Ooooh, I just love maps. Check it out: a blog of strange maps! The one shown here is a map of cannibal zones. But don’t miss the story of the State of Absaroka, U.S.A. — what? You don’t know that one?

My favorite books relating to maps:

The Mapmakers: Revised Edition

1066: The Year of the Conquest

1421: The Year China Discovered America (P.S.)

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (the endpapers were the place I first fell in love with maps)

The Thomas Guide

And now go away and don’t bother me. I’m looking at maps busy.

This week I was invited to join a Facebook group called Six Degrees of Separation. (I didn’t.) Presumably, the idea is to see how many people will join if the invitations spread “virally”, where the underlying premise is that every human being on the planet can connect to every other one through a maximum of six degrees of connection (a fallacy… but that’s another story).

The Jewish Daily Forward?

I don’t see why you need a Facebook group, though. In the last six days, I have received the names and email address of 200+ complete strangers. Also the email addresses of about 50 distant acquaintances. Oblivious friends and family forward on a joke or a news item to 20 (or 30 or 40…) of their dearly beloved, putting all the addresses in the CC field instead of the BCC field.

Most of these tidbits have been forwarded five or six times without being pruned, expanding their populations in proportion. It’s lucky for my friends (and their friends, and theirs…) that I’m not a direct marketer trolling for contact information. It’s creepy for me to think that all those people now have my name and number.

Six degrees of email separation from everyone on the planet? Can you imagine the spam?

How do you use waiting time? Many people “kill time” while in line: watching mobile TV, checking email, sending an SMS message, playing a game. What if you believe that “killing time” is bad?

Seen in a neighborhood branch of the Israel Post Office:

A shelf of Biblical and Talmudic study books for customers to read while waiting to mail a letter, deposit money, or pick up a package.

It’s a small gesture, but one that respects the immediate culture and values of the environment.

Some thoughts on the book Reading Lolita in Tehran:

1. The book is described as triumph of literature and a lifeline of sanity (or whatever) in the difficult world of Islamic revolution in Iran, yet I see the author as deliberately using literature to subvert the revolutionary culture. Nafisi uses her faith in novels not so much to maintain her personal freedom as to teach, to spread her open approach among her students. For her, teaching is used intentionally as an anti-revolution propaganda tool.

Now, you might or might not like that revolutionary culture — personally, I think it’s evil — but that’s not the point. Her attempts to force her students to adopt her beliefs in Western freedom, in literature as the means to that freedom, are not as different from Islamic brainwashing as you might expect, and that’s a very different purpose from the one expressed on the back cover.

2. As a group, the books she presents are classics, and part of the standard western syllabus. As individual books, the novels chosen (Lolita, Gatsby) are particularly uncomfortable ones. In the context of a generally religious society, they would absolutely be unappreciated — even in the U.S., I imagine that most religious high schools and colleges don’t choose these books course material.

It’s difficult to believe that Nafisi could have created her curriculum without realizing that even moderate Iranians would be offended by her choices and resist her efforts. Knowing that, the question begged is: Why did she deliberately choose these books?

3. In discussing Lolita, Nafisi finds a theme of tyranny: of those in power trying to form others in the image they want, maintaining total control of them, lack of empathy or respect for others as their own people.

In that context, she unexpectedly describes the students as “my girls” — part of a more pervasive attitude of her trying to create these girls over in her own, subversive image.

4. Disappointingly, the book is disjointed and doesn’t flow evenly. Too much space is devoted to literary criticism and plot discussion of the classics — remember, this purports to be a memoir. (Four pages alone are devoted to a biographical history of Henry James.)

The years and even the writing style jump around. First there are the semi-secret literary sessions in her home (which turn out to be the end of the story, not the beginning). The scene then shifts to her time as a university student in the United States, then to teaching in the  university in Tehran — with a backward step to teaching in a private women’s college.

This leaping about is not of the flashback sort; there is no apparent reason, no cohesion. Within a section, the book is for the most part very readable. Nonetheless, I am left with the impression that the book was written in little unrelated fits and spurts of essays and sections over many years, making it difficult to follow the author’s motivations.

5. Finally, and related to all of the above points, Reading Lolita in Tehran is permeated with a sense of the arrogance of author: her great knowledge, the importance of her writing and teaching to the world. The importance of literature.

One might suggest that if Nafisi still feels the power of literature after all she has been through, that itself proves its value. Yet somehow, I am not convinced. Is it possible that the deep value of literature for the author — a value equal sometimes to life or death — is because literature itself is her identity?

Nafisi doesn’t seem to fit in her culture, her nation. There’s a lot of “we this” and “we that”, yet the sense is one of separateness and detachment. Of not being one of the people. Of not joining the cast of characters.

I am left disappointed, but also wondering: Is this detachment, this isolation from the experience of the people ultimately the selfishness of arrogance?

