poppies

I've got so much to write about, and many photos to share (from recent travels and otherwise) but right now I am just utterly swamped with all the freelance editing work I've taken on, which is going to amount to the equivalent of an intermittent second job this summer. I owe my poor, patient clients their drafts back, and have no time to write, at least not until the three-day weekend arrives. In the meantime, here are some California poppies for you--like other migrants from that state, they're enthusiastically colonizing the Northwest. You'd think some florally-inclined Johnny Appleseed had flung fistfuls of poppyseeds all up and down Puget Sound.

hometown

I'm out here for a week, spending some quality time with family, old friends, real mountains, and a few million pine trees. My flight landed just before midnight; by twenty hours' time later I had ridden three metro buses and a ferry, consumed 3 astonishingly good espressos and one pink kashmiri chai, and also a Widmer Hefeweizen and a Pyramid Apricot Weizen, complained about the weather, had lunch on the Ave with two JSIS faculty and ran into a third in the bookstore a few minutes later, spent a combined 3 or so hours in University Bookstore, Magus Books, and Open Books, walked from the UW campus to Wallingford, seen both my sisters and my mother and the cat, eaten clam chowder, counted upwards of 50 Obama posters/buttons/bumper stickers, and picked California poppies from the sidewalk.

Today involved pho and cream puffs, more public transportation (with Blue Scholars on the headphones), more superlative coffee, this time in the company of one of my Turkish TAs whom I hadn't seen since Orhan Pamuk's reading at Elliot Bay Book Company way back before he got so famous, EBBCo. itself, a photographic hour in the Seattle Central Library, actual progress on some freelance editing work, a Lebanese movie, and the best Thai food I have had in six months.

I love New York tremendously and have no intention of leaving anytime soon, but it's nice to be reminded how sweet life is here, too.

summer music

I'm in for what's probably going to be a tiresome summer (for reasons medical, financial, and work-related). But I intend to seek consolation in what promises to be an excellent summer concert lineup, free and otherwise.

Tonight Miriam Makeba was supposed to headline at the Celebrate Brooklyn festival, in the park. She apparently hurt herself in a fall the other week (fingers crossed for a speedy recovery, and I hope she's able to come perform again--as I understand, this was supposed to be her last American tour) but Sibongile Khumalo has taken her place. I saw Khumalo perform in Cape Town years ago, and she's marvelous. And LPG has got us passes to the BRIC tent.

Tomorrow, we'll head into Manhattan to see Outlandish at the 168th St Armory in Washington Heights--some halal hiphop for a hot afternoon. And in other moro-musical news, Rachid Taha's on the Summerstage lineup in Central Park next month. (I wrote about Taha and Outlandish last year.)

And best of all, a birthday present: the Blue Scholars come back to New York the day after I turn twenty-seven. So there's no question of how to celebrate; we'll be at the Highline.

There are lots more, but other highlights include: Kiran Ahluwalia has concerts scheduled in August, Vieux Farka Touré and Beth Orton will be free in various parks (Central; Prospect) in June and July, The National is doing one of the Summerstage benefits, and the Brooklyn posse is going to hear the irresistibly-named "Oxford Collapse" and "Frightened Rabbit" at Southpaw, because how could we not?

back in the saddle

So this week I got a summer membership at the Y, because although I've managed to start running again (if not enough) this spring, the recent heatwave has evaporated all desire to be in Prospect Park for the purpose of anything more exerting than lying on the grass (preferably while drinking illicit alcohol). I've been missing the strength and flexibility I had when I was a rower, and know it will take more than running to resurrect those abilities. I haven't been feeling very at home in my body lately, and need to do something about that.

I signed up after work on Thursday, and being late for dinner with a friend, had no time for a real workout. But I found the rowing machines, and decided to do a 2k before leaving.

It was the first time in years that I've touched an ergometer. I always hated the erg--working out on a rowing machine is all the painful effort of the sport, and none of the pleasure. Technique is boring, all timing and pacing and fitting your body to a machine: none of the joyous unpredictability of contending with the water, the wind, the other eight people in the boat and the rhythm you create together. I always regarded erging (balefully) as nothing more than a means to an end, that end being every minute spent on the river.

But it's been three years (!) since I've set foot in a racing eight, and maybe it's only because I yearn so much to be back on the water that this pitiful substitute suddenly feels so good. My body took to the machine with an excitable familiarity, and the mental side of it came too, unbidden, effortless: the posture, the pacing, the coach-in-your-head coaxing you down through the last 250 metres, the calibrated regard to split and rating. All of it flooded back in the first few strokes.

My 2K time was still pitiful in comparison to what I'd have expected three years ago, but I kept the split in a respectable range, and impressed myself with a nice ten-stroke surge at the end. I'll be working on this for the rest of the summer. Columbia has a boathouse on the Harlem River--and while I have no idea if there's any intramural or informal rowing for those not in the university team, I'll have every intention of best trying to start something if it doesn't already exist.

