So it’s particularly gratifying to discover that someone out there values something I had to say about my favorite novel. The article in question, “Cosmopolitanism and Zoroastrianism in Moby-Dick,” appeared in recent volume from Ashgate Publishing entitled The Turn Around Religion in America, edited by Nan Goodman and Michael P. Kramer. The volume brings together work inspired by the scholarship of my dissertation advisor, Sacvan Bercovitch.

Here’s what the review in the May 1st issue of Choice had to say about the book:

More a festschrift dedicated to a distinguished scholar than a fully cohesive set of essays, this collection addresses Bercovitch’s characteristic themes during a long career at Columbia and, ultimately, Harvard. Best known for his work on Puritanism, Bercovitch has included all of American literature in his scope, and he is one of the vertebral forces behind recent revisionary conceptions of the field. The contributors to this volume are former students of Bercovitch and distinguished contemporaries such as Michael Colacurcio (who writes on Emerson). Receiving full treatment are typology and its millennial-Christian reading of Judaic biblical motifs; dissensus and its role in regulating American life while providing an aura of rebellion; Edward Taylor, brilliantly reconceived (by Shira Wolosky) as Hebraic; and Herman Melville and Nathanael West. Goodman (Univ. of Colorado, Boulder) and Kramer (Univ. of Bar-Ilan, Israel) also include essays on Bercovitch’s work: e.g., Andrew DuBois’s masterful discussion of irony in Bercovitch’s writing. Further afield, Cyrus Patell on Zoroastrianism in Moby-Dick and Giuseppe Nori on “process and continuity, genealogy and destiny” in the Romantic historiography are major contributions to scholarship. This reviewer cannot imagine the Americanist who will not need to refer to this book at least once in his/her career. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. — N. Birns, The New School

To become a “vertebral force” — now that’s an aspiration I’d never thought of before. But, actually, it’s a pretty good description of Saki’s contribution to literary scholarship and cultural studies.

Thanks again, Nan and Michael, for including me among the contributors. It was an honor to participate.

For those of you who think in Celsius (something I haven’t yet learn to do after eight-and-a-half months as an expat), that means its 26C at 8:00 a.m., going up to 38.

My apartment is about to be divided into two different temperature zones. My wife loathes air conditioning and wants to keep the windows open — to enjoy the desert breezes — but I can’t work at my desk when I’m sweating.

Meanwhile, over my coffee and camel link, I find the following tidbits in today’s National.

“Emirati visitors help boost ailing Egyptian tourism industry”

“Egypt is open for business. I think it’s a fantastic opportunity for tourists to enjoy Luxor, Aswan, and the Pyramids when it is relatively empty, to enjoy the beaches on the Red Sea or the Mediterranean when they are not extremely crowded.” — Mounir Fakhry Abdel Nour (Egypt’s minster of tourism since last February) [Read article]

“Burj Khalifa floor for sale, to developer Emaar’s surprise”

“A US website is offering an entire floor of the Burj Khalifa at auction – despite developer Emaar denying any knowledge of it. … ‘As far as notable real estate auctions, this one tops them all,” Bill Lange, the president and chief executive of LFC Group, said in a statement. “The auction will attract serious buyers who understand that this is an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to purchase an entire corporate floor in the Burj Khalifa at a price they determine through online bidding.’” [Read article]

Featured Comment: “The truth on mixed marriages: only the strong will survive”

“The divorce rate in the UAE is on the rise and, as much as we would like to blame the Turkish soap operas as some newspapers have suggested, the truth is a lot more complex. Many factors are contributing to the destruction of that sacred bond that in most cultures is meant to last a lifetime. … The majority of mixed marriages are between Emirati men and expatriate women. But since there are many eligible, attractive Emirati women, why do many Emirati men choose to marry women who come from different cultures? … In many cases, the in-laws are mercifully thousands of kilometres away, only a factor during holidays, over the phone or via Skype, which can dramatically improve the husband’s general quality of life. A marriage with distant in-laws, fewer financial obligations and a wedding that can be conducted in the courts in less than an hour is simply irresistible to many Emirati men.

