Dudes, WTH

Has the blog died? Please, write things on the blog if you have time. I'd like to hear from everyone that reads this, and I assume that there are still others that check the blog religiously, as I do. Tell me what you think of your first years. I am jealous of their youth. But I am petty, and you are probably not. Tell me about your escapades in second year. I miss you all.

hullo hullo

I wonder if you guys still read this often. I miss you!

Here's something I just came across, pretty cool I think (especially the sticky bot thing):

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/aug/04-3-robots-that-move-just-like-animals?source=mag

WHEN GREAT MINDS COME TOGETHER

Please, excuse the pretension of the title.

It's been so long since we've had a post. Summer can't have you that busy. (Well, maybe, we are after all TASPers, who above all, are busy getting some.)

But, there is finally an occasion this summer that demands a blog post: Katlin and Julieta are in the same place for the first time since August 2007! There have been many such reunions among all of us but this too-short TASPer frolic in it's final moments before we had to say goodbye brought forth a brilliant plan. So here goes:

We've always talked about TASP reunions (we mean all of 34 of us as the factotos don't get out of this one) but along with the dream of having one hell of a swinging TASPer rendezvous (according to spell check this is one word in English--wth?) was the reality of how impossible it would be to get so many people in one place at the same time. So, as we (J & K) drove around the parking lot where we waited for Julieta's aunt to come pick her up, we began to rattle on about a road trip. We started thinking about what the best drive would be and Katlin said something about driving across the United States. And then Julieta said something like "I want to go to New England too. And we should visit the Harvard-Yale-MIT kids." And then friends, it turned into an all out pick-up-every-TASPer-and-factotum road trip. Oh yeah. We would buy the bio-diesel bus off this guy Julieta knows who pretty much drives around the US running on what he gets from McDonald's greasiest deep frying baskets. We would start in Texas (because I said so...I guess. It seems like as good as any place to start at wait no, in Florida so that we get Niko). And head west. Pick up Big Mac and Linda in Tempe (if they were not at school of course, in which case maybe we could chill with their parents). Keep heading west. Break Dylan out of Deep Springs and forced gofer-slaughtering by busting through the gates (they must have gates, right? how else would anyone stay??)and sweeping him into our crazy-ass bus. Keep heading west hit up the rest of Cali getting everyone at Stanford and Berkley...maybe work on the tan at the beach--not that Julieta needs one--and go to Tijuana one night to get drunk and hopefully not killed). Um, drive east. MIDWEST TIME!! And we wouldn't go through Iowa for no reason--Brian Sherwin, check! Next pick up everyone at UChicago (yes, we pick Mac up twice dammit) and stir up a storm to rival the Blues Brother's police car chase. Keep heading east. And northish (we aren't exactly looking at a map this moment). Visit the ivies and thumb our noses at the rich brats clad in Lacoste and Ralph Lauren (actually we don't know what the hell they wear but whatever)and pick up about a third of the missing TASPers and make picking up Ibrahim really fast because there is more on NYC to come. Next reunite the original rule-breaking uber-exclusive couple (Chanel and Joe! We'd probably wouldn't have to go to both Rochester and Syracuse since I imagine they would already be reunited). At this point we should have all TASPers. We'd do this circut so that somehow we'd get to Cornell last (wait no, Olivia would be the last one!). And bust into the House by way of the kitchen pretending to be rowdy frat boys and drunken sorority girls and then refuse to leave until we had the house to ourselves. What exactly we do there is up to us. But two things are mandatory: trip to Collgetown Bagels and sunset at the peace sign--and this time, hell, we might accept that joint. After getting bored in Ithaca...onto NYC! We should just get stuck in traffic in the city and have a party raging inside the bus all night long. Finally drive all the way down to Miami and party the night away in the land of Valentine and maybe, if we're feeling daring visit Havana (although maybe V Fernandez would disapprove). And then it would be goodbyes and most likely terrible hangovers and then some tears and many, many facebook albums.

WE LOVE YOU! YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN!

Katlin & Julieta

(this is posted from Julieta's account because Katlin is having issues with posting on her account)

P.S. Katlin starts West Point on June 29th. Send her letters of encouragement (yes letters, as she has no internet access until Aug. 15th) at the address posted on facebook.

