Bill Murray's Blog, page 53
August 20, 2018
3QD
From today I’ll be contributing a monthly travel-themed column called “On the Road” to 3 Quarks Daily. Today’s entry is On The Road: Rapa Nui.
Just a wee bit of it here:
“The coast is close; the waves crash in. They’ve come a long way, got up a good head of steam. Brine in the mist. Lick your lips and you taste it.
Horses graze on shore, unbound by fences. They’re not wild, exactly. They all belong to somebody, they’re branded. But since there’s nowhere for them to go, they go where they will. The surf pounding behind them frees you, too.
Horses and cows and a produce stand. This planted field and that on the inland side of the road. We are running up the east side of the island, setting sun casting deep shadows, darkness covering the sea.
Here, a moai has been toppled on the ahu where it once stood. Looks like they knocked it over in just such a way to add insult to injury. Back broken at the neck, in two pieces. Naked conflict happened right here.
You read about violence in the late statue-building period and here it is before you, the cruelty of war somehow magnified on this smallest of canvases. The most advanced instrument of war was the adze, a hand tool.
Please go and read the rest on 3QD.
•••••
3 Quarks Daily is an aggregator. If you’re not familiar with it, pay a visit and spend some time there when you can. 3QD “curates commentary, essays, and multimedia from high quality periodicals, newspapers, journals, and blogs puts together a distillation of the best of the web in daily links,” as it has since 2004. I think it’s brilliant.
Every Monday 3QD features all original writing, to which I’ll contribute a travel-related column every fourth Monday starting today. I’m honored to participate.
August 19, 2018
Don’t Become Hostage to Somali Pirates
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I have read 135 pages of The Desert and the Sea sitting here just yesterday and tonight. It’s the frightening memoir of Michael Scott Moore’s time as a hostage in Somalia. Sample quote, from being driven around in his captors’ khat-infused paranoia on a particularly bad night:
“The sheer alarming stupidity of breaking off a wheel in the middle of the desert while running from a plane, or a drone, or nothing at all, made the blood pound and slosh in my head.”
Mr. Moore’s hostage experience chimes with the way others have defined war: “months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.” Don’t try this at home, in Somalia, or anywhere else.
Quotes: Turkey’s Lira Problem
“We are beginning to see echoes of the old practice of asking friends traveling abroad to bring back electronics, clothes and even books, as we did in the 1980s, when Turkey was yet to liberalize its economy and a pack of Marlboro Reds was considered a generous gift.”
– quoted in the New York Times
August 17, 2018
Monsoon India in Pictures
The flooding in Kerala looks just terrible, doesn’t it? One official declared it the worst in nearly a century. It makes this photo essay in Nowhere Magazine from the monsoon in Delhi look almost quaint.
Weekend Reading
Some things are just downright imponderable, like these guys. Here are a few entirely more ponderable things to read and enjoy this weekend.
Let’s start with an article with a travel bent – and pictures: Letter from Bishkek: Soviet utopia meets postmodern charm in Kyrgyzstan’s garden city capital by Samuel Goff in the Calvert Journal.
A man and his dog, disappeared in Australia: In a Town of 11 People, Mysterious Disappearance Turns Neighbor Against Neighbor by Jacqueline Williams in the New York Times.
A different mystery, Inside the Poisoning of a Russian Double Agent, a big, long blow-by-blow of the Skripal case by Tom Lamont in GQ.
Marxist World: What Did You Expect From Capitalism? by Robin Varghese in Foreign Affairs (You’ll need to register for a free article a month).
Questioning diversity by David Goodhart and Christian Kjelstrup at Eurozine. Europe. Refugees. Tough questions.
Conservatives Can’t Decide If Nordic Socialism Is a Totalitarian Nightmare or Actually Capitalist by Eric Levitz at New York Magazine.
Last week I recommended an article on global supply chains. In See No Evil, Miriam Posner, in Logic Magazine, asks “Software helps companies coordinate the supply chains that sustain global capitalism. How does the code work—and what does it conceal?”
And I’ve bought another doorstop, just shy of the size of The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century from a couple years back (and I admit to not having read all 1192 pages of that one). This one is Adam Tooze’sCrashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, a history of the decade since the collapse of Lehman Brothers. This will surely take the rest of the year. Perhaps you’d prefer just to stick with two reviews.
We’re going to do something a little different next week. Do check back on Monday. For now, enjoy the weekend.