I walked out of the Y on legs of jello, breathless and smiling. It wasn't until few minutes later that I noticed my palm smarting, and looked down to see the telltale redness and the swell of blisters, at the ridge where the fingers meet the palm--the kind that won't break, if I'm careful, but will instead heal into a ridge of rough, thickened skin. I don't miss the bleeding blisters and the ragged nails, or the band-aids patched across my hands, but I've missed my calluses. For three years everything I touched, every book and every body, was felt through that roughness, evidence of the palm's familiarity with the oar handle. The loss of them, in the months after I left Oxford, was a tangible sign of a certain bereftness: for the people I'd left behind, for work unfinished, for the river and the sport and all that they taught me.

Since Thursday, my right thumb has been absentmindedly tracing the sore spot at the base of my ring finger, as if to say welcome back. And I went back again yesterday and rowed another 2K, faster and better.

verde que te quiero verde

This poem showed up in the comments here some time ago (via the usual suspect) and has been reappearing elsewhere of late. Lorca, like Borges, makes me regret never learning Spanish, although I can muddle somewhat through the original (scroll down) with guesswork and half-remembered French.

Green has been my favorite color since I was old enough to speak, and there's no sign of that changing anytime soon. It's the wrong season for this kind of green, though--I don't think Lorca's verde is a June green. But anyway.

Romance Sonambulo

Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.
With the shade around her waist
she dreams on her balcony,
green flesh, her hair green,
with eyes of cold silver.
Green, how I want you green.
Under the gypsy moon,
all things are watching her
and she cannot see them.

Green, how I want you green.
Big hoarfrost stars
come with the fish of shadow
that opens the road of dawn.
The fig tree rubs its wind
with the sandpaper of its branches,
and the forest, cunning cat,
bristles its brittle fibers.
But who will come? And from where?
She is still on her balcony
green flesh, her hair green,
dreaming in the bitter sea.

--My friend, I want to trade
my horse for her house,
my saddle for her mirror,
my knife for her blanket.
My friend, I come bleeding
from the gates of Cabra.
--If it were possible, my boy,
I'd help you fix that trade.
But now I am not I,
nor is my house now my house.
--My friend, I want to die
decently in my bed.
Of iron, if that's possible,
with blankets of fine chambray.
Don't you see the wound I have
from my chest up to my throat?
--Your white shirt has grown
thirsy dark brown roses.
Your blood oozes and flees a
round the corners of your sash.
But now I am not I,
nor is my house now my house.
--Let me climb up, at least,
up to the high balconies;
Let me climb up! Let me,
up to the green balconies.
Railings of the moon
through which the water rumbles.

Now the two friends climb up,
up to the high balconies.
Leaving a trail of blood.
Leaving a trail of teardrops.
Tin bell vines
were trembling on the roofs.
A thousand crystal tambourines
struck at the dawn light.

Green, how I want you green,
green wind, green branches.
The two friends climbed up.
The stiff wind left
in their mouths, a strange taste
of bile, of mint, and of basil
My friend, where is she--tell me--
where is your bitter girl?
How many times she waited for you!
How many times would she wait for you,
cool face, black hair,
on this green balcony!
Over the mouth of the cistern
the gypsy girl was swinging,
green flesh, her hair green,
with eyes of cold silver.
An icicle of moon
holds her up above the water.
The night became intimate
like a little plaza.
Drunken "Guardias Civiles"
were pounding on the door.
Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea.
And the horse on the mountain.

Federico García Lorca

may days

dear readers (if any are left)--I've been gone some time, forgive me.

Michael's death and its circumstances occasioned a lot of thinking and talking and writing, but this blog wasn't the place for those conversations. So for awhile I had little to say here. NPR had a short piece about him recently, and my friend Sasha wrote this memorial for Brown's alumni magazine--it's the one that best captures the person I knew.

Several of us went up to Massachusetts for the funeral--the New Yorkers took the train up to New Haven the night beforehand, and piled into cars with our classmates-turned-law students in the morning. We drove to Medway in a caravan of friends, and there was something fitting and comforting that we came together. So many familiar faces--twenty or twenty-five from our Oxford cohort alone. Some I hadn't seen in years--fellow rowers from the boat club, activist friends, members of my scholarship year. Many I'd lost touch with, or kept only in the barest contact online. They're doing amazing things, practicing law and delivering babies and teaching undergraduates and writing books. A surprising number are married, now. As someone said to me, we should have met again at one of the weddings; not for this.

As that memorial ended, we heard, another was beginning on the other side of the Atlantic, at St Antony's, and more friends were gathering there. J. read a short remembrance he'd sent to be read aloud at that service, in which he noted that the JCR had done two immediate things in Michael's memory--lowered the college flag to half-mast, and put Guinness on half-price in the late bar. That's a tribute he'd have liked--as is the scholarship created in his memory to help Brown students conduct independent research abroad.

