Thackeray´s Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo

I recently finished reading ¨Orientalism¨ by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said. This book is an examination of European attitudes toward the East, from Arabia to China, but mostly centring on the Arab world. To summarize the work in a phrase is difficult but ¨Michel Foucault goes East¨ might be close enough to give an idea. Regardless of what you might think of Foucault´s ideas or Said´s wisdom in using them, Said knows his business. He seems to have read just about every book on the subject in existence. He treats many in detail and I´d like to focus here on one in particular, a travelogue that he mentions in passing along with more famous authors such as Mark Twain whose ¨Innocents Abroad¨ is often cited these days for a passage that mentions (pre-zionist) Palestine as an empty wasteland, and Richard Burton, the ¨1001 Nights¨ translator and adventurer who, disguised as a Pashtun, smuggled himself into Mecca. What struck my interest in Said´s list of titles however, was a travelogue by William Makepeace Thackeray. Said said it was ¨moderately amusing,¨ which is moderately high praise, coming from him.

The book in question is called ¨Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo¨ and was published in 1845 after Thackeray´s two month journey which touched off in several ports on the Iberian peninsula, some islands in the Mediterranean, Greece, Turkey, Palestine, finally ending at the summit of the great pyramid of Giza. It appeared not long after Thackeray´s novel about the rascally Barry Lyndon, and just a few years before his most famous work, ¨Vanity Fair,¨ about the even rascalier Becky Sharp.

I only got an idea about the contents of the book after I went to my computer and searched around a bit. There was no information on the book beyond a mention of its title, author and year of publication. I was a little surprised as Said´s book is well known, and with his reference to the book in a positive light, slight as it was, I would have thought it would have attracted more attention to itself. There was nothing in Wikipedia, an oversight I might try to correct, but fairly quickly my search led me to a remarkable page which allowed me with the click of a mouse to download the book in its entirety. In several different formats. The internet has such a marvelous potential to make so much available with such ease at so little cost. I was only the 80^th person to avail myself of this work. The quality of the scan is not perfect. Little mistakes abound and there are one or two places where the thread of meaning is lost. Here´s an example of what must be the worst:

The terrace Wiore tlie palace was similarly en-dtvacheil U{H»n by these wi^tched habitations. A fii^w luilUons. Judiciously e:!cpended

I should stress this was the exception. Still, I wonder whether these errors spring from a rushed job at scanning, old and crusty source material, or perhaps modern rendering algorithms aren´t suited to archaic fonts and type faces. In any case, the book is there for the taking, and with a few exceptions, easy to read.

Is it worth the read? Yes and no. Thackeray is no expert on the areas he visits; he is a tourist, has more interest in the journey itself and praising the steam ship, the captain and crew, and above all the company which, and hats off to Thackeray´s frankness here, provided him with a free passage. The actual destinations are of secondary importance to him. He frames all that comes before him with the expectations of one who never leaves home, nor has any desire to. This is not to fault Thackeray. He plays the part of the tourist with honesty and wit. He gives us as good an illustration of the tourist´s mind as any. For example, he tells the story of his early morning visit to St. Roch cathedral in Lisbon to see the famous mosaics. (They still draw tourists today.) He arrives only to find the curator still in bed. Instead of waiting, he leaves, doubly pleased with himself. Pleased with his making the effort, and pleased that he is spared trouble of actually seeing and taking in the mosaics.

Thackeray reflects much of the prejudices of his times: the cheapness of the Jews, the horrid sensuality of the Arabs, the obsessing over the different shades of skin in each port, the happy black people, the immanent decline of Islam, and the low value placed on life in general. If Thackeray didn´t see anything directly to back these sorts of assertions, he has plenty of lurid second-hand stories to tell us. All this conforms to Said´s thesis in ¨Orientalism,¨ that the West thinks of the East as the embodiment of the ¨other,¨ derived from some kind of platonic counterpart to the West. It´s not at all difficult to see this same conception of the East in popular culture today. Thackeray still manages to surprise us. The difference between how he views Greece and Turkey couldn´t be more stark. Of Greece, he says ¨the shabbiness of this place actually beats Ireland, and that is a strong word.¨ With Turkey, despite his reservations over the despotic Pasha, he raves over the architecture, the food, the women, the navy, and what may bear the most significance, a detailed account of his visit to a Turkish bath.