P.P.S. Julieta will be in Paris starting July 1st for about a month. If you are in Europe get your ass down to the city of lights and home of the triplets of Bellville to see her.

P.P.P.S. And if you want postcards from France post your address!

It was a dark and stormy night...

and then Laura Kling came to Chicago and made the sun come out! (This was strangely accurate) [I observed the same, too, myself! Almost uncanny...]

So today was the U Chicago spring festival, the one with lots of free popcorn and cotton candy and giant hamster balls (People tried to run into each other in them. It was sort of ridiculous.) and a mechanical bull and Broken Social Scene and LOTS of hipsters. 

So many hipsters.

Maybe too many hipsters. [This and the previous statements are not even invalid. Also hipster-crowding-into-a-vent-in-the-library was a Scav Hunt item!]

(Actually, there were less hipsters than usual for UChi, which was still more than usual for Yale. The hipster stomping ground in front of Cobb was quite forlorn. But of course Laura didn't know that until we told her.)

Definitely too many pairs of salmon-colored pants. (And by 'too many' Laura actually means two. Which, admittedly, is two too many.) 

Definitely not enough TASPers. Since we miss you. (This,too, is accurate.) [Mm-hmm! Emphatically. We send you transcendental hugs.]

Anyway, we met one of Mac's friends. We're pretty sure he's a serial killer. He was hanging out in the library during the festival, when he should've been running through the inflatable obstacle course (or riding the plastic bull). 

Mac says he's not a real friend of his. That he's unsavory. (Mac knows. He's tasted him.)

So then we went to Chinatown and bought a couple of wooden swords (and had an epic sword fight.) [with a weird straw Asian-looking hat] Then we were obvious tourists. (Arguably, we were obvious tourists from the moment we bought the swords. Or, we were awesome. Probably not.) [But probably so.]

Apparently one time, for the university's scavenger hunt, some kids built a working nuclear reactor (in a 2005 TASPer's room.) [Only a trivial distance away as we speak right now!]

They didn't win.

[Humbert Humbert was married to some gal for some 50 days, says Mac.]

You have to guess who's who. Hint: One of the UChicago TASPers is really, really lazy. Hint: It's clearly not Kim or Rachel. Hint: It's clearly also not Laura. Clearly.

Krzysztof

I was trying to text Mac Krumpak's name, and after I entered "kr" the phone autocompleted to "krzysztof." This is clearly not what I meant. Oh my gosh.

Happy Birthday, V.N.

So it's Nabokov's birthday today. The 23rd, that is. 110 today. 100 years younger than A. Pushkin and officially 335 years younger than Shakes. Some more trivia about V.N.-Day: April 23rd is the major feast day of St. George; 1616, Cervantes and Shakespeare die; 1858, the beginning of the end for classical wave physics; 1928, cocktail-drinking teetotalers everywhere gear up; 1968, Columbia University is shut down for gym maintenance; 1982, citizens of Key West, Fla. bored with rest of country; 1988, the moon finally comes back; 2009, Mac desperately avoids anything remotely resembling work.

Judith Butler

Is here.  Right now.  At Yale.  Sadly, Charlie is not.  But Laura and I are!  And we're liveblogging it!  For you!

4:08:  Howard Bloch is talking extensively about Naomi someone-or-other.  We don't know who she is.  Apparently she's dead.  Where's Judy?  Oh, never mind, apparently Judith's here to honour Naomi someone-or-other.  Binary oppositions are being upset as we speak.  Well, type.  Howard Bloch is speaking.  Apparently it was Naomi's way to take deep breaths and sigh while complaining about Judith Butler.  This is a rather strange introduction. –d

4:10:  He's talking about Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter.  And everything else she wrote.  One of the things he admires most about Judith Butler is that she is unpredictable.  This may be solely because it's so difficult to understand what she's talking about.  He didn't say that last bit. –d

4:12:  OMGWTFJB!!!!!

