Put out the lights and get yourself a beer

Yesterday I found dental floss on the dolmuş. A long ream wended its way across the seat next to me, and as I stared at it from my window seat, I tried to picture this passenger with the dental floss. I imagined a man with a moustache and yellowish teeth, maybe he has just eaten nuts for breakfast even though his wife has nagged him not to eat foods with so much oil in them. Bits of nuts have gotten caught between his teeth. He tries using his tongue, but as this doesn't work, he pulls the floss from his coat pocket and cuts himself an ample length. The man stretches the string out, fixes it between his teeth, and tugs back and forth as the other passengers look away politely. He licks the string to eat whatever nuts the floss has excised, yells to the driver, "Inecek var," indicating his desire to stop at the next corner, and drops the floss on the seat next to him as naturally as he can.

Later in the day, we are talking about paragraphs in my essay writing class. Actually, I am yammering on about the value of using paragraphs, trying to find my passion on the subject, and thinking of the passenger with the dental floss. Then, I think of myself as a college student and my Tuesday/Thursday literature humanities class with Professor Gross. How I lived for that class despite the fact I had no friends in the class. I was a Barnard student and they were all first-year Columbia students. I was so lonesome that when I would see people who appeared to know each other well, I would wish that I could be them, that I could be someone with friends and an identity.

Professor Gross was not yet a professor and he clearly did not want to be there, but he had a brilliant mind and when we discussed the History of the Peloponnesian War, he pushed us to think more deeply. He would not accept shallow or lazy interpretations. You could see the contempt and disgust for the smart ass or the lazy student. One day he asked us to each write one question about the text on a piece of paper. Someone asked him why he wore a tie every day to work. His jaw clenched and he raged against all of us, "Why do you dress like a slob? Why do you wear your pajamas to class? Is this a university or a day care?" Professor Gross caught me between two crises, the crisis of moving away from my family for the first time, and the crisis of my own sexuality, which I dealt with by turning to religion and buying an enormous cross to wear around my neck.

It was a terrifically lonely time in my life, but what does it have to do with now? Does it have anything at all to do with now? My Kurdish neighbors have not been honest with me. Mustafa has a girlfriend who lives with him, and neither his roommate Deniz or he ever bothered to tell me this. I am an outsider and in this patriarchal society, I am not an equal -- only a foreigner, only a woman. They will treat me nicely at first, but they will use me if they can.

the end of an era

and I locked
the door then
put out the
lights
got myself a beer
and
sat there
in the dark
drinking
alone.

and
I liked that
so
much
that
that's the way
I continued to live
from then on.

there were no more
parties
and
after that
the writing got much
better

everything got much
better
because:

you've got to
get rid of
false friends and
bloodsuckers first
before they
destroy
you.

--Charles Bukowski's "The End of an Era" (lines 160-199)

To the Spring, To Be Quiet and Hate Them

I would go down the hill to the spring where I could be quiet and hate them.
--Addie Bundren in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying


It was the talking that got to me. No, not the talking exactly, the disrespect, the childishness. "They," I could not think of them as anything but "theys." They had turned in their papers and had begun giggling and whispering in Turkish and had not stopped. But I should put quotations marks around the word "paper" as well, because these "papers" were syntactical disasters of superficiality, laziness and time-wasting. Only three met the minimum length requirement. Black smudges streamed across title pages and titles like "Times is changing, so the eating habits" foreshadowed grammatical pyrotechnics and a burning red pen that would surely rage across those syntactically wily pages.

As a reward for that defacto exercise in futility, we would watch On the Waterfront (1954) with Marlon Brando and Eve Marie Saint and some other dated actors I can't remember. I don't even know why I chose the movie, come to think of it, apart from the fact I didn't want to watch any sex scenes while on the job, and to be reminded that this was the reason why I was here in the first place, since my predecessor couldn't keep his man-paws off his students, and also because in the second place, my text message in broken Turkish to my neighbor Mustafa had gone unanswered.