Bathing and the importance of hygiene in the 1840s were not what they are today. In the previous century baths were taken maybe once a year, and the hygienic practices that were followed were dubious. Settlers from Europe amused native Americans by their habit of pulling a clean handkerchief from their pocket, blowing their nose into it and carefully refolding the hankie and replacing it as though it contained something precious. Bathing in Thackeray´s time was something relatively new, good not just for hygiene, but cure for illnesses, mental and physical, and even as a punishment for the wrong doer. It was Thackeray, by the way, who coined the term ´the great unwashed´ to refer to the common people. Wikipedia tell us that it was David Urquhart who introduced the Turkish bath to England in 1850, but Thackeray beat him by 5 years, at least on paper. The mystery and indulgence of the Turkish bath is clearly the highlight of his travels.

Perhaps another contribution Thackeray makes, this time to the world of literature, is a proto-type for the stock figure of the exert expat Englishman gone native. In this case, he appears late in the book, in Cairo. His name is ¨J,¨ an old school friend of Thackeray´s, and expert on all things Cairene. Though English to the core, he has adopted local dress, customs and mannerisms. He even enjoys the attentions of his own concubine whom Thackeray is delicate enough to refer to as an attractive and seemingly available ¨cook.¨ Such characters are with us today and can be found in exotically-localed works like the James Bond films. They tend to be dispensable and can be forgotten once they´ve made themselves useful by giving the hero some bit of information. The character Henderson in the Bond film, ¨You Only Live Twice¨ is a prefect example. He provides us with a little comic relief, a show case for comfortable exoticism, and to Bond he provides a name, enabling the plot to keep rolling along, and, this accomplished, he is promptly murdered by a gang of ninjas. Thackeray´s ¨J¨ is spared the fate of a murder at the hands of marauding ninjas but is nevertheless forgotten once he leaves Cairo.

Thackeray deserves praise for the laudable religious tolerance he shows. In his time, religious tolerance was not an Englishman´s strong suit. For example, the conversion novel was a popular genre of English fiction. A young spiritually starved Jewish girl escapes from the clutches of the grasping materialistic men who surround her. She meets a fine young Christian man, she converts, they marry and live happily ever after. Thackeray himself contributed to the genre, and as might be expected, he has not much good to say of non-Christian faiths or those who follow them. To be fair though, not much bad is said of them either, and Thackeray bears them no special animosity. He also has the ability to admire female beauty wherever and however it presents itself. His harshest words are reserved for the Christians who congregate in the holy land around Bethlehem. There´s the meddling religious crackpot of an American consul, the Armenians, the Catholics and the Greek Orthodox, all up to their necks in sectarian squabbles. Thackeray leaves the holy land in a disappointed and bitter mood. The trip between the port town of Jaffa (that´s Tel Aviv today) and Bethlehem is noteworthy. It´s the wildest part of the journey and because of the risk of attack from brigands, the party is obliged to travel on horseback in a convoy, escorted by an Arab bodyguard, armed to the teeth and dressed to the nines in flowing robes, whom Thackeray romanticizes shamelessly.

