The Lotus Notebooks

Alevis: Part 1

2011-10-01T19:00:00.000-07:00

When I think of the Alevis I have met, the word "luftmensch" comes to mind. I imagine traveling bards, dervishes, street performers, fire-breathers, circus people. I think of a culture that emphasizes art as an expression of life and playing an instrument or singing or dancing as a matter of course.

Ali and Hakan, for example, play the saz and sing traditional folk music in a conservatory in Europe. When in Istanbul, they go out every night until three and four in the morning. Their evening begins with chai and backgammon in Taksim Square and ends spontaneously as they migrate through Taksim from chai shop to nargile restaurant to music hall. Sometimes they bring the party back to the apartment, which means, I wake up with strange bodies to step over and every couch and bed occupied.

Can keeps a photo of Kerouac above his bed. He claims he's trying to live "on the road," just like Kerouac. He has few possessions -- an old automatic camera, some plaid shirts, two pairs of jeans. His saving grace is that he can cook. Most days he prepares breakfast for everyone in the apartment, but not unti he's asked enough of us for money to come up with the ten lira for the ingredients. He's a handsome man, Can, and has at least three girlfriends that I know of (although one recently went back to France, leaving him a gift, a very nice graphic novel, so I'm not sure whether to count her or not). Not bad for someone who works in a movie theater, although he does speaks Zazaci, as they all do, everyone in the apartment, apart from Anton.

Anton studied opera at Istanbul University and is, apparently, working for the state opera a couple days a week. Not only is he the only one in the apartment who doesn't speak Zazaci, but he's also the only one not from Tunceli and not Alevi. He's married to Gizem, whom I've never met, but who lives here during the academic year, when she teaches psychology classes somewhere in the city. Frankly, I don't know how she can take being married to Anton. I've never once seen him clean up or cook a meal and yet many times I've heard him complain about the food or talk about how dirty the apartment is or how backward the neighbors are. He doesn't pay rent, apparently, because he's just crashing at the apartment temporarily for this state opera job; in any case, in my view, his guest tenant status gives him license to stay quiet and smile more.

I never realized how much Anton considers himself superior to the others until once after lunch the conversation came to language, specifically, Zazaci. "There's no point in learning to speak it. You're better off learning French or English, some Western language. I mean what are you going to use it for. No one outside of Turkey speaks it." Ahmet, Can, Can's girlfriend Turkhan, and Kemal and I were all sitting around the table and no one said anthing for about a half a minute or so. Then, Can very calmly said that he hadn't had much choice because his mother had spoken it to him since birth. Later I found out Turkhan and Can had actually met at a rally in Ankara to promote the Kurdish languages being taught in the schools, so clearly this was a subject about which they felt pretty passionately.

From what I have observed, these people in our apartment have pretty loose romantic arrangements. Turkhan, for example, works as a psychologist for the schools in Tunceli, but she comes to Istanbul during holidays to see Can. When she's in Istanbul, they do everything together -- make meals together, clean up together, smoke cigarettes together, go shopping together. To me they seem an ideal couple, yet there are two other girlfriends who do the same thing with Can and who also have short, dyed hair, flat chests, nose rings, and wear the same kind of waifish sandles and yoga pants. They all seem very attractive to me, but I wonder how it all plays out, finally. The French girlfriend's card said simply, "You were different from the others." She must have had a start when she saw me opening the door with my three-month-old daughter in my arms. Probably thought Can had forgotten to tell her about more than just the old girlfriend in Tunceli.

On Living by Nazim Hikmet

2011-09-20T20:24:00.000-07:00

I

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example--
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people--
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees--
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II

Let's say you're seriously ill, need surgery--
which is to say we might not get
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast ...
Let's say we're at the front--
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind--
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.

III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet--
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space ...
You must grieve for this right now
--you have to feel this sorrow now--
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived" ...

Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993)

Piro needs slippers

2011-09-10T13:46:00.000-07:00

Most of Mustafa's friends just ignore me, but there are a few who try to make conversation. One of those is Piro, an ex-guerilla, with a strange, high-pitched voice, a graying mass of curls, and a penchant for old-fashioned clothes, grandfatherly cardigans, button-down shirts, khakis or unstylish pleated jeans. This morning he throws up in the bathroom next door. The sound of his retching vomit and his high-pitched mutterings wake me.

Mustafa tells me that Piro has not worked for the last ten years. Before that, he lived in Germany, doing what, no one knows, but his German is still broken. When I ask him about his time there, he responds vaguely, as if he doesn't want to talk about it. He has just been to Tunceli, he tells me, a mountainous region in Turkey where the majority practice the minority Alevi religion. He's an only child, in his early forties, who has never married, and is among those who lost his farm when the Turkish government burned the villages of those they thought were supplying the Tunceli guerillas with weapons or bread or food.

Of those who come to the house regularly, Piro's one of the ones that I like. He allows me to make mistakes when I speak Turkish and he doesn't give up making conversation if I trip over the words or I can't quite express what I mean to say. Maybe he's more forgiving because he knows what it's like to speak a foreign language and to live in a foreign country. He's also an Alevi, as they all are, everyone who comes to the house.

Piro makes his way from the bathroom, smiles as if embarrassed, and passes into the living room. I can see that he's wearing socks but no shoes and the apartment is cold. Piro needs slippers, I realize. There are the slippers I bought at the Tarlabasi market last year. They're crummy and worn-out, yet they keep disappearing on me. Mustafa offers them to all the guests, the ageing former guerrilla fighters, the out-of-work opera singers, the visiting girlfriends, even the electrician who never fixes the faulty wiring. I too offer the slippers now. I put them in front of Piro's feet and ask him if he wants some tea.

Hansel and Gretel, Starvation, and the Kurdish Village

2011-02-03T04:12:00.000-08:00

In the film Bananas, Fielding Mellish accidentally joins the San Marcos revolutionaries to impress a sexy political activist back in New York. After the revolutionaries save him from a run-in with a local militia, he decides to thank them by walking into a Central American bakery and ordering 5,000 ham sandwiches to take back up to all those hungry rebels still fighting in the mountains.

Mustafa's friends view me as a sort of female Fielding Mellish, as if my job is to feed and protect them. Like guerillas, they use the element of surprise to catch me off guard. Can, Mina, and Selcuk, for example, come every weekend, ask for Mustafa, and when I answer that he isn't here, they walk straight in, sit down in the living room, help themselves to the food in the kitchen and generally monopolize the TV set and DVD player. They have been known to stay for days at a time and often become more brazen when Mustafa finally arrives. Usually, something goes missing -- if it's not the lighter for the stove, it's Mustafa's books, or the honey, or the oranges.

In Mustafa's childhood, the guerillas regularly came down from the mountains to secure food and supplies from his village. All of the villagers opened up their home to these men, he claims, giving them whatever bread and vegetables they had. Why would these villagers, who had so little to begin with, be willing to sacrifice their own sustenance for those of the guerillas? Under what cultural and psychological conditions were these villagers living?

In families of eight, nine, or ten children, at least one child might join the guerillas. If not a child, then maybe an uncle or a cousin. The psychological effect of this outsourcing of the family males is worth exploring. In this re-envisioned Hansel and Gretel fantasy, the beleaguered and impoverished parents risk their own future to guarantee the survival of the ethnic family at the expense of the biological family.

In the original Brothers Grimm story, Hansel and Gretel's father and stepmother twice lead Hansel and Gretel out into the forest for the purpose of abandoning them there. Hansel and Gretel's biological father objects to the plan but concedes because of his new wife's persistence that they can no longer afford to feed Hansel and Gretel. According to Bruno Bettelheim, the cast out children must use their own ingenuity to survive on their own, to outwit the witch who tries to trick them, and to find their way home again, while at the same time securing the necessary resources so that when they return they will be able to provide the family unit with the tools it needs to survive and prosper.

Yet in this case, the villagers must be psychologically re-conditioned to redefine the family unit as synonymous with the party and to perceive the party as symbolically the provider, protector and benevolent father. To do this requires an emotional rhetoric that symbolically fuses party and family and depicts the economic survival of the family as highly dependent on the party. To present the party as essential to the survival of the family, the party not only has to create an outside threat more dangerous than its autocratic rule but also must fashion an atmosphere in which the contributions of the individual are essential to the survival of the party. This description rings true to the recollections of former PKK terrorists on their methods. Akif Hasan, a former spokesman for the PKK, describes the organizations attempts to raise money for the PKK in this way:

"You have to convince people, it can be difficult. Once, we made a play about a guerilla who was wounded, he goes to a tent hoping to get help from a doctor, but it's too late, he dies. Before he dies, he says, "tell my children I am sorry I can't see them before I die." The message was that he died because the guerillas did not have enough bullets [for lack of money]. People would cry watching it." (Marcus 231).

Elegantly Dressed Wednesday: Accidental Elegance

2011-02-02T01:42:00.000-08:00

The above photo is courtesy of Fashion Mommy.

Igor Stravinsky holding a negative of W.A. Mozart, courtesy of Opera Chic:

Dreams, Part II

2011-02-02T01:24:00.000-08:00

#1 The Communist Island Dream

All the trees and vegetation on the island have been sold. The horses are listless and starving; the people, untrustworthy and anemic. From the edge of the island, I can see a green, beautiful island. I want to swim to that island, but I am afraid of drowning or freezing along the way. On the island it rains constantly and is always cold. Wherever I look, there's concrete and dirt – grass does not grow here.

#2 The Father Dream

My father speaks fluent Turkish. I try to get him to speak in English but he can no longer understand English, much less speak it. I realize if I want to communicate with my father I will have to improve my Turkish.

#3 The Shoe Dream

The authorities have filled the lake with boots, some relatively new, some full of mud, others un-wearable. It takes me some time but I locate one of my boots on the shore. My boots are made of good soft leather and are worn in just how I like them. I search the entire beach but find nothing in the way of the right pair for my shoe. I realize then that I must drain the lake or scuba dive in search of my boot’s perfect match. I also understand that draining the lake will be expensive and that scuba diving in search of my boot’s opposite will be time-consuming, but I don’t care.

You say you want a revolution

2011-01-28T12:36:00.000-08:00

Thirty Years of Hope: Martyrs of the Party and the Revolution begins with photos of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong, followed by photos of the movement's Turkish founders, Kemal Ruzgar, Halil Ibrahim, Reza Berivan. The text is in Turkish, but much can be conveyed through the photos, mostly bearded youths, serious blazing women, some as young as 17. Most hold their weapons in their photos and, if for some reason, no one has provided a photo, a graphic of a man thrusting an automatic weapon in the air appears in its place.

Mustafa tells me that his uncle is in the album – that he was killed in the eighties in a shoot out. The uncle’s name is Ugur Tulkan and he was his mother’s brother. Mustafa was only three years old when the shoot-out took place, but apparently he remembers his mother and his uncle’s wife leaving to identify the body. The wife apparently intended to fight with the guerillas until she became pregnant and then instead opted to stay with her mother in the village. Her fatherless son now lives a quiet life as a civil servant.

There are quite a number of women fighters, all of whom appear to be young, between the ages of 18 and 22, all not smiling, all with sad, penetrating gazes, and all, of course, now dead.

1980: I see an image of the big house on the hill, the rushing Chattahoochee River, the jumps I have set up outside for my imaginary horses, the autographed photos of Olivia Newton John and Ronald Reagan taped to my wall. The neatly folded Izod Lacrosse polo shirts, the Mad Magazines, the bad play I am writing about our Episcopalian principal reimagined as a cross-dresser and a hoarder of Playboy magazine, the talented Mr. Bernstein enduring my tone deaf guitar playing.

By the fifth grade, in Ms. Field’s geography glass, we learn of the histories of China and Russia. We read Betty Bao Lord’s Eighth Moon. I involve my stuffed animals in very involved rescue missions. We must defect by repelling from the second story loft space down to the couch. If we do not land on the couch, we will be eaten in the shark- infested waters of beige carpeting, or even worse we will be banished – sent back to the loft. In my mind the loft represents Cuba or Russia or China, places where they eat nothing but gruel and porridge, and endure an endless ritual of singing revolutionary party songs, marching and hoarding rations.

Nothing about that world appealed to my eight-year-old mind, so how could it have held such promise for Mustafa? What about Chairman Mao would attract a small child from a village in the middle of Turkey? In answer to this question, I seek out any websites about the party I can find. The basic information I can find about the party coincides with the dates of the Thirty Years of Hope album. Yes, the man in the album is the same as the founder of the party, a strikingly handsome man, with very sharp cheekbones and a cruel mouth, by the name of Halil Ibrahim.

Their explicit goal is to fight for a classless society and to overthrow the state by force. On their website they boldly proclaim that they will continue their revolution until they reach their goal of world communism. They want no national borders. They want the proletariats from each land to act as a platoon of the world proletariats. They are a part of the Peasants Freedom Army of Turkey, an outgrowth of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China.

On the website is a tribute to Chairman Mao but also a tribute to the party and violence and power and militancy. Everything that the passages from Romans 12, the ones the Anglican Minister called us (we fifteen battered members attending that battered church) to reflect upon, oppose.

“His (Mao’s) development of other principles is also a great treasure: people are the main factor in revolutionary war; the starting point is relying on the masses; the Party; leadership is the principal aspect; the principle of self-reliance, the decisive importance of a correct political and ideological life (?), and especially the question of the new political power; and the revolutionary violence as a law without exception, as indispensable to seizing political power, which is the main law of every revolution.”

At times they have even cribbed Thoreau – throwing around terms like self-reliance and attributing them to Mao.

Dreams, Part 1

2011-01-20T09:52:00.000-08:00

Through thick wood, poplars, mulberries, dogwoods and kudzoo, past fallen trees and sandy banks, we follow the Chattahoochee river. A series of modern glass houses are all to be sold as commercial real estate. The one closest to the street looks so beautiful: hardwood floors, bright, simple, bold modern paintings hanging from glass walls, the trees and the river clearly visible behind it. We try to step inside, but the doors are locked. Many people want to get inside these glass houses, but all the doors are locked. I mention to the people I am with that the area had once been a flood zone. A bitter dispute between the Fulton County government and the builder ensued. The county would not allow the builder to build a multimillion dollar home on the flood plain. This builder brought in tons of rocks and fresh dirt, raised the land by twenty feet, and built anyway. The house was rumored to have leaks, but the builder's family lived there for at least ten years until husband and wife divorced, sold the land, and remarried.

Elegantly Dressed Wednesday: The Headscarf

2011-01-19T02:01:00.000-08:00

Shadow Boxing, Part II

2011-01-19T01:02:00.000-08:00

Only a handful of people attended the Anglican service. Usually the same ones came: soft-spoken, gray-haired English ex-pats, some of whom have lived in Turkey for well over ten years. Once before I knew I was pregnant, I felt compelled to visit the church. The assistant vicar (a woman) spoke of love and tolerance and charity. We stood for long periods of time; we had to stand for eons of time, and I just wanted to sit. I was so tired, even though I had slept for more than ten hours the night before.

Today my mind is on those Egyptian Coptic Christians who were killed in the middle of their New Years services and before that, the Iraqi Christians who found themselves locked inside a church with the gunman simply firing at random.

Samuel, my ex-neighbor, has tea with the vicar occasionally and even brought him back a bottle of scotch whiskey from his last trip to England. “The vicar has a weak spot for scotch whiskey,” he says, “He even came down to Tarlabasi to pick up the whiskey – had to bring his two bodyguards with him, of course, though.” Apparently, a few weeks before the church had been vandalized. Some bottles were tossed through the stain glass windows. Some telephone threats, thus the Serbian bodyguards.

The vicar has a round face and a gentle way of speaking. He speaks of the impressive economy of language in the Latin translation and reminds us that today is the four-hundredth anniversary to the day of that translation. He asks us to spend some time this week ruminating on Romans 12, “Think of its generosity, its integrity, its kindness. Think of the way it asks us to develop ourselves into a higher form of humanity." "The rewards are in the acts themselves,” he tells us, "not in the recognition of those acts."

He never mentions safety concerns, but I think of them. We are less safe from the fanatics in a church than in a Starbucks. Turks hang out at Starbucks. Wherever Turks are is safer; wherever foreigners are without the protection of Turks is less safe.

Am I being ridiculous?
1) The three missionaries who were stabbed in Malatya.
2) The bombing of the British embassy and the killing of Roger Short, apparently a member of this Anglican church.
4) The Tophane art gallery attacks against foreigners
5) The government’s tepid response to the incident.
6) The passage of the reforms to the constitution which strengthened Erdogan’s AKP.
7) The passage of the headscarf reforms (October?)

I have given my Bible to Anna, another atheist, because my version is bilingual – Turkish/English and I have told her it was a good way to improve her Turkish. Both of us are reluctant to concede that the New Testament stories actually provide some kind of solace. Anna likewise has told me that she sometimes goes to church to think even though she does not believe.

No one in the congregation leaves when the service is over. The vicar and his aids file out but the visitors kneel to pray. Likewise, they extend the handshaking, the saying of “peace be with you,” to well beyond just exchanging words and handshakes with those around them. They cross the aisle to shake everyone’s hand as if each of us is somehow familiar to the other. What are their stories? Do they dream of locked glass houses on the former flood plains of their youth? Do they dream of friendship with their sexual competitors, of other people’s pregnancies, of longing eyes, of the childless? Why are they here? What bridges must I cross to find them, those friends, of my youth? I am assured of just one thing that the divide between the Anglican and the Catholic and the Atheist is but a stone’s throw.

The body under the clothes

2011-01-16T01:21:00.000-08:00

Mustafa's brother Erdem intended to catch his connecting flight in Istanbul and to continue onto London from there. Since his first confrontations with the police eight years earlier, Mustafa had not been able to see any of his family. In the morning he planned to meet Erdem at the airport. I was focused on preparing review sessions for the students' final exams. My friend Bert had had a crisis related to his girlfriend leaving him. My officemate Anna brought her four-year-old daughter to work that day. There were simply too many things going on, and I had not enough time between classes to make a call.

If we ever spent time together, I would talk to him about the meeting with the Dean, about my maternity leave, about the engineering professor who refuses to grade on a curve and so is having trouble adjusting. I might talk to him about my Americanized student Doğukan's conflicts with his Turkish professor, Mehmet, or about the many many absent students who miraculously show up to class for the review session and finally ask pertinent questions which show that they can think, but that they simply don't want to. If they could only act like students on the other days too, if they could only know why they were here, what their purpose was when not facing yet another test.