When a friend wrote to tell me about the flag, I found myself thinking of the last time I remember it flying low, though surely there must have been other instances in between. Michael was the third person I knew and liked in Oxford who has died suddenly. So John and Meeto have also been on my mind, these past few weeks. All three of them were remarkable, deeply gifted people, who burned very brightly in their short lives. I've been thinking about how they spent their time in this world, and how I'm spending mine.

in memoriam

There were all these other things I wanted write about, but right now there's only this: my friend Michael was killed yesterday in Afghanistan.

I hadn't seen him for a couple of years; we'd fallen out of touch after leaving Oxford. For as long as I'd known him, he'd been working on Afghanistan--conducting research for a remarkable interview-based study of the Afghan mujahideen, and consulting for various NGOs. His love for the country is transparent in this photo essay he published summer. Last I'd heard, he was back at Brown, his alma mater, serving as a visiting fellow in international relations. I didn't know that he'd recently started working as a 'field social scientist' with NATO forces.

Oxford was full of overachievers, but Michael stood out even among that crowd; I was equal parts impressed and intimidated when he had his first book published while still only a grad student. But he was also one of those people who, while intimidating on paper (one look at his achievements tells you why) somehow managed to be not the least bit so in person--just smart, generous, dedicated, and funny. It's hard to watch these short clips of him speaking, but his intellect and warmth come through clearly.

And yet, they only show one side: I also remember a story about a champagne-fueled punting trip down the Isis, with a smoking hookah carefully balanced on board. (I think it was the same green hookah I later inherited; it still sits in a friend's house in Oxford.) Or a lively goodbye party, before another trip to Afghanistan, at the top of the founder's building, and days on the river--he was an avid rower, and it was that as much as political or academic interests that we had in common. When I got home, I went looking for pictures of him, and found some from the Boat Race in 2004--when several of us went to London to watch Oxford chase Cambridge down the Thames, and later left the tables of a dosa restaurant in Hammersmith stained with dark-blue face-paint. My thoughts are with his family and friends and all the others remembering him today.

Michael Bhatia, 7 May 2008.

the damage

I should know better than to amble into the Strand with a bellyful of apple cider from the Greenmarket, on an evening when I should be hurrying home to beat the threatening rainclouds.

I didn't find the book I was looking for. I did find:

• Here is Where We Meet, John Berger
• Dancer, Colum McCann
• The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, Vijay Prashad
• Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond, eds. Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi Shankar.

That's actually quite a lot of book for $37.82, and I wouldn't feel guilty were it not for the fact that I also had a Strand Moment just the other week (Swords of Ice, Latife Tekin; Love Marriage, V.V. Ganeshananthan), and I am currently supposed to be making an effort to be frugal. Which should mean: library.

My present self-imposed IMF austerity policy is the result of an unexpected $350 worth of laptop repairs last month (ouch), a desire to pay off the small credit card balance I'm carrying before starting grad school in the fall, and--more cheering--the fact that I just bought a $1,200 plane ticket to Delhi and Kolkata for this coming December/January. More on that, later--I have some reading to do.

benevolence (without end)

I'm too joyful to be coherent tonight. It seems like I've spent the last six month down on my knees, praying for so many things to work out as hoped. And one by one, the answers have come, and overwhelmingly they've been yes: to tenure-track jobs, doctoral fellowships, book deals, betrothals, beginnings. This spring has been a season of extraordinary blessings for me and my loved ones. By the end of last week, there was just one more big answer to wait for, without which, it was impossible to celebrate wholeheartedly--because it seemed the most-needed blessing of all. Yes. Against the odds, despite the lottery, the quota, yes: dear S. is coming back to New York, to take up her dream job (may I say, tatlım, where it will be?) The government might call this a visa, but what it is is a homecoming, long-awaited and much-deserved.

We've been batting fragments of this poem back and forth for some time. When I got home tonight I pulled the milk crate filled with old New Yorkers out from under the desk, and sorted through them until I found it, in the issue of October 16, 2006. To whatever is out there to be thanked: thank you, thank you, oh thank you.

Autobiography: New York

Returning alone after long absence
I was engulfed. No novel, no play
had prepared me for this,
the arched November trees
glazed with ice, the night-emptied
sidewalks chipped with mica
in silent offering.
I had left it all behind
and here--it rose! The City's
fiery parcels all undone.

It was the season of regret
and the great wave of first
love lost swept over me.
Catching the buildings'
hooded eyes from afar--
my true paramours!--I was
mournful in my travelling kit,
adolescent with longing
for everything laid out
before me, down on my knees
in the frigid air, on the first
night, asking for benevolence,
second chances without end.