The book ends in Cairo with a remarkable scene on a Nile river boat where, he tells of his first sighting of the pyramids:

¨The distances, which had been grey, were now clothed in purple; and the broad stream was illuminated. As the sun rose higher, the morning blush faded away; the sky was cloudless and pale, and the river and the surrounding landscape were dazzlingly clear. Looking ahead in an hour or two, we saw the Pyramids. Fancy my sensations, dear M – two big ones and a little one!!! There they lay, rosy and solemn in the distance, - those old, majestical, mystical, familiar edifices. Several of us tried to be impressed; but breakfast supervening, a rush was made at the coffee and cold pies, and the sentiment of awe was lost in the scramble for victuals.¨

Thackeray notices his companions are similarly unimpressed and goes on to wonder how ´our organs of veneration have become so withered.´ It´s an odd note to end on, because surely, if the tourist ponders the health of these organs, then he should realize that it´s the traveller on a religious pilgrimage whose veneration is strongest. The only pilgrims he comes across in the journey, however, are some Jews bound for Jerusalem and nobody else in the book is treated to such a verbal drubbing as these fellow passengers. Perhaps there´s a happy medium between the coffee scrambler approaching the pyramids and the single minded pilgrim but Thackeray doesn´t pursue these questions.

Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo has its points of interest, especially for the Thackeray compleatist, the Orientalist, the historian, the traveller or the tourist. Thackeray makes an amusing and observant travel companion but thankfully, he leaves us at Cairo, not insisting we accompany him all the way back to Cornhill.

Guns and Gun Ownership

I´d like to make a comment or two about the aftermath of the school shooting last month. I don´t think that guns or mental illness or video games are to blame. If I were to pin point something as a cause for these incidents, I would go with social fragmentation, alienation, dispossession and powerlessness. Maybe some time in the future I will elaborate on these causes, but for the moment, I´d like to explore the possibility of gun control.

Specifically, I´d like to counter those who claim that in the United States, with millions of gun owners determined to keep their guns no matter what, strict gun control is an impossibility. I don´t think it´s a likelihood, but if the government really wanted to institute a ban on guns, they could do so. It´s a hypothetical I´m dealing with here, but please indulge me. My argument hinges on a tasty paradox.

First off, there are no shortage of people in society who are willing to obey someone wearing a uniform. If guns are to be eliminated, they will be salami sliced away through legislation, bit by bit. Americans have shown time and time that they are willing to trade freedom for some illusory security.

What about these millions who swear that the only way they´ll be disarmed is when their rifle is pried out of their cold, dead hands? I imagine the number of people who´d rather die than surrender their weapons to be vanishingly small, internet bluster notwithstanding. Still it´s conceivable that these gun owners could club together, form a militia, and mount an effective resistance to any government programme to eliminate guns. But here is where my paradox makes its entry. Clubbing together and surrendering autonomy to a collective is simply not part of the gun owner´s ¨cultural DNA.¨ The gun owner buys guns out of feelings of anxiety, suspicion and distrust, especially of their neighbours. It's a catch 22. The forces that motivate people to seek the protection afforded by gun ownership - social fragmentation, feelings of insecurity and distrust of neighbours - are going to militate against them uniting and forming an effective force to resist gun confiscation.

This brings us full circle. The powerlessness of the gun owner is caused by the same malaise that causes the shooting incidents: it is this lack of cohesion and solidarity that I referred to in the first paragraph. If anything, gun owners, despite the illusory security that their weapons give them, are just as much the victims of this social affliction as the rest of us. Well, at least those of us who manage to avoid getting themselves victimized in these shooting sprees.

Where are the Christians?

This is probably as good a time as any to comment on what appears to be a new Christmas tradition in the making. I'm referring to the renewed fighting in the 'war on Christmas' that I've noticed in recent years flaring up around this time. Someone notices a public display of a Christmas message, complains, and controversy ensues. This year, I saw it erupt in the news story of complaints over a Christmas message on the Saskatoon bus service in Saskatchewan, Canada.

The following is not an untypical reaction: "Buddy, I am about as atheist as they come. There is not even a hint in my mind that a god may exist. MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!"

Atheists, and just about everyone else embracing Christmas. Conspicuous by their absence, however are the Christians who don't appear to have anything to say about the matter. I'm surprised to see nobody identifying themselves as Christian denouncing the public Christmas displays or defending the complainants.

