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Although I've been blogging regularly over at Patell and Waterman's History of New York over the past few months, I've been on hiatus here. But now that the year has officially begun its second half and my summer graduate class on the American novel after 1940 has come to its end, it's time to start up this blog again.


During the hiatus, I've done what I predicted in my last post: I'm writing this entry on the 13"  aluminum MacBook that I asked NYU to get for me. I was due a new computer in the fall, but our computing chief managed to provide the Mac early so that I could use the summer to get used to the new platform. I used some of my research funds to upgrade the specs to a larger hard drive and faster processor. Here the important numbers:

Model Name:    MacBook
Model Identifier:    MacBook5,1
Processor Name:    Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed:    2.4 GHz
Memory:    4 GB
Bus Speed:    1.07 GHz
Hard Drive Capacity:    232.89 G

It's basically equivalent to the new 13" MacBook Pro that Apple announced last month. The new model adds the possibility of a faster processor, and it adds a Firewire port and an SD slot to the side, while subtracting the dedicated line-in jack. A bigger difference is that the new model has no removable battery, though Apple claims that its built-in battery last significantly longer on a single charger. I'm a fan of removable batteries, though, and I'll be buying a backup battery for my trip to London later in the month.

I'll admit that one of the first things I did to the machine when it arrived in May was to create a Boot Camp partition and install a copy of the Windows 7 Release Candidate software that Microsoft has made available.  The tech guys told me that they thought that was a waste of hard disk space and that I'd be better off installing virtualization software to run Windows from my MacDesk top. As it turns, out they may have been right: I've had little reason to boot up the Windows partition, especially now that I've installed Mac versions of Adobe Acrobat Professional and Photoshop Elements. The Windows partition does sport the full Adobe CS3 Master Collection, but I'm thinking that I should learn the Mac video tools that my older son has begun to learn at his school.

For now, it's video that keeps me linked to the Windows world, because I haven't yet figured out how to do all the things on the Mac that I know how to do with in Windows to create video clips for my classes. That's a project for August. I have, however, demoted my Vista desktop to second-tier status, hooking it up to my secondary monitor and moving the Hackintosh that I built around an EFI-X dongle to the primary. In other words, I'm mostly Mac these days.

The NYU tech support folks did warn me that I'd need Windows to run some of the administrative software that NYU uses: in my case, its the accounting software that lets me monitor various research funds that I have. So I've installed Parallels software in order to run Windows XP in a virtual window. It works like a charm. Meanwhile, the NYU accounting software doesn't work well with Windows 7 thus far, so it's looking increasingly likely that I'll be deleting that Boot Camp partition from my MacBook in the near future.

Have I become an Apple fanboy? No, I'm afraid I like tinkering with my computers too much to be fond of Apple's don't-open-it-up ideology. (For example, I've discovered that the Intel Quad Core processor that I used for the Hackintosh, a Q8200, doesn't support virtualization and therefore can't run parallels. So chances are good I'll be upgrading it before long.)

But I've found a lot of things to like about the Macintosh, which I'll be discussing in the coming days.

Computer bilingualism is here to stay.

I acquired a Dell Mini 9 netbook very soon after it was released last fall. My HP Tablet was feeling heavy, and I wanted something that I could carry around more easily. I'd been checking out the various ASUS Eee PCs, but I decided to go with the Dell because of its reportedly roomier keyboard. I was hoping that I'd be able to use the Mini 9 to run my PowerPoint presentations in lecture.

When the unit arrived, I wasn't disappointed. I immediately upgraded the memory to 2 GB (Dell would only sell me 1GB due to restrictions imposed by Microsoft; in retrospect, I should only have ordered 512 MB). I didn't mind the lack of dedicated function keys, but I found myself wishing that instead of placing the quotation/apostrophe key on the bottom row to save space, Dell had put the colon/semicolon key there instead. I suppose Dell thought that more people would use the Mini to surf the web rather than to do extended typing: ostensibly you need the colon after your "http" more than you need apostrophes or quotations marks. (Most browsers, however, allow you to do without the "http://" these days, so I'm still not sure it was the right choice even with net-users foresmost in mind.)

