Book Review: The Painter of Battles

As a few of you know, I tend to read a lot but such activities have been curtailed a lot by grad school. Well, now that school is only a week and a half from being done and I am done with all my assignments I've gotten back into reading. As some of you also know I am a big fan of Arturo Perez-Reverte, a Spanish author probably best known for The Club Dumas (upon which the movie The Ninth Gate was loosely based), the Captain Alatriste series, and a couple others.

The basic plot of the book revovles around Falques, former war photographer, who has given up the camera and at the moment is painting a mural in a tower. The book goes back and forth between Falques interactions with a Croatian ex-soldier who shows up one day and tells Falques that a photo he took ruined his life and that he is going to kill him, and flashbacks involving his ex-lover who was killed when she stepped on a landmine in Bosnia. The only real twist comes right at the end and is a bit underwhelming. Frankly, I'd say Arturo kinda phoned this one in. The book is pretty short (200 pages) and is cut from a pretty standard Perez-Reverte cloth: downtrodden borderline anti-hero, mysterious unknowable femme fatale, sinister bad guy. Given his real life experience as a war reporter, he does bring perspective to the book but I don't think it saved the book from being much more than mediocre. If you want to read any of his books, I have all of the ones (that have been translated into English, anyway).

Rating: * *

Otis Loves His Lobster Costume

What a sad-sack.

More Drawings, This Time Something Different

Well, I actually managed to draw something besides Otis for a change. I'm not sure what the title is, but here is a recreation of a Japanese woodprint by Hokusai Katsushika, who is perhaps best known for The Great Wave off Kanagawa. This piece probably dates back to the early 1800s. For the barbarians out there, these kind of woodprints are from a school of art called ukiyo-e or "floating world." They tend to be rather stylized rather than realistic, in part due to the nature of printing with woodblocks.

My New Thing: Kiva

Well I'm staying home with the sniffles today so I thought it would be a good opportunity to finally set up my account on Kiva this morning. I first read about Kiva on Andrew Leonard's How the World Works blog at Salon (articles here and here), which by the way is a a great way to keep up with all things economic unless you are an operative for the RNC. Anyway, apparently Bill Clinton has been stumping for Kiva as well.

So for those of you who don't know what Kiva is, it's a non-profit company that allows people like me to loan money to the working poor around the world, a practice generally referred to as microcredit. The loans requested are generally pretty small, from a few hundred to a couple thousand. Traditionally most of these people have been ignored by the traditional finance system because they lack collateral, a credit history, or are generally considered not profitable. Microcredit has received a fair amount of press in the past couple of years, as Bangladeshi entrepreneur Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for their work in microcredit and economic development. Hopefully some day the worldwide microcredit infrastructure will be built up enough so that organizations like Kiva are no longer needed, but until then I figured I would give a hand.

So for those of you wondering where all of the money for the Christmas gifts you didn't get went, this is where it is going. I did a little math and figured if I threw in some money for myself that might come out somewhere around $500 so the plan is to lend $100 to five different people. One of the hardest things to do is to decide whom to make a loan to. Each entrepreneur has his or her (or their) own story posted on Kiva, and it's hard not to want to give all of them a helping hand. Since I had to pick some methodology I guess I am going for a mix of geographic distribution. I made my first loan this morning to a guy named Oleg, a taxi driver from Ukraine. An unexpected choice, but Oleg appeared to be having problems attracting loans - my guess it's because he looks like a pretty jovial white guy (seriously Oleg, you need to work on your 'downtrodden' look). Anyway Kiva lets you attach a banner for your guys such as the one below, which I think should update as they move towards their loan goal. I'm going to wait a couple days to make sure everything goes swimmingly, and then I'll let you know about the other loans.

More Fun With Otis

Well gang, once again here is another drawing of Otis, this time with his good buddy Phoebe. I was starting to wonder whether I could actually make a living out of drawing pictures of Otis but then I realized my income would be limited by Mindy's discretionary income and willingness to keep buying pictures of her dog from me. Oh well, maybe I will stick to helping her with designs for her new web business.