August 13, 2018
Visit Istanbul Now
With inflation at 15.4% officially and expected to rise, Turkey is in a tough spot. President Erdogan is feuding with his NATO ally America and his currency is in free fall. In a more political post I’d suggest that having himself elected Super-Extra-Special Potentate means President Erdogan maybe should have been careful what he asked for.
But for visitors, Erdogan’s problems make it just about an ideal time to plan a trip to Istanbul, via the outstanding Turkish Airlines international network, while the Lira stands at fifteen American cents and struggling. So far foreigners haven’t been scapegoated and you can still get a beer in Karaköy and Beşiktaş. And Turkey, while civility prevails, is a fabulous destination.
See a larger version of the Istanbul photo above, and 385 other photos in the Turkey Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
August 12, 2018
How to Do It
This is so right. Thank you, Mr. Kugel.
August 11, 2018
Naipaul
Goma, DRC, across Lake Kivu
Difficult man or not? Probably. Pretty much nobody says not. Still, alongside Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Naipaul’s A Bend in the River takes you to Congo, sticks with you.
Congo won’t stop being a compelling place on the planet. It may or may not be that Kabila’s reign in Congo is drawing to a bitter close., even as the Kivu provinces totter close to armed conflict – again – and the Latest Ebola Outbreak Is Centered in a War Zone. In Congo.
The subject for another time, but please remind me to post my growing Congo reading list. I have a familiar refrain these days – too much to read, too little time. Still, on the occasion of Naipaul’s death, let’s all pull out A Bend in the River or A House for Mr. Biswas and reread. In the moment.
August 10, 2018
Weekend Reading
Take a day off.
It has been an unusually wet summer in our corner of Appalachia, which makes for foggy, cool mornings. Just the right atmosphere to brew up some coffee and settle in on the back porch with a view of the forest and a batch of enjoyable weekend reading. Some suggestions:
A burst of good stuff from nautil.us yesterday: Strange escapism in Stranger Places, Brief encounters with cuckoos by Adam Petry, and really faraway escapism in Predators, Prey, and Vodka, Surveying muskoxen in the Russian far north by Joel Berger.
What are Chinese authorities up to in the far western Xinjiang region? See Crackdown in Xinjiang: Where have all the people gone? by Emily Feng in Urumqi in the Financial Times.
Two stories about people and whales: We May Never Understand the Ocean-Wide Damage Done by Industrial Whaling by Peter Brannen in The New Yorker, and It’s Tough Being a Right Whale These Days by J. B. McKinnon at The Atlantic.
“To hide in plain sight while on assignment in foreign nations, agents needed precisely tailored clothes made to look local.” Such an obscure topic, the very idea that someone thought to write about it is a pleasure Clothing Britain’s Spies during World War II by Jocelyn Sears at JStor Daily.
Alarming reading from Cynthia Lazaroff, who was in Hawaii when that ballistic missile attack false alarm came in last January: Dawn of a new Armageddon in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Pertinent as voices in the UK urge stockpiling goods in case of a Brexit-gone-bad, Swedish journalist Elisabeth Braw looks at how Global Supply Chains Are Dangerously Easy to Snap in Foreign Policy.
Quillette calls itself “a platform for free thought.” To use a Finnish saying, I’m not sure yet if it’s a fish or a bird, but it mostly seems to enjoy poking at today’s mainline leftish “correct thinking.” In Britain’s Populist Revolt, the point I think Matthew Goodwin, a young academic, wants to make is that if Leave won because the social contract is broken, the Remainers and the anti-Trumpists have no interest in fixing it.
Granted, this is not for everyone: because of the stir created by an emergent “Democratic Socialist” movement in the U.S. ahead of the fall midterms, my weekend mission is to compare and contrast two articles. The first, in Jacobin, A Time to Be Bold by Mathieu Desan and Michael A. McCarthy, and a reply in The Atlantic called Democratic Socialism Threatens Minorities by Conor Friedersdorf.
Enjoy the weekend. See you next week.
August 9, 2018
Quotes: On Being a Slave
“My people, you unnerstand me, dey ain’ got no ivory by de door. When it ivory from de elephant stand by de door, den dat a king, a ruler, you unnerstand me. My father neither his father don’t rule nobody.””
This is a quote from Kossula, aka Cudjo Lewis, born around 1841, and sold into slavery. Kossula sailed as a captive on the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to the US from Africa, arriving in 1859. He sailed from the then kingdom of Dahomey, now Benin.
The book is Barracoon, The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” by Zora Neale Hurston, who visited Kossula in and around 1927 in Plateau, Alabama.