Oddly, I found the lack of hard drive noise and the absence of a hard drive activity light a little disconcerting too, but with the SSD, the system was pretty snappy to boot up, and, yes, it did a great job with my PowerPoint presentations. It became my standard classroom machine.

I ran into a problem when I tried to upgrade my firmware to the version A04 in late December. The firmware updater was a Windows program, and it hung up in the middle of the update -- bricking the poor little Mini! So I didn't have it with me when I went to the MLA in December: it was at the Dell service depot being unbricked. It was, however, back before the new year.

And then I heard about the RunCore SSD upgrades, demonstrated on the jkkmobile blog, a site devoted to testing, upgrading, and hacking netbooks. So I ordered a 64GB SSD from mydigitaldiscount.com. It was backordered (as it is again today), but once it arrived, the installation process was easy. I followed jkkmobile's instructions below:

was enhanced in our household by the fact that we'd acquired two bettas last fall, one of which bore a striking resemblance to Microsoft's.

I'm told that the betta will disappear when the public Release Candidate version appears in May.

And then I learned that the Dell Mini 9 made a wonderful Hackintosh because all of the hardware is supported natively by Apple's OS X Leopard operating system.

Now I'm a big fan of iPods (I've owned 5 different models so far), and I love my iPhone 3G, but I've always found Macs a little off-putting. It started back in the day when the first models were released and you needed to eject CDs using the software. The software-eject became the embodiment for me of the way I reacted to the Mac difference: what was supposed to be easier for most people was actually harder for me. Then again it'd taken me a while to get used to the whole graphical user interface thing, because I'd spent my summers in college programming for IBM on mainframes: I was used to the command line and I liked it!

I actually own a first-gen (pre-Intel) Mac Mini. I bought it when my older son was entering Kindergarten, because I'd heard that his classroom would have a Mac. It did, but it was an older Mac running OS 9, and the programs that the kids used -- the Bailey's Bookhouse series from Edmark -- didn't run very well on OS X Tiger, which came with the Mac Mini. The Windows versions ran fine, however, so we used those at home. The Mac Mini currently resides in my office, where one of my Macophile colleagues uses it.

Now, however, he is a third-grader, and his school has an up-to-date Mac-based computer lab and all the Macs in the school are networked together. He's been learning PowerPoint and Keynote and lately iMovie in his technology class. So I figured it was time for me to start to learn to speak Mac more fluently. I'd always felt in the Mac environment the way I feel in Paris linguistically: not quite up to speed.

I'd had it in mind to build a new computer to run Windows XP, and then I learned about the marvelous EFI-X USB dongle, a bootloader that allows you to load any major operating system (Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X, Linux) so long as you have compatible hardware (and it's OS X that imposes the has the most restricted compatibility). So I acquired an EFI-X, bought hardware from their compatability list, and put together a triple-booting machine over the Christmas break: XP, OS X, and eventually the Windows 7 Beta. And I started my Mac lessons.

So when I read this guide to loading OS X onto the Mini 9 from Gizmodo, I couldn't resist. Like the author of the guide, I had to create a bootable USB drive and transfer the files from my OS X disc to it. I diverged from the instructions near the end, continuing to use the USB drive where the author reverted to a USB DVD drive. As a result, in step 15, I had to enter "81" instead of "82" to get to the Mini's SSD (if you read the guide, you'll see what I mean).

And it worked. It just plain worked. The larger SSD meant that I didn't have to strip down Leopard, and I've loaded iLife '09, iWork '09, and Microsoft Office 2008 with plenty of room to spare. The only thing that doesn't work well for me so far is Garageband, in part because the program needs greater screen resolution than the Mini 9's 1024x600, but mostly because the Atom processor in the Mini 9 can't handle the processing required to enable plugging in an electric guitar. (That works fine on my Hackintosh by the way.)

If you want proof of how well the Dell Mini 9 handles OS X, check out this video by Andy Inahtko of the Chicago Sun-Times:




Inahtko's also written a column about this project for the Sun-Times online.