4:13:  Naomi's last name is Shore.  Shaw?  Apparently she was a strong feminist thinker.  The fact that neither of us knows her last name seemingly means we are not strong feminist readers.  Eve Sedgwick just died?  What?  Dammit.  -d

4:17:  So far she's actually a very clear, concise speaker.  This is surprising and gratifying.  Unpredictable, even.  Howard Bloch was right!  -d

4:19: Someone grumped about the typing. We are pursuing other methods of liveblogging. I will handwrite this blog if I have to. The back row will not get us down. –l

4:22: So—you guys know how certain smells can be deeply connected to long-lost memories?

Or, to choose a more canonical example, you know the Proustian madeleines?  Judith Butler's rhetoric is that.  -l

[Dom says: Smelly? Judith Butler's rhetoric is smelly?]

4:24: I mean, crazily.  Even the spacing out for a minute, then realizing I have no idea who she's quoting, or what it's supposed to support, or what the role of psychoanalysis is in this shifting stage of gender identity.  Because I really have no idea.  It seems like even Judith Butler doesn't know.  -l

4:25:  We are now both writing in notebooks.  This reminds me of note-based communication during SCT lectures.  Along with the fact that she's now talking about shame - oh, Bruce Robbins! - I am now worried that I'm completely instrumentalizing this lecture in order to be all nostalgic about TASP.  Oh well! -d

4:28:  That said, I actually understand some of what she's talking about now.  Or at least I think I do. -d

4:29:  I have begun wondering about the role of discourse as a form of conceptual art.  Emily Chertoff, you should know what I'm talking about. -l

4:30:  Dom doesn't know what I'm talking about.  One time (probably much more that one time), Emily Chertoff and I talked about doing PubSpeaks/a performance for the talent show based on Text, Context, Subtext, Pretext.  It has nothing to do with Said.  Maybe a little to do with Said.  But mostly it has to do with the fact that I don't need to focus on what Judy's saying about subject and structure for me to get a lot out of this lecture. -l

4:31:  Laura lies.  I have a vague idea of what I think she might be talking about.  But I'm not positive.  Basically it seems like she's just saying that there's a certain aesthetic delight in this absurd torrent of words which has very little to do with their meaning.  Or at least to do with the meaning with which she's trying to invest them.  I'm not sure words can be thought of aesthetically without their meanings playing a role.  I'm going to stop writing about this now. -d

4:34:  But it has so much to do with their meaning.  I mean, ish. -l

4:35:  Besides, I wonder what she expects.  Honestly. -l

4:36:  Every time she refers to an "outmoded form of seduction" I imagine Carlos Adolfo Dominguez, smelling like cheap aftershave, leering at her in a back alley. -d

4:37:  I hope I never encounter a form of seduction that outmoded. -l

4:38:  Seriously, Sedgwick is dead?  I mean, shit. -d

4:39:  I think it's illegal to employ forms of impingement upon a child.  Unless they're purely linguistic. -d

4:39:  Judith Butler, radical lawbreaker. -l

4:40:  Just imagine the movie - Judy on the Run.  Dom, what's the tagline? -l

4:41:  "When you get in Gender Trouble, only your corpse will be a Body That Matters!" -d

4:42:  Or maybe "Structuralist Oedipal Subject instinct exogenist seduction matter structure hegemonic of that end quote"? -l

4:45:  How often do famous academics give lectures consisting only of summaries of other peoples' less well-known theories?  First Spivak on Gramsci, now Judy on Laplanche. -d

4:42:  The number of women I've seen at this lecture wearing some combination of black coats, flowing dark hair, glasses, and vaguely ethnic-looking scarves is staggering.  I wonder if they smoke cloves. -d

4:44:  Actually, I really like looking at who's in the audience.  It's standing room only.  There are many girls with shorter hair than mine.  I see six college-age guys in our part of the balcony. -l

4:46:  Including me? -d

4:46:  I think so.  I don't want to gawk too much to look around.  Point being, there are very few. -l

4:47:  It probably goes against the spirit of the lecture that we're breaking down the audience according to which side of the gender binary they fall into.  Oh well! -d