So I did not call him, but then that night as I was clearing the laundry off the rack, I started looking at his t-shirts and his boxers again, thinking of his body inside the clothes, his body being brutalized, the police perhaps insulting him or verbally abusing him, and him still possessing that same body, having to sleep on a wire cot with nothing but a sheet and a raw wool blanket to cover him, no one to rib him about his teeth grinding, or maybe someone ribbing him about it, but doing it in a way that made him fear taking a shower or paranoid about walking down dark prison halls.

What were Turkish prisons like today? I had asked my colleague at work and not received an answer. Probably she had believed even the question itself was an insult to Turkishness. (What goes through their heads when they won't just talk to us?) Rahime, for example, yesterday during her presentation about the town of Mersin, about the restoration plans to the St. Paul Church and the nearby well.

Me: "Any idea why the municipal government rejected the proposal to restore the well?"
No answer.
Me: "Was that under Erdogan or before?"
She: "No, it was not under Erdogan."
Me: "Was it in bad condition before?"
She: "No."
Me: "Was it in good condition?"
She: "No."
Me: Any idea what they will do to it?"
Long silence.
She: "Just make it nicer."

I could dismiss it as a language problem, except that I experience the same kind of caginess with the Turks in my department. Veering from the party line to truly disclose information, especially when the person asking the question is a foreigner, they view as a kind of betrayal, as if truth is less important than silence.

Things I have been silent about, Part 3

2011-01-15T02:13:00.000-08:00

They lie about why they cannot come to class. The lies are so brazen, the doctors' notes so patently forged, the excuses so flimsy, that often I am stunned into silence. Every semester I remind myself to strictly enforce some kind of attendance policy, some system of reward and punishment, and every semester these policies have no positive effect. I begin with high aspirations -- fieldtrips, movie clubs, scavenger hunts, activities designed to challenge them to push their language speaking skills to a new level -- but find my enthusiasm for meeting my students outside of class waning by about week six.

If I venture beyond the classroom, either to my language class or to my home in Tophane, I am struck by the number of people in Mustafa's circles who do not work. Mustafa's friend Ozgur lived in Germany for at least five years, now is back in Turkey, but apparently has never once worked. Mustafa's closest friend Can was an anthropology student but apparently left the university over a dispute with a professor. He cobbles together his living by doing odd jobs, occasionally steals books, and lives a spartan hand-to-mouth existence. Neither of these men are young, Ozgur, 40, Can, 35, and yet they choose not to have families and not to work. Can's girlfriend Nilufer lives with her parents at 30+, and apparently studies anthropology, an endeavor that has already taken her well over eight years. Firat, a quite talented photography student, abruptly left her degree program in photography after eight years as a student and now works at a youth hostel down the street from us.

In American culture we attach great shame to not working. We consider it a moral failing, a sign that that individual has nothing to offer society, that there is something mentally, physically or spiritually wrong. People who don't work are suspicious and not to be trusted. A question that has been on my mind is how much of the shame of not working comes from the Protestant religion, from its effect on what we value and how we view our individual self-worth. Max Weber first posited the same question in his 1904 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism when he wrote:

"Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all people not living under capitalistic influence. At the same time it expresses a type of feeling which is closely connected with religious ideas."

What then is the attitude toward work in Islam? A quick Google search turned up one discussion thread on the topic "Muslim and Work Ethics". Manuel Kommenos opened the dicussion with the following comment:

"Looking at the immigrants where I live, having worked with plenty of them, I have discovered a clear distinction between the different ethnic group's attitudes towards labor and hard work, both in the field of academic work, and normal labor. Whereas Indians, Tamils, Chinese and Vietnamese work like heroes, the effort among Muslim immigrants is generally dismal, be it Pakistanis, Iraqis or Somalis. Apart from a few honorable exceptions, I find them generally worse than the clichéd Italians. They often neglect agreements, and have a rarely negative attitude towards being commanded. They take every opportunity to laze about, and don’t meet much resistance before they quit.

Looking at the economies in Muslim countries, either very poor, or largely fueled by raw materials and tourism, one doesn’t find a lot of examples of tough built creative businesses. Especially if we distinct between India and Pakistan, one might get the feeling that there is some fundamental stubbornness towards work in Muslim culture. Just see how India has risen above its neighbor Pakistan. Although, I realize this is a very long reaching generalization. I don’t mean that there necessarily is anything contradictory between Islam and hard work, but maybe that in those regions where Islam has prevailed they have a lazy culture, from old? What are your ideas on this?"

The German sociologist, Weber, considered religion one of the most important factors in determining a society's political outlook, in particular whether it developed a liberal tradition or not. Weber never finished his final work, The Sociology of Religion. However, in that book he did manage to develop some theories on Islam. For Weber Islam was not only antithetical to Puritanism in terms of its attitude to women, luxury and property, but the religion also pulled the culture in two separate directions. Warrior Islam gave the religion a militaristic ethos whereas Sufi Islam pulled Islam in the direction of mystical flight. Both political systems in general stressed the values of imitation and the rejection of innovation, and were therefore antithetical to the spirit of capitalism.

Elegantly Dressed Wednesday: Aubrey Beardsley

2011-01-12T06:11:00.000-08:00

Birthdays

2010-12-19T12:20:00.000-08:00

My discontent had to do with my birthday, with the way Mustafa had not said anything -- no congratulations, no cake, no gift -- even though he knew the day was my birthday. Periodically, I checked my Facebook page to see who had posted on my page. As the numbers grew, I felt worse, not better. Why could the father of my child not, likewise, offer some acknowledgment? But then Mustafa did not know the date of his birth. As the sixth of eight children, he had never celebrated birthdays as a child. He knew only what his mother had told him: his birth had taken place sometime in late June/early July in the late 1970s. His astrological sign was Cancer, not Gemini, but beyond that, he knew nothing.

No one in the family ran down to the newsstand. No one checked out the estimates on the exact date at the chai shop. No one ventured down to the town hall to inquire as to the day of the year. After forty weeks of carrying Mustafa in her stomach, his mother had taken no photos of his birth. In fact, she had taken no photos of any of the children. There were class photos and a few random photos, taken by whom and for what purpose, he did not know. Only he had burned them, in order to protect himself during his earlier activist period.

Birthdays tend to be considered a western phenomenon in the Muslim world. In her memoir Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia, Carmen Bin Laden explains the troubles she ran up against in her attempts to throw a birthday party for her daughters in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. None of the other wives would venture to disobey their husbands and bring their children to the party. A quick scan on the internet reveals the same phenomenon. Mommy Muslim at Mommymuslim.wordpress.com writes:

"Al Hamdulilah! My daughter just turned four this week. I wanted to celebrate it with her and invite a few of her friends (Muslim) over. I was told by one of the parent's (sic) that no one would come because no other parents allow their children to celebrate birthdays. We are new to this masjid and I didn't realize that this was a major faux pas. I do understand their position. If they tell their children that "Muslims don't celebrate birthdays" and then the kids come to my daughter's birthday, they will wonder why she gets to celebrate and they don't. So I totally support their position. Consistency is vital."

Mustafa would likely object to being called a Muslim, since 1) he was raised an Alevi, and 2) he is now an atheist, if anything. The Alevis do not worship in a mosque, but in an assembly house, in a service that consists of men and women dancing and singing together. The leaders of the assembly house even open up the religious topic of the week to discussion. Perhaps this is why Alevis have a reputation for liberalism and for holding religious views somewhere between Islam and Christianity.

Elegantly Dressed Wednesday: Katherine Hepburn

2010-12-15T08:21:00.001-08:00

The apartment

2010-12-15T03:21:00.000-08:00

Mustafa's books lean into one another; they climb - like vines - up, up to the ceiling. The free ones embrace those locked inside the three standing bookshelves. The books are all in Turkish, mostly Marxist texts, books about philosophy and Kurdish history, but there's also some poetry, one Barbara Kingsolver novel, a copy of Stendhal's The Red and the Black.

On the night I moved in, the wind blew one panel of siding right off the roof. The rain came in through a disarmingly large L-shaped chasm in the ceiling. Occasionally, the sound of gravel rolling down plastic alarmed me. A large water stain clouded the far corner of the living room. Pools of water collected on the stairwell.

From what I could see, the Kurdish people in Tarlabaşı liked their apartments cluttered. They liked dark furniture, dark patterned blankets, rugs covering every surface, TV sets on. In front of the set, the Kurdish fathers recline, wrapped in mismatched floral print blankets. On cold days, the streets reek of burning coal.

The first thing I did in my room was get rid of the old and dusty mustard yellow and navy Persian rug. I wanted to hang my simple green IKEA curtains, but apparently, my bedroom wall cannot support the stainless steel rods from my old apartment. Mustafa and Onur's rooms still have dark Persian rugs, all the dark floral prints, all the mismatched, heavy furniture, the style I remember from those Tarlabası apartments. The smell of cigarette smoke and dirty clothes from Onur's room makes me want to take flight. Mustafa's room also smells, but at least he does not smoke.

The neighborhood is known to be conservative and religious. The bakkal (grocer) on the corner, for example, listens to the Imam's sermon on Sunday evening. Last Sunday, when I came in to get groceries, I heard the speaker use the words "Yahudiler" (Jews) and "Hiristiyanlar" (Christians). To me the voice speaking sounded like Tayyip Erdoğan's. I asked if it was Erdoğan speaking. "O Erdoğan değil," he answered. That's not Erdoğan. "But it sounds just like him," I said. "Yes, it does, effendim." The shopkeepers always use terms of respect like "effendim" They are always polite, but I still don't trust them completely. Not after the men selling köftes and his buddies laughed off the art gallery incident. "No, abla, it isn't like that. Don't believe what you read in the papers. It isn't like that, we're not like that." Ha-ha. A neighborhood mob uses sticks and stones on art gallery attendees taking a smoke break. Five art lovers are sent to the hospital. Afterward, the köfte-makers have a giggle.

But if you think of the art gallery incident, you have to also think of the lovely covered woman in our building, following her son to the door with instructions. We do not converse, but she nods at me as if in acknowledgement of our common womanhood and smiles as she shuts the door.

Across the street, in an internet cafe, the neighborhood boys play video games. The clerks are eager to show you they know more than the numbers in English, even if you speak to them in Turkish. Then when you counter with a question in English, they usually can't understand you. How do they feel about us? Do they hate us or love us? The cab drivers like our money and our tips. The clerks at the internet cafe use remote access control to print my pages for me. The cursor moves across the screen, even though I have not asked it to.

Now that I am living with Mustafa, apparently, Yağmur will not come to the house anymore. The other day I found her petite singlets on the laundry rack. What could I do? I just folded the clothes, put them to one side, and hung my stuff on the line. How enormous my things looked next to hers, especially those damned maternity jeans!

This evening when I came home Mustafa was busily washing all the dishes. He and Onur had put in the DVD of the Julia Roberts' film Eat Pray Love, and were watching it intently. Mustafa did not grumble once about the pile of dishes, even though it took him over an hour to wash all of them. After finishing the dishes, he made dinner for all of us, and even sat down to watch the film without even one complaint.

Eleven Things & Writing

2010-12-13T07:57:00.000-08:00

The prompt for this post comes from Clio Bluestocking Tales via Professor Zero:

Prompt: What are 11 things your life doesn’t need in 2011? How will you go about eliminating them? How will getting rid of these 11 things change your life? (Author: Sam Davidson)

NATASHA'S ELEVEN THINGS

1) Blaming the world outside (a country/a people) for my own unhappiness.
2) Trying to please other people at the expense of my own desires/instincts. (Having the baby in the U.S. -- why? because my mother wants me to/Agreeing to teach anything -- why? because "I'm so lucky to be here"; then, teaching badly because the subject bores me. )

3) Letting the institution "hollow out the inside." Allowing myself to be "institutionalized."
4) Doing research/academic work because it is more likely to be rewarded. (You have not suffered or starved yet for your choice to study writing. You will not in the future either. Do not try to do academic work just to be "normal." )

5) Seeking the eternal pat on the head. From Daddy, The Heavenly Father or Daddy-Substitute.

Or, from Mommy, The Heavenly Mother or Mommy-Substitute.

6) Ignoring the things that give pleasure/seeking punishment (for what?)

7) Neglecting my "i" out of insecurity. Let the "I" and the "i" talk to teach other -- calmly, though.

8) Worrying for the sake of worrying.

9) Forgetting Kerouac, Whitman and Dickinson.

10) Panicking because I don't speak Turkish well enough.

--Being fluent in Turkish will not help my writing.

11) Working for the sake of working. Give yourself a break occasionally. Come back to the writing fresh.

*This image comes from the Masters of Photography Series. Ruth Bernhard. Torso. 1955.

Impregnable of Eye: Emily D to the Rescue

2010-12-11T08:02:00.000-08:00

In 1998, Alain De Botton published a book called How Proust Can Change Your Life. Unfortunately, a similar book about the many ways in which the poetry of Emily Dickinson can change your life hasn't yet been written, but the poetry of Emily Dickinson can change your life. Her poetry offers not only the possibility of new worlds and an alternative way of seeing, but also provides a window into one of the most unique and idiosyncratic minds of the nineteenth-century. In 1862, for example, Dickinson wrote this poem about the imagination:

I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors--

Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye--
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--

Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands--
To gather Paradise--

With only six months left until I give birth, I am stuck on the second line in the second stanza, "Impregnable of Eye--". I am now over the worst of the first trimester nausea, but I also have dramatic mood swings, panic attacks and fears about the unknown. What strikes me now as I read this line "Impregnable of Eye--" is the root of the word "pregnable," as meaning something that can be conquered, something vulnerable and weak. As everyone knows, Dickinson never married and remained a virgin her whole life. Apparently, she wrote to her best friend and sister-in-law Susan Dickinson that marriage was a dangerous thing. To Dickinson, a husband represented someone who could subsume her identity and therefore posed a threat to her own creativity.

Yet this is not a poem about marriage or relationships, but about poetry. Just because the etymology of the word "impregnable" hints at the vulnerability of the pregnant woman, that does not mean I necessarily have to do the same. Besides, Dickinson lived in the nineteenth-century. At that time, she could "dwell in possibility" only by refusing to marry, but women of the twenty-first century enjoy the benefits of modern medicine, can delay childbirth, can have children and not marry, or, marry, opt not to have children, and focus on their careers.

Some women claim pregnancy as the happiest and most productive time in their lives. In Vittorio De Sica's 1963 film Ieri, Oggi e Domani, Sophia Loren plays Adelina, a Neopolitan woman who cannot feel good unless she is pregnant. Her overworked husband -- played by Marcello Mastroiani -- tries to convince her that eight is enough, but to no avail: she wants more. Other pregnant women say that, as their bodies metamorphose, they shudder over their loss of autonomy. Doctors, friends, and family all give advice. Our bodies become foreign to us. Our habits change. A night out at a bar, once an entertaining prospect, now sends us into a heart-palpitating fit. We can no longer handle the cigarette smoke and the noise. We have begun to feel like just a gestating womb.

Here's where Emily D comes in. Her advice: You must become "impregnable of eye". You must build a fortress, an internal one, continue to read and to think, continue to nest and prepare for the future. Don't allow the negative possibilities to overtake the positive. Instead, use your inner eye to look out into the world, without fear. Good luck.

Pregnant Aliens and Superheroes

2010-11-27T03:10:00.000-08:00

My Body: The Unfinished Revolution

2010-11-20T05:25:00.000-08:00

**Bild: Die Revolution in Berlin 1848**

and distant drums beat out the rhythms of death

2010-07-25T08:45:00.000-07:00

Hakkan was so handsome that he caused a stir when he walked into a room. Because of his beauty, people often assumed things about his life being charmed. They felt a certain jealousy that his features had so perfectly fallen into place, that he never wore an unironed shirt or pants, and that all his ties were designed by the expensive Turkish designer Vakko -- I too assumed things about Hakkan, say, for example, that he had a wife and children, and that he was rich and heterosexual, but not necessarily interested in me. If he were single, he might be in search of a wife, but not a foreign one. In the military, in particular, a man in search of a high station would do well to find a Turkish wife, so what did he want from me?

In an earlier post, I wrote about the Turkish need to find a westerner in whom one can 'confess'. I speculated that the reason for this is that we are in general less likely to have cultivated a vast web of connections within Turkey and our often barely proficient Turkish means our Turkish confessor is not likely to lose face through damaging gossip about his masculinity or lack thereof. All this has very little to do with us as western women, with our hopes and our fears, our shortcomings, etc. and as I argued in thet earlier post, our role within this narrowly circumscribed world can change quickly depending on the need of the moment.

I first realized the cultural fix Hakkan was in when I visited him at work in the middle of March. It was late, at least 8:30 or 9, and Hakkan was still working, as usual. The guard at first didn't understand me, but after some repeating of Hakkan's name, he directed me to his office. It was a corner office with large bay windows, a large flat screen monitor, and a sitting area for guests.

Hakkan sent the guard to make tea for us. As we were waiting on the tea, he picked up the camera on the coffee table. "Photos from my father and brother's visit today," he said wıthout actually lifting the camera in my direction. I knew he didn't want me to look at the photos, but I was curious. So I looked into the viewer and was momentarily astonished by the ugliness of his father. How could he be related to such an unattractive man? He had a thick moustache, dark squirrelly eyes, a squat frame and a look halfway between menacing and despondent. But this wasn't the illuminating part of the photo.

The most illuminating thing was his father's tense, critical and unbending mouth; the man would not smile. The occasion of the visit, the birth of a grandchild (Hakkan's brother's first) and his younger son's promotion, would seem to be a happy one and yet it did not merit even the slightest grin. The second thing that clued me into Hakkan's problems with his father was his own flat unhappy expression. He too stood tensely at attention without a hint of a smile, and when I asked whether his brother's child was a boy or a girl, he said he couldn't remember. "Can't remember the sex of your niece or nephew?" "I really wasn't listening," he said.