“To ensure that Emirati men make the right decision and are aware of the challenges that accompany cross-cultural marriages, a course could be offered before they make such a life-changing decision, intended to educate both people about the reality and the obstacles that lay ahead of them.

“Not only could a course be offered before the wedding, but also during the term of the marriage and when problems begin to arise. A culture of marital support needs to be freely offered and better promoted to ensure that couples are educated and have a place to turn when all else fails.” — Taryam Al Subaihi [Read article]

The best piece of news in the paper, from my perspective, is about the team from NYUAD that took first place in the energy competition at the Hult Global Case Challenge. Four NYUAD  sophomores — Madhav Vaidyanathan (India), Songyishu Yang (China), Muhammad Awais Islam (Pakistan), and Gary Chien (Taiwan) — and NYU alumnus Neil Parmar (Canada),who actually writes for the National, received the award for a plan to help SolarAid provide solar lighting to one million homes in Africa by 2013. The Challenge also had competitions for initiatives in education and housing. Bill Clinton announced the winners in New York.

You can read about it here: “NYU Abu Dhabi team shines with solar plan.” See also Parmar’s piece “Winning formula aims at powering up Africa.”

I’m especially pleased about the team’s success because the NYUAD student who initiated the effort — Madhav Vaidyanathan — was one of the candidates whom I interviewed during the first admissions weekends that I attended in November 2009. Don’t tell him, but when people used to ask me why I was so excited about NYUAD during the months before we opened, I used to cite the polymathic Madhav and our ability to get him excited about NYUAD as sign of the promise of the institution.

I may be living in the Middle East, but I’m still a dyed-in-the wool New Yorker.

And it’s a rare moment for a New York sports fan of my persuasion: both of my favorite teams are in first place. That would be the New York Rangers (hockey) and the New York Mets (baseball). It won’t last, so I’m savoring the moment.

I’ve been following the Rangers since 1973, suffering through many ups and downs. This year, though, the Rangers have had a spellbinding season, after quite a number of recent disappointments. They’ve built a team around a core of younger players mixed with a few bona fide stars: goalie Henrik Lundquist and forwards Marian Gaborik and Brad Richards. Here’s the best thing about the team: it’s talented and gritty, as shown by its commitment to blocking shots. (Would you put your body, even in hockey pads, in front of a slap shot traveling at about 100 mph?) With two games left in the season, they clinched first place in their conference, guaranteeing home-ice advantage in the playoffs until the Stanley Cup Finals. And, who knows, if they win tomorrow, they might even get that. The Rangers last clinched first place in the Eastern Conference in 1994, the magical spring in which they won the Stanley Cup for the first time in 40 years. They have a very good chance to repeat that feat this year, though as every hockey fan knows, the Stanley Cup playoffs is a second season altogether, grueling and unpredictable. But wouldn’t it be glorious, if Madison Square Garden could witness a moment like this one again:

I’ve been following the New York Mets even longer — since 1969 when I was in second grade and watched them win the World Series on a black-and-white television in the hallway of my elementary school. I’ve suffered a lot because of the Mets too, as readers of this blog know from my post “The Crypto-History of the Historic Collapse of the New York Mets.” (I really should update that post to take the humiliation of the Bernie Madoff era into account!) But today they’re in first place, having won their home opener 1-0 behind the pitching of Johann Santana and David Wright. The possibilities seem limitless.

Let me dream a bit. I’m well aware that the team’s spring training record was an abysmal 9-20-2, the 20th a loss to the Yankees in a game that the Mets were leading until the 7th inning. So, starting tomorrow, it’s probably all down hill. But right now, it looks like this:

Thanks to the magic of twenty-first century technology, I can stream the teams’ games in HD over the internet by subscribing to Gamecenter at nhl.com and to mlb.tv. The picture quality is amazingly good — good enough to watch on my big LED HD television. Afternoon baseball games turn into night games here, which is fine, but those 7:00 p.m. hockey starts are going to take their toll. (We’re 8 hours ahead, so you do the math.) But, hey, our school year ends in mid-May, and I fully expect the Rangers to be playing well beyond that. And if they do, I’ll be getting up at 3:00 a.m. cheerfully.