I should mention a few words here about the Muhtar and about acquiring my verification of residency, as without that delicious bit of Turkish bureaucracy, I would never have met Mustafa. About a month ago, the department assistant had given me a tiny Post-It note with the words, "I need a verification of residency. Can you help me?," written in Turkish, and I in turn had knocked on every apartment door in my building until finally reaching the last attic apartment, where I encountered Mustafa for the first time. He had a tea cup in his hand and slippers on his feet; he was rubbing his hair and making a face. I gave him the post-it note and he asked me to come in. Through visual props and gestures and Turkish-English dictionaries, I was able to find out that he was a communist and a publisher and that he was also publishing an Armenian/ Turkish newspaper, which he showed me. From me he was able to find out that I was staying for six weeks and that I was from Australia -- ok, alright, my Turkish was pretty useless back then. I couldn't understand what he was saying and he couldn't understand what I was saying, although I did find out he was paying about two-fifty less in rent than I was.

I'll come back to the Muhtar later, because all the paperwork was for nothing, apparently. Our department had misunderstood the requirements for a residency permit, and we never sent those residency verification forms to anyone. But should anyone ask, I have them on hand.

So it was Friday afternoon and the thing with Mustafa had gone badly and my university students were acting like middle schoolers. They were talking and talking and talking - they would not stop talking. They did not care for the history of cinema. They didn't want to know more about Method acting or about Elia Kazan. They didn't care that he was born in Istanbul. They didn't care. I couldn't respect them, and I couldn't understand them. I only wanted to "go down to the spring where I could be quiet and hate them." "If you need to go, LEAVE!" I said in the last fifteen minutes of the class. No one got up, and I hated them all the more for being cowards. They would go on whispering, but they did not have the courage to get up and leave.

Korkuyorum: I Am Afraid

Our teacher, Ozge, asks us what we most fear. We are to go around the room and provide our answers in Turkish. I am just a tiny bit in love with her. Even more so, after learning that she travels an hour each way from Bahcesehir, a suburb of Istanbul, to teach us Elementary Level I students after a long day of teaching eleven-year-olds at the local public school.

"Ucmak korkuyorum. I'm afraid of flying," Christa answers. She tilts her last syllable upward as if unsure that she's got the right one.

"Ne yapiyorsun? What will you do? You will have to fly back to America, won't you?" asks Ozge.

"Bilmiyorum. I don't know," answers Christa, "I will take Valedrin and sleep, I hope."

"Orumcek korkuyorum. I'm afraid of spiders," says Mark, a German from Essen with long, stringy hair and a drugged-out sort of a smile.

"Odev korkuyorum. I'm afraid of homework.," says Matthias, the sports fanatic from Germany, who watches every Turkish football match and somehow keeps up with the games in Germany, too.

"Kizler korkuyorum. I'm afraid of girls." says Cihan, a Korean Hyundai employee working in Istanbul.

And then my turn comes. Korkuyorum, I say. Afraid? asks my teacher. Yes, korkuyorum. But of what? she wants to know. Just afraid, I shrug.

"Nicin? Why?" asks Ozge.

"Bilmiyorum," I say.

In all honesty, I do know: I just don't want to say.

I am afraid.

I am afraid of writing. No, let me elaborate, I am afraid of writing badly. By the way, I'm also afraid of writing well. If by "well" you mean writing honestly - afraid that no one will like it, and by extension, no one will like me, or that if I write about those most private things, I will be ridiculed. And that if I don't, I will allow myself to be silenced. Afraid that without the company of women, I won't find the strength to write honestly and that without the company of men, I won't find the honesty to write strongly.

Nine women signed up for my non-fiction documentary novel class and only two men. Men wrote one hundred percent of the works we will be reading: EL Doctorow, William Styron, Truman Capote, and Normal Mailer - those are the authors on the departmental syllabus. I had at first rewritten it to include more women. I wanted Theresa Cha and Laurie Anderson and perhaps Kathy Acker to be on the list, but those works are just as difficult and almost unknown. There's hardly any critical scholarship on the works of Laurie Anderson or Muriel Rukeyser or Kathy Acker, even if that is changing.

Korkuyorum: I am afraid.

But I don't want to end this post on that note. I'll end by quoting Muriel Rukeyser about the joys of reading poetry and conquering fears.

READING TIME: 1 MINUTE 26 SECONDS

The fear of poetry is the
fear : mystery and fury of a midnight street
of windows whose low voluptuous voice
issues, and after that there is not peace.

The round waiting moment in the
theatre : curtain rises, dies into the ceiling
and here is played the scene with the mother
bandaging a revealed son's head. The bandage is torn off.
Curtain goes down. And here is the moment of proof.

