Southern California: Where Winter Never Is

Seriously? This is November? Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. Enjoy the day, and travel safely.

Why Sad Panda is Sad

via LAist

Bike Help Needed

From a story that begins well with the Bikerowave, and ends today:

Less awesome: The bike I was working on. I brought in an absolute clunker of a bike – an old Motobecane that had been sitting outside under the porch in Colorado for far too long and had then made the trip to California and spent most of its time sitting in our hallway. Less than awesome. There’s progress on the beast, and it was almost (briefly) rideable. But when I brought it home and inflated the tire a little more, I realized there was a slight issue. If the tire was inflated to the recommended psi (say, about 80), it bulged out seriously on the sidewall, so much so that it wouldn’t spin through the brakes. So I deflated the tire, tried to reseat the bead in the rim, then inflated the tire again. Same problem. Repeat, except this time I removed the tire and spread a little chalk on the inside between the tube and the tire, thinking that the tube might be getting bunched up when inflated. When I inflated the tire again (again, to about 80 psi, though the tire says it takes 90 psi), it seemed fine. I was psyched. Deflate the tire, slipped it back into the bike, tightened down the wheel a little, then pumped up the tire again. Everything seemed gravy, but within about a minute, the tire/tube was bulging back over the rim. I went to deflate the tire again to look at it when the tube (predictably?) popped.

Any thoughts?

Orhan Pamuk on his newest book

(Thanks Jenny!)

Kitchen portrait

Making fresh lasagna for dinner.

Rice fields, Syauli Bazar

Rice fields, Syauli Bazar, originally uploaded by timurhammond.

At work on other things, but another shot of Nepal.

Call for Papers AAG 2010

Call for Papers: 2010 Meeting of the Association of American Geographers
Representing Place: Methods, Tensions, and the Problem of Authenticity

“What I am describing may not, in the end, be special to Istanbul, and perhaps, with the westernization of the entire world, it is inevitable. Perhaps this is why I sometimes read Westerners’ accounts not at arm’s length, as someone else’s exotic dreams, but drawn close by, as if there were my own memories. I enjoy coming across a detail that I have noticed but never remarked upon, perhaps because no one else I know has either.”
- Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City

Part of Orhan Pamuk’s project in his memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, is the authentic representation of Istanbul as a place of vibrant experience. Yet in his representation of Istanbul, Pamuk encounters two related problems: First, almost all of the historical accounts of Istanbul during the Ottoman Empire were penned by Westerners, visitors to the city of sultans. Second, Pamuk remains self-conscious about the non-Turkish origins of his own literary craft. Is it possible, he asks, for a Turk to write a memoir (itself a mode of representation with its own specific Western geography) about Istanbul that relies on Western accounts?

Pamuk answers in the affirmative, but his memoir raises a set of questions of broad importance to geographers. How do we come to be able to represent a place? What is at stake in the representation of a place? Do modes of representation (novels, paintings, photography, film) have their own geography? If so, what are the issues raised by taking those modes of representation elsewhere?

Broadly, this session is organized around the recognition that any representation of place - be it image, text, or sculpture - does not simply emerge from an essential experience of place. Rather, representations of particular places (like Pamuk’s Istanbul) come from somewhere else. Thus, to represent a place is to both search for a genius loci and to articulate relationships with other places. In the case of Pamuk’s Istanbul, his memoir is both an authentic representation of Istanbul and an argument that Istanbul can only be represented by drawing on Western writers and modes of representation. Istanbul: Memories and the City introduces what might be a necessary tension in any representation of place: They always come from somewhere else.
This session aims to gather a diverse set of methodological and conceptual approaches. Possible specific topics might include (but are certainly not limited to):

* Seeing the desert: ecology and imagination in the American West
* Bollywood and Hollywood: representations of India on the silver screen
* Representing jihad: the Middle East on film after 9/11
* Representations of the self in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North
* Learning to paint the world: Mughal painting under the rule of Jahangir
* Poetry and place: Robert Frost and “The Gift Outright”
* On the outside looking in: Representations of the United States in foreign media

The session will include 5 papers; presenters will have 20 minutes for their presentation and discussion. Interested parties should send a CV and a 250-word abstract to Timur Hammond at timur.hammond@gmail.com no later than October 25, 2009. Preference will be given to papers with a non-European focus, but papers exploring “Western” representations of place in a comparative dimension are also welcome. All questions will be responded to as quickly as possible.

Some explanation for an absence...

Annapurna South from Ghandruk, originally uploaded by timurhammond.

I took a trip to Nepal. The centerpiece of the trip was 7 days trekking to Annapurna Base Camp (which sits a shade over 14,000 feet, but well below the summit of Annapurna itself). This photo is from our second day on the trail, a glimpse of Annapurna South before the sky filled in with clouds.