-Melanie Rehak

the language of ma'alula

I know that I'm easily susceptible to the pathos of dying languages. (It's possibly why I spent a year learning one when I was eighteen, though I've since forgotten almost all of what I learned.) So I was drawn in immediately the other day when I saw a short piece in the New York Times on the dwindling Aramaic-speaking communities of Syria, with a dateline of Ma'alula. The reporter introduces us to the town via an elderly resident named Elias Khoury (not to be mistaken with the Lebanese novelist of the same name!) and details the familiar villains of language loss: urbanization and migration, education practices and "Arabization" policy, television, the generation gap. Not much new here (indeed, some familiar clichés, including the obligatory reference to the "language of Jesus"), but it left me sinking into Syrian memories anyway.

I have warm memories of a short time spent in Ma'alula, and I did hear Aramaic spoken there, although it sounded close enough to Arabic to have little resonance for my ignorant ear. More vivid is the memory of wandering into a church in Bab Touma--the Christian quarter of the Old City of Damascus--where a deacon offered to show me an Aramaic bible, and read the verses aloud to me, tracing the lines of Syriac script.

One line from the article that made me shake my head, in reference to a young man called John Francis--"Western-sounding names are common among Christians in Syria and Lebanon." Not quite--they're Christian names, not "Western" ones, and would be no less common in, say, Kerala. But one can't assume too much from a name, common or otherwise: not long after my visit to Ma'alula, I spent several days in a desert monastery called Deir Mar Musa in the nearby mountains. One of the resident monks, a young Christian man from a Maronite village in a neighboring valley, was named Jihad. All the careless uses and careful parsings of that word I've seen in text after text these last several years, and still I find myself thinking first of bearded Brother Jihad, who made me my first cup of maté and taught me to milk the goats.

shameless cheering

about many things, including this!

historical tremors

Ari Kelman had a wonderful post up on Friday at The Edge of the American West, commemorating the anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake of 18 April, 1906:

It lingered for nearly a minute, an eternity for terrified San Franciscans. In an instant, the ground in some parts of town liquefied; whole blocks of poorly constructed tenements slumped into piles of rubble, entombing those inside. Even monumental buildings, constructed to embody state power or Gilded Age prosperity — the US Post Office; the West’s most luxurious hotels and grandest office buildings; and the still-new City Hall, a Beaux-Arts monument that captured San Francisco’s ostentatious sense of itself at the dawn of a new century — all suffered significant structural damage. It was, without question, the worst disaster in a city whose short history had already been punctuated by earthquakes and fires.

Kelman takes us through the aftermath of the quake—the catastrophic attempts to create firebreaks, the confusion that ensued with a mayor seizing some of the powers of martial law, leaving the devastated city swarming with troops and caught in a legal limbo, and perhaps most appalling, the opportunistic use of anti-immigrant sentiment and racism to persecute the city’s Chinese community. As he writes (making the parallels to more recent ‘natural disasters’ explicit), “The fires demonstrated that although the quake had been natural enough, the disaster would be a byproduct of poor planning, negligence, and the politics of catastrophe.” He ends on a rather ominous note: as ever, we’re still waiting for the next Big One, and for all the time spent talking about it, we may not be prepared.

The 1906 quake occupies a special place in family lore; my sixteen-year-old great-grandmother narrowly escaped being crushed by a falling chimney as she fled the house that morning, and her family spent some weeks afterwards camped out in the Presidio among tens of thousands of their fellow San Franciscans, refugees in their own city. She died in the mid-1980s, when I was five or six, but I have clear memories of visiting her apartment on 32nd Avenue, between California and Clement, down the street from the house where my mother grew up and my grandmother still lives. At that age I was fascinated by earthquakes and volcanoes, and was always eager to hear her retell the story of the Big One. Her descendants still live along the “rim of fire”, and I don’t think there’s a single member of the family, save perhaps the youngest, who doesn’t now have earthquake memories of their own--the biggest I’ve experienced was the 6.8 Nisqually quake in 2001.

Among my assorted childhood obsessions, this one has stuck--New York seems to be set on fairly firm ground (or we wouldn't choose to live in this crumbling building) but I keep falling in love with seismically-active cities. When I finally move the blog to wordpress I should have an 'earthquake' tag. See: on earthquake diplomacy and earthquake politics, which explores the political impact of the 1999 Izmit quake in Turkey, especially with regard to Turkish-Greek relations, and assorted posts on the 2005 Pakistan quake.

(aftershock: how odd that the Wabash Valley Seismic Zone chose April 18th, of all days, to shake up Illinois. Also, I should get around to sharing some excerpts from Pamuk's essay on "Earthquake Angst in Istanbul.")

lost city maps

(and now I'll stop the self-indulgence & get back to the sorts of matters for which this blog was created!)

