امروز به بازار برو و يك كتاب بخر و صهيونيست هاى غاصب را اخراج كن

So my favorite souvenir from my trip to Syria was a pair of Farsi textbooks from the Iranian Cultural institute. I was leisurely reading the chapter on the command for of verbs when all of a sudden things took a turn for the Bizarre and hilarious.

ھر روز صبح ورزش کن۔ سپس صبحانہ بخور و لباست را بپوش
Every morning practice sports. Then eat breakfast and put on your clothes.
مسلمانان جھان! بہ عزت خود برگردید۔ صھیونیست هاى غاصب را اخراج كنید
Muslims of the World! Return to your power and chase away the usurping Zionists.

Without warning they just slip that last sentence in there. Later there is a part where you're supposed to change singular to plural commands and after sentences like "come home" and "listen to your father's advice" comes "resist oppresors" and "help the oppressed."

Teen Dream

Teen Dream

The Urdu ghazalth and its discontents

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was struck at reading Urdu Ghazal poetry by its incredibly sappy, self-debasing, and 'emo' tone. These supposedly eternal verses came off as not much more than portentious whining. Then my buddy özge did me a solid by giving me access to her friend Evrim's libary account at boğaziçi university and I've been spending all morning drooling over articles, one of which was Ralph Russel's "the pursuit of the Urdu Ghazal" which detailed his own initial disdain and disbelief with why Ghazal's are so revered when they don't seem much more than a random string of couplets about unrequited love. Russsel finds a key in a quote by C.S. Lewis "any idealization of sexual love, in a society where marriage is purely utilitarian, must begin by being an idealization of adultery". Lewis is referring to medieval European literature when he made this statement but russel sees no offense in describing Urdu literature as such since the mughal empire was entirely "medievel in spirit" as well as being itself the language of an elite and thereby being "markedly aristocratic in its values".
So when you take this historical background into account, and imagine some stubble-chinned poet in mughal India being a little bit dramatic because he can be counted among one of the more blue-balled of the civilizations unbehangen (Herbert Marcuse would be so proud of me now, historicizing the ontogenesis of Mir Taqi Mir ), you can be a little more sympathetic for our dear hyperbolic bards.

we can use this little passage from Russel to expand on the historical context

It is worth pointing out that all three of these situations (coveting another man's wife, homosexual love for a youth, courtesans) of love have one feature in common- the lover knows that his love must in the last resort be hopeless. A girl married or betrothed to another man can never be his; a boy grows up; and a courtesan by the very nature of her calling cannot giver herself to him alone. The desperation of the lover portrayed in the ghazal is, therefore, a desperation founded upon all the real-life experience of love

He goes on to discredit such a mechanical interpretation of the inspiration for these poets, and waxes on about the relative unimportance of wondering if in concrete reality these authors actually experienced such unrequited episodes of passion, even in the mystical sense, for if we know something for certain it is that most of the most famous urdu poets were not overly mystical. The important thing for Russell is the role these poems play as a sort of social pressure release valve in a society founded on feudal principles of divine decree, ordained caste, and fatalist social standing. Even the rulers can get in on the act of allowing a couple of homo-erotic love poems to become adored by society. He says
"the rulers of society felt no great difficulty in giving the seal of approval to the ghazal as a, so to speak, licensed, institutionalized form of passionate protest against a world in which the poet and his audience were likewise confined"
I of course live in an age of repressive desublimation and so sexual angst means almost nothing to me unless I work in a contrived aesetic way to engender it in myself (which I actually did once for a semester and even that in small doses drove me straight into the arms of mysticism and troubadordom) and so I guess I can imagine to what lengths I would be emo-ized under such conventionally repressive conditions (I no doubt buy into the notion that repression has merely been deffered into the performance principle but at least I can look at boobs before I get married) . If you take a look at any one of ghalib's macabre verses you can begin to appreciate a sense of meloncholy as "a pure culture of the death instinct".
I can imagine myself likewise repressed in an age where satisfaction wasn't so immediately accessible. not even in the erotic sense, hell take Jstor for example. before I had access to it it could be said of my heart
دل میں ذوق وصل ویاد جائ ستور تک باقی نہیں آگ اس گھر میں لگی ایی کہ جو تھا جل گیا

not even relish for union and memory of the beloved Jstor remained in the heart.
Fire so raged in this house that whatever remained, burned

Lundinish

So I hoped that by studying verbal nouns, case endings, and syntax of enough languages I could somehow find a transcendent path to making Lundinish the most unique language possible. I wanted to get away from any overly obvious semblance to an existing language by blending and extracting to the point of completely erasing my tracks. I think it's uber interesting that the more grammar's I read (Yoruba, Japanese, Kurdish, Quechua) about, the more imprisoned I feel in human thought. There is no way really to evade one of the inevitable choices between SOV, VSO, SVO, etc. you can make minor changes to pronouns if you want but they seem cosmetic since you still have to have them. It feels like watching a bad sci-fi movie where you can tell that the magical creature they've conjured up is just an elephant with scales, or a robot that just looks like an effeminate bald guy. Even elvish is just a rip-off of Finnish.