I see no Christians complaining about the public displays of febrile consumerism. No complaints over public displays of elves, flying reindeer or gifts under trees. I suggest these are doing more harm to the Christian spirit of Christmas than these Saskatoon complainants ever could. I can't understand how Christians who take their faith seriously are happy with state sponsored celebrations of Christmas that muddy the message of universal love in the gospels and pollute the sanctity of their holidays with pagan symbols.

The liberal values of our society separate the church and state. It's to prevent clerical power from gaining undue influence over our lives. I think though it works both ways; the separation also protects religion from encroachment by the state. Consequently, these days we see that the more true Christian meaning is drained of Christmas, the more non Christians will speak up in defense against the (almost always) heretical public displays. When atheists defend Christmas, Christians should begin to worry.

Movie of the Year: Clint, a Chair and Petition

The most gripping drama I saw this year was Clint Eastwood's performance of an actor addressing the audience of a political convention in the late summer of this year. Eastwood's role is as an old actor who takes to the television airwaves for an embarrassing eleven minutes as he remonstrates with an empty chair, where supposedly sits the president of the United States. The actor Eastwood plays hasn't prepared his lines, and is distracted and unfocused. When he does say something, it's inappropriately belligerent and at odds with the setting. As the seconds tick by, the tension mounts as all who watch know that this moment - the climax of the convention - has cost millions and was planned month in advance, suddenly lurches into a crazy off script turn that could spoil the career of a presidential hopeful.

Well, that's not really a movie, and the next one, I only managed to watch this year. But it's real, very real. It was made over a period of 12 years and completed in 2009, and released in the United States in 2011. The movie's name is Petition and the director Zhao Liang shot the movie on digital video, much of it from hidden cameras. It is a documentary about a group of petitioners, Chinese people who have been subject to some injustice and after being thwarted at the local level, have come to Beijing where they mingle with other similar cases from all across the country.

The petitioners are fearless and determined, but lead utterly marginal lives, subsisting on found food and sleeping in improvised shelters. They show us how much people are willing to endure when they believe their (admittedly hopeless) cause is just. There's a teacher who was fired for exposing corruption in his school's administration. Another, a young man who was arbitrarily beaten and hospitalized by thuggish policeman. And a woman who's husband died mysteriously while being given a workplace medical exam and then summarily cremated. They don't sound like much, but if it's inspiration you seek, set aside your Amazing Spiderman comics and DVD and watch Petition. These are real heroes. Such people will be the kernel of any movement that arises in China to challenge the current regime. Most reviews I've seen speak only of the Kafkaesque justice system in China. They are missing the remarkable dignity of those who are fighting it.

I've uploaded this movie in a file just under one gigabyte to The Pirate Bay. It's in Mandarin with English and French subtitles. I will be seeding this over the next little while as long as interest holds. Click here to get the torrent file.

Vegan Dog Biscuit Recipe

Meet my dogs. There's a photo of them on the right. Gitajanli is 8 years old. She's a terrier mix, weighs 6 kilos and has always had a retiring and nervous disposition. I attribute this to her family background. She was bought as a puppy from the owner of a dog meat restaurant in the countryside in South Korea. Finnegan is 3 years old and weighs 4 kilos. Her father is probably a full blooded Maltese terrier whose owners abandoned in the countryside, and her mother is a local mixed terrier. She has a high spirited, adventurous character. She loves to cuddle and she loves to roll in carrion. I attribute her disposition to her being born in a roadside drainage pipe where she was found one cold winter morning, only weeks old, alone and at death's doorstep. Were they to speak, "yes" is the word you'd most likely hear from Finnegan, while Gita would say, "no, thank you."

They're living in Mexico now, in the small city of San Cristobal de las Casas. There is dog food available in the shops, but no vegan dog food. I've been making it myself for them since May this year and they've been eating little else. They are both in fine health, and I figure it's time to share my recipe. Here it is:

Ingredients

1 cup of beans

1 large potato

1 cup pumpkin seeds

1 heaping cup of mixed rice, lentils, oatmeal, bran, soy protein

1 teaspoon of salt

cooking oil

wheat or corn flour

Take the beans and lentils and soak them in water a day or so. Boil them in water until they soften. As they are boiling, add the potato, cut into small pieces so that it will be ready when the beans are done. Let them cool and drain thoroughly. Cook the rice and when it is almost ready, put in the oatmeal, bran and soy meal. Add the salt and a splash or two of cooking oil. Use water sparingly. The drier the mixture the better. Grind the pumpkin seeds as they are. There's no need to cook them.