Then Hakkan did something that bothered me: he dimmed the lights. We weren't making out or anything, but I realized afterward that he wanted it to appear that we were making out for the guard who would momentarily bring the tea in. We sat in silence for a bit, I was not comfortable, and said I had to go. He followed me out and wanted to know what was wrong. I wanted very badly to say that he was using me and that he should come out without fear and love whomever he really loved instead of pretending, but I could not really say this because I really had only a vague idea of how safe or unsafe coming out actually was in Turkey. Only after doing some reading online did I find out, for example, that only a few weeks before Turkey's State Minister Aliye Kavaf made a statement that homosexuality was a disease which homosexuals should seek treatment for [1]. A little over a year earlier, the court had used the same reasoning to try to shut down Lambda Istanbul, a gay and lesbian advocacy group, on the grounds that it violated the law for the protection of the family and public morality. [2]

This was around the same time as the case that the papers declared "Turkey's first publicized gay honor killing" [3]. Ahmet Yildiz, a 26 year old university student, was on his way to buy ice cream when he was shot five times by his own father. His father, Yahya Yildiz, apparently traveled 600 miles to kill his son, and not only did witnesses watch the killing without coming forward to testify, but none of his family ever returned to claim Yildiz's body. The thought of that abandoned body could be enough to make any gay man want to marry a gullible foreigner.

1. "Homosexuality is a disease, says Turkish minister". Hurriyet Daily News. 10 March 2010. Accessed 7.24.10
2. "Court Shuts Down Istanbul's Gay Rights Association," Kamil Pasa.com. Accessed 7.24.2010.
3. "Was Ahmet Yildiz the Victim of Turkey's First Gay Honor Killing," The Independent. 19 July 2008. Accessed 7.24.2010.
4. "A Death that Shouldn't Have Leaked Out," The New York Times. November 26, 2009. Accessed 7.24.2010.
5. "Turkish Society Continues to Discriminate Against Gays, Survey Says". Hurriyet Daily News, Thursday, May 27, 2010. Accessed 24.07.10.

(The exquisite photo above is by Man Ray and is called "Observatory Time". To find out more about Man Ray's work, click here.)

Tarlabasi, Part 2

2010-07-17T10:39:00.000-07:00

The three unmarried brothers, Alevi Kurds, who own the 24 hour corner grocery see everything. Weddings, traffic arguments, domestic arguments, domestic resolutions, petty crimes, serious crimes, they have seen it all. Through the course of the year, the oldest of the three has become sullen and gained weight. He rarely smiles but I can often see him patrolling the block, talking to the neighbors, or cleaning the area around his store. His younger brother is 34 but has prematurely gone grey. He would like to learn English, as would his younger brother, but once, when we set up a time for a language exchange, he changed his mind and asked me whether I wouldn't be interested in teaching the neighborhood children instead.

The students would all be Kurdish children as everyone in the neighborhood is Kurdish. I am reluctant to get involved, even though offering English lessons might help them develop a skill that could lead to opportunities later in life, but who would come and where would the lessons take place? With the regular police searches on my street, the recent PKK attacks in Istanbul, and the continued banning of schools where Kurdish is the language of instruction, the Kurdish community in Tarlabasi is right to be paranoid. If I got involved, I would likely be watched and as I work for a Turkish university, that might make my personal and work life more complicated.

Some writers like Aliza Marcus, the author of Blood and Belief, have suggested that relations between the Kurdish minority and Turkey are at a boiling point. Eighty soldiers were killed this year in the southeast region. Last week Turkey bombed PKK strongholds in Northern Iraq. (Is Turkey's PKK Problem Spiraling Out of Control?). These tensions, says Marcus, have not been helped by the government's cool reaction to the PKK's declaration of a ceasefire last April: the day after the declaration, 53 executives and members of the pro-Kurdish party were rounded up on suspicion of ties to the PKK. In December tensions escalated again when the government shut down the pro-Kurdish party for its alleged connections to the PKK.

Devrim, my former neighbor, shortly after the closing of the DTP party in December, remarked that the Kurds were beginning to feel that no matter what, they would never be heard as every time the Kurdish representative party used legal channels and made even a modest demand for reform, the government responded by shutting down the Kurdish party, and the cycle of building another party, often the old party under a new name, would begin again.

Turks are still extremely reluctant to engage in any kind of discussion about the Kurdish question. Some have personal experience of fighting the PKK during their compulsory military service. Others can recall a relative or acquaintance who fought and was perhaps injured or killed in the east. My own attempt to initiate a mock debate in the classroom after the parliamentary shutdown of the Kurdish party in December ended rather disastrously when some students walked out, others refused to participate, and even - so I heard later - went to the department head en masse to complain. What struck me as bizarre at the time was that the students accused me of being emotional and yet there were many issues about which I feel emotional -- the American health care system, my experiences in graduate school, or gender issues -- but this was not one of them. So as far as I can recall, I had almost dispassionately divided the students into two camps, groups which were not intended to reflect their true position on the party's forced shut down. I had then explained that this exercise was intended to make them develop their reasoning and argumentative skills, as they would in the work sector be asked to perceive a problem from many different angles.

This is perhaps why the American intelligence officer Kenneth Pendar's impression of the Arab/Muslim world as a place where what people said was nearly opposite of what they meant rang true to my own experience of my Turkish students. What they resented was the emotions the topic aroused in them, not in me. And what such a discussion might show about them,, such as how it might expose their own assumptions about the correct measures of the government, their democracy, or in this case the shutting down of the party, the individual, or the group whose views one simply did not want to hear.

The New York Times recently featured an interesting column about the process of teaching critical thinking skills at the American University of Cairo in Egypt. In the article called "A Campus Where Unlearning is First," Michael Sluckman details a process he calls "unlearning" which involves teaching the students to forget the rote learning of their high school years, so that they can more freely explore the concepts again, this time with an inquisitive and open mind. One student in the article spoke about the disconnect between the culture in the school and that of the world outside the school.

"It's different here because there is room for people to express themselves," said Manar Mosen, a junior majoring in political science and journalism. "It's not that simple outside, where it is more about conformity."

Students learning to doubt, question and express themselves are making a difficult transition, said Sluckman. The fact that plagiarism is pandemic is an indication the students haven't yet learned to distinguish between regurgitating their teacher's work and copying the work of a professional writer found online.

This would be the case for the students at my university. I have given open book quizzes and found whole passages lifted from the text, without even a word or phrase altered. Cheating on quizzes will often have a lemming effect. One student will copy her neighbor's paper, who will copy his neighbor's paper, who will copy etc etc etc. As a result, the students' responses will be surpisingly uniform. Everyone in a class might, for example, miss the give-away early quiz question, but for some reason answer the obscure, and from my point of view rather trivial, extra credit question, simply because one student in the class happens to know the answer to that particular question.

The students I teach often have no inherent interest in the subject (For more on the Turkish system for selecting majors of study, see Turkey: World Law Correspondents' Report ), they are unfamiliar with teaching methods that emphasize hypotheses and questioning, and at times they also struggle with expressing themselves in English.

There is also a tricky political matter to consider. Today Turkey has the highest rate of anti-Americanism in the world. According to the PEW foundation, only 9% of Turks expressed a favorable view of America whereas 85% held a negative view (The Turkish Conundrum, Global Unease With Major World Powers). Even in the American Culture and Literature Department, anti-American attitudes reflect themselves in the relatively few students who express a desire to study in the United States. Living in a society where most do not particularly like Americans, these students must continue to prove their national allegiances with reassuring responses to the questions of relatives and friends about whether they are not already too Americanized.

Students who have been raised in the United States by Turkish parents can find adjusting to the expectations of Turkish faculty difficult. One Turkish student raised in New Jersey, for example, described how his attempts to contribute to the lecture were often received negatively and suspiciously as an attempt to undermine the professor's authority and to be disrespectful.

I have yet to see any numbers on anti-Americanism among Kurdish Turks but I would imagine those figures would be exactly inverted. That is, only 9% would have a negative opinion of the United States and 85% would have a positive one. The suspicions of insult, the quickness to anger, and the tendency to make negative generalizations are things I have never experienced in my neighborhood or in my daily interactions in Tarlabasi.

Which brings back to my Kurdish Alevi grocers. Police searches will likely continue to occur in my neighborhood, just as transient foreigners, who usually don't speak Turkish, living in the neighborhood will likely observe these searches without completely understanding why they are happening. The police and the government would like to crack down on the PKK's influence among Kurds in Istanbul, but as Aliza Marcus discusses in her article Is Turkey's PKK Problem Spiraling Out of Control?, the terrorist organization remains popular. As the Kurdish problem intensifies, these allegiances between Americans and Kurds will enrage nationalist Turks as will the possibility of providing Kurds with quality English instruction and a quality education.

Through the Looking Glass (first draft)

2010-07-11T06:25:00.000-07:00

I first heard Valley of the Wolves mentioned back in January when a usually indifferent student gave an enthralling presentation about the political fallout between Turkey and Israel as a result of the show. As he explained it, back in January, the Israeli ambassador and a Turkish official had met to discuss a controversial episode of Valley of the Wolves depicting Israeli intelligence agents as baby snatchers. In that meeting the Israeli ambassador had, apparently, shamed the Turkish offical not only by giving him a lower seat but also by publicly calling attention to the seat's height. At the time I hoped the Israeli government would have the sense to dismiss this buffoon, so that it could get back to the matter at hand, the puzzling depiction of Jews as baby-killers and spies who threaten the future of the Turkish state.

If Valley of the Wolves weren't so popular, the show could have been written off as a fringe phenomenon not worth taking seriously, but the show (together with Aşkı Memnu) was one of the most popular television program in Turkey, occupying the coveted Thursday prime-time viewing slot. The 2006 feature film Valley of the Wolves: Iraq became one of the top-grossing films in Turkish cinema history when it brought in just under $26 million revenues ("Valley of the Wolves: Iraq," Wikipedia).

In a written statement, Pana Films dismissed complaints about the 2007 episode Valley of the Wolves: Ambush by saying that the show would "continue to tell the truth and expose the wrongs." Continue to tell the truth about what? About Israelis being baby snatchers who storm the Turkish embasssy to hold its ambassador and family hostage?

One year earlier, these same producers released Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, a film that also stirred up controversy for its perceived anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. Highlights of the film are viewable with English subtitles here.

The film shares some qualities with American propaganda films following World War II. Back then American filmmakers juxtapposed stock Japanese villains screaming "Bonzai!" to rational, humane Americans who preferred to use their wits rather than their fists. Today as American television and cinema, egged on by HBO realism, push for more verisimilitude and complexity, Turkish cinema seems to have gone in another direction.

In one particularly disturbing scene, Sam Marshall, the stock American villain, challenges the Turkish hero, Polat Alemdar, to blow up the American Grand Hamilton hotel. To manipulate Alemdar's conscience, he calls in the children of the occupation, an impossibly well-behaved group of kids, dressed in bright red school uniforms, the girls in pigtails. Our hero Alemdar should kill these children in the process of destroying the building, asserts the villain Sam Marshall. Only Alemdar cannot bear unnecessary violence against children. His only goal in coming to Iraq, a goal he of course accomplishes, is to avenge the honor of the eleven Turkish special forces agents who were hooded and detained for 48 hours. The villain American proudly proclaims that he understands everything there is to understand about Turks: Turks value human life too much whereas he would have no qualms about killing 11,000 of his own men if it would secure Iraq for the Americans. He also is tone deaf to Turkish pride and repeatedly humiliates Polendar's Turkishness by saying Turks always borrow money and never produce anything.

Valley of the Wolve's popularity has not escaped the notice of Wall Street Journal columnist Robert L. Pollock, who wrote about the film in a column entitled "Erdogan and the Decline of the Turks." According to Pollock, Turks have been "fed a steady diet of imagined atrocities perpetrated by U.S. forces in Iraq, often with the implication that they were acting as muscle for the Jews." Well-respected newspapers like Hurriyet, says Pollock, claim everything from the mass organ harvesting of Iraqi organs to American troops' mass dumping of bodies in the Euphrates resulting in a fatwa being issued against eating the river's fish.

If the state didn't support the show, one wouldn't have such a sense of going "through the looking glass" when living in Turkey. But Pollock claims that in a series of interviews with Prime Minister Erdogan, the prime minister did nothing to distance himself from the show. Below is an excerpt from the dialogue between the two men in Pollock's column:

Erdogan: "I believe the people who made this movie took media reports as their basis . . . for example, Abu Ghraib prison—we have seen this on TV, and now we are watching Guantanamo Bay in the world media, and of course it could be that this movie was prepared under these influences."

Me: "But do you believe that many Turks have such a view of America, that we're the kind of people who'd go to Iraq and kill people to take their organs?"

Erdogan: "These kind of things happen in the world. If it's not happening in Iraq, then its happening in other countries."

Me: "Which kind of things? Killing people to take their organs?"

Erdogan: "I'm not saying they are being killed. . . . There are people in poverty who use this as a means to get money."

Even Turkey's parliamentary speaker Bulent Arinc called the show "absolutely magnificent." ("Rice Wants Turkey to Challenge Anti-US views"). Perhaps there's no point in discussing the matter if top-government officials can so uncritically embrace political propaganda which the Wall Street Journal called "a cross between American psycho and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion." ("Turkish Delight")

The moving sidewalk

2010-06-10T11:31:00.000-07:00

The truism that "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" has to some extent never caught on in Turkey. For most, nationalism is not just a right but an expectation. Most Turkish citizens put out a Turkish flag on national holidays, they keep the government mandated photo of Ataturk in their offices, and in November, they commemorate the death of Ataturk with three minutes of silence. Americans tend to be nationalistic as well, but this nationalism is not state-mandated, with harsh punishments for those who do not comply, as it is here in Turkey. This past November, I can recall my Turkish officemate bounding into the office after the three minutes of silence, all aglow, "It is a real moment of unity for us." And on that day, having just completed Taner Akçam's A Shameful Act, I vomited in the bathroom and convinced myself that my vomiting was not nausea-induced but a real stomach virus.

I would have understood it better if not for my family history. My father's childhood experiences and his realization, through his own study of The Third Reich and through his friendships with Germans and Jews in America, that he had been bamboozled by an empty and murderous ideology, had convinced me that the supposed unity of state was a mirage.

If I wanted proof that the Turkish privileges of citizenship did not include free speech, I needed only to climb two flights in my building and knock on Mustafa's door, where I could talk face-to-face with someone who had suffered under Turkey's repressive domestic policies, as Mustafa was not only Kurdish, but he had published a magazine called Long March that had landed him in prison at age 20 and then again at age 31, this last time serving just six months of a two year sentence for insulting the memory of Atatürk. The book he published included a Kurdish folk song and lyrics questioning Atatürk - "Why do you allow us to suffer and do nothing?" - something along those lines, but questioning the actions of the Father of the Republic was grounds for incarceration. And now that I had read Taner Akçam's book, my sense of the denial at the heart of the founding of the republic had not eased.

Akcam's book was published in 2006, over 80 years after the last Ottoman-led attempt to try and punish those responsible for the killings of approximately one million Armenians. He makes extensive use not only of the Ottoman but also of the Austrian and German archives. He also uses documents found in the United States, including the records of American consular officials who could travel freely, since the United States did not enter the war until 1917, and the recollections and memoirs of Armenian survivors.

The most interesting question Akcam raises, then, is the question of why, despite the growing body of evidence, Turkey has insisted on denying the genocide. He offers many possible options, but the most compelling of these is the notion that Turkish society is disinclined to consider its past because of the close connection between the founding fathers of the nation and the extermination policy. The CUP, the unionists of the Young Turk, were instrumental in founding the nation. Many became national heroes and are, according to Akcam, closely tied to today's ruling elite.

"The first parliament passed decrees proclaiming as national heroes CUP members who had been tried for crimes against the Armenians. In 1926 parliament passed a law awarding land and pensions to families of former CUP members, including two who had been executed as a result of the Istanbul trials, and those who had been assassinated by Armenian revenge killers. There has been no fundamental change in this position from the founders of the republic to Turkey's current ruling elite, and the continuity has made it very difficult to conduct an open discussion on the beginnings of the republic. More profoundly, declaring some of Turkey's founders war criminals would call into question the state's very identity" (11).

As Chris Rock once said, all this has "a little German on it."

That time of the year

2010-06-06T01:18:00.001-07:00

The professor who shot his wife and her suspected lover and even the manager of the theater company, his Facebook page was still viewable. There I learned that, on his last Saturday alive, he played the Facebook game "What kind of car are you?" (He was a 1974 red Corvette, if memory serves). He added some old friends from his elite Baltimore prep school, and, without even a status update to indicate his intentions, he logged out, collected his four and six-year-old children, strapped them into the backseat of his red Jeep Cherokee, and as if this were a day like any other, drove off to the community theater picnic. He took a backpack with his guns in it and left the children in the car. What did they talk about as he drove them back home, as he dropped them off at the neighbors, calmly explaining that he had an emergency? What did he think of on his last drive, racing out into the woods, as he dug a hole, lay down in it, and shot himself through the head.

Do you have a problem with us?

2010-05-29T05:26:00.000-07:00

"The Islamic identity (view of mankind and the world) is based on groups, and its central concepts are honor and disgrace, or shame. 'Honor' is closely linked to the group. The relevant groups, in order of size, are the family, the clan, the tribe, and, ultimately, the community of the faithful (ummah).

"Within the community of the faithful, the fact that someone claims to be a Muslim is enough for other Muslims to regard that person as closer to them any non-Muslim. Muslims feel an emotional bond with their oppressed brothers and sisters everywhere in the world. When a group of Muslims--no matter where--is suffering or being oppressed (Kashmir, Palestine), the community of the faithful is commonly depicted as a bleeding body in pain."

--Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Caged Virgin, p. 47.

Two incidents stick out in my mind when I think back to my first days at my new job. These two separate experiences brought me back to texts like the one above about Muslim culture, because I sincerely did not understand the actions of my colleagues, and because at the time what I perceived as their dishonesty was, in retrospect, a more simple case of cultural difference. The first incident happened within the first two weeks of my new job. At the time I had plans to move to the cleaner and more spacious Asian side of Istanbul.

The one bedroom apartment I had found was in Moda, a clean moderately upscale neighborhood on the Asian side, and was newly furnished and even had a bath. Even if the rent was almost twice as much as my apartment in Tarlabasi and about 200 liras (about 150 dollars) more than what I wanted to spend every month, I figured it would be worth it to have some peace of mind. But there was one thing I was still concerned about: where had all my money gone? Between the flight to Istanbul, the rent subsidy for the subleasee of my Athens apartment, and the cost of temporarily renting a fully furnished temporary place, I was out about $3000, and, as if that weren't bad enough, I would need even more money to get out of Tarlabasi.