Let’s go Mets! Let’s go Rangers!

On the way there, I made a brief stop outside the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex …

where NASA is listening for signs of life in outer space, using these big radio dishes:

At Tidbinbilla, I saw these …

… and these …

Unfortunately, koalas was nowhere to be found in “the wild,” though I did see one of the critters …

It was great to be out and about in the bush, even if it was somewhat domesticated bush. One of these days, I’ll be back in search of a more rugged experience.

At the airport, I resisted the temptation to buy these …

I did, however, buy some of these odd-looking items …

What are those, you ask. They’re little scent pots made from the very absorbent cones of the Banksia Grandis, which is found in Southwest Western Australia. A few drops of eucalyptus inside, I’m told, and your room will smell like a forest.

When I first heard about the conference on cosmopolitanism being held by the Island Southeast Asia Centre (ISEAC) at Australia National University in Canberra. I jumped at the chance to add Australia to my list of continents visited. Only Antarctica remains, though I won’t really count Africa until I’ve been sub-Saharan. (Something that may happen this summer.)

Canberra is a planned city, situated between Sydney and Melbourne, though closer to the former. The spot was chosen in 1908 as a compromise, because neither Sydney nor Melbourne would agree to let the other become the nation’s capital. Canberra was designed by the Chicago architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, and next year marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of construction.

As capital cities go, Canberra is pretty sleepy. The picture above was taken from the Telestra Tower at the top of Black Mountain, just west of the city center, and it shows the downtown. My hotel, the Crowne Plaza, is next to the cranes just to the right of the center of the picture, and the Canberra Centre, a mall that occupies several blocks, its buildings joined by enclosed walkways on the “first” floor, is just to the left a little forward. ANU is in the foreground at right. It’s very, very green all around the city, which seems dominated by its landscape.

To put things in perspective: the shops in the Canberra Centre close at 5:30 p.m. on weekedays, 5:00 p.m. on Saturdays, and 4:00 p.m. on Sundays. It’s open late on Fridays (9:00 p.m.). A few restaurants — like Sammy’s Kitchen, where I had lunch yesterday with some of the conference organizers, or Kingsley’s Steak & Crab House, where I had a wonderful T-Bone for dinner, are part of the centre and spill onto the street, and they remain open after the rest of the centre has closed. But the whole area has a deserted feel to it at night. On Saturdays, the parking meters near my hotel only charge you from 9:00 a.m. to noon., which tells you something.

i decided to rent a car because I was arriving late last Wednesday night, and while driving on the left is something I get used to quickly, I decided to take it easy on myself an opt for an automatic transmission rather than a manual. Left-handed shifting at night on unfamiliar roads seemed like it might have been a bridge too far.

But nothing in Canberra seems like it’s too far. The airport is about a 15-20 minute drive, and Google Maps keeps telling me that wherever I want to go is about 8-10 minutes away by car.

Looking for whatever culture might be available, I bought tickets before arriving to see an Arab Australian comic named Akmal (Saleh), who was trying out material for a new show at the Canberra Theatre Centre, about a five-minute walk from the hotel. That was Friday night. On Saturday, I’d planned to attend the Canberra Symphony Orchestra‘s outdoor “Proms” concert, but I received an e-mail at mid-morning saying that the concert was cancelled due to a forecast for severe weather. For a while, as I visited the National Museum of Australia in the late afternoon and then walked around the artificial Lake Burley Griffin in the bright sunlight, it seemed that the weather gods might have been playing sport with the symphony. But from the top of the Telestra Tower, which I visited next, you could see clouds rolling in from the distance, and, sure enough, there was driving rain, crackling thunder, and lightning bolts at about 7:00 p.m. The post-storm air, tinged by the smell of wet eucalyptus, was delicious and very un-Abu Dhabi.

