Hunting Dracula with The Historian

I honestly never meant for Geek Buffet to end up with a whole series of posts on vampire fiction, but here I am, adding to it again. (Previous posts here, here, and here.) I picked up The Historian to take with me on my long business trip in large part because it looked interesting enough and, perhaps more importantly, it looked long, thereby cutting down on the number of individual books I would be putting in my luggage. It turned out to be a good choice, so if you’re looking for summer travel reading as well, read on.

I mentioned before that most of my vampire fiction reading has ended up being at an interesting intersection of vampire and detective. The Historian doesn’t quite fit that model, although the story definitely provides enough mystery and suspense for the reader to make you have to know how it ends. (Or at least it did me.) The title, interestingly enough, could apply to any number of the characters in the book: the narrator, her father, or her father’s advisor. Truly, there are three stories going on in the book, from each of these historians’ perspectives, creating a very layered effect as the story travels back in time through three generations of characters and then forward again, (which at least one person I know found off-putting enough that she didn’t get past the first couple of chapters, but really, you should keep going.)

The stories are all really the same story, of course, and everything converges nicely at the end. The premise is this: The narrator begins the book by saying that she wishes to present the story of how her family became so involved in, and later known for, the search for Vlad Tepes, aka Dracula. She begins at the beginning of her own journey, when she was still in high school and discovered a strange book in her father’s library, blank except for a woodcut illustration covering the two pages in the exact center of the book depicting a dragon and the word “Drakula.” It is also accompanied by a bunch of very old letters addressed to “My dear and unfortunate successor.” Her curiosity piqued, she finally asks her father about them.

Basque Gastronomy and History

I seem to have stored up a backlog of book reviews that I’ve been meaning to post, so I’ll start trying to clear them out of my head and onto the internet now. This first one is somewhat unusual, in that it’s actually non-fiction, which I haven’t been reading much of lately.

This book actually has to be paired with a radio story. Back in May, before I had to leave for my 3-week business trip to Asia (I’m chronicling that over on my personal blog), I heard this piece from the Kitchen Sisters on NPR, from their Hidden Kitchens series: The Sheepherder’s Ball: Hidden Basque Kitchens. While my own cooking skills are notably underdeveloped, I find this series fascinating for the way it explores history and culture through the initial touchstone of recipes and food. In this case, they revealed the existence of a sizable Basque community in the US that I had never heard about before.

Francisco and Joaquin Lasarte came to America in 1964 from Basque country in northern Spain. Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator who repressively ruled the country for nearly 40 years, made life miserable for the Basque people, suppressing their language, culture and possibilities.

The result was a massive exodus, and the only way to come to the United States for many Basque was to contract as sheepherders. There was a shortage of shepherds in the American West, and Sen. Patrick McCarren of Nevada helped craft legislation in 1950 that allowed Basque men to take up this lonely and difficult job.

Neither Lasarte brother had any sheepherding experience when they arrived in America.

Blogroll Addition: Jeff in Burundi

We seem to be having some sparse posting of late, but the summer travel season (including such things as vacations, business trips, weddings, moving, and preparing for new schools or jobs) is well underway, which is terribly distracting for our writers, alas. Hence, a blogroll addition to keep you distracted.

Jefferson Mok is a classmate from Grinnell who has just moved to Burundi to “establish a residential shelter for female child soldiers who need assistance to reintegrate into their communities.” Simple, yes? Especially as the sole representative of his organization. You can follow his adventures so far at his blog. He spent the last two years working with asylum seekers in Chicago, and is now going to try to help at the source. We wish him the very best of luck! I, for one, am somewhat in awe at the task he’s taking on.

How should the media cover Barack’s blackness?

A typo (I think that’s what it is) in today’s lead NYT campaign story caught my eye:

Mr. Obama also has sought to tie Mr. McCain to the country’s current economic woes, charging that the Bush administration has been “the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history.”
“And now John McCain want to give us another,” he said.

High Altitude Soccer Back On

Almost exactly a year ago, Geek Buffet’s Sports category was inaugurated with the post “Altitude Discrimination?“, about FIFA’s controversial decision to ban matches at altitudes above 2500m. Today, I spotted this article saying that FIFA has suspended the ruling.

It appears the initial ruling had undergone some changes since I noticed the original article. According to the one today, the rules ended up going into effect this way:

Fifa imposed a limit for international matches of 2,750m (9,022 ft) altitude in December.

Under the ruling, players could only take part in matches above this altitude if they had had one week to acclimatise, rising to 15 days for games above 3,000m (9,843ft).

Clubs have to release their players for internationals only five days ahead of internationals.

Due to the protest from many countries in South America, particularly Bolivia, FIFA is now forming a committee to look further into the true effects of playing in extreme conditions, including high altitude, as well as “heat, pollution or humidity.”

Hopefully I’ll notice when those results get reported on, whenever that happens. I’d be interested to see what they find, and how they decided to test such things for the specific purposes of soccer-playing.

-posted by Dana

The Obama/Clinton divide you haven’t been hearing about

It’s a story (followed by an argument, followed by facts) about the biggest split within the Democratic Party. It starts with two groups.

Group A is a social minority whose political and cultural power exploded during the 1960s. As that decade went on and certain factions within Group A grew more militant, Congress pushed to extend voting rights to millions of disenfranchised people in Group A. Today, Group A is shrinking as a share of the population, though its leaders remain visible and outspoken – and though its members increasingly dominate pop culture and the entertainment industry.