4:48:  Maybe I like being heteronormative. -l

4:49:  Maybe hetero-norms like being you!  Ha.  (In Soviet Russia...) -d

4:49:  She just mentioned a current event - Gay/Lesbian parenting in France.  She is applying her theory to the real world.  Maybe.  She is still talking about messaging, desire, and the Other. -l

4:52:  Is it ever the theorists' job to seriously examine how parent-child relationships actually work, or do they stick to theory and leave practice to psychologists?  Also, I wonder to what extent these ideas she's talking about could be translated into Bardi. -l

4:53:  If one of the logocentric problems of Western discourse is the privileging of speech over writing, why did Derrida ever give lectures? -d

4:54:  I think that the lit majors around us disapprove of the fact that we're being flippant during a J-But lecture. -d

4:55:  I'm just newly glad I'm not majoring in theory. -l

4:56:  I'm majoring in Soviet film and mass-produced Marxist art!  The fact that this isn't actually a major does not in any way deter me in this. -d

So: To sum:

Dom likes bragging about his major.

Much love!

—Laura and Dom

Saw The House For The First Time...

My original intent re: revisiting the House was to wait until someone came to visit Cornell so that I could see it with them, but I'd long forgotten exactly where it is on campus (and most people here have absolutely no idea what the Telluride Association is), and so accidentally stumbled upon it a few nights ago ("stumble" here being used more literally than I would have liked to think at the time).

It was actually kind of funny, because I don't think any of us were quite aware of this, but the Telluride House is right on one of the main frat rows at Cornell. Those beautiful old buildings that surround the House aren't dorms -- they're frat houses, and they house some of the sketchier Cornell frats to be sure. I mean, right across the street from it is one of the more reputable frats in that area that, nevertheless, had a party that night that started at 10, was completely filled by 10:15, had the campus police waiting outside of it by 11, and was closed down by 1. And there was the placid Telluride House, where I can imagine that people were either working or keeping their binge drinking to themselves.

It's actually more fitting that the TA is there than I'd like to pretend, to be honest. Cornell consists of two types of undergrads: Type 1: brilliant slackers; Type 2: ambitious, hardworking dumbasses. While many frat boys and sorrority girls do keep the stereotype alive, I've met an awful lot of them who fit into Type 1 and who filtered into the frats so they wouldn't die of boredom, more or less. Because they're smart enough to coast into (and out of) Cornell, they're also smart enough to know when it's socially desireable to play dumb. You can't fault them for choosing people over some abstract pursuit of... something.

This is getting rambling, but my point was mostly that I was at the Telluride House the other day, and thought of you all.

Egregious

I'm doing linguistics homework. Again.

One of my assignments involves tracing semantic histories of words. I think it's important that we all know this:

"Egregious" was originally composed of Latinate morphemes that literally meant "towering above the flock." This was a metaphorical composition; the word meant "remarkable in a good sense."

But everyone was so ironic, guys. So now the word means bad. Really, really bad. Since everyone was so ironic all of the time.

I'm sort of tempted to tell my professor about our reanalysis of the word, and how it now has an entirely different meaning, but I don't really like sharing in that class.

This is of little to no importance but...

I miss you all.

The R-Word

So because I'm prone to occasional bouts of navel-gazing, and because literature has instilled in me a voyeuristic interest in the navel-gazing of others, I'll share a story, and then a question.

There's a point to this, I promise.

Cornell really buys into the American notion of a liberal arts "take intro courses in subjects you don't care about goddamn" education, so we have mandatory Freshman Writing Seminars. By sheer force of luck (read: rigging the randomized seminar selection ballot), I was able to have the same professor for both of my writing seminars, and so I've had an opportunity to see my writing develop throughout the year through the eyes of another person.

Now, the economics major at Cornell essentially assumes that you will be double-majoring in mathematics if you want to go to graduate school, which is exactly what I'm doing. I am not, by nature, a math person. My first semester in Calculus, I am embarrassed to say, was gotten through by a combination of luck (God Bless you, idiotic premeds, who dragged the mean on exams down to Hell with you) and sheer force of will. Sometime during this semester, though, I had what the alcoholics call "A moment of clarity," an epiphany, or what I would term in this case, "A sudden ability to see the blindingly obvious," and now math just makes sense to me in ways it didn't. I can't explain it other than to say that suddenly, everything that seemed arbitrary to me made perfect and complete sense, and I can't understand why I couldn't understand things.