The problem came as the due date for all the payments - for my Turkish class, the real estate agent fee, and the first month's rent and security deposit - all fell on the same day. We had made a gentlemen's agreement that I would pay half of the real estate agent's fee and security deposit and rent this month and the other half the following month.

The other problem was that our student assistants, apparently, both lived in and around Moda and knew the real estate agent personally. This put me into a tangle of interpersonal relationships and initiated me into the Turkish way of doing business. I had found it quaint when the shopkeeper had sent his son down the street to get an adaptor plug. Now that I was in the market for something more serious, I was more than a little perturbed. I just wanted a good rate on my rent and someone who could read over the contract to make sure I wasn't getting swindled. Instead, I was a part of some kind of real estate mixer, with the real estate agent, myself and my student aid all sitting around drinking chai together.

The fifth of October arrived, and with it my first paycheck, only the amount was 1000 liras short. Frantically, I phoned around complaining. I must have done something right because the next day I had all the money in my account. Yet I still felt uneasy, in that I had signed a contract in a language I did not speak and was now immersed in a culture I clearly did not understand. Had a university that could afford such prime real estate and so much landscaping and personnel expense (the cleaning staff was forever behind, in front and beside you, wiping the door handles, watering plants and dusting the tops of lockers) really not thought of a translator? And yet the administration had hired no one to translate the contract -- it seemed quite an oversight.

Clearly, I could not throw any more money at anyone else, not until I had a better sense of what was going on. But the flat was so very nice, and all the other new faculty lived on the Asian side. I was afraid to be alone, and I really wanted to get out of Tarlabasi. Maybe I could get him to negotiate. Maybe he might come down on the price. I would try to call him and ask him. After all, I had negotiated a rent reduction in Athens too, and maybe the market slump had reached Istanbul just as well.

Here's where I ran into that group mentality Hirsi Ali, Lewis and Pryce-Jones mentioned in their three characteristics of the Muslim world. The student aid began blinking like a maniac when I handed her the sheet with the price negotiation questions on it. "No information on this, no information on this," her eyes seemed to frantically say to me.

"See, if he doesn't want to negotiate, then that ends that, and I just can't move into the apartment. I'll just have to stay in Tarlabasi."

More blinking and then a flustered pushing away of the paper.

"Look, we've got a kind of a cultural misunderstanding here."

Once again, I tried to explain. I had the agent's card in my hand and gave it to her. At one point I think she was even poised next to the phone, card in hand, but she did not dial. Clearly, she did not feel comfortable doing this, and I no longer felt comfortable asking her.

After my next class, I again came downstairs to the main office, this time to ask Mehmet, the Turkish adjunct professor whom I had met at orientation, if he would make the call to the real estate agent. He referred to himself as Professor Mehmet So-and-So and addressed the emlak with the courteous title "Bay". If the conversation had not taken place over the phone, some chai drinking would have been involved. After some time, Mehmet hung up the phone and smiled at me.

"He said no, but he wants you to call him."

"Why?"

"He just wants you to call him."

What in the world did he want to talk about? Would we just chirp into the phone, communicating like birds? I did not speak Turkish, he did not speak English, and he had said no to my proposal. I thanked Mehmet. In my mind I said goodbye to the apartment, and thought I would never hear another word about the matter again.

Later, in the afternoon, our department head called me into her office.

"Do you have a problem with us?" she asked.

I think I momentarily stepped out of my body when I heard these words: "Do you have a problem with us?" What? With all of you collectively? It was the way she posed the question that made me lose my courage to be forthright.

"You have to understand," she said. "Mehmet thought you would call the real estate agent. It's not the student assistant's job to help you find an apartment. They went out of their way to help you."

There were plenty of problems. I would have liked to have the copy services form to be at least translated into English. I would have liked to have been prepared for students whose English was inadequate for teaching at the college level. I would have liked not to have been pitted against them, and if they had asked, I would have happily pulled out my expense accounts to explain why after spending $3000 to move to Istanbul, I was not anxious to drop another $3000 more -- at least not yet. Could this be explained? Was this so very complicated?

"It's just that when I was hired, the Dean indicated to me that the International Office would be there to help me find an apartment. Where is the International Office? Can I contact them?"

"There is no International Office. It's only for students, and it's really just one person who has many responsibilities. That's not her only job."

From this incident I was left with a sense that I was living in a place where the truth mattered less than saving face and where direct expression gave way to subterfuge. I was left more certain than ever that I was an outsider. Couldn't the student aid have come to me directly and said, "The emlak is a friend of mine. I feel awkward about negotiating on your behalf, but you could ask so-and-so"?

And why exactly did she feel awkward? Was it because she could not allow herself to negotiate on behalf of an American without losing face as a Turk? Or was I being paranoid? Instead, she had spoken with her eyes only, but said nothing directly to me, and gone to the department head, which made me respect her less and made her suspect me more.

No recollection whatsoever

2010-05-28T21:56:00.001-07:00

This part may have been a dream or it may have been real.

The garage door was open. Inside: my green Chevrolet Cavelier, parked at an angle, the driver's seat window rolled down, some white chalk scratches along the car door, some crushed cardboard storage boxes next to the car. My mother tried to open the car door, and then I heard a loud gasp, punctuated by the words "Oh no!"

We had just driven twelve hours through the deep south. It was a cool sunny evening in early June, and we were driving back from my nephew's graduation in Washington D.C. We had talked about my aunt, who was divorcing, the entire way up and my father's first wife, who was at the graduation, the entire way down. At a Cracker Barrel somewhere in North Carolina, over a dinner plate of ham, bean and biscuits, my mother pushed her plate away, sighed and said, "I always pick the wrong thing."

"You could order something else."

"No, it's too late."

He didn't pick up when my mother tried to call him, and he hadn't picked up Friday, and then on Saturday, only briefly, as she had woken him up from a nap. And now my Chevrolet Cavalier mysteriously abandoned, parked diagonally in the garage, some crushed boxes next to the car, and the both of us, my mother and me, calling though the house, "Hello, is anyone home?" No answer.

The hallway light was on, the door to the master bedroom open, and there was my father watching TV, smiling.

"Hey, you're home! Welcome back. Do you want some of this bread and sausage?"

He could not remember. He did not recall any of it, not one single memory of the drive to the grocery store, of crashing into the dividing concrete wall separating our unit from the neighbor's, or of how he got out of the car whose driver's side would no longer open -- no recollection whatsoever.

Black bile, melancholy and hüzün

2010-05-21T11:10:00.000-07:00

The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, in his book Istanbul: Memories and the City, uses a Turkish word of Arabic origin to shed light on the psychological and metaphysical condition of living in Istanbul. That word is hüzün which roughly translates to "melancholy," and yet means more than just a state of melancholy. He writes that the hüzün of Istanbul is a "way of looking at life that implicates us all, not only a spiritual state, but a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating"(82).

Pamuk devotes much space to comparing the classic Islamic philosopher El Kindi's views of hüzün to the seventeenth-century English writer Robert Burton's perceptions of melancholy. The two states of mind appear to be identical and yet because of El Kindi's Islamic outlook, they are not quite the same. For El Kindi hüzün is an emotional experience caused perhaps by loss or the death of a loved one or even by more mundane spiritual afflictions like anger, fear, love, bitterness etc, while for Burton melancholy is a "black pain" brought about by any number of causes, fear of death, love, defeat, evil deeds, and/or a wide assortment of food and drink. So far, so good. Pamuk continues:

"So hüzün stems from the same 'black passion' as melancholy, whose etymology refers to a basis in humours first conceived in Aristotle's day (melan khole - black bile) and gives us the coloration normally associated with this feeling and the all-occluding pain it implies. But here we come to the essential difference between the two words: Burton (Robert Burton, who wrote Anatomy of Melancholy) believed that melancholy paved the way to a happy solitude; because it strenghened his imaginative powers, it was, from time to time, to be joyfully affirmed; it did not matter if melancholy was the result of solitude or the cause; in both instances, Burton saw solitude at the heart, the very essence, of melancholy. But, for El Kindi, who saw hüzün, both as a mystical state (engendered by the frustration of our common aim to be at one with Allah) and as an illness, the central preoccupation, as with all classic Islamic thinkers, was the cemaat, or the community of believers. He judged hüzün by the values of the cemaat and suggested remedies that return us to it; essentially, he saw hüzün as an experience at odds with the communal purpose....Now we begin to understand hüzün as, not the melancholy of a solitary person, but the black mood shared by millions of people together. What I am trying to explain is the hüzün of an entire city, of Istanbul" (82-3).

"The black mood shared by millions of people together," says Pamuk. Americans living in Istanbul can cushion themselves from the hüzün of Istanbul by living in ex-pat communities, socializing only with other ex-pats, and sending their children to the American International School. If they have the resources and connections, they never need to enter into the intensely hierarchical and also markedly closed system that surrounds them. But if you teach Turks and you work for Turks, you enter into unspoken agreements about comportment, expectations and world views that can only, as David Pryce-Jones suggests in his book The Closed Circle, be partially understood. After a while Henry Kissinger's experience in Saudi Arabia resonates: "He could not penetrate a style 'at once oblique and persistent, reticent and assertive."

Opening drawers

2010-05-16T19:10:00.000-07:00

Maybe I was just looking for a TV Guide or some Starburst candy, which were sometimes mixed in with the paper clips, erasers and rubber bands kept in a wooden bowl in my father's drawer. I can't remember exactly. All I know is that when I opened the drawer, I found a handwritten letter from my father to my mother. He had written it in pencil on a yellow legal pad as if it were a memo with bullet points and subheadings.

Children are always the first observers of their parents' marriage, said Ingmar Bergman.

When you're a child, there's nowhere to go. There's nothing you can do about your parents' bad decisions or their hang ups or even their delusions. You have to live with them and occasionally you look around at other kid's parents and think about what it would be like to swap. Often you realize your situation isn't half as bad as you thought it was. Sometimes you have an epiphany: life isn't half as fair as you hoped it would be, either, because some people's parents are mean or egotistical or just plain crazy.

When you thought about the dads, I mean really thought about them, I mean even if you just took the carpool dads, like Rachel Gruskin's dad, with his porn littered all over the house, trying to stuff all of us elementary school kids in his midlife crisis Porsche, driving like a fiend as if he actually wanted a pack of elementary school kids to die with him in carpool, as if that were his diabolical plan.

Or Bill Overstreet's dad who could not dance to save his life and yet at every school function brought out his wife and tried to show us elementary school kids that he still had it.

Or as long as I'm thinking of them, let me not shy away from the most abject example of a father, one I would never in a million years trade for my own: Lindsay Holliman' father, forever grinning, forever born again, and forever detached from his own feelings -- the rock antithesis, maker of bad Christian music, a capital offense in my eyes.

Or what about Summer's dad who was always bellyaching about malpractice suits and mumbling incomprehensible grumpy things. He had a terrible grumpy half smile which he thought was more than generous.

The only dad I really liked was Jo's dad, just because he liked to joke around and also played teeball with Jo and me and Zachary, and made the whole family watch the Braves with pop corn and Coca-Cola and lots of clapping and howling for the Braves, just for fun, just privately.

They all kept Playboy magazines, my father included, except maybe Summer's dad, maybe that was why he was always bellyaching.

They could all stuff it as far as I was concerned. They were fakers.

My father may have been a Nazi, but at least he was real.

And he was really falling apart too.

For nights after, I wished I had not read that letter. I wished I could go back in time and shut the drawer or say to my father, "There's a letter in there. Can you put it somewhere else? I have no business reading it."

But a part of me could not resist.

The first line I remember very well. "If we go bankrupt, would you leave me?" it said. The rest I remember less well, but the general gyst of it was that he did not think he had lived up to my mother's expectations of what a husband should be. He had caused her unhappiness by taking her away from her family and making her live in a foreign country.

There was no mention of my sister and me in the letter. I read it over and over again, hoping to find something about us. Had we not brought them happiness? Was the money the only thing worth talking about? Or the house? Or the pool? Or was my father, Gatsby, mistaking my mother for Daisy? My mother, who had grown up in the mountains along the Italian border and as a girl who had considered eating a bananas a cause for celebration, Daisy? She told us many times that as a girl she and her sisters had even pulled the sap off of trees and chewed on it, just to pretend it was real chewing gum. My mother: Daisy Buchanan, the materialist extraordinaire and faker of all fakes? What in the world was the man thinking?

Notes on "being had"

2010-05-16T01:54:00.000-07:00

From David Pryce-Jones' The Closed Circle (41):

“In the West, what is said or done more or less corresponds to the intentions of the speaker and the doer. Liars and cheats abound, of course, but generally they can go only so far before being caught out in the contractual relationships of their society. Lying and cheating in the Arab world is not really a moral matter but a method of safeguarding honor and status, avoiding shame, and at all times exploiting possibilities, for those with the wits for it, deftly and expeditiously to convert shame into honor on their own account, and vice versa for their opponents. If honor so demands, lies and cheating may become absolute imperatives. In Shia practice, a man is allowed what is called 'precautionary dissimulation,' a recognition that truth may be impossible in some contexts.

"The greater the stakes, the more urgent the caution and the need for a safety screen. Kenneth Pendar, an American intelligence officer whose task it was to persuade Moroccans to side with the allies during the last war, expressed the difficulties of conducting a negotiation in which he expected a yes or a no from people unable to commit themselves to either, because they could not tell who would win the war and acquire honor or who would lose and be shamed. Pendar wrote:

"Arab psychology is a fascinating study….Much of what goes on in places like Syria or North Africa must seem utterly confusing to anyone who has not lived with Arabs and been in close contact with their subtle and indirect ways of thought. At first I was completely baffled by some of the conversations I had with them. As I carefully recorded my notes afterward, I would find that my written record of the conversation was quite different from the impression I had of it. Sometimes it seemed exactly the opposite.

"Conversations took place on a series of different planes: the upper stratum that seemed to be the main subject on which the Muslim was communicating. 'They appear, glance and retreat, or are only felt, like lights in a prism. It is on these planes that the real exchange of ideas is made.' Such obliquity, in Pendar’s judgment, accounted for the political inefficiency he ran into. Recently, Dr. Henry Kissinger, as Secretary of State and therefore in a position to frustrate and be frustrated in the power-challenging dialectic, observed the same phenomenon in the case of the Saudis. He could not penetrate a style 'at once oblique and persistent, reticent and assertive.' Success or failure in public negotiation is all the more fraught in that an attentive Arab audience is eagerly anticipating the allocation of honor or shame.”

This house is haunted

2010-05-15T04:40:00.000-07:00

A few years before my father decided he wanted to kill himself, his psychiatrist brother prescribed himself enough sleeping pills to put down a horse, took them all in one sitting and never woke up again. He had long since divorced his first wife Nadja and was in sporadic contact with his children. It was a family tradition as my grandfather had also killed himself. "We were Nazis, all of us," said my father. "We all got swept up in the promise of National Socialism," said my grandmother. But when the war was over and the veil lifted, they started killing themselves one by one, each at the age of 53. On the night my father fell down the stairs, he was in the middle of celebrating his fifty-third birthday.

My godparents were Jewish, my best friend Jo was Jewish, most of my father's colleagues were Jewish, and my father's much admired boss Eli Waldman, who would later go on to make billions and to be an important player in the Los Angeles art collecting world, was Jewish.

Was it survivor's guilt? Or was it the guilt of the accomplice?

The child's memory is selective. We remember the things that the adults said or did that scared or repelled us. We recollect those things that made us laugh and feel happy. But we don't delve too deeply into motives or our parents' own fears. We don't seek out the "why?" -- burgeoning psychologists among us accepting -- for exploring why would mean we would have to see them as people first, then parents, and the psychological need of the child is to keep the parents as parents alone.

The Spectors moved not long after I told Jo that my father had been an officer in the Hitler Youth. My father's side of the family had even mysteriously lived in a ten-room apartment way beyond their shopkeeping means. I heard whispering that their apartment had belonged to wealthy Jews who had to leave in a hurry.

The morning after he fell down the stairs, he had a big white gauze pad taped above his eye. My sister had been inconsolable the night before when the ambulance took him away. Mr. Adler and Mr. Cohen had stayed close to her and consoled her because my mother was not there. (Had she gone with my father in the ambulance?), and here they were, the people whom my father's side of the family had tried to exterminate, consoling my sister. My father's colleagues, they were the ones who sent cards on our birthdays, who spent time with us, and talked to us, not about regrets as my grandmother did, or about their unhappiness, but about us.

The living room had a Cathedral ceiling and a loft space above it where my sister and I slept. You could hear the laughter, the movement between the balcony and the living room. You could hear voices and conversation, not usually about the children, not like the old southerners, where the conversation revolved around the children, but about anything and everything.

"Wouldn't you be better off without me?"

"Wouldn't you be better off collecting the insurance money?"

"I will have to make it look like an accident, but how can I make it look like an accident?"

My father was thinking aloud at the dinner table, planning the logistics of his final exit. I was ten at the time, my sister thirteen. It was horrifying. In my view he had an exaggerated sense of guilt. He sat out a few years of fascism when he had tuberculosis and was in bed listening to Radio Free Europe, a crime punishable by death in Hitler's Germany, and reading the Bible, another crime as he lived in Catholic Bavaria then. Too bad he hadn't sat out them all.

I thought about what we would do if he killed himself. Would we move to Austria to stay with my grandparents? What would my mother do? Would she practice law again? Was my father right - were we better off without him? I wouldn't have minded having my grandparents around, all the birthday parties, the family, but I would have missed Mad Magazine, Superfudge, Jo, watching Love Boat on Saturday nights with my sister. We would be watching bad TV like Little House on the Prairie (my Austrian relatives were watching that show into the nineties).

Nothing, I'm fine

2010-05-10T10:25:00.000-07:00

In the middle of the night, I heard him wandering around. He shufffled down ceaseless corridors, turned lights on, tapped at the computer, shut lights off, down to the kitchen for a snack, back to his office, then to their bedroom to watch television. I never came downstairs, but I stayed up listening, and I even knew the nights to wake up, Mondays and Wednesdays. In my room, I read or stared at the ceiling or just thought about things - my teacher, my best friend, the boys in the class who liked me or made fun of me.

