Boratmania, or something not entirely dissimilar

With Borat sweeping the USA and Canada it strikes me that a great many people know exactly nothing about Kazakhstan or Central Asia in general other than what is in this movie. I’m not exactly sure what is in the movie, but I can make a few guesses. Does Borat talk about how Kazakhstan and the rest of Central Asia are in the middle of a tugging war between the USA and Russia over influence over oil fields, pipelines and their strategic importance in relation to the Middle East (and China)? Did he talk about the culture or music (other than having extremely good prostitutes according to the one trailer that I saw) or the fact that much of it was nearly wiped out by the Soviet Union, not to mention language? Anyway, I could go on but I’m not really interesting in talking at length about a movie I have little interest in seeing. Rather I wanted to point out some interesting stuff that the library has relating to Kazakhstan and the rest of Central Asia.

There is a wonderful range of Central Asian music available at the library.
There is a great series co-produced by Smithsonian Folkways and the Aga Khan Trust For Culture called Music of Central Asia. The library has the first three volumes.
Vol 1: Tengir-Too: Mountain Music from Kyrgyzstan
Vol 2: Invisible Face of the Beloved: Classical Music of the Tajiks and Uzbeks
Vol 3: Homayun Sakhi: The Art of the Afghan Rubab
Wonderful liner notes plus a CD and a DVD. The DVDs are unfortunately each quite short, around 30 minutes each, but still well worth watching and the CDs are all wonderful. On the DVD for Vol 3 Homayun Sakhi describes his neighbourhood in Kabul that he left behind to go to Pakistan and later the US. “I have a lot of memories of Kucheh Kharbat, the musicians quarter in Kabul, where 400-500 musicians lived. Young and old alike played instruments. We were all playing music or making instruments. Every night we would go to someone’s house and play music. It was as if our street had been blessed and people made pilgrimages there. At night wherever you looked you would hear something nice. From one place you’d hear a Rubab; from another, a tabla. When things got bad in Afghanistan our street was completely destroyed. The whole area where musicians lived was decimated, and their instruments were buried under the earth”.
Music and art is often one of the first casualties of war as it is of religious fundamentalism. I feel like any media coverage of the war in Afghanistan (any of the wars) portrays Afghans as backwards and in need of Americans (and Canadians and Europeans) to sort out the mess that they’ve made of their dust-bowl country. There is never any talk about how US funding for Osama bin Laden and the mujihadin lead to the rise of the Taliban or that so many of the problems in Afghanistan have to do with cold war rivalries between the United States and the Soviet Union. Or that despite the ravages of war and civil war, and the Taliban, Afghanistan has still retained a lot of its culture. Now all of Central Asia is in a similar position.
The Islamic music of Central Asia is very much influenced by Sufism, the mystical path in Islam, and is as far away from fundamentalist Shiism or Wahhabism as you can get. Here are some cds that the library has:
Songs from the Steppes: Kazakh music
Ochilbek Matchonov - Music from Central Asia: Uzbekistan on the Silk Road.
The music of Uzbekistan (this is a wonderful collection recorded in 1970 by one of the worlds greatest song collectors Deben Bhattacharya)
Inside Afghanistan (another collection of Deben Bhattacharya’s recordings)
The secret museum of mankind Central Asia: ethnic music classics 1925-48 (This is a wonderful series in general on Yazoo, a label which re-releases music originally released on 78s, much of it Blues)
Central Asia in Forest Hills N.Y.: music of the Bukharan Jewish Ensemble Shashmaqam
Khomus: Jew's harp music of Turkic peoples in the Urals, Siberia, and Central Asia
Afghan Ensemble – Songs from Afghanistan

This is just a small sampling of what the library has and is based largely on my personal taste. I didn’t include anything from Tuva (for example the excellent Huun-Huur-Tu, who recently played a show here in Calgary) or Siberia (check out the excellent series Siberie on Buda Musique. The library has Vol 1-4, 8,9).

I wanted to mention two books
Fabled Cities of Central Asia: Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva by Vadim Evgenevich
Gippenreiter is a wonderful coffee table sized books with lots of info about the aforementioned cities and Central Asia in general.

The hundred thousand fools of God: musical travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York) by Theodore Craig Levin is part travel books, part ethnomusicology but one hundred per cent interesting and readable. It also has a very good cd that it comes with.
For analysis about what’s happening in Central Asia that is more informed than this blog please try World War Four Report. Also the raio show Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade (download episodes here) often covers Central Asia and generally plays excellent music from all over the world, including Kazakhstan and its neighbors.