Technically, I've violated the user agreement that came with my copy of Leopard when I installed it on non-Apple hardware. But should Apple really be upset that I'm currently running a purchased copy of OS X on a Dell Mini 9. I don't think so, and here's why: First, as Inahtko points out in his column, creating a Hackintosh is not for the faint of heart (even with a relatively compliant piece of hardware like the Mini 9), and it will only ever be an enthusiast or hobbyist project. Bottom line: it won't cut significantly into Apple's sales. And it might just get Windows people like me in the Apple door.

Creating the Hackintosh Mini 9 got me to buy a copy of iWork '09, and I'm going to be testing out Keynote in class later in the month. What's more, it's now likely that the next notebook that we buy (sometime before this fall) will be a MacBook. Or even a MacBook Pro. I'm now committed to computer bilingualism.

In recent years, I've been arguing that Melville's Moby-Dick dramatizes the benefits of cosmopolitanism -- as well as some of the obstacles to its realization. So I was pleased to discover that the political scientist Aristide Zolberg wraps up his study A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (2006) with a discussion of cosmopolitanism in which he marshals none other than Melville.

Zolberg makes a case "for restraining the power to exclude, grounded in the necessity for liberalism to adapt to globalization by developing a more 'cosmopolitan' orientation" (p. 454). He then argues that

the gist of a more radical argument on behalf of open borders was set forth a century and a half ago by Herman Melville, when the Great Hunger drove hundreds of thousands of destitute Irish out of their country, prompting the emergence of a wave of xenophobia on the American side and a spate of proposals for restricting immigration. As against this, Melville, who had recently served as a sailor on an immigrant ship, urged that the door be kept open. (p. 455)

The "Melville principle" is expressed by a quote from the novel Redburn

Let us waive that agitated national topic, as to whether such multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American shores; let us waive it, with the one only thought that it they can get here, they have God's right to come; though they bring all Ireland and her miseries with them. For the whole world is the patrimony of the whole world; there is no telling who does not own a stone in the Great Wall of China. (p. 455).

Zolberg does suggest that Melville's "generous stance was predicated on the knowledge that Ireland contained but some 6.5 million people, and that there were just so many sailing ships available at any given time to bring the Irish to the United States" (p. 456). Zolberg suggests that the realities of the modern world have rendered that kind of calculation obsolete. Unlimited immigration is simply not an option for wealthy nations, which would quickly sink to the level of poorer nations if they were overwhelmed by immigrants.

And yet, the Melville principle remains a principle worth adapting and promoting. For, as Zolberg concludes, "immigrants who feel welcome rarely set out to destroy their new home" (p. 459).

[To give credit where credit is due, my reading of Zolberg's book was prompted by my reading of a forthcoming boundary 2 essay by Jonathan Arac on Chang-rae Lee's novel Native Speaker (1995).]

So here's a place where two of my interests -- technology and politics -- come together: David Bergman's Gigapan image of President Obama's inaugural address. It's a 1.47 gigapixel shot -- yes, that's gigapixel not megapixel -- created using Gigapan's Epic photo mount, which enables you to shoot a series of multiple overlapping pictures that can later be fused into one helluva panoramic print. Bergman set it to shoot a grid that was 20 photos wide by 11 photos down. The whole process took about 15 minutes to complete.You can read Bergman's account of how he came to make the picture on his blog.

If you click on the image below, you'll be taken to a fullscreen viewer that you can explore, zooming in, out, and all around, using your mouse.

One of the questions that arises in the course of Melville's Moby-Dick is whether Ahab's name is significant. It's not just a matter of literary symbolism, in which the author is sending a signal to the knowing reader that the the reader might glean something about the character from the name. That's standard practice in allegory.

For example, in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come (1678), a Christian allegory that takes the form of a dream vision, the main character is named "Christian," and we're meant to understand that what we're reading is a representation of the Christian life. But none of the characters in the book talk about why Christian is named Christian.

Likewise, Oedipa Maas, the protagonist of Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) has a name that is fraught with symbolic overtones: her first name brings to mind Oedipus, Sophocles' tragic hero or Freud's Oedipus complex or the Oxford English Dictionary (commonly referred to as the "OED," which happens to be Oedipa's nickname, "Oed"); while her surname sounds like the Spanish , the intensifier "more" (from the Spanish más, meaning "more" or "most" or "else). Reader, make of all that what you will!