Go back to the beans, lentils and potato mixture and mash it thoroughly in a large bowl. Once done, add the rice, oatmeal, bran and soy meal and mix together. Then add the ground pumpkin seeds, and while mixing, add a cup or two of flour until the mixture has a non- sticky consistency. Let it sit over night to dry further.

Next day, take small fistfuls of the mixture and form patties, and put them in a very lightly oiled frying pan and roast both sides, until the biscuits are rather hard but not burnt. Repeat until the mixture is finished. The dogs especially enjoy eating the biscuits while they are still warm from the frying pan.

Substitutions are possible. Instead of a potato, a chayote can be used. Some red beet can be added for colour. The patties can probably be baked in an oven more easily than roasted in a frying pan although not having an oven in the kitchen, I haven't tried this. Using an oven would probably save time and effort. The recipe makes enough to feed the two dogs for ten days to two weeks, depending on the dog's appetite which varies with the seasons. The recipe can easily be doubled.

Buen provecho! Enjoy, and don't be afraid to nibble on a biscuit yourself. Humans find them tasty too!

My Education? My Business!

I remember hearing something on the radio. The details escape me now but it was an interview with, I think, a producer at the BBC. He was recalling his career and he spoke of how he got the job. He sat at the desk opposite the interviewer who sat in front of a large bookshelf. The interviewer gestured to the books behind him and asked the applicant if he'd read any. The applicant said yes, I've read that one and that one and that one. The interviewer chose a book and asked the applicant to talk about it. He was able to impress the interviewer enough to get the job. I was impressed by the anecdote and it led me, in a roundabout and not entirely serious way to offer the following proposal.

The proposal is simply that job interviewers should be forbidden from asking candidates about their educational background: how much schooling, where, when, and what was studied. All such questions should be off the table.

Before fleshing out the argument, it will be helpful to look at some of the questions that job interviewers already are currently forbidden from pursuing. This is admittedly a little United States-centric but most wealthy countries have there own, albeit shorter list of such questions:

     Where were you born?
    What is your native language?
    Are you a lesbian? Are you married?
    Do you have children?
    Do you plan to get pregnant?
    How old are you?
    Do you observe Ramadan or Yom Kippur?
    Do you have a disability or chronic illness?
    Are you in the National Guard?
    Do you smoke or use alcohol?

Please notice two things. One, the list is designed to protect privacy and prevent discrimination. Two, there is no effort to extend this protection to a candidate's education background.

It's arguable that discrimination against candidates for going to the 'wrong' school is not a big problem in our society. I will set this aside and proceed to my main point. The ban on questions concerning education would not so much benefit the candidates as it would our work places, educational institutions, and society in general.

I want to consider this illustrative example. In South Korea candidates for jobs as counter persons at department stores are expected to have a degree from a university. Not to dismiss too lightly the skills necessary to perform such a job, but a high school education plus a few weeks of on the job training should suffice. I don't think the requirement for a degree is about knowledge or expertise in a job related field. It's about docility. Those who have been able to graduate have demonstrated a desirable degree of docility - attending class, following teacher's instructions, and performing as expected. That's what's behind the requirement for a university degree for a counter person in a department store. A certificate of docility. Of course department stores have their reasons to seek out a docile labour force, but I argue that it's not the proper function of our educational institutions to help them here, and to the extent they do, the quality of education suffers.