“Medical help is being given to the last-known surviving speaker of a minority language in Nepal. Soma Devi Dura, an 82-year-old living in western Nepal, is thought to be world’s sole speaker of Dura, a Tibeto-Burman minority language. Scholars want to preserve Nepal’s disappearing minority languages. The country has more than 100 tongues, several with fewer than 100 speakers each.”

[via InterWorld Radio News Bulletin, 16 Jan 2008]

A peice like that really gets me thinking about language in particular, and communication in general. The choice of what form of communication to use (gestural, vocal, body language/facial expression, email, SMS, IM, FaceBook message, FaceBook poke…).

What makes us incline towards using one communication means over another at any given point in time?

Factors include:

• Who we’re contacting
• Time of day (where we are / where the other party is)
• Technology / network available at the moment of communication (where we are / where the other party is)
• Cost of network time at the moment of communication (where we are / where the other party is)
• Desire for privacy  / desire for publicity
• Shyness about opening a channel of communication
• Social implications of the communication channel

I’m sure there are others.

Personal related anecdotes:

• Only “old folks” use email. Kids use SMS.
• “Poking” someone on FaceBook when I’m not sure they’d want to be a friend, but might feel compelled to accept if they received an invitation.
• Wanting to kick someone under the table during a conversation, but refraining.
• Calculating which landline (or cell phone line) to use to call a relative in another country, based on calling plan rates.
• Trying to reassure a tense friend whose mother-tongue is Tagalog.
• A surprised daughter exclaiming, “Mommy! They all talk like we do!” in a supermarket in San Francisco.
•  Delaying data downloads to the cell phone until accessing a WiFi network.
• Receiving an SOS email: “Are you up? Can I call you?”
• Being available to that friend in crisis when she can’t call anyone in her own country for help at 2.00am local time.

Back to our opening story…

What would it feel like if your native tongue were nearly extinct? What would it be like to live in a world where you always — always — had to speak in a foreign language to be understood? What kind of alienation would you feel?

My favorite books on language:

• The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language
• Seeing Voices
• A Man Without Words
• The Wisdom in the Hebrew Alphabet
• Etymological Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew
• The Word: The Dictionary That Reveals The Hebrew Source of English

Seen today in Jerusalem: 

Kudos to National Geographic for being true to its tradition of respect for other cultures.

Now available: an alternate edition of the Israeli edition of National Geographic magazine — targeted to the “Torah Observant community” (the term is inclusive of National-Religious, Sephardic, and haredi groups). Presumably, this NG version selects articles that avoid controversial discussions of evolution, and edits out those images of indigenous women that kept the boys in my fifth-grade class so interested in anthropology.

Thanks to Mr. Deadfish for the National Theographic title.

A text link is a tease. A paragraph with link colors on intriguing words tantalizes with the promise of interesting, entertaining, or novel content on the other side of the link. Rarely is that promise fulfilled (so many links lead internally to other posts on the same site, or to a Wikipedia article), but just enough gems exist to make encounters with linked paragraphs a little bit more exciting.

You might say that the grass is always greener on the other side of the link. (If you’re a golfer, make that, “the other side of the links”. Sorry.) I guess that’s why so many spam emails include links.

Personally, I dislike losing my train of thought, and don’t like back-paging to get to my starting point again, so I open new links in new tabs (not spam email links, however). Which means that I frequently have 10 or 20 Firefox tabs open at once. Which means I am putting a lot of pressure on my computer’s RAM resources. Which means that my link-following system is not perfect.

“The old-fashioned fronts of these houses, which had older than old-fashioned backs, rose sheer from the pavement, into which the bow windows protruded like bastions, necessitating a pleasing chassez-déchassez movement to the time-pressed pedestrian at every few yards. He was bound also to evolve other Terpsichorean figures in respect of door-steps, scrapers, cellar-hatches, church buttresses, and the overhanging angles of walls which, originally unobtrusive, had become bow-legged and knock-kneed.” (from The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy)

“…before he walked to the window to recollect himself, and feel how he ought to behave.” (p. 56)

“But neither Charles Hayter’s feelings, nor anybody’s feelings, could interest her, till she had a little better arranged her own.” (p. 57)

– Persuasion, by Jane Austen, Wordsworth Classics edition 2000

Not only are these neatly turned phrases, but they imply a marvelous sense of intellectual control over emotion. Do we have similar expectations of ourselves in modern culture(s)? Do we assume that emotions have their place, but that it isn’t in public? Some of that does remain in attitudes regarding business relationships, but even there things are changing.

Happiness does not come from having or not having. It comes from appreciating what we do have, and we all have some things. A note posted on an email list to which I subscribe:

This is why I love my kid so much! It is things like this that make me realize just what a wonderfully amazing character he is.

I was just looking through his folder and mounds of paperwork and I came across an “I am thankful for” list. You know what topped that list?

1. My health

Can you believe a kid that has gone through so much medically, sometimes on a daily basis and in light of all of the “new” medical issues that have reared their ugly head, he is thankful in spite of all of this.

I love my baby boy.

Proud mama bear,

[name withheld]

Related reading: Stumbling on Happiness