It's different in Moby-Dick though. Naming the captain of the Pequod "Ahab" is not just a signal to the reader about ways of reading both the character and the narrative: it's also a subject for discussion among the characters themselves. In one of my favorite chapters, "The Ship," Ishmael signs up to serve on the Pequod (after a wonderfully comic good-cop-bad-cop routine in which two of the ship's owners, Captains Peleg and Bildad, use Biblical logic to drive down poor Ishmael's share of the profits) and then thinks to ask about the ship's captain.

Here's Peleg's answer:

He's a queer man, Captain Ahab -- so some think -- but a good one. Oh, thou'lt like him well enough; no fear, no fear. he's a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab; doesn't speak much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab's above the common; Ahab's been in colleges, as well as 'mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier stranger foes than whales. His lance! aye, the keenest and the surest that out of all our isle! Oh! he ain't Captain Bildad; no, and he ain't Captain Peleg; he's Ahab, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!  

Ishamel, though, is a former schoolteacher and knows his Bible, so he calls Peleg's bluff: "And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood?" The reference is to the story of Ahab in 1 Kings.

So Peleg changes his tack:

"Come hither to me -- hither, hither," said Peleg, with a significance in his eye that almost startled me. "Look ye, lad; never say that on board the Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did not name himself. 'Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed mother, who died when he was only a twelvemonth old. And yet the old squaw Tistig, at Gayhead, said that the name would somehow prove prophetic. And, perhaps, other fools like her may tell thee the same. I wish to warn thee. It's a lie."

Is naming Ahab's prophetic? Near the end of the novel, Ahab seems to embrace the idea: a sense of destiny that seems to be foretold by his naming. Justifying his seemingly mad actions to his first mate, Starbuck, Ahab asks (in Chapter 132, "The Symphony"), "Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? ... how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I." Seemingly answering his own question, he says, "By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike."

Now two economists at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, David Kalist and Daniel Lee, offer a modern perspective in the Social Science Quarterly. You can read about their work in a Time magazine article entitled "Can Your Name Make You a Criminal?" According to Time, "The short answer is that our names play an important role in shaping the way we see ourselves -- and, more important, how others see us."

I guess squaw Tistig was on to something.

Then again there are people who, unlike Ahab, manage to overcome the limitations implicit in their naming. Here's one for you: Barack Hussein Obama.

Barack Obama has patterned himself after some of our most revered Presidents. During the campaign he invited comparison to another Illinois politician who began his career in the state legislature, Abraham Lincoln, and it's been widely reported that he's been influenced by Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin's account of Lincoln's cabinet. Because of his age, he's been compared to John F. Kennedy. And in his inaugural address on Tuesday, he invoked George Washington and echoed Thomas Jefferson.

On day two, however, he was keeping company with two of the less august members of our presidential pantheon: Chester A. Arthur and Calvin Coolidge.

Arthur, Coolidge, and Obama are the only three presidents who have had to retake the oath of office.

In both Arthur's and Coolidge's cases, the irregularities occurred because a sitting president had just passed away.

Arthur was sworn in on September 20, 1881 in New York City after President Garfield died the previous day from the wounds he received after being shot in the back on July2. The oath was readministered when he returned to Washington, DC, two days later. (Click here to see an engraving of the first oath.)

Coolidge was sworn in on on August 2, 1923 after President Harding passed away. The oath was administered to Coolidge by his father, a notary public, which struck some as unseemly, so it was redone. (You can read Coolidge's rather moving account of his intial swearing in here and a painting of the event from the Library of Congress here.)

Which makes Obama's case unique and a tad embarrassing in comparison. Of course, Obama's mistake wasn't exactly his fault: it was Chief Justice Roberts who misplaced the word "faithfully," with Obama (who clearly had studied his lines), then prompting the Chief Justice to correct his error. But in the confusion what Obama ended up doing was repeating the mistake. Greg Craig, the White House chief counsel, said that the original oath was legal, but that it was better to do it again "out of an abundance of caution." There's a nice little account of the do-over at msnbc.com.

