howardpark

My first week in Jordan has taught me that I'm not as well-traveled as I thought. For instance, every place I've been previously uses the same basic weekly calendar. Of course they have different names for the days, but in most countries the work week is Monday through Friday and the weekend is Saturday and Sunday. In Jordan, the work week is Sunday through Thursday, Friday is a holy day when most places are closed, and Saturday is a "normal" weekend day.

A trip into Amman drove the point home even more forcefully. We ran into some Jordanian friends-of-friends who instantly offered to show us around the city. They had an open bottle of vodka in the car and drank freely from it as they maneuvered through traffic, which in Jordan is an adventure even when sober. That was strange enough, but then the thought occurred to me that I was sitting in a Jordanian car next to a couple of caucasian women who were talking in Mandarin about the last time they met in Kenya. I suddenly felt extremely provincial.

As in many non-Western societies, the idea of equal treatment as a policy or principle isn't firmly established. Wasda (personal relationships) often take precedence. Want to transfer some money? You must fill out forms X, Y, and Z. But my uncle is a friend of your father. Ah, in that case, no problem!

Some other little quirks: To turn a light on, you flip the switch down, not up. The landscape is dotted with Bedouin tents and their sheep, goats, chickens, and dogs. These nomadic people are allowed to live anywhere they can, i.e. any place that does not physically prevent them from entering and squatting. Although there are many Western-style restaurants, bars, and hotels, there are also types of establishments that are totally unique, such as the Reem al-Bawadi ("gazelle of the wilderness"), a kind of open-air restaurant situated in a series of huge enclosed courtyards partly covered by tents, with fountains, archways, bridges, low ornate tables, divan-like seats, and a kitchen chimney spewing smoke like a foundry. Each table has a manhole-sized depression in the center, lined with carved bronze, in which the food is served. And when everyone's done eating, they break out the shisha (hookah).

The last few days have been wondrously disorienting, but also auspicious. On my first night in Jordan, I saw the biggest, brightest shooting star I've ever seen. It moved across the sky at such a stately pace that I mistook it for a plane until it finally fell to earth and broke up like a firework.


(The first photo shows men at Friday prayers in the old town of Amman. The second shows the King's Academy campus with some of my colleagues.)

In three days, I'll be leaving home for a true-life adventure in Jordan. I'm going to teach history at King's Academy, a school set up to spread tolerance and peace in the Middle East. What am I expecting and hoping for? First I'm hoping to learn as much from my students as they learn from me. I want to hear their life stories and try to understand what it means to grow up in the 21st-century Middle East. I am expecting to hear that some things there are more heartbreaking than a middle-class American could have imagined, but also that kids there experience love, joy, and fun, as kids have throughout history. I'm also hoping to form deep friendships with my colleagues. I know that together we'll be helping to address one of the biggest problems of our time, violence in the Middle East. In my free time (if any), I want to explore Amman, walking all over the city and stopping in cafes, markets, and shops to see (and perhaps take video of) what people are doing. I'll be posting pics here for those who are interested.


Notice Israel on one side and Iraq on the other. In a way, Jordan is at the fulcrum of history right now.

Happiness may seem like a pretty nebulous concept, but psychologists like Martin Seligman have been doing their best to study it scientifically. This field is called Positive Psychology, and over the past few decades its practitioners have come up with some interesting results.

"Contrary to everything you might think, 'in the long run, it doesn't much matter what happens to you,' [Jonathan] Haidt writes.... 'It's better to win the lottery than to break your neck, but not by as much as you'd think.... Within a year, lottery winners and paraplegics have both (on average) returned most of the way to their baseline levels of happiness.'

"The study showed that people were most content when they were experiencing... 'the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one's abilities.' We are at our happiest when we are absorbed in what we are doing.... [Happiness is] 'a by-product of absorption.'

"A person in good health in a Western liberal democracy is, in terms of his objective circumstances, one of the most fortunate human beings ever to have walked the surface of the earth. [People in the past] would have regarded our easy, long, riskless lives with incredulous envy. They would have regarded us as so lucky that questions about our state of mind wouldn't be worth asking. It is a perverse consequence of our fortunate condition that the question of our happiness, or lack of it, presses unhappily hard on us." (John Lanchester, "Pursuing Happiness")

In short, your attitude has a much stronger effect on your happiness than any external event does. If you want to be happy, do something you're good at. And even the people who have the most to be happy about can find reasons to be unhappy.

If you were to ask an art historian about landscape painters, two names that would probably come up are Constable (above) and Ruisdael (below). John Constable was an English painter born in 1776, the year of the American Revolution. Jacob van Ruisdael was a Dutch painter who lived a century before him. They had some similar ideas about how to paint a landscape. For instance, they both considered the sky a matter of maximum importance; they thought of it as a dome of light that controlled the appearance of every other part of the painting. But in one important way, they were diametrically opposed. Ruisdael felt free to paint from his imagination and "improve" on reality. Constable felt that imagination could never surpass reality. For him, the highest goal of a landscape painter was to observe and understand nature.

Should art try to be better than life? Or is that merely self-delusion? Both sides have a point, but I'm a fan of better-than-life. Sure Constable is the purer artist, sticking to his principles... but his pictures don't make me long for another time and place, the way Ruisdael's do. What's wrong with a little outrageous invention if it produces pleasure? For me, enjoyment is everything; artistic principles are nothing.

Speaking of landscapes giving pleasure, my friend ShirlT made and sent me a beautiful painting for my birthday. Deepest thanks, Shirl! Her paintings can be viewed online here.


(The first painting is John Constable's Stour Valley and Dedham Church. The second is Jacob van Ruisdael's Bentheim Castle.)