Check out Virtual Ani--an online cartographic and textual resource on the ruins of Ani, a medieval Armenian city that was once the capitol of a kingdom encompassing extensive lands on both sides of the modern Turkey-Armenia border. A thousand years ago, the city had a population of over 100,000, but after successive invasions and trade shifts it declined, hosting only a small settlement for centuries, and becoming a ghost city by the nineteenth-century. Various (mostly European) travellers re-"discovered" the ruins in the subsequent decades, writing raptured accounts of the lost city, and later launching photographic and archaological expeditions--among other things, the site features a number of travel accounts, expedition diaries, and a wonderful series of stereoscopic photographs from the 1870's. It focuses on Ani, but also includes entries on a number of other Armenian sites throughout Eastern Anatolia. While I've come across the occasional troubling assertion--particularly some passing references to the Kurds--most of the information seems generally sound, based on what I know about the area and its recent history.

Given the fraught battles over that history, though, the VirtualAni project not only a resource for historical images and texts--it's a political statement of sorts. The Turkish Republic's stewardship of Ani, and other Armenian sites in the region, has ranged from malice, to neglect, to a crude and problematic "restoration" process. And although the site is now afforded some protection and is accessible to tourists (after decades of being off-limits due to its location in a heavily-fortified "military zone" near the border), the official signs apparently obscure the site's Armenian origins, in keeping with the state's denalist attitude towards the legacy of the Armenian presence in Anatolia. So VirtualAni functions not only as an information resource, but as a re-inscription of that history, a way of mapping out a claim to an Armenian past in this land.

Ani continues to play an important symbolic role in constructions of Armenian identity and territoriality--both in official, state-sponsored manifestations (postage stamps; history textbooks) and popular culture: see, for example, this label for a Yerevan-brewed beer named after the city:


And while maps and messageboards aren't enough to free Ani's contested history from competing nationalist agendas, I'm glad to see that the interactive map part of the site is available in Turkish. I wish could explore the messageboards more easily (due to a free hosting service they're infested with pop-up ads and strange formatting, at least in my browser)--I'd like to find out what kind of conversations the project is fostering. (Thanks to Ayda for passing it along!)

switchbacks

The blog has been quiet due to an extraordinarily tumultuous week, followed by a bout of food poisoning that left me curled up in bed, miserable, for most of the weekend (to add insult to injury, my laptop was in the shop for repairs at the time). But I'm back in action, and finally supplying some answers.

[as promised, most of this post is now redacted. If you want the whole convoluted story, you can email me for the details.]

Anyway, the big news: so, what I said the other week, about going to NYU? I was wrong. (Don't worry, I'm still not headed to Harvard.) I've accepted a full fellowship to the doctoral program in socio-cultural anthropology at Columbia. As I've promised Sepoy, I'll play the historian half the time anyway, and I'm already laying the groundwork for dalliances with the history department at Columbia. I'm overflowing with plans and ideas, and the delight I've been feeling since last Monday suggest that this was the right decision: what a rollercoaster ending. I'm not even getting into (yet) the part about how we also spent much of the week thinking we were going to be evicted from our beloved and irreplaceable apartment.

But! Does this mean I have to stop saying snarky things about the Ivy League now?

çok awesome

I am just going to quote this entire brief news report (via KS's facebook) because it needs to be enjoyed in its totality:

A mishap Thursday caused some mosques in the Black Sea province of Trabzon to broadcast a love song instead of the call to prayer for the noon prayers.

According to reports, all mosques are connected to a central system from which the call to prayer is broadcast to all mosques. On Thursday at noon, the people of Trabzon were greeted by Geçtiğim dikenli aşk yollarında, elimden bir kırık saz geldi geçti (On the thorny roads of love I tread, I got hold of a broken saz), sung by Zeki Müren, a highly respected Turkish singer, composer and poet who died in 1996. While he dressed effeminately, wearing large, ornate rings and heavy make-up, especially in the later years of his life, he never confirmed or denied the public rumors that he was gay.

According to reports, Müren's song was heard for three minutes, before the call to prayer began.

Officials from the Trabzon mufti's office said the mishap occurred due to a technical problem.

God, I miss Turkey.

(nb: While the style of Turkish classical music that Zeki Müren performed doesn't do much for me, his work is wildly popular, and he was widely embraced as a national treasure in his lifetime. If he lived in Brooklyn today he'd probably be referred to as genderqueer, but I just sort of think of him as sui generis. This 1984 clip is a pretty remarkable example.)

five things

I'm too busy--and on tenterhooks over several major unresolved questions--to finish anything substantive now. But in the meantime you should read these:

1. My contrapuntal friend has started blogging again, alhamdulillah. See his post on the desire to provincialize Bengal, born of:

getting a little fed up of books by eminent Indian social scientists that invariably turn to Bengal for their empirical meat. After 4 and something years in graduate school, I have this vision of a Bengal teeming with social scientists discussing Marx, Dostoyevsky, or genealogies of modernity at coffee shops or second hand book stores on streets named after writers, while all around them bhadralok and bhadramahila scurry to and fro on their bourgeois itineraries, with idle subalterns watching stealthily from between cracks in buildings. None of this has been vindicated by trips to Kolkata....