Let's hope that we remember this little episode as the biggest mistake of Obama's presidency (wouldn't that be nice?) and not a portent of bigger mistakes to come.

In a sign that it's a former rather than the latter, one of the other things that Obama did yesterday was a literal case of putting his money where his mouth has been: he froze the pay of senior White House aides making more than $100,000.

Go, O!

{Photo Credit: Office White House photo: Pete Souza / White House handout via AFP - Getty Images.]

INAUGURATION DAY 2009


At the words "And so help me God," we popped the bottle of Mumms. I'm saving the cork.


"We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness."

Tomorrow  is the one-year anniversary of the rebuilding of my right knee by Dr. Andrew J. Feldman. The surgery involved a high tibial osteotomy, an ACL recision, and a microfracture. When I saw Dr. Feldman three months ago, he was very pleased with the result. The tibia, into which a wedge of cadaver tissue had been inserted, had healed perfectly; the ACL reconstruction was stable and strong; and the alignment was just what he wanted. He believes that we have staved off a knee replacement for a good long time. Unless I abuse it. (Apparently, Steve Yzerman, the former captain of the Detroit Red Wings hockey team who had the same operation, went back to playing hockey, knowing the the knee would only buy him a couple of years. Given the salary he was being paid, it was worth it to him, but now he will need the knee replacement sooner rather than later.)

So I'm going to wear a knee brace whenever I do sports activities that are likely to put rotational stress on the knee. That includes ice skating, rollerblading, kicking around a soccer ball, and playing tennis. The brace is way cool, by the way. It's the official brace of the U.S. Ski Team, and it's manufactured by Donjoy and was custom-fitted for me by Gotham Surgical and Brace on 39th Street. I had my choice of colors, but chose a respectable dark blue.




















I know it's hard to believe seeing just the pictures, but the brace is actually remarkably comfortable, indeed, much more so than the smaller fabric covered brace I was wearing a couple of months after the surgery. What's great about the brace is that there's no fabric on it, so it's cool and there's nothing to rub against the area where the plate was screwed onto the bone. 

The knee feels strong. Here's what I can do now that I couldn't do before the surgery: run for the bus. I can go from standing still to running without a second thought and without pain afterward. The arthritis is still there on the medial side of the knee, but with the weight shifted to the outside of the knee, I'm rarely aware of it. Oh, there's a minor twinge every now and then just to keep me honest, but it's night and day from a year ago.

And the area where the plate was inserted has almost all of the feeling back. In fact, I think there's less numbness than there was after the first surgery twenty years ago.

To celebrate the anniversary, I bought myself a new set of CCM hockey skates, my first new pair in about fifteen years. My first time on the ice after the surgery was last weekend at Wollman Rink, though it was so crowded that it was hard to really get in good skating rhythm. So tomorrow morning, weather permitting, I'm off to the "The Pond at Bryant Park" first thing in the morning to put the knee through its paces. Bryant Park on a weekday generally has the advantage of being less crowded than Wollman and -- even better -- much less expensive: in fact, it's free.

Don't worry, Dr. Feldman, I'll be conservative!

Major League baseball's free agent-signing season began today, with the Yankees making a monster offer to the Milwaukee Brewers' pitcher C. C. Sabathia. They're apparently also planning big offers to free-agent pitchers Derek Lowe and A.J. Burnett. The Mets are going to be more conservative with their money this off-season, but they're still hoping to be able to find some free-agent help for the bullpen and the outfield.

This year, however, I'll also be watching as another team takes shape: the Presidential Team. How nice -- and how strange -- to be following the rumors about Cabinet posts with the same intensity that I follow the rumors about baseball signings and trades. Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State? Bill Richardson? They both seem like good choices to me, but I think that if Clinton would agree to do it, we'd have the strongest sign yet that it isn't going to be politics as usual in Washington starting January 20. (And I always thought that the triumph of liberal politics in The West Wing was such wishful thinking, particularly the last season with a young minority candidate winning the presidency and then choosing his rival to be Secretary of State.)

And what a change to be looking forward to Inauguration Day! It feels like the beginning of a new millennium. Too bad about the eight-year delay.