This morning I’m going to venture south of the city centre toward the Parliament Building and the National Gallery of Australia, which has a special exhibition called “Renaissance: Raphael, Botticelli, Titian, Bellini.” The exhibition features 15th- and 16th-century paintings from the Academia Carrara in Bergamo and runs until April 9.

After that: further down south, to the Tidbinbilla National Park, in search of a brief bush walk and a marsupial or two.

As far Antarctica goes, who knows? According to this recent article from the National, the company Antarctic Dream will be running cruises in November …

[Avec l'iPhone 4s et un peu d'aide de Photoshop Elements et des excuses à Georges Seurat.]

Some years later, a professor at Syracuse University named Douglas Brode asked if he could include the essay in a reader that he was putting together for a course on Star Wars. Naturally, I agreed.

Some time after that, the course having been a big success, he asked whether the essay might be included, in revised form, in an anthology based on the course reader that would be published by Scarecrow Press. Once again, I agreed.

Cut to the chase: “Star Wars and the Technophobic Imagination” will be appearing this June in the first of what has turned out to be two volumes about Star Wars. Both are edited by Brode and Leah Dyneka.

Here are the tables of contents for each volume.

Volume 1: Myth, Media, and Culture in Star Wars: An Anthology

1. Douglas Brode, “Cowboys in Space“: Star Wars and the Western Film”
2. Arthur Berger, “Is Star Wars a Modernized Fairy Tale?”
3. Craig Svonkin, “From Disneyland to Modesto: George Lucas and Walt Disney”
4. Leah Deyneka, “May the Myth Be with You, Always: Archetypes, Mythic
Elements and Aspects of Joseph Campbell’s Heroic Monomyth in the Original Star Wars Trilogy”
5. Dan Rubey, “Not so long ago, not so far away: New Variations on Old Themes;
Questioning Star Wars’ Revival of Heroic Archetypes”
6. John C. McDowell, “From Sky-Walking to Dark Knight of the Soul: George Lucas’
Star Wars Turns to Tragic Drama”
7. Michael Kaminski, “Under the Influence of Akira Kurosawa: The Visual Style of George Lucas”
8. Crystal Renee White, “Balancing the Force: How Media Created by Star Wars
Now Defines the Franchise”
9. Jon Hogan, “A Long Time Ago on a Newsstand Far, Far Away: The Mythic Comic Book Hero in Marvel Comics’ Star Wars”
10.  Eric Charles, “The Jedi Network: Star Wars’ Portrayal and Inspirations
on the Small Screen”
11. Seth Sommerfeld, “Gaming in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: The History of the Expanded Worlds, Canon Conflicts, and Simplified Morality of Star Wars Video Games”
12. Henry Jenkins,”Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media
Convergence, and Participatory Culture”
13. Cyrus R. K. Patell, “Star Wars and the Technophobic Imagination”

Volume 2: Sex, Politics, and Religion in Star Wars: An Anthology

1. Douglas Brode, “A Rocky Road to Star Wars: The Early Life and Career of George Lucas”
2. Andrew Howe, “Star Wars in Black & White:  Race and Racism in a Galaxy
Not So Far Away”
3. Julien Fielding, “Beyond Judeo-Christianity: Star Wars and the Great Eastern Religions”
4. Andrew Bank, “May the Force Be with JEW: The Jedi-Hebraic Connection”
5. Nick Desloge, “Star Wars: An Exhibition in Cold War Politics”
6. Peter Krämer, “Fighting the Evil Empire: Star Wars, the Strategic Defense
Initiative and the Politics of Science-Fiction”
7. Ray Merlock and Kathy Merlock Jackson, “Light Sabers, Political Arenas, and Marriages for Princess Leia and Queen Amidala”
8. Anne M. Boyd, “The Over-Soul of the Force: Emersonian Transcendentalism
in the Star Wars Saga”
9. Lucy Place, “George Lucas and Freud’s Anal Stage Manifestations of Excretory and Vaginal Fear in THX 1138 and Star Wars”
10. Roger Kaufman, “Homosexual Romance & Self-Realization in Star Wars”
11. Matt Singer, “The War for Star Wars”
12. Nick Jamilla, “Defining the Jedi Order: Star Wars’ Narrative and the Real World”
13. Andrew Gordon, “The Empire Strikes Back: Deeper and Darker”

Meanwhile, the Star Wars universe is very much a destination in my household. My two sons are addicted to the new MMO game Star Wars: The Old Republic and continue to watch new episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Their dad might be doing a little playing and watching too (though not nearly as much as he’d like to).