Group B, by contrast, holds sweeping political power. Much of the machinery and benefits of government have therefore aligned in Group B’s interest, despite the fact that Group B’s members are about half as likely to live in poverty as those of Group A.

Though they’ve often joined the same political coalitions, Groups A and B face a deep cultural divide on issues from the war in Iraq to gay marriage. In this year’s Democratic presidential primary, those fissures have showed up in state after state across the country, with Barack Obama winning Group A by colossal margins almost everywhere he goes and Hillary Clinton winning Group B by margins almost as big. It’s such a clear split that it seems to threaten the party’s unity.

Oh, by the way: Though no member of Group A has ever been elected president, more than half our presidents have belonged to Group B.

More Local China-Tibet Protest News

Not to make this blog all East Asia, all the time, but hey, it’s what’s catching my attention right now. It turns out there was a lot more fallout from the local NC protest/counter-protest I mentioned last week. A Chinese undergraduate somehow ended up between the two groups, apparently trying to get them to actually talk to one another rather than just competing over who could yell slogans loudest, and, well, things went downhill for her from there.

Some people posted an account of her actions to the Chinese student and scholar listserv I mentioned before as having organized the counter-protest. Outraged messages followed calling her a traitor. Then people posted her picture… and her name, her Chinese identity card number, her US address and email, her parents home and work addresses in China, a map to their house, and pictures of their front door. One of my colleagues has friends in the student’s hometown, and they called over the weekend to ask what the student had done to get rocks thrown through her parents’ windows. News of this has now made:

• The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 14, 2008
• Global Voices Online (with translations of some of the listserv emails), April 13 & 15, 2008
• NY Times, April 17, 2008
• Washington Post, April 17, 2008

Interestingly, the two articles that came out today do not mention at all the event that took place last night, which the NY Times reporter attended sitting next to the threatened student. It was a panel discussion set up to address the contentious issues surrounding Tibet (and to some extent the Olympics as well) in a calm, rational setting. Though seven campus police officers had been arranged for security, the entire thing went very smoothly, with no heckling or interruptions of any kind during the speakers’ presentations, nor during the Q&A. The campus paper has a reasonably good report of the overall points that speakers made here: Panelists Stress Trust, Sincerity.

Secular Memorialization

My last post on the Yasukuni documentary got me looking around for other stuff on the politics of war memorials in general. While I have mostly found so far that I will need to go to the library and check out actual books, I did come across an interesting article on Sino-Japanese relations in a 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs, which contained the following intriguing paragraph with a suggestion on how to handle the Yasukuni issue:

[C]onferences … involving academics from neutral countries such as Canada as well as Asian specialists from within the region, could improve relations by fostering less-politicized discussions of the war. Germany and Poland, as well as Japan and South Korea, already have joint textbook commissions that could serve as models for China and Japan. An initiative such as this could be particularly effective at de-escalating tensions in the wake of progress in the strategic dialogues outlined above. To help those dialogues along, moreover, U.S. officials should refrain from making casual pronouncements on the delicate matter of wartime commemoration in Japan. As Koizumi has noted, many personal issues are involved in such events. The Japanese people themselves, however, deserve the broadest possible range of options about how to remember the war. For several years, there has been spirited discussion about building a national secular war memorial to supplement Yasukuni, and this deserves serious consideration. Such a model has worked well in both Hiroshima and Okinawa. Apart from providing a way to commemorate the sacrifice of civilians and other heroes of past conflicts not enshrined at Yasukuni, a secular memorial would clearly help improve Japan’s relations with other countries in the region and provide foreign leaders with a way to gracefully honor the past sacrifices of the Japanese people.

-Calder, Kent E., “China and Japan’s Simmering Rivalry,” Foreign Affairs, 85(2)

(emphasis mine)

Yasukuni Documentary

I’ve written about the Yasukuni Shrine in Japan before, and all the controversy it causes, especially every year when the prime minister decides to go or not to go to pay respects. I was therefore very interested to read this article on the BBC yesterday all about a documentary that has been made about the shrine, simply called “Yasukuni,” by a Chinese director. It sounds fascinating to me, especially its attempts to understand what the shrine represents to differing groups:

In all, Li Ying has spent 10 years, on and off, making the film.

During visits to Yasukuni he says he was at times threatened, abused, and on occasion had his equipment confiscated. Newspapers here have reported that he has received death threats.

He says he set out to try to understand better what the shrine means to Japanese people.

[...]

To many it is one of the most sacred places in Japan. To others it is a place they feel glorifies war.

Local Olympic Torch Protest Follow-Up

Well, I did indeed get to come to work today and find out how the planned pro-Tibet vigil and pro-China counter-protest turned out last night. Both the campus paper and the local paper reported on it. The basic description from the campus paper:

Crowds of upset protesters flooded the Chapel Quadrangle Wednesday evening, interrupting a planned candlelight vigil supporting freedom in Tibet.

Members and supporters of the Duke Human Rights Coalition, led by juniors Daniel Cordero and Adam Weiss, marched from East Campus to West Campus, Tibetan flags in hand, to advocate for the region’s freedom from the People’s Republic of China.

In response, protesters bearing signs and Chinese flags filled the Chapel Quad, expressing patriotism and criticizing Western media through chants and song.

When the pro-Tibet faction arrived outside the Chapel, protesters swarmed them en masse with chanting and shouting.

The pro-China students had recruited compatriots from the two other large universities nearby and had them carpool over. Fortunately, yelling really loudly and in large numbers was as far as things went.

A bit more from the local paper, highlighting the frustrations of the Chinese students: