desiderata

The photos from the trip are available here.

Some them need some explanation, so here goes. I'll start with Corsica.

There's an (incorrect) local legend in Calvi that Christopher Columbus was born and raised here, and on the outside of the citadel is this monument to him.




The Calanques, near Piana, are a bunch of weird pink and gray granite formations that rise steeply from the Golfe de Porto. At the end of a trail to an overlook of the Golfe de Porto and the Calanques, people have left hundreds of stacks of stones, pictured here at sunset.




The monoliths at Filitosa, near Propriano, have simple faces and other features carved into them. They're also extremely phallic, though it's hard to tell how intentional that is. The site also has many stone structures.




After Filatosa, we went to the south coast of Corsica, to Bonifacio. Bonifacio is a port city hidden in the tall chalk cliffs that mark the Corsican side of the Bouches de Bonifacio. The citadel, pictured here, rises above the port on a peninsula.

Our last day in Malta, and the vacation, was spent looking at 5500 year old stone temples, wandering the south coast of Malta, looking at the blue! at the Blue Grotto, and lying in the sun.

I didn't include this in the post yesterday, but Valletta is a really beautiful city. Maybe it's the fact that the principle city of Malta is also at the end of a peninsula (like San Francisco), but I really felt at home here. The cafes on Misrah ir-Repubblika were great spots to people watch, and during the day the city is has a lively, cosmopolitan feel. At night, though, everything empties. It's very strange. I could easily spend more time here, at a later date.

Anyway, trip fatigue has sort of set in, and I'm looking forward to getting home.

Malta is a densely populated couple of rocks between Tunisia and Sicily filled with stray cats, public gardens, tiny cars rocketing around crappy roads, and more British tourists on package tours than I've ever seen. There are also tons of Americans, with a healthy dose of French and the ever present Germans. It's strange to suddenly be in a place where everyone speaks English, and it was something of a disappointment, despite the linguistic isolation that we experienced in Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily.

It rains very little in Malta, but we managed to hit the first storm of the season, which brought an extended lightning storm and flash floods. Kari was bummed, as we were looking forward to more swimming and sunbathing in the hottest climate on our itinerary, and the bad weather sort of hindered that plan. What was worse was the rain started on Kari's birthday, the 17th (Happy Birthday, Kari!), and continued to the next day, which I called Kari's Birthday, Observed as we were traveling most of the day on Friday.

Part of the reason we had Kari's Birthday, Observed, was the awesomely horrible meal we had on Friday night. We were tired from the ferry crossing from Sicily, and the weather was bad, so we decided to eat at our hotel's restaurant, which was supposed to have a barbecue or something, with entertainment by Shitty! or some similarly named band. Due to the rain, the barbecue was nixed, and we sat down inside, noticing the buffet tables. We should have sneaky-Peted it out the back door right then and there, but we were on a trajectory, and it was easier to stay the course.

Shitty! was playing some vaguely Maltese instrumental folk songs with a modern flair, but soon launched into a vocal rendition of "Unchained Melody," proceeding onto All Your Favorite Hits From the '60s and '70s. The song that really got the crowd on their side was "Leaving on a Jet Plane," which the dining room sang along with during the chorus. Shitty! continued with "Return to Sender," "Bad Moon Rising," "House of the Rising Sun," a Tom Jones song that I've blocked from my memory, and so on and on and on.

The buffet was ghastly, and Kari felt ill all the next day. The mainly British and over-55 crowd loved it, and were clapping along to Shitty!, then dancing between the tables. I felt I had accidentally been transported onto a cruise ship. I had my first cup of truly bad coffee (brewed, American-style coffee, which I later learned was from the kind of automatic brewing machine found in vending machines) of the trip. Shitty! was still going strong when we got the hell out of there, and the whoops echoed out into the empty courtyard, but thankfully were not audible in our room.

We wandered around Victoria/Rabat on Saturday under a gray sky and the occasional lightning flash, and by the afternoon it was raining hard.

The next day was great, except for our good friend Jeff, whom I will no longer mention. We snorkeled around Dwejra Bay and Fungus Rock, so named because of a rare breed of parisitic plant used for medicinal purposes by the Knights of St. John.

Jeff was our taxi driver in Gozo, whom we thought was really nice (he helped us find a dive shop to rent snorkel gear) and was supposed to pick us up at a remote beach on the west coast near Dwejra, and didn't. We had to walk back to Victoria, where an extremely nice Maltese/Australian named Jason gave us a ride back to our hotel, unprompted.

Fate conspired to send Jeff back to us as our driver to the Gozo ferry that night, and he made up some excuse about how he actually did drive to the parking lot and didn't see us. When I called him on it (we were there all the time, and I was looking for him) he made up some yarn about how he was in a different car, and didn't remember what we looked like, blah blah blah. Anyway, because we waited an hour for Jeff at Dwejra, and took an hour to walk along the road, we couldn't return the snorkel gear by 6:00 PM at Jeff's friend's dive shop, nor were we able to make it to the ferry until two hours after our original plan.

Then, due to thunderstorms causing flooding in Malta (which we would have avoided had we gotten to our ferry on time), there were no cabs willing to drive to Valletta. We took the last bus, which took another hour. All told, we wasted over three hours because of Jeff, who tried to make it seem like he was doing us a favor for not charging us to take back the snorkel gear, the asshole. We hadn't eaten lunch or dinner because we were saving our cash for the taxi ride and a generous tip for that nice driver Jeff. Valletta at 10:30 PM is a necropolis, so we had to take another couple of expensive taxis to get to St. Julian's, a tourist ghetto filled with overloud clubs and the kind of public, testosterone-fueled drunkenness common in more boreal European climes, Tijuana, or Majorca. This was the only place in Malta with open restaurants, and all this was due to Jeff. I really hate that guy.

My next post will talk about the things I like about Malta, but this one is all about Jeff-hate.

A quick post from Siracusa, on the southeast coast of Sicily. The net cafe is closing in ten minutes, and it's the first one we've seen since Bonifacio, an island and a country ago.

Sardinia and Sicily have been most kind to us. The people here are extremely nice, and especially tolerant of my idiot mumblings to them in some broken version of Italian straight from the mouth of a linguistic toddler. I'm all nouns and numbers.

Driving in their cities, however, is quite literally maddening. Labyrinths of tiny streets just barely wider than our Opel. Scooters putputting by. We got lost in a relatively small city, unable to find our way out. I kept thinking of a sinister line from Gravity's Rainbow, '...a progressive knotting into....' That was us, looking like the ornery tourists we were.

The old part of Siracuse is called the Ortygia, and it's been the city center for a long, long time. The duomo here (supposedly) has an altar that the Greeks found when they got here, in the 6th century B.C. Then they built a temple to Athena there, and the Christians later filled in the blanks between the still visible columns, and eventually wrapped it in a baroque veneer. Unfortunately, we couldn't find the altar, and the nave was blocked off with two large green curtains that stretched to the ceiling. Altogether, the facade was impressive, but the inside? Eh. I liked the columns.

Tomorrow we take a ferry to Malta, for the last leg of the journey. We'll see about net connections there.

We're in Bonifacio, on the south coast of Corsica just across les Bouches des Bonifacio from Sardinia. We drove down the west coast, stopping for a few days in Piana, near these wild decomposed granite formations called les Calanches, or les Calanques. They're pink, and at sunset they're amazing.

I've had a few "duh" tourist moments so far, and it's most frustrating attempting to convey the subtle nuances of human communication with 20 vocabulary words. I found out the hard way that nobody here in Corsica takes coffee to go. They all thought I was crazy when I asked for "cafe au porter."

The Mediterranean sea is amazingly calm compared to the Pacific. We've finally gotten some wind here in Bonifacio, but it nonetheless has the look of a semi-breezy lake. I suppose in winter it gets worse, but it's not so surprising that the Phonecians, Greeks, Carthagians, and other sea-faring folks couldn't get much beyond Gibraltar for thousands of years.

We went inland the other day to do some hiking and to check out some Genoese bridges built across a river at the bottom of the Gorge du Spelunque, a sheer canyon inland from Porto. After the hike we swam under one of the bridges in a rock pool, and then the clouds and wind came up, and a warm rain began falling.

After the rain, we headed up the valley to a mountain village, Evisa, on the edge of the Foret de Aitone. The village was pretty, and we decided to take a walk in the forest. There, we were surrounded by feral domestic pigs, forraging for chestnuts and acorns under the trees. We continued to the crest, where there's a statue that separates Haute Corse from Corse du Sud. We hiked through the mountain meadows, beech groves, and Corsican pine to a rock ledge overlooking some shepherd huts and a waterfall as the sun was setting.

The landscape is just weird enough to be beautiful and too large to be pretty.

-Paul Theroux on Corsica, Sunrise with Seamonsters

Tomorrow, Kari (girlfriend type) and I head off to the Mediterranean to see some islands. First, Corsica, (home of The Odyssey's cannibal Laestrygonians), then Sardinia, Sicily, and finally Malta. Assuming there will be internet cafes here and there, I'll be posting updates.

Yesterday I stepped outside to golden sunshine here in San Francisco, and the quality of light and the angle of the shadows, were striking: it's autumn. Not technically, not for another three weeks, but still. Every year I notice this, and it's always something of a revelation. The transition from winter to spring is similar in its suddennes, a time in late February where a switch is thrown and winter's over.

Autumn-to-winter and spring-to-summer are more feathered; the seasons gracefully merge, over a month or so.

I was playing around a bit with the stylesheet for the site, experimenting with a new look, and afterward the old design suffered in comparison. So, a new design.

I've switched the site from MovableType to WordPress (well, a modified version that runs on PostgreSQL) and cleaned up some lingering problems with parts of the server (CSS problems, some colors I wasn't happy with, broken links).

