Dove's Eye View

Randa Jarrar: A Map of Home

If you've been paying close attention, you'll remember that my friend and blogging buddy Randa Jarrar has a novel coming out - on Tuesday! She's already receiving great reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. See here for advance praise:

A Map of Home.

"The narrator, Nidali Ammar, is delightful company through these pages that take us from her birth in Boston to her childhood in Kuwait to her flight during the first Gulf War to the relatively safe haven of Alexandria, Egypt, then from Egypt to the United States once again. Nidali must negotiate the confusion of being part Greek, Palestinian, Egyptian, and American, but more than this she lives in perpetual exile. Hers is a particularly complicated immigrant story, since she is continually arriving and adjusting only to depart, arrive, and adjust again. On her map of home, the borders are never fixed. ...Funny, surprising, and fully alive." -Porter Shreve

Go buy this book!

Sad Bumperstickers of San Francisco

Seen August 28 on a carefully-maintained, vintage VW microbus, Sutter Street, San Francisco:

"I never thought I would miss RICHARD NIXON"

Sad, funny and true.

Egypt opens Gaza Strip crossing

Egypt opens border crossing with Gaza Strip.

For Ramadan.

I don't understand why Egypt has closed the border at all. They are collaborating with Israel in perpetrating a war crime - collective punishment. The blockade of Gaza is illegal under international law. Egypt should not be cooperating with Israel in this criminal matter.

Keep the border open!

California: Curb Sprawl and Emissions

California Moves on Bill to Curb Sprawl and Emissions - NYTimes.com.

“What California is doing for the first time,” said Ed Manning, a lobbyist who represents the state’s 25 largest homebuilding companies, “is planning for housing needs, transportation needs and climate-change needs all at the same time.”

Homebuilders and environmentalists worked out a compromise to create this bill - hope that means it will actually do some good.

P.S. - why don't I read about this in the local papers? The Oakland Tribune is hopeless, but at least the San Francisco Chronicle? It's always the Times, based in New York, that covers these big picture business and environment topics in California.

Collard Greens, Rednecks and California

I've been bantering back and forth at another blog with somebody who thinks Bay Area folk are too anti-redneck to eat collard greens. He just doesn't know the Bay Area. Our climate favors winter greens and you can get collards fresh, frozen, canned, pre-washed and cut, organic, Italian, you name it. My interlocutor also claims that yuppies would never put a sofa in the front yard; I answer with the Pottery Barn catalog of upscale outdoor furniture. He says outdoor clotheslines are redneck, I say the yuppie environmentalists all want them. He says folk here are too health-conscious to eat fatback, I answer that foodies have moved on and are totally into meat and fat, albeit sustainably grown, hormone and nitrite-free.

This commenter, calling himself Roger Bigod, says we in Northern California would not want to eat collard greens with fatback cooked in an iron pot over a wood fire. I say that dish sounds like the next big Berkeley Slow Food hit. Here's the recipe:

Recipes.

COLLARD GREENS

3 c. water

1 ham hock

1 tbs. sugar

1 tsp.. salt

1/2 tsp. pepper

3-4 bunches collard greens. Can also use mustard or other greens.

Put water and ham hock into pot and hang over fire to boil. Then move off the fire a little and let it to simmer for an hour or so. Wash the greens with good water, cold if possible. Tear stem off each leaf and tear remainder up into bite sized pieces. Check ham hock; if too much water is boiled off add enough to cover it again and move pan further off the fire next time. When everything is up to a simmer again add the greens, salt pepper and sugar. Simmer 45 min. to an hour or until greens are tender enough to eat.

Now I just have to get an iron Dutch oven and figure out how to build a fire outdoors. We don't have to call this redneck cooking, we can call it American Slow Food.

Oh yes, and fried chicken? Fried chicken has been the must-eat yuppie foodie dish for at least two years. Here's a Chez Panisse-derived fried chicken recipe that sells out every day at Bake Sale Betty's in Oakland. Don't forget to drink your boxed Pinot Grigio with it. Or sweetened iced tea.

The Times They Are a-Changin'

Philip Weiss, a journalist interested in ethnicity in America and Jewish power, believes that the narrative on Israel is changing in the corridors of the elite and even in the mainstream press. Today he points us to a Max Rodenbeck review in the NY Times as evidence:

'A Path Out of the Desert,' by Kenneth M. Pollack - Review by Max Rodenbeck.

"Pollack seems oddly unaware of history’s motivating forces. To assert that “what triggers revolutions, civil wars and other internal unrest is psychological factors, particularly feelings of extreme despair,” is plain silly. The Boston Tea Party could not have been prevented by Prozac. Similarly, he ascribes feelings to broad categories of Middle Easterners, devoid of any context or explanation. They are “angry populations” who suffer “inchoate frustration” and “a pathological hatred of the status quo.” We repeatedly hear of “Arab rage at Israel” and “Arab venom for Israel.” Nowhere is there a hint that such attitudes might bear some relation to the plight of the Palestinians, the agony of military defeat or the humiliation of life under Israeli occupation.