I thought about the people I had known who had died. I thought of my mother's friend Alice, with her festive cotton candy blonde hair, who had shot herself, of her big D bra size and how she liked to stroke my hair and call me "pretty", and of my Uncle Alfons's death and the apartment in Passau, Germany which my parents had had to clean out, the expensive Biedermeier furniture we had inherited, the wooden cross and long-haired Jesus nailed smack onto it. On my way to the patio or the pool, I would sometimes stop and run my fingers over the wooden nails, and look at my own hands and imagine the crunching bones as the nail went through, and then I would apologize and tell him that I hoped it hadn't hurt too much but I needed to go now.

In the fall a tractor trailor carrying horses hit an acquaintance of my parents. She survived but was paralyzed from the waist down. The horses broke their legs and had to be put down -- for me, a horse lover, this was more difficult to stomach. In February, a reversing taxi cab crushed Adele Cohen's legs as she tried to pass between two parked taxis on 64th and Broadway. (She would walk with a cane for the rest of her life.) I imagined legs as appendages that came on and off. I read books about The Tales of the Fourth Grade Nothing and missed my best friend Jo, who had left school to to move to a suburb further from the city where her parents could send her to public school and they could live in a more Jewish neighborhood, Sandy Springs, where we too would wind up moving.

Then in April, my grandparents, en route to Atlanta, while waiting on the tarmac of the Munich airport, just missed a terrorist attack, a bomb that had gone off in check-in and arrivals and killed eight people.

In 1983, the world outside was a dangerous place, and at any moment, one of us might fall -- which is exactly what happened during the summer of my fourth grade year. We were living in a house about twice the size of the old, in an isolated, heavily wooded part of Buckhead, along the Chattahoochee River. The house was at the top of a steep winding road, and was so far away from the road, that in the summer you couldn't see it. The house was a modern wooden house with three floors and three balconies, one for my parents' master bedroom, one for the living room, and one for the family room downstairs. We built the pool in the summer of my third grade year and by the fourth grade, my father was already talking of killing himself.

Eleven Commandments

2010-05-03T21:15:00.001-07:00

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring."
3. Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can't create, you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it--but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the book you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.'

--Henry Miller (from Henry Miller on Writing, 161)

Tarlabasi

2010-05-01T00:30:00.000-07:00

I was born into a mildly religious family and lived for 35 years in majority Christian countries. My father was a non-believer and my mother was Catholic. I am an agnostic with a soft-spot for the philosopher Jesus. My own attitude toward sex is that we make too much of it, and not enough. In general, my views fall in line with Alvie Singer's at the end of Annie Hall, that we know that it all makes no sense and yet we continue to "need the eggs" and so we're glad when no one tells us that we're not really in love or that we are deluded about the object of our affections.

But Alvie Singer's views are those of privilege. As part of the entertainment industry and as a single man living in New York City during the sexual revolution, he enjoys almost complete sexual openness.

Not all of us can be so lucky. I live in Istanbul, a city no doubt more progressive than the rest of Turkey, but one that is light years from being New York City in terms of its sexual mores. Even in Istanbul, most single women still live with their parents. Even as an academic, if I were to openly talk about my sexual relations, I would surely be ostracized, which is why this blog is anonymous. There was no sexual revolution in Turkey, ever, and there's none on the horizon either.

Only about a quarter of a mile from my apartment is one of the most notoriously liberal neighborhoods in Istanbul, the area with the most bars and nightlife, and more foreigners per capita than any other section of Istanbul. Yet I live in Tarlabasi.

In the 1990s, the PKK guerrillas, after fighting for fifteen years, not only still sported Kalashnikovs and daydreamed of a united oil-rich Kurdistan, but they also had a nasty habit of bringing their laundry home to mom and picking up homecooked meals to take back to the mountains. Elites of the Turkish military, aware of the "mom-factor," had the bright idea of burning Kurdish villages as a way to cut off the supplies and emotional support of the guerillas. 3,000 villages were burned and about 45,000 people displaced (For more on this, see Joost Jongerden's The Settlement Issue in Turkey and the Kurds).

The Turkish government set some of these traumatized people up with free housing in my neighborhood, and yet tried to keep the psychological clamps tight on the younger generation, for fear that they would grow up to be PKK sympathizers. The language of instruction in school was to be Turkish only; speaking Kurdish in public places was illegal (this law has since been rescinded).

Enter Natasha, stage left, 36 year old American woman, excited to have her first academic position, and an income which meant she wouldn't need a second or a third job to live comfortably. Upstairs in an attic apartment the same size as hers live Devrim, Mustafa and Berivan, independent publishers of Zaza (a Kurdish dialect) grammar books, Kurdish folklore books, and Kurdish history books, who also work for the newly legalized (as of 2006) Kurdish television station.

I had seen the covered women lowering their buckets by rope from fourth and fifth story apartments so the bakkal (grocer) or one of their (many) children could add bread or whatever they needed. But I had not realized how very little most earned every month until reading an article about wages that gave the average wages of families like this as 800 lira/month. These families are large - 8 to 12 people on average - and they live on nothing, practically. Some of these apartments are still heated with coal and they have no toilets and no bathtub or shower stalls, only one hose in the bathroom for washing, cooking, and cleaning. Just five minutes from here, though, I am in one of the most expensive areas in Istanbul, Cihangir. Sushi shops flank art galleries; Byzantine churches flank outrageously expensive interior design outlets. Two months ago the Pera Museum exhibited Picasso nude ink drawings not more than 300 meters from my apartment.

This subject of sexuality is far too complicated to fully discuss in one blog post, so I will continue to add to the topic in future. I would like to conclude with an excerpt from the International Encyclopedia of Sexuality about sex roles in Turkey:

"The concept of honor, referring to the sexual modesty of a woman, implies that men control the sexuality of women. Honor is largely dependent on others’ evaluations, and an insult to honor results in disputes, fights, or even blood feuds. The ties among the family members, kin, and community are so close that sometimes the honor of a whole village or community is affected by the honor of one man."

"Within the family, young women are controlled and their status is low. The young bride, in particular, is expected to serve all adults within the patrilocal household. Once she bears a son, however, her status improves, especially when the son grows up and brings in a bride and the cycle thus repeats itself. Hence, every woman in the traditional rural society prefers a son as a child; if she does not bear one, her marriage may be threatened (Kagitçibasi 1982a)."

"The preference for sons does not only depend on an economic basis. The son, especially the eldest one, is responsible for all women in the family, including his mother in the absence of his father. In contrast to the central role of the son in the patrilocal family, a daughter leaves the household to get married when she reaches an age to be “useful.” However, Kiray (1976) noted the changing value placed on daughters, who now often replace sons as the “dependable” child."

"In the traditional Turkish family, the mother’s relationship to her son is intimate and affectionate, in contrast with that of the father who is authoritative and distant. In some ethnic groups, the father is such an authority figure that his son cannot even talk to his own wife or show affection to his own children in the presence of his father. In fact, the mother often protects the son from the father’s disciplinary acts. The mother-son relationship is generally stronger than the husband-wife relationship in the traditional family, where any public show of affection between spouses is disapproved of. A man does not even talk about his wife in the company of others, and if he has to, often he uses the word “family” to mean “wife.” Communication and role sharing between spouses is limited, and sex roles are well differentiated and non-overlapping. Males are the decision-makers in the family."

"Özgür and Sunar (1982), who examined the problem of homicide in Turkey, attributed the high rates of homicide to a traditional system of norms that condone and require a violent response to violations of personal honor. Male homicide was found to stem from more normatively approved motives, such as self-defense, property defense, or honor, whereas a greater proportion of female homicides stemmed from domestic quarrels, jealousy, and similar motives."

The grin is too much

2010-04-27T12:29:00.001-07:00

The grin is too much, that's what you notice. Why so enthusiastic about a person you've never really met, or talked to, before? The grin forces you to counter-argue. His grin and yours engage in a battle of congeniality. Each frozen second perverse, the grinning continues. Against your gut-instinct, the grins insist that you're happy to be there, and not out with friends, in his case, or at home with a book, in yours.

You can't agree on a bar. He wants a back lit bar and retro dance music. You want bean bags, fish tanks, cheap alcohol and free nuts. You notice how carefully, lovingly, he sets his beige tweed Mandarin coat on the chair next to him, how gently he unsheaths his color-coordinated scarf. Your halfway impressed, halfway perplexed by the way he has mastered the Parisian knot. The only people you know who have a handle on that black-belt of scarf knots are stylish petite Atlanta socialites.

You think of Mustafa's underwear. For a moment you see visions of those bright red underoos, so tiny, so 1970s, so un-American they should be tried before Judge Irving-fucking-Kaufman. You've come all this way to escape the tyranny of feckless men in boxer shorts, you realize.

Important phone calls from the police chief follow. From your bean bag, through a bubbling fish tank, you watch him pace on the balcony. You notice the height; a Turkish man who has some inches on you, you can not quite believe this. The large face, the Roman nose, the broad shoulders, the long torso, the black hair. "His job carries responsibilities," his pacing seems to say. Even on a Saturday night, he must work. You, in your search for the male holy grail, consider him a possibility. He gives you a wink, writes on his notepad, and sloughs off the police chief's commands.

Socially decadent, may I help you?

2010-04-27T11:09:00.000-07:00

From Manuel Puig's The Kiss of the Spider Woman:

"J.D. Unwin, author of Sex and Culture, after studying the marital customs of eighty uncivilized societies, seems to support the very generalized assumption that sexual freedom leads to social decadence, since, according to orthodox psychoanalysis, if an individual does not perish from his neurosis, the imposed sexual constraints can help to channel such energies toward socially useful ends. Unwin has concluded from his exhaustive study that the establishment of the first foundations of an organized society, its subsequent development and appropriation of neighboring terrain--in other words, the historical characteristics of every vigorous society--are evident only from the moment when sexual repression has been instated.

While those societies in which freedom of sexual relations is tolerated--whether prenuptial, extra-conjugal or homosexual--remain in an almost animal state of underdevelopment.

Unwin says that societies which are strictly monogamous and strongly repressive do not manage to last very long, and if they do in part, it is by means of the moral and material subjugation of women. Therefore Unwin claims that, between the suicidal anguish that the minimizing of sexual necessities provokes and the opposite extreme of social disorder attributed to sexual incontinence, a reasonable medium ought to be found which might provide the solution to such a critical problem--that is to say, an elimination of the "surplus repression" about which Marcuse speaks" (167-9).

The image for this post, a still photo from Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), comes from Movieforums.com

Mustafa, Or "I have a DVD player!"

2010-04-24T00:28:00.000-07:00

If he's my dream he will fold back into my body
His breath writes letters of mist on the glass of my cheeks
I wrap myself around him like the darkness
I breathe into his mouth
& make him real.

--Erica Jong, "The Man Under the Bed"

His breathing did not take me back to my own childhood, but back to a time a few years ago when I was visiting my sister's family in Minneapolis. My sister's child, Allie, was just a baby then. He had a gorgeous goofy smile and a mass of fine strawberry blonde curls. I was holding Allie as he banged on a Casio electronic keyboard. Er hat geschnaufen, the Germans would say ("He wheezed"). A miniature nail-bitten finger pressed the drums. Flat doughy hands patted the keyboard. I thought he was dancing because his knees kept giving way, but, really, it was just that his leg muscles weren't developed enough yet to stand for any length of time. He was so engrossed by pressing the buttons and keys and hearing the notes that followed. Still, you could hear the labor involved in his breath.

The laptop wouldn't work. I had reset it to Region 1 to watch an American film, but we lived in Turkey, Region 2, and the film would not play. French people chatted with each other, horses trotted down a road, languid classical music played, yet the picture was only a maze of lavendar shifting tubes on a deep purple background.

For a long time I had ceased to see the sense in living. I needed a mandate to live, but I had not yet found one. Without words, without his words, I could not see the mandate. It was an ancient outdated romantic notion, and yet it was true: Without his breathing, I did not feel the mandate.

But you have your students? Irrelevant. There are plenty of English teachers around. Lose one teacher, another one follows, always just a few steps behind.

I would have liked to keep him there next to me forever. Even the sighing when the Windows Media Player didn't work, then Quick Time, then Real Player. I would have liked to have sat beside him as he clicked icons upon icons, strawberries upon strawberries.

Once when I visited my sister before she had Allie, I struck up a conversation with a squirrelly-looking guy at a local Minnehaha (that's a street in Minneapolis) video store. I was in graduate school, and on spring break, and while my sister and brother-in-law worked during the day, I sort of loafed around the city. I was constantly losing my way and feeling disoriented until I finally found that enormous video store which allowed me to get lost in a more contained (and heated) location. We chatted about the film Short Cuts, if I remember correctly, because I was crazy about that style of filmmaking then.

"We could see it together sometime. Why don't you give me your number, or better yet I'll give you mine," he said.

As I walked out of the store and down Minnehaha Avenue, I can remember, I pulled his number out and looked at the piece of paper again. On it in big capital letters, he had written, "I HAVE A DVD PLAYER!" I cannot remember his name now, but I remember thinking that was probably the worst pick up line I had ever heard in my life. And yet this week when I talked to Mustafa on the phone, I found myself uttering the same desperate words: "I have a DVD player!" The unstated omission, of course, being: "And nothing much else that I can think of to entice you."

Fishing for Strawberries

2010-04-22T12:33:00.000-07:00

In my early childhood, my father loomed larger than anyone. He was enormously tall, and had a deep authoritative voice. He watched Macneil Lehrer during Sunday brunch and did the New York Times crossword puzzle in the afternoons. He was removed from my sister and me. I can not really recall him holding us much. If we dropped a fork or a knife or clinked our glasses into the plates, he would chastize us with the same words, "No noisy eating!"

An executive for an insurance company, he was under a lot of pressure in those years. He had pushed the company to relocate from Baltimore to Atlanta, bringing his staff and their northern ways with him. Some experienced too much culture shock and left the company. His office occupied half of the top floor of a building on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta. Once when he came home from work, he tripped over my sister's sneakers. He didn't hesitate for a moment to grab those sneakers and march outside and pitch them deep into the woods. That was the thing about being a child in his house--you couldn't really comfortably be one, because there was always someone asking you why you were crying or why you hadn't grown up yet, or even just asking for estimates on how many calories you consumed in the course of a day. We were always being interviewed, being given three piece suits, or fountain pens or name plates for our desks.

Company parties involved champagne and strawberries and much alcohol. I got drunk at age 7 by playing a game at the punch bowl called "fishing for strawberries". It didn't matter though - we were always the boss' children, we were always protected.

But my mother, she had it hard in those first years in Atlanta. When Phyllis, our old neighbor from Baltimore, died of cancer, I saw my mother cry for the first time. It shocks a child to see their parents cry. (In fact, I think it took me at least a year to recover from the time I saw my father cry in eleventh grade.) Then, Annie Canning shot herself. Annie Canning was the former governor of Georgia's daughter. She wore low cut sweaters - and had enormous breasts -- and used at least a half a bottle of hair spray on her bleach blonde, winged hair every day. One week before she shot herself, she called my mother to have lunch, but my mother must have blown her off as far as I can tell. Kids don't understand much, since at that age we suffer from myopia.

I was always being told as a child what a beautiful woman my mother was. And she was -- very beautiful, that is. She must have had a problem with men and boys paying too much attention to this and not to the other things. I say this because, apparently, once this psychiatrist she saw during that period found out she was from the Alps, he began to talk to her about skiing during the sessions, and she couldn't get a word in anymore about her problems. She stopped going after a while, although he did give her an IQ test, which is how we found out that her IQ was at least as high as, if not higher than, my father's.

Silence, Part Two

2010-04-19T19:51:00.000-07:00

Always I dream about my father. In my dreams he's usually driving an enormous sedan through the rain. My mom's in the passenger seat, clutching the door handle, as the sedan slides down an embankment toward a precipice, an ocean below it. I wake up and realize I am far way and there's nothing I can do.

I have not said a word about my father to Mustafa. I can not always understand what he is saying to me. He talks and talks and talks and I nod and nod and nod, but as Salinger once wrote,"You never saw anybody nod as much in your life as old Spencer did. You never knew if he was nodding a lot because he was thinking and all, or just because he was a nice old guy that didn't know his ass from his elbow" (Catcher in the Rye 12). It's embarrassing, really. To be so succeptible to breathing, that's really why I'm thinking of Mustafa. I like to have him breathing next to me. I like to hear him talking, even if I don't always know what he's saying.

I sometimes have so much I would like to say to Mustafa. I sometimes would like to tell him a story. I would have liked to explain about Samit Abdullah, for example, who read all my stories and pretended to write to me from Nigeria. I would like to tell him how I panicked when I saw the letter addressed to Samit in my mailbox. Someone was watching me. Who else was watching me? Were they reading my emails? What did they want from me, and why? I asked myself too many questions like this, and most of them came to nothing. I have stopped expecting answers: this means I am becoming Turkified.

But how could I have told him about this without mentioning Orhan? By saying that without that sheer panic, I would not have stolen Samit's mail and taken it to the police station as evidence that someone was stalking me. Without my outrageous and imagined hysteria, I would not have met Orhan. Orhan - I sometimes wonder whether I am being had by that poor son of a bitch, living in a country like this, where the Family Minister not more than a month ago, on national television, announces that homosexuality is a disease. I have so much to say about this, but I will not say it now.

**The image for this post, a still photo from the Ingmar Bergman film The Silence (1963) , comes from Dear Cinema.com.

Silence

2010-04-17T20:55:00.000-07:00

As teachers, we often lie to ourselves. We envision the idealized classroom, the modern agora, a place where students explore their ideas as well as challenge their professors and classmates to form new ones. Unfortunately, these ideals seldom become reality. If and when they do, a teacher always, always falls in love with her students. It might happen once a semester or once a year, or sadly, once a decade, but as in love, we hold onto those moments when we felt we understood, if only for an instant, why we were there, and why it was right and good that we should be there in that classroom and that classroom alone.

What happens, though, when we try to force the love? When students are not speaking in their native language, for example, and, thus, are disadvantaged (even more so those first-year students with weak English language skills)? What happens when culturally they are conflicted? This space is, of course, inherently politicized and yet inherently full of omissions, things left unsaid, things better kept unspoken. Students who do not yet have a command of the English language risk themselves; one misused word, and the speaker can be drastically misunderstood.