There's also this nice review of a show of avant-garde European prints at the British Library ("the fascinating thing about brick kilns is that they are made of the very things that they make. As are libraries.")

2. Beth at Cassandra Pages has spent the last several months writing with great patience and beauty and humor about her father-in-law, who hails from a part of Syria I know and love, and whose life is drawing to a close half a world away, at the age of almost a century. I refuse to excerpt any of this: take an hour or so sometime and read it all slowly, with the care it deserves. It has been a long time since I watched a book unfold online with such pleasure--the last one, I have recently learned, will become paper-and-ink, and I hope 'The Fig and the Orchid' will follow.

3. Sashi is posting more poems, which he should send to magazines, but in the meantime they are here on the internets for us all to enjoy. This one I like a great deal; and also this. In a recent epigraph he also introduced me to a this quote from a poet we both love, Jack Gilbert--a fragment from a Paris Review interview: "We're the only things - leaving religion out of it - we're the only things that know spring is coming." Let it come soon, please.

4. Psyche, riffing off another blog, considers 'the books that got away' (I am in the process of trying to keep two or three from doing the same). I've known a number of books that got away, but the one that puzzles me the most is Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter. I've read some pages of it over and over, started anew several times, remember the early paean to the oyster dance in a New Orleans whorehouse with a startling vividness, have devoured other novels of his cover-to-cover five times--and yet I've never actually finished the book. Perhaps because last time I was reading it, I wound up in the hospital, and it still carries the tang of illness, or perhaps just because the wily, jazzy narrative is as slippery as that oyster. I'll catch it someday.

5. Manish of Ultrabrown has somehow managed to see and review Fatih Akın's new film, Auf der Anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven)--and calls it "a masterpiece--one of the finest diaspora flicks I've ever seen." I am desperate with envy, having waited long & impatiently for the New York premiere in May. As some of you may remember, Akın's last feature film Gegen die Wand is not only one of my all-time favorite films, but was the subject of the very first post on this blog. I also love his documentary about Istanbul's musics, İstanbul Hatırası/Crossing the Bridge, and enjoyed Im Juli (In July), an early outing into romantic comedy. He's a young director, only in his mid-thirties: here's hoping for a very long career, and more stories of the borders crossed and uncrossed in the migrations that link Germany and Turkey. I have every hope that The Edge of Heaven will be, as Manish says, "just mind-blowingly good." And I am also keen to encounter the soundtrack--those from Akın's earlier films are on heavy rotation on my ipod--as well as to see whether the wondrous İdil Üner makes another cameo in this film, as she has in both of his prior features.

Oh, and that post includes a review of The Band's Visit, a rather charming Israeli film I have been meaning to write about since Anand & I saw it back in December. Later this week, perhaps.

you begin again

Amitava's going to scold me for being cryptic once more; but there's no way to be direct about the details right now. Some things that I thought had been decided are now undecided; it's good news rather than bad: a different door might be opening, and all shall be well either way. Still, it's messing with my head a little.

This sudden shift, upon the heels of other disturbances and disjunctures, has left me terribly restless. I'd like the uncertainties to come to an end. I want it to be spring, now. I want the cold winds to stop blowing. I want to make my plans and plant my garden--yes, there will be a garden, this year--and sit out in the warm air with my loved ones; smoke cigarettes on fire escapes, organize picnic expeditions. It's been a tough winter for all of us, and I want it to end.

In my anxious anticipation of a phone call this afternoon, a friend wished me 'good luck'--except he abbreviated it to 'gluck', and my mind being what it is, I read it as Glück. And I remembered reading a new poem of hers in the New Yorker last week--when in the midst of some tiresome story about the commercialization of pomegranates during a D-train commute, I turned a page to find this late-March musing. The season of discoveries is beginning.

The phone call was late, and I spent most of the next half-hour covertly reading portions of The Wild Iris online. By the time it finally came, I had mellowed back to a state of something close to peacefulness, and I've managed to stay there since.

Finally the dog goes in.
We watch the crescent moon,
very faint at first, then clearer and clearer
as the night grows dark.
Soon it will be the sky of early spring, stretching above the stubborn ferns and
violets.

Nothing can be forced to live.
The earth is like a drug now, like a voice from far away,
a lover or master. In the end, you do what the voice tells you.
It says forget, you forget.
It says begin again, you begin again.

prayer (foolish or otherwise)

For a visa, a new chapter, a lucky break, second chances without end. For next spring under the cherry blossoms in Prospect Park. Fingers (and toes and knees and spine) crossed.


(photo: Nevins St., Brooklyn, 2007)

postscript: another prayer, for somebody's words to come back to him, and for london/barcelona/vancouver/bristol/providence to happen. especially providence, divine or otherwise. this post is now the virtual prayer wall of the blog.

frivolous note

Even Paris Hilton is in İstanbul, and I'm not. So unfair. On the other hand, I'm totally a better dancer (at least when it comes to this kind of music) than she is.