That climax when the brain acknowledges the world,
all values extended into the blood awake.
Moment of proof. And as they say Brancusi did,
building his bird to extend through soaring air,
as Kafka planned stories that draw to eternity
through time extended. And the climax strikes.

Love touches so, that months after the look of
blue stare of love, the footbeat on the heart
is translated into the pure cry of birds
following air-cries, or poems, the new scene.
Moment of proof. That strikes long after act.

They fear it. They turn away, hand up, palm out
fending off moment of proof, the straight look, poem.
The prolonged wound-consciousness after the bullet's shot.
The prolonged love after the look is dead,
the yellow joy after the song of the sun.

The Temptor Under the Eyelid

"I remember looking up at the ceiling of my parents' room to see kaleidoscopic light shows--'peas and carrots' I called them, meaning the fragments of green and red on the insides of my lids when I closed my eyes again in their big warm bed. 'The temptor under the eyelid,' Dylan Thomas names this flickering creature. Is it that temptor who makes a poet?"

--Erica Jong, Fear of Fifty (10)

How to Be a Stranger to Yourself (And Be Happier), Pt. 2

I've been thinking lately about Rudolf Steiner's advice to watch the events of your life as if they're not happening to you, and I'm fascinated with the possibility of being able to do this, even if I'm not yet able to fully "step outside myself." I tried to hover above the event when my student told me she couldn't read Kerouac because "God wouldn't want her to read pornography," and, yes, I felt pity, but not for her, for myself, and I doubt that is the right way to do it.

My problems in the past have never been about my inability to feel pity for myself, but my inability to communicate, to make my views known to others, or in this case, to this student - I wanted to tell her why she was being ridiculous, but under the current circumstances (budget cuts, job insecurity, hysterical students), I didn't want trouble, and I doubted that my superiors would side with me in any case, no matter what I did.

I know these students: I know their panic-stricken faces, their hyper-conscientiousness, their obsessions with their scholarships and money, their conservative and distrustful parents, their knee-jerk dislike of the "cafe latte crowd" and their consumerism - how could I not know this? I also know they have the power, they who often come from fractured and unstable backgrounds, who seek the approval of their adult authority figures, whether they intend to or not.

Their parents, with their distractions and their legitimate and often serious concerns, but, principly, with their fears, cause anxiety by constantly reminding these kids not to fall through the cracks, not to step here and not to step there, not to do this and not to do that. These students do not seem to have a connection with nature or with unmediated others; that is to say, their interactions usually happen either in overly controlled churches or schools or the other extreme: in anarchic settings, where they mistake alcohol and sexual experimentation for rebellion and freedom from authority.

I want them to learn that there is nothing to fear, but I also want to learn this myself. At the moment I feel prepared at every instant to lose everything and I'm almost glad that I never had much to begin with - although the prospect of complete humiliation (i.e. having to wear any costumes involving chickens, roosters, or any bird in general) scares me. Perhaps it is time to watch Six Degrees of Separation again and to realize that in American culture you can rise quickly, but you can also fall just as easily.

"Try My Cheesy Baked Tortellini, Or Else!"

From The National Gallery of Art. Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp as Belle Haleine, 1921

I had been imagining this type of cheesy baked tortellini with mascarpone ever since trying out the recipe at Frau Rosen's house (a.k.a. my mom's place). The mascarpone tastes like a blend of unsweetened whipped cream and cream cheese, and is the secret ingredient that adds texture and creaminess to the dish. If you're familiar with the Italian coffee and rum dessert Tiramisu, that recipe also calls for mascarpone. Last night Frau Doktor Rosen (i.e. me) organized a Oiuja board/dinner party so I could finally re-create my mom's dish before an audience and also, possibly, channel a spirit or two. For the culinarily adventurous, I have provided the recipe below.

1 cup of mascarpone
2 cups of marinara sauce
1/4 cup parsley
2 tsp thyme
1 pound cheese tortellini
2 ounces thinly sliced smoked mozarella
1/4 cup freshly grated parmesan

1) Preheat oven 350 degrees.
2) Cook tortellini al dente (2-3 mins).
3) Blend marinara sauce and mascarpone.
4) In a flat dish, add cooked tortellini.
5) Add marinara sauce and mascarpone blend.
6) Add thinly sliced mozzarella.
6) Add parsley and thyme and grated parmesan.
7) Bake for thirty minutes covered.