In Tuesday's essay writing class, Emre, a religious Muslim who studied Arabic at Istanbul University before transferring to mine, argues with Müge, a scholarship student, a former competitive tennis player, and a staunch secularist. They argue first in English and then in Turkish. I must rein them in, and yet I feel a sense of both exuberant nervousness that they are learning to express their ideas and also of uneasiness that things could go horribly wrong.

The seed of this argument was in a relatively innocuous essay assigned for Tuesday's class about lowering the voting age. "Is the ideal voting age sixteen, or should it be some other age?" I asked students.

"Before college, students are like androids. They just vote how their parents vote. They don't have any ideas of their own," said Emre.

"I think it should be 19," said Müge. "They haven't been asked to think yet, so they don't know what they think. They go with the AKP. They go against the principles of Atatürk...they're trying to make Turkey into country based on religion. I get so angry about this."

My student Mehmet made the comment that Turkey is reacting to Europe's rejection of their bid to join the EU: "They treat us like slaves."

Another commented, "We're sick of being told what to do."

A third student chimed in, "We are always the students, and they are always the teachers."

The discussion turned once again to the matter of the headscarf, a contentious issue as wearing the headscarf on university campuses violates Turkish law.

One recent Gallup poll showed almost half (45%) of Turkish women wear the headscarf. Even on an informal level, I can attest to the tension surrounding the headscarf issue. In a 2001 Turkish film I recently watched, Yazgı (Fate), I was amazed by street scenes of Istiklal Caddesi, the main pedestrian thoroughfare. What astounded me was that on a street of hundreds, even thousands, only a few women don the scarf. This would not be true today. My Turkish colleague, Ayşegül, corroborates my opinion. She insists that women did not wear the chador in her childhood in the late seventies and early eighties and that she first saw a woman in a burka when she was nine-years-old.

Many secular Turks are afraid of the Islamists. I too ask myself what the future will hold, as it appears now that Turkey could turn either east or west, depending on the geo-political situation. "What is my role to be?" I ask myself.

Azar Nafisi recently gave a talk at a symposium sponsored by Google. In this talk, she explains that, in writing Reading Lolita in Tehran, she wanted "to write not just about Nabokov and his works, but also about the different realities under which [she] read his novels and how those realities changed [her] interpretations of his books and how his books changed [her] perception of reality." Nafisi concludes her talk about her more recent memoir, Things I have Been Silent About, in an unforgettable way. She states:

"It was not just about the political injustices, and it was also not just about the Islamic regime, but there was a whole tradition in the Iranian culture where talking about the personal would be considered taboo, and you know, I had not noticed until I started writing this book how much of my diaries were about those personal silences. All my life it seemed I had been writing a story that I could not tell."

Have I too been writing a story that I could not tell? Have I censored myself? Can I articulate why the Turk confessor oscillates wildly through such varied emotions? And if I articulate this, am I revealing confidences I shouldn't? Is there a way that I can use those confidences to push myself to re-evaluate and to open myself up to my own silences? Should this be the role of the writer, and do we not then have an obligation to "write the stories we can not tell"? I leave these questions unanswered for now.

Strange Fruit

2010-04-13T08:43:00.000-07:00

In just half a year, I have heard a steady stream of the most fantastic stories. God knows why people feel compelled to confide in me, but more than ever before, wherever I go, people tell me their secrets. Even if I don't ask to know, even if I don't go to many places (on any given day, you can find me in one of three places, at home, in my office, or at the local Starbuck's), yet I am given the keys to the innermost chambers of virtual stranger's hearts.

One 45-year-old Swiss Turk informed he had just killed a man in Ankara. A despondent 21-year-old boxer believed his 40-year-old American wife was cheating on him. "The webcam," he said, shaking his head, "why would she shut off the webcam so quickly unless she was not alone?" A 30-year-old photography student insisted that she will certainly be the victim of şantaj, a type of blackmailing where money is accepted in exchange for assurance that photos of "compromised" unmarried girls will not be sent to the girl's family or place of work.

These photos need not be of much more than a girl kissing a boy in a private place. If her family sees them, her honor, and theirs, will be ruined. The woman in question -- for a 30-year-old is after all a woman -- went to the home of a Turkish "friend" while she was vacationing in Spain, where the "friend" proceeded to force her to kiss him as another friend photographed them.

Why am I told these things?

As a yabancı, I am an abnormal mutant who has no real social power. I lack what in the parlance of the alternative hipster would be termed "street cred." I don't believe Turkish people when they tell me that they are tired of the West or that they are sick of Americans, as this has not been my experience. More than once I have heard Turks confide in me that they can not stand Turks, dismissing them as untrustworthy, dangerous, and manipulative. In the same breath, though, I have heard the same person describe yabancı as know-nothing, unsophisticated degenerates.

In Turkish, there is only one word to denote the strange, the stranger, and the foreigner: yabancı. I am a yabancı; The linguistic fusion of the term yabancı to mean stranger, strange, and foreigner suggests to me that as foreigners we are always already outside, and the quality of being outside of normal society by definition makes us abnormal. In that sense, we are necessary, for as McFuil mentioned in that Yahoo answers website I referenced in Sunday's post, we help to define what it means to be normal. We allow the normal, i.e. the Turks, to define themselves by our counterpoint.

The state then of being yabancı -- of being not only a foreigner, but also of being strange and of being a stranger -- can lead to delightful possibilities. Even as the language connotes that we are strange, strangers and outsiders, we as foreigners can move across a vast spectrum of emotions within the world of the Turk. We can occupy their imaginations as a frightening spector or a liberating force. And the way Turks react to us oscillates wildly, from desperate and immensely grateful to dismissive and hostile, from almost embarrassingly devoted to humiliatingly arrogant. The confessor Turk speaks to the yabancı stranger, in a strange language, of subjects about which she does not usually speak. Often the Turkish confessor will both confirm and deny any secret communication has taken place. All this can happen within the space of an evening, a conversation, or a look even.

Blue Skin

2010-04-10T23:56:00.001-07:00

What would it be like to be normal? If I, a 36-year-old single woman who spends most of her days reading and writing, could refashion myself to behave more like everyone else, would I be happier? If I were married, for example, could I pass as normal? No longer would the moniker "weird" plague me. No longer would I feel the need to rise to the defense of my homosexual, Kurdish, Christian, Alevi, or Armenian friends, because I too would feel the smugness of being part of the majority, of being safe and protected both by law and by habit.

In an article called "The Lure of the Normal," Patrick D. Hopkins makes a convincing argument that no matter our age, we are always enticed by what he calls "the lure of the normal." What we seek in the normal is not necessarily to be like them, but instead to have access to the privileges that they as normal people have. Finally, if abnormality were to allow us extra privileges, if we weren't discriminated against, that is if society were to acknowledge our abnormalities as good, if they were to perceive us as exceptionally beautiful, powerful, or wise, then we would naturally try to cultivate those differences.

Hopkins uses the comic book series X-Men to illustrate his point. The psychic Jean, for example, can and does pass as a normal human, even though she is a class 5 mutant. In the original X-Men, she presents her views on mutant behavior at a senate hearing, for example. She is competent, well-dressed, and impeccably coiffed. In the third X-Men movie The Last Stand, when scientists discover a cure for the mutant gene, Storm, whose special power is to control the weather, dismisses the discovery: "Who would want this cure? I mean, what kind of coward would take it just to fit in?" But Storm is played by the model Halle Berry and Jean Grey by Famke Janssen. Both women embody the physical ideal in a way which has allowed them to make millions of dollars off their faces and bodies. Clearly, they have gained something from their exceptional beauty. However, blending in is something that some mutants find easier than others. As her fellow mutant Beast points out, "Not all of us can fit in so easily. You don't shed on the furniture" (X-Men and Philosophy 8).

The struggle between Magneto, who considers the mutants as Gods among men, and Xavier, who wishes to help mutants integrate into human society peacefully, reflects a philosophical dilemma. How dangerous is it for the abnormals to embrace Nietszchean ideas of exceptionalism? For example, if you google the term "being normal," much of what you find on chat forums, dismisses the normal as "scary," "immoral" and "dangerous." Decius, on the Captain Cynic Discussion Website, for example, writes on a Being Normal Forum:

"You're normal or becoming normal, and you don't even know it. Normal is when you in any way create a facade to represent you in the "Real" world. A majority of other people do the same thing, and the end result is ironically a "Real" world with nothing but "Fake" people [....] I'll venture to say that a good way of knowing whether you are "normal" or already somewhat "normal" is to judge whether you hope in a romantic way (i.e. daring and risky and idealistic) or if you hope in a controlled and unemotional way (realistic, logical, pessimistic). Therefore, presumably, the younger you are the less "normal" and the more unique you are..."

Amanda H., from a Yahoo Question forum called "What is the significance of being normal in society?" answers the question in this way:

"I wouldn't want to be NORMAL even if I knew what it was."

Another respondent, Finn Mchuil, interestingly suggests that normal people need abnormal people to define themselves, and vice-versa:

"The so-called norm does give rise to the "weird" and the "oddballs" that make the norm exactly what it is. These are the opposite of the "norm," those that rebel against the mainstream and create their own almost underground culture without which there would be no norm. We need one to define the other."

Yet idealization of the abnormal can have equally far-reaching and equally destructive results. After all, fascist ideals of eugenic science to create a master race evolved from myths of the perfectability of human genes. The cultivation of talents to the exclusion of the cultivation of parental love for a child's imperfections can dehumanize us. The challenge then is for mutants to continue to love humans even as they continue to reject, exclude and hate us.

(**The image for this post comes from Abu Nuwas and the Wily Young Man, 2000, by the Editorial Board, World History of Male Love, "Arabian Folktales.")

Characters We Love (and Why)

2010-04-03T22:17:00.000-07:00

Certain narratives stay with us.

We mourn the turned last page, the closed book, the rolled credits, the burnt-out film projector, the turned-off light switch .

There are characters like this as well, ones whom we identify with, whom we think of as people we know, friends even. We're with them all the way. What binds those fictional characters we remember to each other? I am making a list, a personal list, and like my favorite characters, no doubt a flawed list, and only a draft for notes, but nonetheless, here it is:

1) The characters we like must have something wrong with them. They cannot be purely good, but must, like us, be flawed. Think of Carrie on Sex and the City, who seven months after Big's marriage to Natasha, begins an affair with him even though a) Big is married, and b) she is involved in a serious monogamous relationship with Aidan Shaw. (For more on why we no longer like Carrie, please see Stephanie Zacharek's brilliant article, The Trouble with Carrie.)

2) They must be in some way unhappy. A happy character is quickly forgotten and in screen writing, is often quickly killed off. Think of Shannon on the TV series Lost. She cannot be both Sayid Jarrah's girlfriend and bond with us, the viewer, not unless there is some tragic reason why they cannot be together.

3) They must believe in love, even if they are incapable of attaining it. Jean Grey on the X-Men is afflicted by her mutant powers, which cause her to do harm to the man whom she loved, Scott/Cyclops, but it is her belief in love that makes her ask Wolverine to kill her, so that she cannot do the same harm to others that she has already done to Scott/Cyclops.

4) They must be unable to get this living thing quite right and be in the grips of something that prevents them from being happy, a neuroses, a character flaw, something that keeps them from making it like the others. And here is where I transition to Irena Dubrovna, the lead character in the film Cat People.

In the film Cat People (1942), Irena is a Serbian artist with an unspeakable affliction, one which not only separates her from others, but also makes her an intriguing cipher to the marine engineer, Oliver Reed, who is besotted with her. She warns him that there are things she cannot tell him. The engineer, of course, allows her her privacy and asks her to marry him, even as he remembers a statue in her apartment of a medieval warrior impaling a cat with a sword.

After she marries Oliver, she lives in fear of their consummation. She begs him for more time, and he arranges for her to see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist flirts with her in a way that makes her freeze up. She cannot talk to this man if he is just a guy, and not a professional, and so she stops going to see him. All the while her husband, Oliver, is growing closer to his assistant who has always been quietly in love with him, but who has given up hope after he got married.

In the novel The Kiss of the Spider Woman, the main characters Molina and Valentin discuss Cat People from their shared prison cell in Argentina:

--You get what's going on, don't you?

--That she's afraid she'll turn into a panther.

--Well, I think she's frigid, she's afraid of men, either that or she has some idea about sex that's really violent, and so she invents things.

--Wait, will you? He says okay, and they marry. And when the wedding night comes, she sleeps in the bed, and he's on the sofa.

--Keeping an eye on his mother's furniture.

--If you're going to laugh I won't go on, I'm telling you this in all seriousness, because I really like it. And besides there's something else I can't tell you, that makes me really like this film a lot.

--Tell me what, what is it?

--No, I was about to bring it up, but now I see you're laughing and, to tell you the truth, it makes me angry.

Where Molina believes in the magic of love, Valentin subscribes to the ideology that only a Marxist revolution will bring happiness and that he, his girlfriend Marta, and the other Marxists will bring this change to Argentina. Who do you think will fall in love with whom? Because, once again, our tragic character must believe in love, and find himself losing that love. Without this, we will throw the book in the corner and say it isn't real. We are disappointed beings and requitted love of the sort in fairy tales is for children, not adults.

But I contend that the viewer does not just want characters who struggle to attain happiness without ever finding it, but the viewer also wants to be reassured, yes, reassured, that love exists and that those myths from childhood about happiness and love are our eternal struggles which we all share and which elude all of us in some way. Those characters who succeed in loving despite the pain involved, they are our heroes whom we wish to emulate and whom we cannot forget.

In my next post, I wish to write about the X-Men, Mutants and Concepts of Normality.

(**The image in this post comes from the blog Six Martinis and the Seventh Art, and is a still photo from the film Cat People (1942))

Put out the lights and get yourself a beer

2009-11-14T09:58:00.001-08:00

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

2009-11-14T06:50:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-08T00:06:00.000-08:00

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

The talking was what 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 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

2009-10-30T10:56:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-28T13:20:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-04-21T18:00:00.000-07:00

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!"

2009-04-18T14:45:00.000-07:00

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.

Notes on Protecting "the Writing Self"

2009-04-16T09:11:00.000-07:00

Bear with me - I'm trying to find out how I feel about writing.

The world outside would function perfectly fine if you or I never wrote another word again. That world matters to me even if all the evidence suggests that I don't always matter to it. My status within this world is often linked to forces that are beyond my control. Universities cut budgets, friends grow apart, boyfriends leave. I experience failure and am subject at every age to my own mental and physical limitations.

Money and environment matters whether I want it to or not. I continue to pay $50 a month for internet service and at any time a virus might crash my hard drive and leave me bereft. If I had more money, I could buy a faster computer - one which wouldn't continually freeze on me (!) - and the best Norton Anti-virus software, and not only would my computer be healthier, but I too would feel securer and would also be emotionally healthier. Yet without that sleek, uncrashable computer, I still find the space and time to write, at least for now.

Before I began this blog, I spent three years writing fiction from a man's point of view. During that time my own point of view went underground. Now I am trying to dig my old self back up again and recover my own history. To do this, I'll need to push out the detractors, the spammers, and also my own voice of self-sabotage.

Since creating this blog, I feel more "me" than I have in a while. Perhaps this is for the reasons Undine mentions in her post Blogworld Creativity: that is, perhaps it's because here I'm able to write about my private thoughts in a space that is both public (hello, eleven readers) and private (as in, no one who reads this blog sees me on a daily basis).

So I will keep digging.

Elegantly Dressed Wednesday: Shadow Magic, Puppetry, and Boxing

2009-04-15T10:11:00.000-07:00

In her recent post Spa, Professor Zero uses the term "shadow boxing" to describe the elusive and unwinnable fight against those who abuse us. The image of boxing with a largely unknown adversary, whose shadows cast light and dark in a way that obscures both the bully's presence and absence, was one I wanted to come back to in this week's "Elegantly Dressed Wednesday" post.

The ancient Chinese art of shadow puppetry, like all art, points out uncertainties and confusion, both in how we deal with others and how we deal with ourselves, and creates out of these uncertainties something mysterious, illuminating and beautiful, and yet still largely unknowable. This week's "Elegantly Dressed Wednesday" post is dedicated to the paradox of this beautifully resonant illumination which leads only to more questions. Below I have selected three stills from the 2000 Chinese film Shadow Magic in honor of that confusion.

Blogworld Creativity

2009-04-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

A bedtime story (and a stunning post) from Not of General Interest:

"All right, it was a dream (hence the OT qualifier), but I think it says something about the relationship between blogging and "real writing," so I'm posting it. I think it was inspired by a message I received recently from an acquisitions editor at a press where I've reviewed several manuscripts, asking me to have coffee at an upcoming conference.

In the dream, a colleague and I were part of some focus group about academic blogging, and he began to pontificate at great length about it. In real life I like and respect this colleague, but you know that Mark Twain saying "it is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt"? It became clear that he knew nothing about blogging, although that didn't stop him from expressing a lot of opinions dressed as theories, and that I had a whole lot of ideas about it just from reading blogs and from writing this one for three years.

The editor and I walked to a nearby coffeeshop through a thicket of blogs, which were posted on beautiful wooden signposts (all of your blogs on the blogroll were there) on gentle green slopes, and the comments pages were paper pages left beneath them where people could write things with the attached pencils. Once at the shop, I outlined something like a theory of blogology--if not like Mr. Casaubon's Key to All Mythologies--and the editor thought this should be a book.

Now, I'm not writing a book about blogs. Instead, I think it signifies a lot of things that blogs seem to mean to us all:

The ability to try out ideas and be heard by a supportive (but honest) community, even if it's largely a pseudonymous one.

The ability to be playful in writing.

The liberating quality of writing about what you know, and what you know you know even if it doesn't square with someone else's theories (as Professor Z often discusses).

The beauty of a writing space--for it was very much a space--in which writing does not need to respond to deadlines, is never stressful, and makes the writer feel as though the expression of ideas and emotions is a good thing.

In short, I think it was about the ways in which blogs foster creativity, and who could say that that's a bad thing?
[Title changed to be less confusing]"

The Lotus-Eaters, Gender Analyzer and Forgetfulness

2009-04-10T12:30:00.000-07:00

In the opening of Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, Dorothy Parker, in a smoke-filled room, types a note to herself: "Oh God, please let me write like a man," she types. I watched this film a few months ago, and thought to myself, "Well, thank God, we've come so far - readers today are more accepting of a wide range of writing styles and don't expect alpha-male Ernest Hemingway prose." And, yes, readers today may be more accepting, but, well, maybe I've internalized a little bit of sexism here and there. I say this because a website that Zoo in the Head called my attention to yesterday, claiming to discern the gender of any blogger, has thrown my own fraught relationship to my own gender back into question.