The whole thing strikes me as a criminal waste of the talent of the great Burhan Öçal (the longsuffering darbuka player). The Burhan Öçal & the Trakya All-Stars album Trakya Dance Party is well worth your liras, dollars, euros, rupees, or currency of whatever sort.

(via DailyCherez). But! while I was in the very process of writing this post, that sneaky Sepoy emailed me a copy of the same clip. What do they say about great minds again? Anyways, apparently Bill O'Reilly shot off at the mouth about it; won't somebody send me a link?

zimbabwe today

Monday update: the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission is stalling and has not yet released the results, lending credence to opposition claims of a victory. The Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN) has released their own parallel tabulation showing a narrow win for the MDC, but by a margin that may require a runoff. Otto was on Kojo Nnamdi's show on WAMU today; audio available here (he comes on around minute 19 and proceeds to kick ass).

Zimbabwe holds presidential, parliamentary, and local elections all in one fell swoop, today--after an election year marred by violence, intimidation, and utter economic disaster--the inflation rate has now exceeded 100,000 percent. I've been back on the Zimbabwe beat at work recently, trying to facilitate some media advocacy around the elections and their potential aftermath. Early reports are not promising, with evidence that Mugabe's ZANU-PF party may have engaged in the kind of widespread rigging and fraud that have characterized other recent elections in Zimbabwe (2002, 2005).

Here are a few stories/resources you might want to look at:

• Sokwanele/Zwakwana (Enough is Enough) is a Zimbabwean civil society action group; their Zimbabwe Election Monitor dispatches and are essential reading.
• Sokwanele has also set up a GoogleMaps mashup to map violations of voting rights and other breaches of SADC election standards. Ethan Zuckerman has a post about the project that's worth reading.
• Kutubana.net's blog coverage
  
• A meticulous and depressing report from Human Rights Watch.
• Q&A with Timothy Burke
  
• Eyes on Zimbabwe is a short online film about the last March's brutal crackdown on civil society activists (which involved mass arrests and brutal torture in police custody). The website also features resources, op-eds, and background on the crisis in Zimbabwe.

(One of the people featured in the film is Otto Saki, a friend who served as acting director of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights last year. He was on CNN international today and will be on assorted NPR affiliates throughout the weekend; I'll post links/clips if I can find them). Thoughts and prayers with those there today, especially B. in Harare.

a desultory personal update

Things that are bad for one's vanity: getting braces in your mid-twenties. They're the discreet ceramic sort, but they're still a pain (literally: the first week hurt like a mofo). I would have a better attitude about the impending year-plus of expensive and painful orthodontia/surgery/etc. if it weren't a do-over: trying to fix some jaw problems that jaw surgery in my teens didn't resolve. The thing is, last time I had braces I was a geeky, gawky kid three years younger than everybody else in college, so it wasn't like I had much of a romantic life anyway. But thankfully, it turns out they aren't as much of an impediment to kissing and other activities as I'd feared. Still, I miss crunchy things. And salted caramels. And reserve the right to bitch & moan about any forthcoming procedures involving people cutting apart bones in my face.

Things that are good for one's vanity: turning down a fully-funded offer from a Harvard PhD program, because you want to stay in New York--and a university here has offered you an even sweeter deal. [erm, scratch initial info here: updated to reflect the fact that I am going to Columbia rather than NYU. All the rest still applies!]

No offense meant to Boston, Harvard and its excellent CMES, or the various lovely people I know who've studied there (like, um, the one I live with) but I can't bear to leave Brooklyn, and I think this department will be an even better fit given the work I want to do. I can't believe my luck: I'm going to get paid to read books and learn languages and live in New York City, y'all. How could I say no? Even my boss has finally given up trying to talk me out of returning to grad school; she knows it's a futile effort. Thank you so much to all of you who've been so helpful & kind throughout the tiresomeness of the applications process. I will try and do something worthwhile with this.

the view from kyoto

While I was in Seattle in December, I stopped by the newly renovated Seattle Art Museum to see the exhibition "Japan Envisions the West: 16th - 19th Century Japanese Art from the Kobe City Museum"--the online exhibition can be found here--and came away wishing I still had students, so I could order them all to go see it. There's a book available from UW Press as well.

I love maps--especially old ones--and particularly those that invert, subvert, or otherwise complicate our mental geographies (for his birthday last year I gave thariel this Hobo-Dyer projection to dizzy his students with). And the first delights of the exhibition were cartological: maps both eastern and western that charted the early encounters. Like this one, "IAPONIA", from Antwerp in 1595--



or a wonderfully puzzling "Buddhist world map" from 1710--

The latter poses the question at the heart of the exhibition: how might the world have looked, three hundred years ago, if your vantage point happened to be Kyoto, and not London or New York (or even Constantinople)? What would you see, gazing westwards? What do you make of these Portuguese and Dutch traders who start sailing into your ports at the turn of the seventeenth century?