I missed National Day last year, but arrived later in December to find the streets still lit up with celebratory decorations in the colors of the UAE flag — red, white, and green (the fourth color, black, doesn’t figure much in the illuminations except as background). Driving in from the airport and seeing all the bright decorations reminded me of New York, lit up at the time with Christmas lights.

Because 40 is a nice round number, this year’s celebration is an even bigger deal.There have been activities all week throughout the Emirates, including a military plane display yesterday in which smoke was released in the colors of the UAE flag, a splendid fireworks display tonight over the Corniche, and a massive Olympic-opening-ceremonies-style extravaganza over at the Zayed Sports City tomorrow.

It puts me in mind of New York again — in particular, the festivities on the annual Puerto Rican day with T-shirts, flags, and gaudily decorated cars. Except on a much more massive scale. The building shown above is the Etisalat Tower across the street from us, which has been sparkling each night for the past two weeks. All around town, public buildings and private houses are covered in bright lights; we’ve seen a few houses wrapped in massive UAE flags.

And the cars: everywhere you look you see cars, large and small, covered in large decals celebrating the anniversary, featuring UAE flags, hearts, the number 40, and likenesses of Sheikh Zayed and of the country’s present rulers. Here are some samples, mostly massive SUVs, but also the first Smart Car we’ve seen here:

Tomorrow, there will be a parade of decorated cars over at Yas Island, with prizes to the three judged best; there will also be an unofficial parade of cars, I’m told, over at the Corniche. And, in addition to horns blaring, there will be the sounds of cars being made to backfire intentionally.

Meanwhile, we’re doing our bit and getting into the holiday spirit:

Here’s what it looks like out our windows this morning. To the northwest:

And to the southwest:

By noontime, I expect it will be mostly sunny.

UPDATE: Actually, my older son had a fire drill at his school around noontime, and he tells me that it drizzled.

Meanwhile, my friend and former doctoral student Robert Gunn (a member of the English Department at the University of Texas, El Paso) recently sent me this reminiscence prompted by his reading of the book:

I really enjoyed your reading of the album in the context of your personal experience of NYC as a kid.  As an ill-reformed rock and roll guitar player myself, I must say I also delighted in your discussion of the technical side of the Stones’ sound, including Keef’s infatuation with open G tuning on five strings.  As it happens, Some Girls was the first full Stones album I bought, in high school (I, too, began with Hot Rocks, and wore it out before bothering to venture deeper into the canon).  Nowadays, Beggars Banquet through Exile remain steady in the rotation (love the country blues stuff), but Some Girls has enduring appeal.

As I was reading, I felt wistful reflection back on my own unselfconscious identification with Jagger’s lyrics.  It was kind of comical, actually—I mean, I knew he was talking about New York in “Miss You” and “Shattered,” but somehow that place didn’t seem real to me; I was sure he was talking, instead,  about that somewhere else I always wanted to be, in a mystical zone of cool and where everyone had that jaded, faded, rocknroll strut.  And even if no one else knew what it was about, that’s where I belonged (and often felt I was, in my own mind).  And so I’d walk down the rainy streets of Eugene, Oregon, humming riffs to myself, thinking you needed to be tough tough tough tough tough tough to live in this town(!), and keeping an eye out for all of those Puerto Rican girls who (I dearly and earnestly hoped) were just dying to meet me.

But the best part was the sound—my best friend and I were in rival bands, and I was extremely envious of his old MXR Phase 90, which produced the “Shattered” sound perfectly; my band played that song for a while, too, but I dropped it because, ultimately, it sounded like shit approximated on my Peavey digital flanger (a truly worthless relic of 80s hair metal; I don’t think I ever, even once, produced a cool sound off of that thing).