I saw Day Watch last weekend with my sister and her husband. We talked about it afterwards, and I was surprised by how much they liked it. I mean, I didn't hate it, but it had such obvious flaws, I thought they would find it as empty as I did. My beef with it was that it didn't make enough sense. It's set in an alternate reality with some supernatural phenomena, but the phenomena seem to have been pulled out of a hat, without rhyme or reason. There's a magical piece of chalk, but it has nothing to do with the magic wad of aluminum foil. And the magic aluminum foil has nothing to do with the magical otherworld known as the Gloom. And of course the Gloom has nothing to do with the chalk. Somehow, this didn't bother my sister or her husband. They simply felt that a movie like this didn't have to have any overall structure or meaning. So what if the different elements were unconnected and inconsistent? That didn't dull the sweetness of the eye candy for them one bit.

Perhaps I wanted Day Watch to be something it wasn't trying to be. But wasn't it trying to tell a story? And isn't a story just better if it makes some kind of sense? It doesn't have be a traditional, realist kind of sense, but I enjoy a story more when all its parts work together. For example, compare Day Watch with another fantasy about a demimonde of the undead, Interview with the Vampire. Whatever you may feel about the absurdity of blood-sucking in general, you have to admit that Anne Rice's story is driven by a certain logic. The story and its phenomena seem to flow naturally from her basic premise about the nature of vampirism. It's possible that Timur Bekmambetov wasn't trying for that kind of narrative logic. It's possible he actually intended to make a movie in which the main premises are incoherent and arbitrary, in which the rules are just made up as it goes along. But if those are the terms on which the movie demands to be accepted, we may as well accept that Bekmambetov simply intended to make an empty, mediocre movie. And succeeded.

Thumbs-up on this site.
But be warned: too much time here
Will make you talk weird.

"I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting--its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers.... it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation." (General William T. Sherman, 1865)


When he was proposed as a candidate for President, Sherman replied, "If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve."

Let me tell you a story about a girl I once knew (some details have been changed). Her name was Naoki, a quite typical Japanese girl's name. She grew up on Long Island with parents who were considered strict and traditional, even by Asian standards. Like many kids brought up under a tight rein, she ran a little wild when she went away to college. She had a wandering heart that took her from one boyfriend to another, sometimes under circumstances that made her seem like a trouble-maker. There was one strange thing about this: none of these boyfriends happened to be Japanese, and all of them happened to be Korean. Naoki's close girl friends happened to be Korean too. But whatever, people are sometimes drawn to people of a race other than their own.

Perhaps that's how she explained it to herself. Then one summer she went to visit relatives in Japan, and in the heat of an argument, one of her cousins let slip that Naoki "doesn't even know who she is." When she confronted her parents about the comment, they had to admit that they were in fact not Japanese--they were Korean. To understand what that means, you have to know a little about the history between Korea and Japan. Korea was conquered by Japan and occupied for 40 years, during which time it was ruled in the same way that European colonies were ruled, by the gun and the prison. Most Koreans refused to cooperate with the Imperial Japanese Army, but a few became collaborators.

After Japan was in turn conquered by America, and Korea became independent, the collaborators realized that they would face retribution if they stayed in Korea. So they moved to Japan, exchanged their Korean names for Japanese ones, and assimilated into Japanese society. The secret that Naoki's parents had been keeping from her was their family's role in oppressing their own people.

Anyway, after several more years of wandering from one guy to the next, she started talking seriously about a guy named Bill. Naoki and Bill went to college together, but other than that, they seemed to have nothing in common. Naoki was athletic, and outgoing, and worldly; Bill was the opposite of those things. Naoki was Korean; Bill was white. Naoki was considered very beautiful, whereas Bill had the kind of looks that made you think he must have other virtues. The problem was, no one could figure out what these virtues might be. Several of her friends openly voiced their concern about the match.

Her parents went even further. They complained incessantly about his various flaws and refused to invite him to family events. That's probably what drove her, their own resistance. Naoki announced that she and Bill were getting married. Her parents cried, screamed, and threatened to disown her. She was resolute. Her parents boycotted the wedding, and before she and her husband moved to California to start their life together, they wrote her a letter saying something like this: We don't understand why you are doing this, but it's obviously intended to hurt us, and we can't take that from one of our own children. We therefore disown you. Please do not contact us again.

Naoki and Bill moved to San Francisco, where they both found new jobs. They got a cozy apartment in the city and started making it their home. Everything was going fine, at least far as Bill knew. He started to think about having kids, but whenever the subject came up, she seemed to get annoyed. Finally, after six months, Naoki sat Bill down for a talk, and she said something like this: I'm sorry but I realize now that I never loved you. I was confused, and it's all my fault, but we should go our separate ways.

Bill was hurt, but amazingly not crushed. He hoped for a while that she might change her mind, but after a year he agreed to a divorce and started seeing someone else. In the meantime, Naoki drifted. She moved in with a friend for several months, until it destroyed their relationship, then with an ex-boyfriend. She became disillusioned with her work. She tried contacting her parents but got no response. Then one day she came down with a really bad cold. It turned into pneumonia. A worried friend flew over from Boston and put her in the hospital, where she died. The friend, herself a doctor, said Naoki "just lost the will to live"--there was no medical reason for her death. She was 34.

When I heard about Naoki through a mutual friend, I couldn't stop thinking about the futility of life. We are each and every one of us going to die. And yet we spend our limited time in a meaningless struggle for money and status; we plan and sacrifice and suffer in the hope of enjoying a future that may never be. If Naoki had known she would have only 34 years, would she have spent so many of them in labor and study? For me, it was like a call to start going out way more often, try all the things I always wanted to try, and visit all the places I always wanted to visit. Thinking about death is also what made me get a job in the Middle East. Before my own number comes up, I want to dip my hands into the very stuff of history.

(Thanks to arjunsharma for this picture.)