Education should focus on cultivating knowledge and creativity in students. Our universities should be more than a spring board to a career selling perfumes and cosmetics. The understanding that the credentials offered by study at university will be of no use in their seeking employment, will allow young people to put their time and money to better use in or out of school, and allow teachers to teach those motivated by intellectual curiosity rather than a desire to pad their resumes. Students will feel freer to pursue what they want, in areas where their talents lie, unconstrained by concerns of their future as job applicants.

My proposal would open up opportunities for a greater role for on the job training. Companies requiring specific skills would train their own workers in their own way, at their own expense. Vocational schools and apprenticeships which grant licenses to those who successfully complete the programmes should also enjoy greater importance. I'm not proposing that prospective pilots should not be asked to produce their pilot license.

There have been studies showing how in wealthy nations social mobility, the ability for one born of a less privileged family to rise in status,  has been declining. Societies have become more static, more feudal. These same studies show that education, ie a university degree, is the royal road to improving one's place in society. Perhaps opening up more space for apprenticeships and the like would open up new paths to greater social mobility. Letting a university degree remain the key to a higher social standing is not helping our social sclerosis. As I point out, social mobility is declining. The quality of education can only decline as well as long as the purpose of a university is seen as something other than a place to foster knowledge and creativity.

Before I close, I should go back to the anecdote I related at the start about the interview with the prospective BBC producer. It's probably true that the interviewer had a full accounting of the candidate's educational background on a piece of paper on his desk before him. And it's quite plausible that they spend a good deal of time discussing mutual acquaintances in their 'old boys' network. But finding the right person for the job needn't involve any of this. What makes a person suitable for a position is in their head and hands, not a university diploma.

Israel and Iran Sharing Holocaust Files

If I were to pinpoint the feature of the Internet that has the greatest potential to change human society and culture, I would nominate Bittorrent.  It's a very simple file sharing application that allows you to download files from other users, while these users download from you. Copying and sharing music, movies and books has never been easier or less costly. At any moment, according the Wikipedia, bittorrent accounts for more internet traffic than Facebook and Youtube combined. I've always thought that a part of the pleasure we get from a work of art comes from sharing it with people whose feelings we care about. This pleasure in sharing is something that all humans have - we should not give up our freedom to share lightly. Property rights exist, to be sure, but we should be very careful about letting them infringe on our right to share as we see fit.

Above is a screen capture taken from my computer on December 1st. I'm using a bittorrent client called Tixati and I'm downloading a bunch of files - mostly films made in Eastern Europe in the 1960's. One in particular is singled out. It's name in English is "Father," "Apa" in the original Hungarian. It was made in 1966 by the director Istvan Szabo, the only Hungarian film director to win an Oscar for the 1981 film Mephisto. Both these films are centred on the plight of Jews under Naziism.

What I want to focus on, however, is a small part of the bigger picture. I've blown it up here:

This tells us that there is a seeder, someone who has the entire file and letting others download, without receiving anything. The seeder is in Tel Aviv, as the Israeli flag at the top and a trace of the IP address indicates. There are three leechers, those, including me - the Mexican flag at the bottom - who haven't yet completed the download of "Father." The other two leechers are from Sheffield, England, and Teheran, Islamic Republic of Iran. Yes, the third flag is Iranian.

Our exposure to the relation between Israel and Iran, exemplified by a google search of the words "israel iran" is not positive. The links I get all point to stories of conflict, threats, defamation, and distrust. Page after page it continues. Yet, with this screen capture I have pretty strong evidence that someone in Teheran is downloading and will presumably watch this work of Jewish culture, and it's thanks mainly to the generosity of someone in Tel Aviv that this is possible. It's very likely that these people don't know they are sharing. Not all bittorrent clients feature the flags, and most users don't spend much time  'under the hood,' so to speak. But the sharing is happening, whether they know it or not, regardless of the overwhelming negativity that characterizes their relations. Our new media thrive on the negative, while with bittorrent, goodwill, trust, and cooperation are built into the system. This is probably getting close to why I have such a regard for file sharing.

This is my first post of December and Christmas is coming. Instead of putting your presents under a tree, why not share them on bittorrent? You just don't know who will appreciate your generosity.