What's interesting about this is that around the same time that this happened, I started getting comments on papers I was writing for my writing seminar saying that line of thinking was "reductionist." Now, because of my professor's biases, I think "reductionist" should partially be understood to mean "retarded," but if I think about it myself, I would say more diplomatically that the way I think about problems now really has changed dramatically since the beginning of the year.

I remember coming back from TASP and realizing that I just couldn't see the world the same way I did before the program, in part because of the warm and fuzzy experience of TASPer love and all that, but because of my seminar as well -- I read things differently after TASP than I did before, for example. It seems like, much more subtly, the same sort of thing is happening again, but with courses that are stacked toward a very specific kind of logical reasoning (namely,  for the first time in my life, having a schedule packed with math and language courses) instead of the humanities.

So there's the story, and here's the question: 

Are any of you experiencing the same thing? Not that you're specifically being molded by math courses, of course, but that you feel that in some readily identifiable way, you've developed intellectually, for good or ill? What has college done to your brain?

 

LOLITA

http://slavic.uchicago.edu/faculty-staff/sternstein.shtml

This is my professor for 'Nabokov's Lolita.' She is possibly the most amazing professor I have ever had. I am so so so excited for this class. Just so everyone knows.

The Unforgettable BR, among other things

That "BR" is obviously the "Unforgettable" Bruce Robbins. So why would I remember such a beloved character from the summer of 2007? I am continually reminded of TASP-related things when I do the reading for my post-colonial African history course. It's been all Spivak (according to wikipedia she was the second woman to be "elected" to membership in the TA) and post-colonial critical theory. This time it was national shame and blame. So I googled it and here I deliver a link to that lecture (well, to the article that it produced) we will never forget : http://www.columbia.edu/~bwr2001/papers/comp_national_blaming.pdf

And,a side note--I challenge a TASPer to make Matthew Evangelista a wikipedia page. Come on guys, you know he deserves it.

That's it. Not much of post but I'll just add, has anyone else gotten those facebook invitations to Telluride reunions? If you are in Chicago or the Bay Area you have no excuse to pass these reunions up. If you go call me and/or post about it. I need my TA fix.

For the record

I wrote letters a while ago.

They went into envelopes tonight.

My plan is to get stamps and mail them tomorrow.

This is honestly the plan.

Ana, ignore the discussion of the weather in yours, as it is no longer very relevant.

I love you guys.

There was a gas leak in my dorm

We were all kicked out because gas leaks are bad. I was sleeping when the alarm went off, so I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt when I walked out into the rain. It was a good day. Aside from all the work. Anyway, I'm primarily writing this post as an excuse to not start my humanities paper. I have lots of work. I'm probably going to fail many classes this quarter. Or not do as well as I'd like, anyway. But yeah. Today is not as good a day as yesterday. Secondarily, or perhaps more accurately co-primarily, I'm writing this post because I haven't had much contact with TASPers lately. Sad day. Also, I've gotten the impression that recent blog activities have been a little boggarted by Ms. Kling. I think I probably should have made a new paragraph somewhere back there, but I'm not going to check. I also think you should all know that the Core is stupid. For all its vaunted depth, the UChicago Core consists of nothing more than some mediocre survey classes and infantile unit manipulations. I find this frustrating. Oh well. My writing TA for hume(anities) is hot. You should all know. She's 30. But also hot. This is so far the best thing that's happened to me in a Core class. I don't know if this is a testament to my shallowness or the Core's. I wrote a paper about phonological and morphological patterns in the writings of Dr. Seuss. I find phonology to be one of the most useless disciplines ever imagined. Maybe I'm not that imaginative. Laura will probably disagree with me, but hours with Halle and Sapir have taught me that the human mouth can make sound. This is probably the most senseless post I've ever written. Also, a victory for all TASP, Valentin and I have finally become friends on facebook. It's been a long time in coming. So I'm going to be staying in Chicago for spring break, which falls between March 21st and March 29th. If anyone is in the area and would like to visit, feel free. I'm pretty sure Kim's going home. And Ms. Rachel Meng has been notably absent from both our lives. Living in Snitchcock has not done good for her intraTASP relations. At any rate, I will be here. So come visit!

Remember Leonardo da Vinci?

This is that folk tale I was talking about a really long time ago. I read it when I was probably five or six years old. Except I think in the version I read, the millet dumplings were actually rice cakes.

Little Peachling

More On Nabucco

So way, way back in the fall, when all that insanity regarding Georgia and Russia was dominating the news, I made a post here about how the Nabucco pipeline fits into all of this. I think it may have come off as conspiracy theory bullshit, but I'd like to share something the NYTimes put out not too long ago.

Remember, you read it here first, boys and girls.

(From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/world/europe/29putin.html?_r=1 ):

MOSCOW — The titans of Russia’s energy industry gathered around an enormous map showing the route of a proposed new pipeline in Siberia. It would cost billions and had been years in the planning. After listening to their presentation, President Vladimir V. Putin frowned, got up from his chair, whipped out a felt pen and redrew the map right in front of the embarrassed executives, who quickly agreed that he was right.

The performance, which was carried on state television in 2006, was obviously stage managed, but there was nothing artificial about its point. It was a typical performance for a leader who has shown an uncanny mastery of the economics, politics and even technical details of the energy business that goes well beyond a politician taking an interest in an important national industry.

“I would describe it as very much his personal project,” said Clifford G. Gaddy, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and an expert in Russia’s energy policy. “It is the heart of what he has done from the very beginning.”

Indeed, from his earliest days in power in 2000, Mr. Putin, who left the presidency in 2008 and became prime minister, decided natural resource exports and energy in particular would not only finance the country’s economic rebirth but also help restore Russia’s lost greatness after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Just this month, Mr. Putin’s personal immersion in the topic was on full display as he ordered natural gas shut off to Ukraine, in the process cutting supplies to Europe. It was portrayed by the Kremlin as a protracted commercial dispute with Ukraine. But the hundreds of thousands of shivering gas customers in the Balkans and Eastern Europe sent an unmistakable message about the Continent’s reliance on Russian supplies — and Mr. Putin’s willingness to wield energy as a political weapon.

When talking about energy, he often rattles off obscure statistics not often heard outside a Houston boardroom, like average daily production of fields and throughput capacity of pipelines.

Mr. Putin “clearly knows as much about BP’s business in Russia as I do,” Anthony B. Hayward, BP’s chief executive, once said after a meeting with him.

In fact, the standoff in Ukraine was just one part of a far larger Russian playbook on natural gas policy under Mr. Putin. In the past year, Russia has formed a cartel-like group with Middle Eastern nations with the goal of dampening global competition in natural gas, sewn up sources of supply in Central Asia and North Africa with long-term contracts to thwart competitors and used its military to occupy an important pipeline route in Georgia.

And this broader struggle extends over a dozen countries from Azerbaijan to Austria. In its sprawl and slow pace, it is often compared to the 19th-century struggle for colonial possession in Central Asia known as the Great Game. In the modern variant, Mr. Putin, a master strategist, has proved far more effective than his European counterparts.

“He has been thinking for some time, ‘What are the means and tools at Russia’s disposal, to make Russia great?’ ” said Lilia Shevtsova, a researcher at the Carnegie Moscow Center. In the post-Soviet world, she said, Mr. Putin concluded that “military power would no longer be sufficient.”

A spokesman for Mr. Putin, Dmitri S. Peskov, said that the energy market “was, is and will remain a strategic sphere for Russia” and that government leaders in Moscow should be versed in the topic. Mr. Peskov denied the Kremlin used exports for political purposes. Of Mr. Putin’s deep personal knowledge of the business, he said the prime minister showed a similar attention to detail in other matters, too.

In this contest, Russia’s overarching goal is to prevent the West from breaking a monopoly on natural gas pipelines from Asia to Europe. Boris E. Nemtsov, a former Russian first deputy prime minister who is now in the opposition, said: “It is the typical behavior of the monopolist. The monopolist fears competition.”

As they did two years ago after a similar supply disruption, European officials have promised in the wake of the Ukraine dispute to take steps to diversify the Continent’s sources of gas to end its reliance on Russia, which supplies nearly 30 percent of the total. European dependence is expected to grow as North Sea gas fields decline.

At a conference in Budapest on Tuesday, Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek of the Czech Republic called for a renewed effort to build the long-delayed Nabucco pipeline to bring Central Asian gas to Europe without passing through Russian territory.

But there is a reason the project has never gotten off the ground: as determined as Europe is to end its reliance on Russian gas, Mr. Putin is equally adamant about extending it.

The Nabucco pipeline was proposed in 2002 by executives from European energy companies with the express intent of undercutting Russia’s gas monopoly. It would pass through Turkey and Georgia to the Caspian Sea.

Under the best of circumstances, building an international pipeline is an intricate and arduous process, technically, financially and politically. However, Nabucco’s planners rapidly discovered that their biggest obstacle was not a mountain chain or a corrupt local politician, but Mr. Putin himself. When OMV, the Austrian energy company, formally created a consortium for Nabucco in 2005, he responded with a competing idea: a pipeline called South Stream that would terminate at the same gas storage site in Austria, but originate in Russia and bypass Ukraine by traveling under the Black Sea.

In a contest often compared to chess, this Russian countermove, like all good chess moves, was both offensive and defensive.

To pay the hefty upfront construction costs, a pipeline needs both an assured source of supply and a market for the gas it transports. The South Stream pipeline would flood the gas market in southeastern Europe, locking up the customers the bankers behind Nabucco were counting on to finance the project.

At the same time it would undermine Ukraine’s domination of gas lines headed west, one of the biggest obstacles to Russian domination of the European gas market.

But Mr. Putin did not stop there. Leaving nothing to chance, he also took steps to choke off potential sources of upstream gas supplies deep in Central Asia.

The race to secure these rich sources of natural gas unexpectedly accelerated in 2006 with the death of the eccentric and isolationist dictator of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov. While energy executives around the world rushed to Ashgabat, the Turkmen capital, to meet the new leader, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, a former dentist, Mr. Putin was the first to cut a big deal.

Smiling and holding shovels at a televised ceremony to mark the start of construction, Mr. Putin and Mr. Berdymukhammedov agreed in 2007 to build a pipeline north, to Russia, depriving Nabucco of potential supply. It was not until 2008 that European Union officials got to Ashgabat with a memorandum of understanding for a trans-Caspian pipeline that could link to Nabucco. It has yet to be acted upon.

Farther west, it was the same story.

In February 2008, Mr. Putin signed an agreement with Bulgaria — over the objections of the United States and in spite of Bulgaria’s status as a new NATO member — making it a partner in the South Stream pipeline.

And in April 2008, Mr. Putin was in Athens, cutting a deal for a spur of South Stream. In this flurry of diplomacy he again beat his Western opponents. The United States State Department’s point man on Eurasian pipelines, Matthew J. Bryza, in Athens the next day, could only rue the signed deal. Mr. Bryza was left explaining to the Greeks: “If you have only one supplier of feta, you’re in a vulnerable position. The same for gas.”

The West still had an important pipeline partner in Georgia, a critical geographical link. But that all but evaporated in the brief war last summer.

By 2007, a pipeline section had been laid across Georgia, the Baku-Erzurum pipeline, which is now used for local distribution but will become a part of the Nabucco pipeline, if it is ever built. This brought the struggle for Nabucco to a pivotal stage, for it was now playing out along a storied trade route in the petroleum business, and one highly sensitive to the Russians.

In the 19th century the Rothschild banking family and the Nobel brothers of Sweden had built a railroad and pipeline across Georgia to sell Baku oil, undercutting the near monopoly in the business, Standard Oil of the United States, which was supplying Europe with kerosene produced in America.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the revival of this pre-Bolshevik energy corridor became a major foreign policy goal of the United States, intended to strengthen the economic independence of former Soviet states and diversify world oil supplies away from the Middle East. At a narrow point, the pipeline route passes just south of the Russian-controlled enclave of South Ossetia and north of another Russian ally, Armenia.