Gender Analyzer thought I was 63% woman. Since yesterday I've been going over that number in my head, wondering, "Is that good?" "Or, is that far too much woman in my prose?" "Maybe I should get it down to 55%" and other equally counter-productive thoughts.

I've also been obsessively checking the gender analysis of my favorite bloggers. At first it seemed that all my favorite bloggers fell in the gender neutral fifty percentile range. Judith Warner of the New York Times came in at 52% female. Mein Name Sei: 51% female. Gatochy: 68% male. Oddly enough, Professor Zero's often-commented-upon masculine prose style still gave her a gender classification of being 79% female, yet her blogspot site registers as more than 25 percentage points lower, 52% female. Then I happened on John the Conqueroo's results (83% male) and August of The Grey Notebooks (66% female). So not all of my favorite sites were gender neutral.

More fascinating is why I am still invested in being gender neutral myself. Here I proclaim to write in the name of forgetfulness and happiness and the Lotus-eaters. Yet clearly I've taken some of the prejudices of the mainland back to the island with me.

Elegantly Dressed Wednesday: The Tale of the Blog I Never "Splashed"

2009-04-08T12:23:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in Berlin lives the real life incarnation of the blog writer August, whose journal The Grey Notebooks inspired me to start my own web log in January of this year.

I discovered August's blog last November while working from home. At that time my work, though tedious, allowed me enough time and concentration to read short, pithy blog posts, but not articles, long chapters, and certainly not books.

Reading her blog felt much like reading about a character who is looking into a collection of mirrors which reflect and refract images upon images upon images. Who was she? Here's what I knew: She was a Puerto Rican New Yorker, a surviver of tough public schools before transferring to a nice private school, an heiress (?), a self-declared American exile in Berlin, a newlywed married to a German national. Her favorite writers were super-Anglo-males like Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell and Seamus Heaney. This raised questions as to whether she was a Modernist, and then there was the matter of her URL address "everydayfascism.blogspot.com" What did she mean by this? Her posts in memory of her dead father gave her blog a ghostly, transcendental air.

August also knew how to tell a story. She'd offer just enough information about herself but not too much as to appear narcissistic or exhibitionist, and I learned things from her. Her Elegantly Dressed Wednesday selections introduced me to fashion illustrator Rene Gruau, photographer Mary Ellen Mark, the Ziegfeld girls, and the fashion illustrator David Downton.

I worried she would be annoyed that my blog name was so similar to hers. In my imagination she had contempt for me for being a "sycophantic slag," as Morrissey would say, and my blog for being fawningly imitative. But as usual the things I worried about happening didn't happen. August has not created a post in over seven months, and she has never tried to contact me. (August, where are you?) The themes and styles of our personal posts rarely converge, although I have often wanted to link to her Elegantly Dressed Wednesday posts.

This post, then, is for the blog I didn't "splash." Gracias for introducing me to David Downton, August!

The SPLASH Awards

2009-04-05T10:51:00.000-07:00

Professor Zero has given me a Splash award. For elegance, she said. Elegance: that delighted me. I read Zero's post with unwashed clothes piled onto the dresser behind me and unwashed dishes stacked in the kitchen nearby. Now it falls to me to nominate the blogs which allure, amuse, bewitch, impress and inspire me. If you want to know why you have been nominated and what to do now, here are the guidelines (which you, of course, need not necessarily heed):

The Splash award is given to alluring, amusing, bewitching, impressive, and inspiring blogs. When you receive this award, you must:
1. Put the logo on your blog/post.
2. Nominate up to 9 blogs which allure, amuse, bewitch, impress or inspire you.
3. Be sure to link to your nominees within your post.
4. Let them know that they have been splashed by commenting on their blog.
5. Remember to link to the person from whom you received your Splash award.

1) Caustic Cover Critic - for uploading eccentric and unusual book cover designs; for blogging about his great aunts, Australian crime writers, whose books, when published in Weimar Germany, produced these amazing crime novel (Krimi Romanen) designs.

2) John the Conqueroo - for reminding me of the more obscure, stunning soul music of Otis Redding, Ann Peebles, Stevie Wonder and the amazing Polish Jazz band called Laboratorium.

3) Gatochy's Blog - for posting the "I Understand and I Wish to Continue Award" and for this fascinating post on the censorship of the Romanian photographer Cristian Cribasan.

4) Exhibit Corpse - for charting her film project Exhibit Corpse , for inspiring and surprising, and for bringing art, film and poetry to the community of South Philly.

5) Professor Zero - for reminding me that writing can be fun and for continually challenging my own cultural assumptions.

6) Mein Name Sei - for keeping me in touch with German culture and for being true and good and honest.

7) Art Deco Blog - for introducing me to the marvelous photography of Man Ray, especially these two beautifully strange photos:

Look up, Julia, up, up there!

2009-04-03T17:41:00.000-07:00

From Art Daily.com

Man Ray, Anatomies, 1930

When we discuss chapter eleven of The Dharma Bums, my student Julia objects to Japhy Rider taking his pants off to hike down the Matterhorn Peak in Northern California.

"He puts his pants around his neck! He climbs down the mountain with no pants on."

"Maybe he wants to feel unencumbered," I say.

Julia's attitude towards Japhy reminds me unhappily of my own high school years. This was the time when the showers in the girls' locker room were divided into separate stalls and when I alone was responsible for all of my anxieties about the strangeness of my body. Was I too fat or too thin? Was I balding? Were my eyebrows growing together? Would I almost die of anorexia, like Edie Lennox, who at her thinnest weighed 85 pounds and who lost all her hair. At lunch she ate only a few salad leaves or sometimes, if she were splurging, some cheese on crackers. In these private stalls, the shower blasted me into separateness and I felt lonely, lonely and alone. Swimmers weren't supposed to have body images issues, but we did - even the butch distance swimmers wanted to be thinner.

In my junior year, the swim team recruited the Darling sisters, freestylers from Canada, and Libby Schmidt, a breaststroker from Lake Forrest outside of Chicago. The Darlings did something that no one born and raised in Atlanta could have done: within weeks of moving from Manitoba, Canada, they had broken our showering taboos. They lathered up, without any embarrassment and without any clothes on, totally nude, in the aisle between the two rows of stalls, talking and laughing. They opened shower curtains, asked to borrow conditioner, and joked about how they liked touching their own breasts and then teased you about wanting to touch yours. They had short hair and boyfriends. Tannis even took showers with her boyfriend when her parents were not home. Showers! They seemed to have come from the moon.

The Japhy Riders of the world may not have any good reason for taking their pants off, apart from wanting to be free from clothes for a moment, but whether they mean to or not, they have a way of pulling us, the shrouded, the private, the hidden, out of our separate-stalled aloneness. The Darling sisters did me a world of good by pulling back my shower curtain and asking, "Let me try some of that Ultra Swim stuff you got there?" Tannis always left the shower curtain open and you felt downright anti-social closing it on her. She would start talking about that last set and how so-and-so just kept tapping on her feet. "If you want to pass me, pass me, 'cause I'm going about as fast as I can," and then she'd laugh. I thought her body was beautiful, but looking back on it now, no more beautiful than mine.

The Naked and the Clothed

2009-03-30T17:13:00.000-07:00

From Art Deco Blog

Man Ray, Natasha, 1931

Last week one of my students informed me she would not be able to read The Dharma Bums because "God would not want her to read pornography." Our class had discussed the book only once--the first five chapters--before she declared herself a conscientious objector.

"I'll read another book - I'll do anything but that. It's just, I'm very strong in my beliefs and God would not want me to compromise those beliefs."

Her fear of this particular book perplexed and disturbed me. During office hours I galloped through all of its chapters in search of pornography. "The Dharma Bums is about hiking and Zen teachings and finding balance and friendship," I told myself, and then I remembered the orgy scene in Chapter 5. "That's nothing," I thought. "We've read worse this semester - remember that line in Ginsberg's America about sodomizing policemen." Why was she giving me grief so close to the end of the semester? I could not control what Kerouac put in his book, and I was not asking her to engage in an orgy.

Then I got furious with her. "I'll bring her a copy of the Old Testament," I thought, "with its Sodom and Gomorrah and its Lot having sex with his daughters, and its graphicly menstruating women in Deuteronomy."

In the end I did the only thing I could do: I started grading those damned papers.

Hers was, of course, among the 44 I received on Friday. In her essay she recounts how she suffered from alcohol addiction from her tenth until her twelfth grade of high school. In The Dharma Bums, Ray Smith seeks out the consolation of nature and Buddhism in order to conquer his alcohol addiction.

The book might offer her something worth having, some bit of wisdom, if she were only willing to read it.

Elegantly Dressed Wednesday: The Bush Years, Part 2

2009-03-26T13:44:00.000-07:00

For eight years the Bush administration wrote its own personal Spaghetti Western, minus the stylish Carlo Simi costume designs and the Ennio Morricone scores. They wrote their own Spaghetti Western while going to bed at 9:30 every night and never reading their own briefs and memos.

Picture Condie in place of Claudia Cardinale, with her face tilted up to the hot hot sun.

Imagine Saddam, a bag full of money in his left hand, a fist full of dollars in his right. Picture Saddam as the the tiny dot-like man second from the right. "Follow that bag!" "Follow Saddam into his hole in the ground!" "Let's see some blood, fellas!"

Below you'll find a more leisurely Rummy, in Native American poncho, slouching slightly, standing "contrapposto," as those pretentious ancient Greeks would have called it (but you knew that, didn't you, Rummy, because you learned it at Princeton, didn't ya?).

On Happiness: Note to Self, Never Marry

2009-03-20T15:00:00.000-07:00

My favorite aunt has recently come out of a wrenching divorce. In the course of extricating herself from her abusive marriage, her ex-husband has accused her of everything from promiscuity, to stupidity, to murder (he claims she has been trying to kill him), and has threatened to shoot her on a number of occasions. She has been married to this man for 32 years and has cooked and cleaned, run errands and ironed shirts, etc. for him.

The divorce laws in the European country where she lives are so arcane that for a while it seemed she would not be able to move out of his house before the divorce settlement. The abuse worsened until last year her ex-husband, 84 years old, took a mistress whom he openly cavorted around with in the small town where they lived. My aunt is 64, so her chances of finding a moderately well-paid job after many years out of the work force are slim. Her husband knew this and refused to give her a divorce, even though he also understood she would not be able to live even moderately comfortably without some kind of settlement.

One of the more peculiar things her ex-husband did was to send faxes and emails to my aunt's siblings, accusing her and the entire family of having "gone to the dark side." When another uncle by marriage told my aunt's ex-husband he was losing his mind, he wrote this man off completely, even though they had once been good friends.

At the same time that this was happening, I started watching the first season of Showtime's mini-series The Tudors. Catherine of Aragon's situation, living with Henry VIII while he was carrying on with Anne, reminded me of my aunt's, but Catherine of Aragon irritiated me, too. Henry VIII ignores her completely, and yet every night she pleads: "My lord, won't you come to my bed tonight." Answer: "No, not tonight," as he eyes her more comely ladies in waiting. She was always praying and begging for affection and moaning about how alone she was, and yet, like my aunt, she knew very well that she would live in poverty if she let Henry VIII divorce her.

I preferred Anne Boleyn for her intellectual ways and her poetic inclination. She gave birth to Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen--well-done!--but she also never called her abuser out on his abuse, and even in her final statement before her beheading, prayed that this sociopath of a man would "be saved" and that he would "long reign over you." She was known for her wit and her intelligence, for being the firebrand between her and her sister Mary. What happened?

Admittedly, the divorce laws were worse in the sixteenth century.

The laws favored the king at every turn, and Anne Boleyn had little choice but to cater to his court and to him. Every courtly "friend" she had sided with the king. Her brother's wife accused her of sleeping with her brother. The more outlandish claims accused her of sleeping with upwards of one hundred men and being a witch.

Not one person rose to her defense. Not even her father.

These are her final words:

"Good Christian people, I am come hither to die, for according to the law, and by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it. I am come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak anything of that, whereof I am accused and condemned to die, but I pray God save the king and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never: and to me he was ever a good, a gentle and sovereign lord. And if any person will meddle of my cause, I require them to judge the best. And thus I take my leave of the world and of you all, and I heartily desire you all to pray for me. O Lord have mercy on me, to God I commend my soul."

"To me he was ever a good, a gentle and sovereign lord."
Enough said.

Elegantly Dressed Wednesday: Addio, Voi Fascisti!

2009-03-17T14:52:00.001-07:00

Since this blog is dedicated to happiness and forgetfulness, I would like to mention a delicious fact: the Bush years are behind us. In tribute to that marvelous truth, I have selected a few stills from Il Conformista, Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970s film about pre-fascist Italy, for this week's Elegantly Dressed Wednesday. While the clothes in Bertolucci's film are no doubt beautiful, the end of the Bush era is what I wish to celebrate in this post.

The film Il Conformista take place in 1930s Rome and Paris, and not a single American actor graces its set, and yet no film more insightfully captures the psychology of the Bush/Cheney decade. Bertolucci's movie deals with a homosexual Italian man, in his early thirties, who wishes passionately to be "normal." In his zeal for normalcy, he marries a woman he doesn't love and becomes an apparatchik for the Fascist party.

As the film unfolds, Il Conformista resorts to spying on his former professor, sleeping with this man's wife, and leading them to a country road, where they are both shot in the head. Bertolucci's uses certain surreal filmmaking techniques to give the viewer a continual sense of vertigo (a feeling I associate with reading the newspapers circa 2003 and 2004). Il Conformista, a cipher throughout the film, expresses a deep admiration for both his brilliant former thesis advisor and for his politically-active, socially-aware wife, and yet he's instrumental in their deaths. At the movie's end, all that we know for sure about Il Conformista is that his need for power will always trump his other, more humane, desires.

A Heretical Post

2009-03-17T14:27:00.000-07:00

A thought-provoking post from Professor Zero's blog:

Writing is fun and publishing is easy.

I know it is heresy to say that, so I will repeat it throughout this post. I am really tired of hearing how much I should be suffering and how hard it should all be. I have just never had a hard time writing or publishing, even though I have pieces I had to submit four times and one I still have not placed although I am sure it is more than good. I also do not think really successful people suffer — I think they enjoy their work.

I have had some illuminations. When I told people I did not like my first professor job, a common reaction was to believe I did not want to work for a living generally. People thought I was comparing working to the fantasy of staying home and being supported in style. Similarly, when I told people I did not like my first book contract, the general reaction was that I did not like to write. This is why they said my disagreement with the project itself was just an excuse. People were making gender based assumptions and I did not understand this.

Writing is fun and publishing is easy.

When I was a small stela, it was assumed that women wanted to teach and not to conduct research. If not they were unnatural, which was problematic. That was why women should be lecturers and men, professors. Since this division was no longer entirely legal the only compromise whereby the natural order of things could be maintained was if women conducted research, but let men design their projects. They could then say they were grateful someone brighter had designed their project for them. They could make it clear that they were having a hard time executing it and were not enjoying it but were yet doing a very good job. Then they beamed amid good reviews and talked about how happy they were to be able to get back to the classroom.

Writing is fun and publishing is easy.

The book I am reading now has one of those prefaces I dislike, that list all the funding, leave time, help, and culinary support the author had. Without all of this they could never have taken the first step toward formulating their book. This kind of preface makes sure we know the writer has an élite lifestyle, and intimates that writing is impossible without that. These prefaces thus perform a gatekeeping speech act: if you are not in my social stratum, you cannot write. But it is not true that one cannot write while also doing one’s own research and cooking, and it is not true that one cannot do one’s own editing.

I have said it before but I really prefer prefaces that only acknowledge the entities they legally must, and the people who did actual work on the manuscript. I also prefer dedications without long explanations. A marvelous quotation accompanying the dedication can be nice, but I also like the discreet dignity of very formulaic dedications. “To V., in loving memory.”

Writing is fun and publishing is easy.

It appears that unlike many professors, I come from a long line of white collar professionals. I never thought I could not be one too, if indeed I prepared for it. What was difficult for me about becoming a professor, or becoming anything of interest, was escaping the expectation that I would not want to. Women should not want jobs. Only insufficient women have jobs. So unlike my colleagues who have escaped the oilfields, I do not say “at least I am working white collar.” I say, “At least I have a salary of my own.”

I was originally told that what was good about being a professor was the that it was a white collar job with security, and that what was bad about it was the research expectation. This is ridiculous, of course, since it is the research component that distinguishes it — if all one wants is a white collar position with security, there is much else to choose from. Why professor jobs might be better than other professional jobs is the interesting question.

My theory on it was that the life of the mind was fascinating, being a research professional was interesting, teaching was fine, and service/administration was all in a day’s work. I had also noted that fieldwork = adventure travel = fun, and that interacting with other intellectually oriented people = fun.

What I did not expect to encounter was the investment of so many professors in suffering and/or false stoicism, and the common idea that suffering = research. I also did not expect to have to work with the assumption that writing + publishing = pain you must endure for survival’s sake only.

I think those proclamations are gatekeeping speech acts like the kind of preface I criticize above. I say that to be a professor you have to like to write academic prose and have some research questions you really want answered. You have to be in a position to insist on pursuing those questions, not just “more sensible” questions (according to someone else). Then:

Writing is fun and publishing is easy.

Much of the advice I got as an assistant professor was the standard advice I had also received in graduate school. It was disconcerting to have this entry level advice constantly reiterated. It was assumed that one would not have heard it already, or that one could not be following it because one was not male enough to have understood it the first time. Some of this advice consisted of insightful variations on the standard advice. Some of it was incoherent, willfully misleading, or otherwise inappropriate. It was not always easy to distinguish among these categories of advice because the site was so unfamiliar.