For Lundinish I am taking the best parts of Arabic verb-roots systems and turkish's clever syntactical use of possessive contructions with verbal nouns (-dik clauses) and the Dravidian use of only having one finite verb per sentence (I'm getting around that by defaulting all infinite verbs to the 1st person singular simple past (like in Arabic but more narcissistic) and making all other verbs act as adverbs). I'm also hoping to make prepositions entirely redundant (I'm getting close) as well as the case system other than leaving in a few prefixes that denote genitive and izafa structures to complex nouns. I've been hoping to find a more novel way to make compound nouns (nostalgia + book = journal) but I haven't thought of anything better than the way most languages do it i.e. just putting them next to each other. My verbal nouns are easily done by adding a single vowel in front of the verb stem, the internal vowel of verbs denote a general sense of mood or essence (big, exotic, passionate, matter of fact, etc.) rather than transitivity of passivity as in Arabic ( I show that through the additions of one of 5 consonants after the verb stem). Subject and object pronouns attach to each other independent of the verb ( I-you talked).
Despite this, even if I smoked lots of opiates and lived in new guinea or continually evolved Lundinish without ever finalizing anything, I will never get away from Deep Grammar. As we say in Lundinish

Atog meşeyaax tascaamç
human social tradition is inescapable

healthcare in Cuba by Ilker Belek

I'm borrowing a book about the health care system in Cuba that I am borrowing from the Jose Marti Friendship association, and it is like reading some sort of futuristic sci-fi utopian novel. when the Cuban government was suffering from agricultural shortages, it started an Urban agriculture which raised fruit and vegetable production by 1000% between 1994-2006. There is an emphasis on equality at the class level between urban and rural areas in terms of access to healthcare. Coordination and decentralization. They have elections for national, regional, and municipal healthcare councils. (aspiring hospital administrators who play guitar on the side shiver in their labcoats). The book also stresses (although not with much extra effort) that these successes are due to the socialist formation of their healthcare system. Motivation is a looming problem for the system but sure as shit better than the alternative. It reminded me of my favorite reading experience of alllllllll time.

our objective is to eliminate ghettos. Therefore, the only valid policy with respect to this objective is to eliminate the conditions which give rise to the truth of this theory. The simplest approach here is to eliminate those mechanisms which serve to generate this theory. The mechanism in this case is very simple- competitive bidding for the use of the land. if we eliminate this mechanism, we will presumably eliminate the result. This is immediately suggestive of a policy for eliminating ghettos, which would presumably supplant competitive bidding with a socially controlled urban land market and socialized control of the housing sector. Under such a system, the Von Thunen theory (which is a normative theory anyways) would become empirically irrelevant to our understanding of the spatial structure of residential land use. This approach has been tried in a number of countries. In cuba, for example, all urban flats were expropriated in 1960. Rents were paid to the government "and were considered as amoritzation towards ownership by the occupants".
This approach to the ghetto land and housing market is suggestive of a different framework for analyzing problems and devising solutions. Notice, for example, that all old housing became rent free. If we regard the total housing stock of an urban area as a social (as opposed to private) good, then obviously the community has already paid for the old housing. We have an enormous quantity of social capital locked up in the housing stock, but in a private market system for land and housing, the value of the housing is not always measured in terms of its use as a shelter and residence, but in terms of the amount received in market exchange. In many inner city areas at the present time, houses patently posses little or no exchange value. This does not mean, however, that they have no use value. As a consequence, we are throwing away use value because we cannot establish exchange value. This waste would not occur under a socialized housing market system and it is one of the costs we bear for clinging tenaciously to the notion of private property.


So many people are dying in America because an exchange value cannot be established for fixing them. Stupidest shit ever. Viva Cuba.

better book collection than goosebumps

found these pearlers at the good old akmar. Almost done with les grottes de phobos and it kicks ass

true love never dies

میں بہت وقت سے اب تک اینڈی موسیقی سے محبت کرتا ہوں اور کچھ سال سے میں پتچفورک ڈوت کوم استعمل کرنے سے اور فیشن پرست ہو سکتا ہوں۔ ہائ سکول میں جسٹین اور میں ایک نیا بانڈ سے ملکر بہت ہیجان اور منتخب احساس رکھتے تھے۔ ہم موسیقی پرہمت مہم والیی تھے۔ ابھی ہر چیز بہت بہت آسان ہے۔ لیکن پرہمت مہم کا روح غائب ہوتا ہے۔ ماضی میں مجھے بہت خاص بانڈوں تھے۔ کوفاکس ایک اچھا مثال ہے۔ انکا ہر البوم بر بر سنتا تھا۔ابھی ایک نیا البوم ڈاونلوڈ کرنے کے بعد کبھی کبھی صرف ایک وقت سناتا ہوں۔ اج کوفاکس کا نیا البوم خود مہں ملتا تھا اور اوک نوستالجیک تجربہ تھا

Koufax-roll the dice