The answer is, you make art. The seventeenth and eighteenth-century paintings, prints, screens, and objects testify a fascination with the small coterie of Dutch traders that the Tokugawa shogunate permitted to remain in Japan, on a quarantined island fort at Dejima. There are painstaking depictions of them with their lace collars and their pipes, and detailed scrolls mapping the layout of their compound, which was off-limits to all but officials, translators, and a certain number of prostitutes.

The collection carefully chronicled the impact of European artistic techniques and perspectives. But my own excitement originated more in the subject matter--and what it suggested--than in style. Two rooms of assorted objects--porcelain, tobacco boxes, furniture, weaponry, netsuke--hinted at the exotic appeal of the "southern barbarians" as subject matter for the decorative arts. It's a striking inversion of the Orientalist images and motifs so common in Western ornament. Here we go again, essentializing the other: but usual categories of representer and represented have swapped places. The pieces I found most interesting were the ones that suggested that these exotic others didn't fall into a European/Asian dichotomy--for example, the "octagonal bowl with design of Dutchmen and Chinese hermits." Perhaps, in nineteenth-century Japanese eyes, Chinese hermits and Dutchmen seemed equally quaint and foreign creatures.

The Dutchmen and Chinese, at least, could be encountered in the flesh. And after the forcible entry of Commodore Perry's black ships into Tokyo Bay in 1853, Americans and their empire, too, were tangible--Perry and his arrival were extensively depicted. Still, my favorite pieces were testaments to some artist's attempt to envision sights unseen--a detailed diagram of a European factory, drawn from imagination and secondhand reportage; or a flock of English sheep that initially escape recognition--because the painter, having never seen actual sheep, has painted them as if the size of rabbits. Or the visions of distant American cities, filled with wide streets and full-skirted women, and in one case, a rising hot-air balloon. It turns out that many of these paintings were actually based on on pictorials of European cities and landscapes published in the Illustrated London News.
And so that, above, is a painting of Washington, DC. I can't help but think of Calvino's Marco Polo, but in paint rather than print, and dreaming westwards.

march 20, 2002

I'm vividly remembering that evening, sitting by the windows in my room in Holywell Street, reading the news, feeling sickened. Five years on, there seems very little to say that hasn't been said already.

Last night I went with several colleagues to see George Packer's play Betrayed, based on his New Yorker article about the plight of Iraqi translators who worked for the American and British occupation forces. It's only one small part of this huge, despairing story, but it's a worthwhile one, if only because it illuminates a particular carelessness, or shamelessness, endemic to the whole enterprise. (As a play, it has its flaws: a little didactic at points, and one character's story--though moving--seems too pat, invented to fit the demands of the narrative. Tellingly, it's not a story that appears in the original article, which is otherwise very direct source material for several of the characters and their words in the play. Also, one of the leads bore an unnerving resemblance to someone I know, which unsettled me throughout.) Anyway, I recommend it, along with a score of other articles and films about the war in Iraq. The piece on Abu Ghraib in this week's New Yorker might be another good place to start. If we sear these stories into our memories, we might have a better chance at making "never again" a meaningful slogan.

the drive to connect

Because it is possible, in the lowest of moods, to post a status message to facebook in a language that most of my 'social network' does not understand (I have a rule by which I am only allowed to be publically self-pitying in Turkish, or occasionally en français), only to have one of the people who knows my foolish head inside out see it, and instantly grasp--navigating via an Urdu cognate--perceptively and precisely what I was thinking. And with kindness, write that understanding back to me, in laughter, with love. What would I do without such friends?

Somehow I never got around to posting it before, but this blog almost ended up being named '(the dream of) a common language', in reference to the last line of this poem-fragment, instead.

Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon
sloshed in the glass. Poems crucified on the wall,
dissected, their bird wings severed
like trophies. No one lives in this room
without living through some kind of crisis.

No one lives in this room
without confronting the whiteness of the wall
behind the poems, planks of books,
photographs of dead heroines.
Without contemplating last and late
the true nature of poetry. The drive
to connect. The dream of a common language.

- Adrienne Rich, from 'Origins and History of Consciousness'

istanbul meri jaan

A striking time-lapse film of familiar İstanbul vignettes, by the artist Veysel Gençten (and set to Mercan Dede's music):



The moon sinking into the arms of the minarets in Sultanahmet; red-tiled roofs; the endless peregrination of boats up and down and back and forth across the Bosphorus; traffic-clogged bridges; clouds blown by Marmara and Karadeniz winds; police cars and the Taksim tram fighting their way through the throngs on İstiklal Caddesi. Has it really been more than two years since I have seen any of it, since my feet have touched this patch of earth?

(thank you to RK--without whom, I might never have set foot there--for sending this along).