There is one piece of information and advice, however, that I have never been given and that I would like to give everyone, at least in the fields I know: writing is fun, and publishing is easy. That doesn’t mean it is not a lot of work and that you have to really do it, but it remains true that writing is fun, and there are so many places to publish things that in fact it is easy.
I wanted to say these things as an antidote to all the grim repetitions I have seen that you must publish to survive, but that to write is to suffer, and that then it is almost impossible to place what you do produce. I have always been told these things and I have always found this news very discouraging but I have never found it to be actually true. I wonder why, and to whom, it is so important to impart so many warnings and to place such value on fear and suffering.

Writing is fun and publishing is easy.

Axé.

Pedro Almodovar's Illustrations, Part 2

2009-03-05T12:14:00.001-08:00

Mille grazie

2009-03-03T07:23:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Professor Zero, Vintage Poster, The Frugal Chariot, The Royal Rendezvous and Gatochy for linking to me!
Mariana, I noticed you linked my article "Other People's Happiness, Pt. 2" to an article on sexual masochism. How true, how true! :)
Professor Zero, thank you for making my post on Emily Dickinson your post. I'm honored.
In Georgia we have just survived two days of a terrific snowstorm - no internet, no power, no heat.
Otherwise, not much new here.

Other People's Happiness, Part 2

2009-02-27T17:35:00.000-08:00

In an earlier post, I wrote about my process of grieving as something physical, something personal and something private - something I felt I needed to work through by myself, alone. During this period the worst thing I experienced was other people looking at me. I had the sense that I was experiencing something that other people could not understand and should not be privy to, and that they were invading my privacy even by looking at me.

The experience was for me a kind of trauma, although it cannot compare to the trauma of combat or rape or long-term emotional abuse. But it was significant to me - and that was what mattered to me. This trauma did not come from some dark event in my past but from my immediate present, which represented shame to me: the shame of not being wise enough to move away from a situation that had hurt me in the past, of repeating the mistakes I had been making for the last four years.

I would not want to repeat this time in my life for anything, but I also realize now that my abandonment was not my only unhappiness in this period. What Henry Miller would call "the world outside" contributed greatly to my general unhappiness. I perceived that world as cruelly laughing at me and as measuring each of my successes and my failures by its own arbitrary rules. I had become obsessed with pleasing the world, forever wondering, "Am I good enough?" "Do I measure up?" "Did I pass this time?" The only way I am now able to move myself away from this world and its demands is through a physical separation from it, through solitude and my own imagination, and through creating a psychological space that distances me from it.

Other people's happiness made me unhappy - other people's successes made me miserable. I realized this about myself and it made me deeply ashamed. I was a horrible person that I could not share in their joys and in their triumphs. I did not feel recognized in the world; I did not feel seen, and I wanted to be seen, but not in my grieving state, but triumphant.

A strange thing happened to me, too, regarding the elections in November. I followed Obama's campaign and dreamed that it would change my life if he were elected. Overnight, everything would be better, I imagined. Life would change. But as soon as he won, I stopped following the news and I stopped listening to his speeches. He had become someone I no longer recognized. I suppose I felt that he no longer belonged to me. No longer an outsider, no longer an underdog, I ignored him, even though I still admire him greatly, but I don't see myself in him the way that I used to.

(Photo from the set of Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria)

Elegantly Dressed Wednesday: Hiding and Revealing, Part 2

2009-02-25T14:44:00.000-08:00

Alfred Eisenstaedt

Paul Slaughter

"I Thought He Died a While Ago": John Updike's Last Musings

2009-02-24T05:02:00.003-08:00

Requiem

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
"Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise -- depths unplumbable!"

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
"I thought he died a while ago."

For life's a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

--John Updike

From The New York Times.

(Photo from the set of Vittorio De Sica's film Umberto D (1952))

Yes, But Was She Happy?: Notes on Daphne Du Maurier

2009-02-22T07:13:00.000-08:00

By the time Daphne Du Maurier reached the age of 31, she had published four novels, one biography, and written perhaps the greatest psychological study of jealousy ever -- Rebecca. Her family life, as the mother of three beautiful children and the wife of a handsome military man, was also the envy of many.

"Yes, but was she happy?" In reading Margaret Forster's excellent biography Daphne Du Maurier, this was what I wanted to know. Of course, I also desired to find out about the more salacious details of her life, such as, "Was she straight or gay?" and "Was she faithful to her husband?"

Even after reading the biography, Daphne Du Maurier is still a study in contradictions - both gay and straight, both faithful and unfaithful, both happy and unhappy, both male and female, both ambitious and deeply, deeply insecure.

As a girl, she had contempt for those who "went Venetian," her code for becoming a lesbian. Yet she wrote long letters to her first governess, Tod, in which she described "the boy in the box," the part of her character she kept hidden from others, the part that wanted to have great adventures, who was ambitious to create art teeming with depth and beauty. In letters to Tod, she admitted to putting this boy "back in his box" when she married.

She was, like most, a product of her times. Her writing career would not have been possible but for the luck of the place and timing of her birth. In 1907, when she was born, the British Empire was at its height and her father, Sir Gerald Du Maurier, made a substantial income as a famous West End actor. The family could afford to employ a cook, a housekeeper and a governess for the three Du Maurier girls. When Daphne Du Maurier had her three children, she did the same. The Du Maurier's nanny was subject to migraines and had many breakdowns in the process of caring for three young children, while at this time Daphne was at her most prolific. It was in Egypt, with the children safely back in England, cared for by Margaret, that she drafted and wrote Rebecca.

Her sexism and racism are evident both in her attitude toward Cairo and toward her own children. She had nothing good to say about Cairo - she thought it dirty and squalid, and had no desire to spend time with the local Egyptians or with the other English transplants. But it is her sexism within her own family that is most heartbreaking. The children's nanny Margaret complained that she rarely held the girls and would never let them be in the same room with her while she was writing. But her son, her son! She wanted him to be a bounder, a ladies' man, and she indulged him daily. While a toddler, she often let him stay with her in the same room while she was working on her novels.

It seems that, like many women, she felt guilty no matter what she did. She oscillated wildly between disbelief at her good-fortune (her novels sold hundreds of thousands of copies) and self-sabotage of her personal relationships. Once when her husband came to her, ashamed, asking whether she couldn't help with his debts, she wrote to her old governess Tod,

"I mean, really, women should not have careers. It's people like me who have careers who really have bitched up the old relationship between men and women. Women ought to be soft and gentle and dependent. Disembodied spirits like myself are wrong" (Forster, 235)

Later in her life, she noticed (and lamented the fact) that her sentences had changed - they'd become choppier - and she had more difficulty writing her way into the story. She blamed these changes on her general boredom with the state of her marriage and her life in general. She and her husband lived separately now and rarely had sex.

The state of her marriage in this period allowed her to explore her bisexuality in a way she never had before. In her legal defense of a plagiarism case against Rebecca, she traveled to the United States where she met Ellen Doubleday, the wife of the famous American publisher. Even though her romantic relationship with Ellen Doubleday never became anything real, the feelings it evoked in her created imaginative possibilites that allowed her to keep producing tight and rivetting fiction.

I wonder whether, if Daphne Du Maurier had lived today, whether she wouldn't have moved to New York and tried to carve out a life for herself as an open lesbian. But at this time, the 1950s, she kept her feelings for Mrs. Doubleday separate from her public persona (even though she was quite explicit in letters to Ellen). This was the inspiration she had been looking for and the genesis of the novel which Du Maurier believed to be her greatest, My Cousin Rachel.

Elegantly Dressed Wednesday: The Paradox of Hiding and Revealing

2009-02-18T12:25:00.000-08:00

Ruth Bernhard

Milton H. Greene

On "Blocks of Consciousness" and Filmmaking

2009-02-16T13:48:00.000-08:00

Photos from the set of the film Borderline (1930).

Kenneth Macpherson and H.D.

Paul Robeson and Kenneth MacPherson

Borderline, A Pool Film With Paul Robeson (Program)

Paul and Eslanda Robeson

From Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities.

Emily D: In Defense of the Lotus-Eaters

2009-02-12T19:36:00.000-08:00

This blog is dedicated to happiness, forgetfulness and writing. In its name I pay tribute to the Lotus-Eaters of Greek mythology, who ingested a plant which could induce a happy and drugged state of oblivion and forgetfulness, the effect of which proved so powerful that Odysseus had to drag his men back to their ships, though "they wept bitterly."

On the surface, these Lotus-Eaters have nothing in common with an isolated nineteenth-century American poet. Scholars confirm Dickinson spent most of her days in her parents' house until her death. And yet a common element links the Lotus-eaters to Ms. Emily D: both found happiness and escape in a mystical place (one induced by drugs, the other by solitude.)

The myth surrounding Emily Dickinson is that she was an overly-romantic women who locked herself in her bedroom and took to writing poems, day and night, as a result of some vague disappointment in love. Yet I have found Ms. Dickinson to take a hard line not only about romance, but also about society and convention. She tends to be especially unwavering in her belief that poetry must look reality head-on, unlike the "they," the silent majority, whom she so disdains, who are content with simple answers and substitute platitudes for real thought.

Poem 686 - an exquisite poem - illustrates this point:

They say that "Time assuages--
Time never did assuage --
An actual suffering strengthens
As Sinews do, with age --

Time is a Test of Trouble --
But not a Remedy --
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no Malady --

Within the first couplet, she has turned the widely accepted belief that "time heals all wounds" on its head. Each double dash adds a sort of emphatic exclamation point ("They say that "Time assuages"--/Time never did assuage--" (1-2)). The rhythms of these first two sentences are almost exactly identical, but while the first line confirms, the second denies. The effect is to build tension until the release of lines 3 and 4 ("An actual suffering strengthens/As sinews do, with age--" (3-4)).

The fifth and sixth lines have a beautiful alliterative quality and also clarify Dickinson's position: real suffering does not weaken with time ("Time is a Test of Trouble/But not a Remedy" (5-6)). For Dickinson those who experience a weakening of emotions over time have proven only that all that they claimed to feel in the past was largely superficial.

I had to mull over that final couplet for a while, especially her use of the word "malady," which we typically associate with disease and illness ("If such it prove, it prove too/There was no malady" (7-8)). "What kind of suffering does she mean?" I wondered --perhaps the loss of a family member, perhaps a close friend, or perhaps, the more conventional love sickness we see dramatized every day in novels, poems, music and movies. But, clearly, Dickinson is drawing out the comparison between love, illness and disease. The effect of this is as far from a romanticized view of love as one can get. Instead, Emily D. associates true love with a heartache which never completely leaves the afflicted.

Of course, it is true that Dickinson often produced stark, dark and brooding poetry. She also wrote the line, "There is no frigate like a book"--and I believe such mental travel is a kind of escape, a kind of forgetting. It is a kind of travel to a mystical place where one is the arbiter of one's own reality. This space is "The Land of the Lotus-Eaters" - a place of forgetfulness and oblivion. In so doing, she was also able to produce some of the most astonishing poetry in all of American letters--and isn't that enough?

Elegantly Dressed Wednesday: The Allure of Caps and Tobacco in Film Noir

2009-02-10T14:43:00.001-08:00

I first fell in love with Greta Garbo when I saw her play a humorless, asexual Russian spy sent to Paris to retrieve jewels and three Russian "capitalist traitors" in Ninotcha. Her style is all about languor and musing.

Marlene Dietrich's signature arched, extremely thin eyebrows give off an impression of allure and seduction. As an aside, note the extremely long ash dangling precariously from Dietrich's cigarettes in the second and third photos. (Her assistant is probably standing on the sidelines, ashtray in hand, forever ready to catch all Dietrich's debris.)

Faye Dunaway's performance in Bonny and Clyde rightly made her a star. Here she is below dressed for her next shoot-out.

Other People's Happiness: How to Deal with the Contented

2009-02-07T12:51:00.000-08:00

"Maybe I ought to say a word here about being happy, since you mentioned your suffering. You see, I often tell myself that I was born happy. I never had to reach for it, as so many people do. For me it was the natural state. That may explain, in passing, why I had had to taste so much suffering. I am not sure. I don't want to be facile. It's so easy to make explanations--afterwards.

But here is the strange thing----I was happy with myself and in myself. It was the others who brought misery and unhappiness into my life. Not only women, though they chiefly, but men too, my friends and comrades; sometimes just "the world outside," if you know what I mean. And I don't mean the old hackneyed "Weltschmerz." I mean before and after the Weltschmerz period."

--Henry Miller (From Henry Miller on Writing, 154)

This book saved my life - well, not just this book - this book, a silent, tearful lunch with my father, and a long distance phone call to a friend in Germany, who spoke to me for over an hour (despite my abject state); all three things, in conjunction, talked me off the ledge and I'm thankful for that.

I should explain that, in December, two events occurred: 1) I turned 35 and 2) my (on-again/off again) lover of four years stopped returning my phone calls.

The second of these two events was easily the more traumatic of the two. I'm sure I wasn't the first person to be left, but it was my first time, and it aroused in me all the anguish of someone experiencing disappointment and loss for the first time. Not only was I in acute pain, but I felt ashamed, for I had repeated a mistake I had been repeating for the last four years. I fell into a deep depression and stopped returning everyone's phone calls. I was not trying to get my revenge on other people; I simply could not bear to be around anyone (and especially not around people who seemed to be happy). The worst thing I experienced was strangers looking at me. I felt that my grief was visible on my face. Those friends of mine (the ones I still had) wanted to help me, but they did not know how. The simplest solution was to delete this person from my memory--erase him from my cell phone and avoid all places (or people) which might call to mind memories--both happy and sad.

At AA meetings, sponsors warn that forgetting is the first step to relapse. "Addiction is a disease of amnesia,"chides the AA sponsor to the addict struggling to get clean.

But I am of two minds on this issue. Lost loves are gone--gone, gone, gone! To be happy requires an erasure of the mind and an erasure of the memory. Certain memories are better left forgotten. This part of me proclaims loudly, "All hail the god of the Lotus! All hail forgetfulness!"

While the other part is rightly skeptical.

On "Blocks of Consciousness" and Writing

2009-02-05T11:20:00.000-08:00

George Plimpton: Would you say something about the genesis of Portnoy's Complaint? How long has the idea of the book been in mind?

Philip Roth: Some of the ideas that went into the book have been in my mind ever since I began writing. I mean particularly ideas about style and narration. For instance, the book proceeds by means of what I began to think of while writing as "blocks of consciousness," chunks of material of varying shapes and sizes piled atop one another and held together by association rather than chronology. I tried something vaguely like this in Letting Go, and have wanted to come at a narrative in this way again--or break down a narrative in this way again--ever since.--

"Philip Roth's Exact Intent," George Plimpton, 1969, From Conversations with Philip Roth

The concept of writing as excavating "blocks of consciousness" is one which I keep coming back to lately. I find that each time I explore any given topic, my first drafts only skim the surface of my subconscious but with each draft I am able to go a bit deeper. Often on a first draft, I can hear what characters are saying to each other and I can imagine what characters are feeling. Yet I can't manage to see what they're seeing. Or, if I can visualize their environment, then I can't hear what they're saying and the dialogue sounds hollow and lifeless. It is a process that I myself don't fully understand, but I do understand that if I repeat the steps, usually - but not always - things come together.

For example, I'm working on a story now about a Mormon woman. A single mother who has been dating a man for five years, she desperately wants to marry this man, but when she finally becomes engaged to him, she's ambivalent. As a matter of duty, she visits her soon-to-be mother-in-law and a distant aunt at the family cabin in the mountains.

When I first wrote this scene, I could hear the mother-in-law and the aunt talking of their memories building the cabin and of the children swimming over a moonlit lake one night. Obediently, I wrote this dialogue down, but when I read through the draft, it was awful. I hadn't even bothered to describe the cabin or the surroundings.

On the second draft, I threw out most of the dialogue and focused instead on describing in detail what exactly my main character was seeing: the cabin, the lake, their faces, their clothes, etc.

By the third draft, I felt as if I was finally getting somewhere, as if this was something I could show another person without being mortified. Most of the time I inch my way forward, only to throw hours (or days) of my life away and draft the scene again. I have to keep reminding myself that the slowness of the process is part of the process.

As I think about this method of excavating "blocks of consciousness" again, I wonder whether the end result of this process is to make drafting more circular rather than linear. You're forced to work outward, horizontally, because you keep circling back around the same terrain. Each time you're trying to get at the feeling of the event. Not the event as it occurred, but the emotional import of that event.

How to Be a Stranger to Yourself (and Be Happier)

2009-02-02T16:29:00.000-08:00

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about happiness - where it comes from, how to get it, and what to do when it leaves. Clearly, some are happier than others. Are those who are happier simply better people? Are they more loving, less complicated? Or worse, do they have more money than I do? (Probably) Do they have more people who truly love them? (Surely)

I just finished reading a biography on Saul Bellow, an excellent writer who was not only a poor "life artist" but also supremely unhappy for most of his life. Winning the Nobel Prize did not help much, but seeking out the advice of the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner did.

After finding this out about Bellow, I checked out Steiner's book The Knowledge of the Higher Worlds from the library. The book is full of instructions on how to ascend to this higher world, but the key thing I took from Steiner's work was this passage on detachment and happiness (34):

"Our aim in these moments of seclusion must be to contemplate and judge our experiences and actions as though they were those of others, not our own. Suppose someone has suffered a hard blow of fate. How different his attitude would be towards a similar fate suffered by a fellow human being. Nobody can consider this attitude unjustifiable; it is inherent in human nature and applies equally to exceptional circumstances and to the everyday affairs of life. The pupil must at certain times look for the strength to stand towards himself as a stranger. He must confront his own self with the inner calmness of a judge. When this is accomplished, our own experiences show themselves to us in a new light. As long as we are entangled with them and stand, as it were, within them, we are connected as closely with the non-essential as with the essential. During a calm inner survey the essential separates from the non-essential. Sorrow and joy, every thought, every resolve wear a different guise when we confront ourselves in this way. It is as though we had spent the whole day in some place where we saw the smallest and largest objects at the same close range, and in the evening climbed a neighbouring hill and surveyed the whole area at once. Then the proportions between the parts of the area will at once appear different from what they were when we were in the midst of them. This exercise will not and need not succeed with current dispensations of fate, but the pupil must attempt it in connection with those undergone in the past. The value of this inner, tranquil self-contemplation depends far less on what is actually contemplated than on finding within ourselves the strength which such inner tranquility develops in us."

Eleven Commandments

2009-01-30T14:56:00.000-08:00

Pedro Almodovar's Illustrations

2009-01-29T14:15:00.001-08:00