I recently finished Peter Robb's Midnight in Sicily, a fascinating and bewildering look at the culture of modern Sicily and the Mezzogiorno. Robb lived in Palermo and Naples for 14 years in the '70s and '80s, when the Cosa Nostra and the Demochristian party's powers were at their respective zeniths. Robb returns to Sicily in the mid '90s for the trial of Giulio Andreotti, the former Demochristian prime minister and senator who was put on trial for ordering the murder of one of his political enemies.

Robb attempts to make coherent Sicily's tangled mess of crime, politics, psychology, history, art, and cuisine. He doesn't entirely succeed, which is less a matter of Robb's skill as a writer than the subject matter being both incomplete and byzantine, a reflection of the Sicilian identity. The character of the island is secretive and conspiratorial, obsessed with the nuance of the half-truth, and the odd theater of intergroup and interpersonal relationships that have developed in this client state over hundreds of years.

It's difficult to keep track of the endless cast of mafiosi, as almost every chapter introduces some new mafia family, "man of honor", or "distinguished corpse". As an outsider it's similarly unclear why, despite the endless killings and obvious corruption, Sicilians have never put up more than token and distracted resistance. Even within the mafia, it's difficult to see the appeal of being a made man, what with the inter-syndicate feuds, betrayals, and rigidly enforced hierarchies.

Robb's at his best when he's analyzing the art, food, and people he's encountered while living and travelling in Italy. I liked his discussion of the novelist Sciascia, and why Italian literature after WWII became more abstract and alleghorical. I also enjoyed the story of Renato Guttuso, the artist, lifelong communist, and eventual senator who was badly exploited by Andreotti and others while he was ill during the last months of his life.

Robb's is an ultimately tragic rendering of the Mezzogiorno, where the beauty of the landscape, culture, and people is mostly offset by corruption, violence, and decay. Sicily's knots are too tightly wound, too intricate to unravel, and it's hard to imagine how a hypothetical Alexander would even begin to cut through them all.

The J2EE Tutorial, 2nd Edition is listed on Amazon.com, which means I'm an author, the 11th Ian Evans in the results page.

The book will be released in June, coincident with JavaOne.

What's the meaning of stacking naked, hooded men on top of one another? Is it as harmless as a fraternity prank? Perhaps not, at least when the activity is coerced, and the men are prisoners of war, and I'm surprised one even needs to point this out.

As the far-right in this country continues to furtively glance in the direction of outright fascism, I'm left pondering the significance of the thumbs up sign in all those photos of our patriotic defenders of freedom and their subhuman charges in various poses of humiliation and torture. What does it mean?

The evident ease in the U.S. soldiers' dispositions tell you just about everything you need to know about whether this was "a few bad eggs" or systematic abuse. Does anybody remember the pictures of a bound and gagged John Walker Lindh at Guantanamo Bay? It seems so...similar.

Part of me has enjoyed hearing and watching Rumsfeld and his military commanders squirm during their testimony before Congress (even if I know it's only temporary political theater), but I'd like somebody to ask these guys why we have officially sanctioned gulags in Cuba, Afghanistan, and Iraq, full of enemy combatants not subject to the Geneva Conventions.

In three acts:

1. Sarah Vowell was interviewed as part of the City Arts & Lectures series last Monday night. She was interviewed by David Kipen (the San Francisco Chronicle's book editor), who was OK, I suppose, but lobbed some really lame questions her way. Vowell didn't do him any favors, responding to the dumb questions with one word answers. Vowell was pretty funny, in her extremely dry manner, but didn't reveal too much of herself. Which is not too surprising considering her proclaimed love of being left alone.

2. After Sarah Vowell, we went to Bimbo's to see Pinback, a band made up of people I imagine must have liked legos, math, and modern art growing up. The show was pretty good, although we arrived a little late due to my brain misfiring, causing us to catch a cab to the Bottom of the Hill on the other side of the city. Luckily the taxi was still around after I realized I got the venue wrong. Stupidity should be expensive, and it was.

3. I read an interview from a few years ago with the novelist Alan Furst, who writes about Europe between the world wars. He had an interesting take on every patriotic American's favorite historical anecdote, the German conquest of France in WWII. He thinks the slow response by France to German expansion was because France still hadn't recovered, physically and psychologically, from the devastation of the Great War. So they allowed Czechoslavakia to be annexed and thought that Nazi Germany could be appeased. I hadn't thought of that angle before. It's so much simpler to just believe that the childish, cowardly French surrendered because it's in their nature to surrender, and need the Americans to bail them whenever things get too tough for their delicate constitutions.

He also makes the interesting point that French collaboration (and more than a little luck, plus the German belief that the French had culture) more or less saved the country from complete devastation, such as was visited on Poland.

With the uncertainties involved with the recently announced Sun layoffs, it's a good time to update my resume (in PDF as well).