"In fact, the book’s most salient distortions stem from Pollack’s protectiveness toward Israel. He makes some absurdly cockeyed assertions, like, “America’s support for Israel over the years has even been a critical element in winning and securing Arab allies.” He offers misleading false alternatives, declaring, for instance, that there is “absolutely no reason to believe that ending American support for Israel would somehow eliminate” the risk of Islamist zealots taking power and cutting oil exports. How about making aid to Israel, and not just to Arabs, conditional, or aiming at mitigating, rather than eliminating, such risks? Pollack makes a peculiarly acrobatic effort to prove that hostility to Israel is not a prime motivating factor behind militant jihadism, repeating this assertion no fewer than four times in two paragraphs. Has he not bothered to listen to Osama bin Laden’s addresses to the American people, where he said that what converted him from dreamer to murderous activist was Israeli bombs falling on Beirut in 1982?"

Go get 'em, Max.

Rodenbeck grew up in Cairo, is fluent in written and spoken Arabic, and is the son of the man who brought Naguib Mahfouz's books into English (professor and former American University in Cairo Press publisher). I knew Rodenbeck in Cairo 25 years ago and still hear tell of him through mutual friends. No other journalist in English has his contacts and his depth of experience in Egypt and the larger Middle East.

What's significant here is that the New York Times had the guts to run the Rodenbeck piece with these acerbic, typically Rodenbeckian skewers. Perhaps the Times notices the shift in sentiment, and feels safe enough to print such comments. Philip Weiss has been predicting a sea change, saying that the book by Walt and Mearsheimer caused a shift in what is acceptable in American discourse on the Middle East. He sees this Rodenbeck piece in the Times as more evidence of that shift. I think he's right.

Max's book on Cairo is probably no longer in print but is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand that city, its history and its present. You also get a good whiff of Max's personality, that sheesha-smoking, dart-throwing cynic in love with Egypt in spite of himself. Rodenbeck, the Middle East bureau correspondent for the Economist, doesn't need the New York publishing world so he can't be shut out or intimidated.

A profile of Rodenbeck's father, a colorful character and Arabist in his own right.

Peace Camps

Len Traubman, tireless organizer of Arab-Jewish dialogue, rounds up peace camps around the United States:

Jewish - Palestinian youth - family summer camp - Arab Muslim Israeli Middle East peace Dialogue education camps.

Too numerous to list here - just go over and look. While the leaders sit around and say peace is impossible until the other side changes, the grass-roots gets up and makes peace happen.

Prudence

Student loans. Big new houses with funny mortgages. The New York Times reports today that this kind of debt gets people in trouble. Well, duh.

Just because everybody's doing it doesn't make it a good idea. Everybody used to smoke cigarettes, too.

Off the top of my head, here are some more bad ideas related to debt:

• Paying private school tuition with your home equity line of credit.
• Buying groceries on your credit card.
• Leasing a new fancy car rather than saving up for one you can afford.
• Buying new furniture on credit because you can't afford to pay cash.
• Investing in a can't-lose, get-rich-quick scheme.
• Lying about your income on a mortgage application to get a bigger loan.

The new furniture tip was taught to me in about the sixth grade and I've never forgotten the lesson. My parents tended to reinforce the idea at home, so I thought the whole world knew that you don't buy consumer goods "on time."

Instead, the whole world managed to forget those basics of consumer finance - or thought that the guidelines had been suspended due to... ??? Magical thinking maybe?

The piper must always be paid.

Early Biden VP Reactions

Positive: Juan Cole.

Not: Colonel Patrick Lang.

Both men report their personal encounters, specifically re: Biden's Middle East stance. Col. Lang emailed me privately that his encounter happened in about 1996 or so. Let's hope that Biden has or will evolve on the subject of Israel/Palestine and the Arabs.

Daily Kos rounds up views that Biden is a huge Amtrak supporter; his son sits on the board as well. The conclusion is that Biden as VP would be great for the United States rail system. Beats the Republicans, who have been trying to strangle Amtrak for decades now.

Fun Food By Bus

Today's SF Chronicle Food Page reviews an Afghan cafe in the Emery Bay Public Market food court. Bargain Bite: Pamir Afghan Cuisine.
The food court itself is a wonder - no chain fast food at all, but every ethnic food you can imagine, including a German hofbrau with roasted meats, as well as Asian, Middle Eastern and South American foods. During the 90s all the high tech guys ate lunch there, including my fiance, later husband.

Check out the Google map showing the direct bus from my neighborhood to the Public Market. We usually drive to Emeryville but the bus gets you there, too!

View Larger Map

If you were so lucky as to land a job at Pixar Studios, you could also ride the 57 bus to work.

Emeryville is a former steel and manufacturing town, controlled by a small cadre of corporations; it decided to remake itself in the 70s, brought in artists to colonize the empty warehouses and put up sculptures; the town then expanded into high tech, "big box" stores, bio-tech and now Pixar. The artists were like the cover crop, providing early hipster nutrients to the former factories and working-class homes.

People sneer at Emeryville for being too development and business-oriented, but we all end up shopping there: Ikea, Williams-Sonoma, discount carpet stores, Home Depot. I bought my first wig at Beauty Pie on San Pablo...

Emeryville has also built vast numbers of "loft" condos and apartments, turning gritty stretches of boulevard into yuppie havens. They haven't filled all their office space or sold all their residential real estate, but they have created a new world out of a funky, post-industrial mess. It's not perfect but it's prosperous and somewhat interesting. Arizmendi, the workers' bakery co-operative and offshoot of Berkeley's Cheese Board, has a branch right behind Pixar. Yummy bread and pizza, fresh coffee, and of course wi-fi. You can't open a barber shop in Emeryville without providing wi-fi.