Trees and Branches

The best blogs (I'm not speaking as an expert blogologist here) are inherently specialist. No one, unless you're famous and large breasted, really cares about your recently dead cat or the recent paint job you got for your car. But if you know what you're talking about, they're are audiences for servicemen overseas, political insiders, constitutional law experts and interns at Paramount studies with juicy tid bits and the like.

Lately, I've been a big fan of a blog of Eurasian affairs, which is done by these two guys Joshua Foust and Nathan(?) who are Central Asia experts. I don't mean they've memorized wikipedia pages on the stuff. NY Times and WSJ pieces I would have accepted without a second thought get knocked apart by careful and destructive logic and observation. For example, the whole premise of the security situation in Afghanistan improving based on road construction by PRTs comes under attack. It's the sort of blog where the reader put asides the scraps of knowledge they'd usually flail about, reads quietly, and makes no comment. Those that do are usually co-experts or aid workers and observers currently in the said locale or pompous idiots who quickly get demolished.

Stylish, well organized, eminently readable-all the sterling qualities of a great blog. What's almost intimidating is how they are linked to so many other blogs with a similar subject, namely the Central Asia and the -stan countries (along with Russia, Mongolia, Iran and other peripheral nations) and how they continually reference these other blogs and are referenced by them. It's almost seamless and yet, once again, it's a question of getting deluged with an information overload. It would be impossible to read them all at once, interesting as they are doubtless all are. It's almost troubling that even though they all touch on the same or similar topics, they're each distinct perspectives on a vast subject. You delve deep, which is what makes them good, but you'll never get the whole picture. If you're not informed, you won't get a coherent one for a long time. The panoramic view becomes impossible.

Of course, this is their very nature as blogs of observation and discussion. They typify why blogs are so emblematic of these times, as a thousands points of light in terms of information gathering. It's so utterly far removed from trying to study the early middle ages, for example, where modern historians are reduced poring over scraps of texts gaping with lacunae, where whole decades pass without remark. Now history is not longer in the province of the few literate or the wealthy patrons or ecclesiastics; it belongs to those who are on hand. Battles will no longer be recorded second hand but directly recorded by the frontline participants shortly after the actual event takes place.

And it's refreshing to see how Registan, for example, not only challenges a government's version of events (which would be too easy, it's almost a given that people would question it) but supposedly reputable journalism not through rabid polemics but through clean cut reasoning and first hand observation.

Massacring historiography

Irving Kristol once remarked

"There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work."


He forgot to mention that then there are truths for whiskey addled self-obsessed gits who behave like old men and secretly enjoy it while they live in quiet terror of vagina dentata. This blog fills that abyss. Roughly and uncomfortably. With much chafing.

Now to the marbled meat of the matter: I intend for this to be a blog about history. Specifically moments from history that fascinate me strike a chord and rile up opinions. My observations are without system or discipline or objectivity. I'm just going to write whatever the hell I feel like about historical topics.

Frankly I'm also writing for myself. There are tens of millions of bloggers out there who are more persuasive or insightful or gay or interesting or sluttier than I am, which I fine. This is my little street corner that I can rant on about secret purple sweater the government is forcing me to wear, etc, etc. At the end of the day, I'm an utter dilettante. I make no apologies for this.

Consider this: When you walk into a Barnes and Nobles, you will probably never read the vast majority of books-that are released in just one year. Forget the perennial classics and self help guides. It's not because you're a lazy philistine. It just can't be done. It doesn't seem outlandish to surmise that there have been more written material published in print or electronically in the last 50 years than in the last 5000 years when a Sumerian hipster first wrote ironic poetry on a slab of cow shit.

It also means the age of the vaunted classic is over. Who remembers Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet from the late 50's? At the time, the buzz was that the quartet placed him in nobel prize territory. Well he's dead as shit now and Barnes and Nobles probably isn't going to fill the empty space on the shelves left by my recent purchase of his books for several years, if they don't just replace them with something else.

Let one complain that the age of great classics is over. That's pure drivel. With the utter deluge of print and electronic media, there are probably dozens of outstanding books published every year that you or I won't hear or certainly won't read in our lifetimes.

The Western Canon has reached its carrying capacity.

At any rate, I'll pick and choose my subjects as I please and do with them whatever I wish.