Some books that I've got recently pt 2

And while it pours rain in BC, it pours books into my library. In this case from a book liquidation website that shall remain nameless. Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law by E.P. Thompson was an exciting find. E.P. Thompson was colleagues with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, George Rude, A.L. Morton. This book looks really interesting and tries to connect Blake to the radicals in the English revolution through the Muggletonians. Another book on my to read Top 50. I also got Making History: Writings on History and Culture by E. P. Thompson, a collection of his essays. Captain Swing by Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude, about the Captain Swing uprisings in the 1830s in England.
On a completely un-marxist-historian related note I also got Hallucinogens: A Reader edited by Charles S. Grob. A nice collection with stuff from Terence McKenna, Huston Smith, Andrew Weil and a bunch of others.
Perhaps most exciting of all was Granny Made Me an Anarchist:General Franco, The Angry Brigade and Me by Stuart Christie. The autobiography of the most famous Scottish anarchist to ever participate in a plot to assassinate General Franco, the Fascist dictator of Spain. He was also tried and acquitted as an accused member of the Angry Brigade, Britain’s best known anarchist bomb throwers. Plus Christie is a long time anarchist publisher and generally interesting dude. This book catapulted itself to the number one spot on the to read top fifty. I’m already half done.
I also got a bunch of vegetarian cook books which I haven’t used yet.

Some books that I've got recently

I have been reading a lot of books lately. So logically enough I’m going to talk about a lot of books I’ve bought lately. Not that the two are mutually exclusive…
Anyway, yesterday I went to Baskerville Books, the best used book store in Calgary (tied with Barb’s) by far. Once again they provided me with books I was very happy to find. Norman Cohn – Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom. I just finished an earlier work from Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. Definitely one of the more interesting books I’ve read in a while (I actually have two copies of Pursuit of the Millennium, so if anyone is interested in a copy I could let one go for a reasonable price). Hopefully I’ll be posting a review of it soon. Cohn considers Europe’s Inner Demons to be a bit of a companion to Pursuit of the Millennium, although a lot more about the official church’s treatment of the heretical/radical sects, rather than about the sects themselves. Europe’s Inner Demons is definitely on my Top 50 to read list. Neither of these books are available at the public library but both are at the U of Calgary library which is accessible with an Alberta Library Card which is free if you have a public library card. I also found The City of the Singing Flame by Clark Ashton Smith. Wow! So excited about this one!!! Most probably know Clark Ashton Smith, if they know him at all, as a contemporary and correspondent of HP Lovecraft. I think I like him even more than HP Lovecraft. Finding copies of his books is a rare happening and cause for celebration.
I was recently in Colorado Springs visiting my parents and happened across a few good finds there. Brain Plague by Joan Slonczewski was a good find. I read it on the trip home and liked it quite a bit. She is officially on my scifi love list. I’ve read 5 books by her now and 3 were excellent the other 2 very good. Brain Plague is about humans being hosts for sentient microbe colonies, some of whom see their hosts as Gods, some who see their hosts as tools to be exploited and with natural resources to extract. An extremely interesting book. Slonczewski’s background as a Phd biologist shines through as well as her critical attitude to technology and bio-engineering. It is quite devoid of the uncritical technophilia which pervades so much of the writing in the sort of futurist/trans-human vein. Not that this book falls squarely into that area. Any way, a very interesting book. Set in the same universe as A Door into Ocean (maybe my all time favorite sci-fi book. Definitely top 5) and Daughters of Elysium. The Library has Brain Plague, Daughters of Elysium and The Wall Around Eden (which is not as good as the other two but still good).
I also got The Ultimate Threshold: A Collection of the Finest in Soviet Science Fiction translated and edited by Mirra Ginsburg. A very nice hc book club edition from 1970. A bit of a steal at $3 I must say. My final purchase in Colorado was William Morris on History (ed. Nicholas Salmon). Some of you may know Morris as one of the founders of the British Arts and Crafts movement and a prominent designer of wallpaper and fabric. Some may know him as one of the modern fathers of Fantasy (and an influence on Tolkien). He was also a prominent Socialist. Some even claim that he was an anarchist, although A L Morton argues very strongly against this characterization. Let us say that he was a socialist with very libertarian tendencies. And this is a smallish collection of his writings on history.