other people's tales (and horsetails)

Since I am still too busy to put up much new content of my own (it’s coming, I promise; maybe after our housewarming?) here are some entertaining things to be found around the internets at the moment.

First, Szerelem went to Istanbul last month, and subsequently posted reams of photographs. The ones of Beyoğlu (my old neighborhood; I still have dreams set there) made me teary; the ones of street food and delicacies reduced me to a quivering mass of longing—I should do some food writing on Turkey, especially on Istanbul. Zencefil hatirladın mı?

While we’re speaking of the beloved city, here’s another treat. My favorite chapter in Pamuk’s My Name Is Red, a novel about Ottoman miniaturists, has always been “I am a Tree,” which is indeed told by a(painted) tree; other chapters of the novel are narrated not only by the human characters, but by a coin, a corpse, a dog, the Devil, and the color red. So lapata, Chapati Mystery’s own resident miniaturist, presents the most excellent “I am a Horse.” And if you think this horse is a pleasant fellow, go look at the rest of her paintings: I’ve always liked the Googoosh ones very much, but the fashionable Atatürk is nice as well (and Atatürk was also the name of a horse--one in the subcontinental stables of thariel’s grandfather).

And so we end up back in India again (but only in spirit--scheduling/financial woes have resulted in the cancellation of my plans to go to Delhi next month) for some writing about other places. In a pleasing coincidence, thariel and Anand both have stories in the current issue of Outlook Traveller. They both wrote me on the same morning to tell me of the other’s appearance in the same volume; I am tickled by the thought of two dear ones (who have still not met one another, despite all of the friends they have in common) sharing the pages of a publication and have requested a hardcopy to be brought back across the oceans. In the meantime, though, they can be read online:

"Marrakesh Express" (on the medina, Franco-Arabic vocabulary, and why the Marrahesh airport looks like something built by the Rajasthan PWD; note also the longer and more political version here),

And "The Odyssey" (on why the Agora is the hot shit. Also, night swimming in the Aegean, and drunken Liverpool fans in the rain.)

I'm just besotted with Brooklyn these days, but I still wish I were off on a journey someplace, too.