so vehemently over the last eight years: imprisonment with no trials, maintaining a legal black hole at Bagram, military commissions, renditions, warrantless eavesdropping, claims of state secrets to prevent judicial review of presidential lawbreaking, legal immunity for all but the lowest-level war criminals, abuse-guaranteeing Patriot Act powers, impenetrable walls of secrecy in the national security context. I suppose it's inevitable. Power is a ratchet and all that. Still a pisser though.

Today I was helping the 9th grade with an end-of-term mathematics test that they were supposed to have finished the week before last. The first issue I noticed was that every single question was drenched with vaguely irritating social-justice “context” that grated at the mind—the first task, for example, was to take a survey of 50 people’s voting records over the last 14 years (this in a village of 500, mind you) and then organize and analyze those data in a simple way, like finding the average and the range. I used to think the education system in the USA drenched with politics—it is, of course, but nothing compared to this. Even finding a simple average has to be turned into a lesson on April 27, 1994, or how mathematics has roots in many different cultures, or some other such hokem. It has its place, I imagine, but not in the maths classroom. On a side note, this seems to be a systematic problem in South African schools that I have seen—that is, too much contextualization. There...

I would start this post with a picture, but I'm still having some trouble uploading. Suffice to say that it rained all weekend, so much that the riverbed through town was actually running a little bit for about half an hour. Exciting! Yet it meant I had no cell signal all weekend, so if you were trying to call me then, that's what happened.

I thought I'd give everyone a real update now that I've got the computer properly tethered to the phone and sweet shining internet running in at a brisk trot. First, I've added a few people to the list, so if you don't want my spam, give a shout. Down to business. Things are progressing relatively well here in my village. We're still on a week-and-a-half break from school, so I've been walking around a lot and listening to audiobooks. Yesterday I was in Kuruman again and met up with some volunteers--with all the down time some of us were a bit stir crazy and needed to see some other makgowa (white people). One of these days I really must break out my camera and take some pictures. I now own a small bar fridge, which cost me 3/4 of my monthly stipend, but due to electrical problems I can't yet plug it in. Wiring standards here are a bit lax--there's a five amp breaker which serves as a light switch in my room that is just hanging from the live wire....

Finally, FINALLY! I now have my phone's internet up and running, and hooked up to my computer as a modem. It wasn't easy, and I eventually ended up downloading a 32 MB exe from Nokia on my phone, transferring it to the computer, and installing it. But now I have sweet sweet internet, anytime I want. It is glorious. I should be in a lot more close contact these days.