The August war sent a chill through boardrooms in the West when, for example, Russian tanks scurried back and forth over one of the buried pipelines and one crew occupied a pumping station. Russia, said Svante Cornell, a specialist on Central Asia and the Caucasus at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, sent a simple message: “We can blow this up at any time.”

While his track record is very strong, Mr. Putin is not infallible. Last summer he made a rare mistake by locking in long-term contracts for Central Asian gas at close to the height of the market — $340 for 1,000 cubic meters in 2009. While Mr. Putin achieved his goal of depriving Nabucco of more potential sources, Russia is now selling that gas in a down market to Ukraine for an average of less than $240 per 1,000 cubic meters — one possible reason, energy experts have said, that Mr. Putin tried to force Ukraine to pay more for gas this winter.

Despite its best intentions, Europe is likely to remain dependent on Russian energy supplies for the foreseeable future and, perhaps, indefinitely if Mr. Putin has his way. And that reflects his long-held beliefs.

As far back as 1997, while serving as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Mr. Putin earned a graduate degree in economics, writing his thesis on the economics of natural resources.

Later, when scholars at the Brookings Institution analyzed the text, they found 16 pages had been copied without attribution from a 1978 American business school textbook called “Strategic Planning and Policy,” by David I. Cleland and William R. King of the University of Pittsburgh. Mr. Putin has declined to comment on the allegation.

Tellingly, the passages they say were plagiarized relate to the indispensable role of a chief executive in planning within a corporation — the need for one man to have strategic vision and control.

News from the Republic (of Texas that is)

So, this is clearly the product of procrastination—a promising muse since I am not normally compelled to post my ramblings here. Hm, it may be the music (Shurik’n, album: Ou je vis). Or it may just be that I had wonderful news today! One of my courses this semester is a seminar limited to Plan II (my honors degree in liberal arts) freshman and is called: Disease, Development, and Democracy in Post-Colonial. I am/was pretty excited about the course and reading list looked promising. Today was my 3rd class in and as I (briefly, of course) zoned out, my mind quickly snapped into full consciousness when I heard my prof, Dr. Wilson, say: “I taught this seminar for rising seniors, that is juniors who are going to be seniors and…”. He, of course, was not able to finish his thought because I eagerly (too unenthusiastic an adverb, really) jumped in with “YOU TAUGHT AT TASP??!”

So, these are my good, WONDERFUL, news. It seems I have finally made some connection to the Telluride community despite my distance from Cornell, UMich, or the Ivies. I was really feeling the need to have that connection, something that those not at state schools really take for granted. I navigated last semester easily but not without a certain amount of disappointment. I couldn’t help but compare the experience to what everyone else was living at the schools I wish (wished?) I was at. I am/was happy to be here but still feel/felt the pressure to do the extraordinary to make up for the lack of prestige at my school. This is all coming out in a jumble but I am just so excited to have found out that my professor knows about, much less taught at, TASP. This is even better because he is going to mentor my 15-16 person seminar for the rest of our undergraduate studies. It was a great comfort for someone to understand my situation and take my ambitious goals seriously. Sorry if this is a boring and/or poorly written post. I just wanted to tell you all (hmm, I suppose I should say y’all but no, I’m not that Texan) about this if you were interested. Plus, how often is it that you read a post that manages to incorporate a ludicrous amount of parenthetical statements and ”--/--“ s. (what do you call those?—oh, there I go again). To summarize: I LOVE YOU AND ALL IS WELL!

Why TASPers Should Love Berkeley

Judith Butler (yes, THE Judith Butler) is a professor here, and I'm going to watch her speak on Tuesday. Does she speak the way she writes? Will I even be able to see her, or will I be instantly blinded by the light of her PRESENCE?!!

We'll know the answers to these questions soon enough. I will definitely keep you posted on how it goes, though, and I'll try to take pictures. Let me know if you want them.

Ah, the memories...

Really important question

What did the thirteen-moon calendar do with the Day Out of Time on a leap year? Was it two days out of time? Do they even have leap years?