Breast health

I'd like to take a moment, in our prayers, to acknowledge all of those poor Turks who, in the course of carrying out their day-to-day jobs, have to interact with me in Turkish. It is inconceivable they are paid enough.

Those of you know know me well will know that an opportunity to combine clothing, personal shame, and speaking Turkish badly approaches whatever intricately masochistic heaven I have picked out for myself. And, indeed, today I had a foretaste of that afterlife.

I'm not really a mall person. This may have been why, after staggering out of Carrefour (silicon madeline pans, bitches), I staggered into a store selling what looked like a rather smart blazer. Up close, the blazer was not actually all that smart; I knew this in a heartbeat. But the storeclerk instantly asked me what my size was. (Or, at least, I think she did. All communication on the other side in this discussion will be very approximate.) And I am a nice person, so I decided to, ahem, "practice my Turkish."

I fumbled around for a while, trying to remember my numbers, which vanish whenever I am required to talk to a human creature. (Silently alone here in a Starbucks, I can remember them perfectly--let's pretend that, anyway.) Finally, this poor creature decided to break the ice.

"Elli altı?" she asked, citing an immense size (European 56, approx. American 46) that only the morbidly, scooter-boundedly obese--at my height and state of muscular development--fit into.

I am, in fact, a 54. I tried to say as much. It sounded like this: "Elli...oh, shit, I'm terrible at Turkish...so sorry...so very sorry...um...Turkçe oğreniyorum*...elli...fuck..dört?" She beamed as though a squirrel had finished his times tables: I had said "fifty-four," with only the additional assistance of having someone just said "fifty" about three seconds before. The only snag: there were no 54s in the blazer that I (remember) didn't really want. But she want to the back, returning with a 56 and a 52. The former looked like a balloon even on me, presumably originally being designed as a parachute or Christmas-tree skirt. The latter fit like a condom.

And then, lo and behold, a 54 was found. By this point I had been reduced even further into gibbering; even my hand gestures were growing inarticulate. But, to move along this weeping tragedy of a clothes fitting, I tried it on.

The 54 was, shall we say, fitted. Were I the opposite gender, I suppose this opportunity to show my voluptuousness burping and buckling out of a blazer-tit would have been welcomed. As it is, I try not to wear anything that makes me look as though I am milked on a regular basis. "Italyan modo," or something similar, the clerk said. And she was right, as far as it goes: many menswear blogs do, in fact, recommend moob-spanning blazer fits. (And, yes, I read menswear blogs featuring fashionable people. I realize that this is like the Little Mermaid dreaming of legs, or Martha--from those children's books about hippos--wearing a tutu. Discrepancy noted.) Of course, all of those people are size 36s, so perhaps it makes more sense there. As it stood, my fit was not Italian: it was Tony Soprano in a leopard-print thong. Or, I suppose, we might say Italian-American, in the Pringle-thickened sense.

"Thank...teşekkurler...fuck...tamam," I said, and I think the shopclerk (who really deserves hazard pay, or such) got the message. I waddled out, cookie-pans (silicon!) in hand.

Next door was (and is, I would imagine, since this happened forty-five minutes ago) a bespoke tailoring shop. I assume I'll have more luck there--or, failing that, are there still companies that make sails?

*"I am learning Turkish." And boy howdy.

Food notes: sahlep

Sahlep is a sweet, warm drink, which according to Wikipedia is served throughout the former Ottoman Empire. Its primary characteristic is being sold out when you want some, pretty much anywhere in Ankara. I have successfully obtained it once.

Oh, Wikipedia has interesting information about sahlep: it's made from an orchid root, for example. And the Romans thought it looked like male genitalia, a fact that is less remarkable the more you know about Roman culture. (The Romans thought about 60% of all objects in the physical world--and an estimated 35% of objects in Plato's world of forms--looked like dongs.) But its primary characteristic is being harder to obtain than most controlled substances--although, lord knows, with the amount of effort I've put into the search, I could probably have obtained heroin by now.

To make sahlep, put up a large, friendly sign that says "SAHLEP," and then tell the foreigners who come in that it is sold out. You do not need to mention that it was always sold out; that you never had any intention of selling it; that maybe you made, oh, three cups' worth, but they sold out in 1993 and you swore your children on the souls of their mother to never make any more. Why not just have some tea? We probably have tea.

Some sahlep vocabulary:
Sahlep bitti: The sahlep is sold out.
Sahlep yok: There is not any sahlep.
Çay ister misiniz?: Would you like some tea?

everyone young going down the long slide

A great, great class today. Only my inner cynic (quiet, you) notes that part of its greatness came from having the students talk about something totally unrelated to the class materials. We're reading the Republic--aren't you envious?--and to open as wide a space as possible for Socrates, Our Contemporary, I asked the kidler to each talk about thing that they'd like to improve about contemporary society. (I also think I opened a space for Socrates, Athenian Dickhead, who is my favorite Socrates. But anyway.)

I take very seriously the idea (pace an ascending percentage of my high school, college, and graduate school instructors) that I do not teach primarily for my own benefit. I get paid, after all, like a grown-ass adult, in order to teach others. But I have to admit that today's class was fascinating. Guess what? My Turkish students are concerned, in their heathen alien Middle East Muslim heathen heathen way, with:

1. The proximity of the media to government
2. The depiction of women by and in the media
3. Unemployment
4. Education

and so on forward.

One of my students even pointed out something that I had noticed, but not been able to articulate, that seemed subtly different about Turkish media: what I think of as the notional ideal subject (NIS, if you're nasty) of advertising.

Now, like me, you probably assumed Turkish advertising looked something like this:

Amazingly, and in many senses depressingly, it doesn't. In Ankara as in Topeka, the blandest, middle-income-wealthy-ist, frankly whitest people are used to sell products. Only here, the bland twentysomethings all tend to be married--so you get the couple (let's call them Mete and Merve) that you might in a North American ad (Joshua and Madison.) But where Joshua and Madison would have a zany cast of twenty-something friends to carouse with while living (one presumes) in sin in a Brooklyn loft, Mete and Merve come furnished with offspring, an attractively-styled home, and a father-in-law with a mustache. (This latter point seems to be mandated by law.) For example, here's Coca Cola's ongoing "let's depress Turkish Marxists by emphasizing the utter Turkishness of our product" campaign:

See? Singletons with children, rather than with dumb little hats suggesting work in graphic design. The marital teleology of the NIS is moved along a few years here, I think, but the result is pretty much the same: Mete and Merve are living only a couple of rungs up on the exact same ladder where Josh and Madison will be in a few years. The only solution, of course, is global homosexual Marxist revolution. 

In the mean time, the Republic leaves me wondering: what do I want for my students? I worry sometimes that I'm a pretty conservative person in this sense: I want them to have good jobs, and pleasant apartments, and as much contentment as is reasonable--as I want for everyone. There are days when I think that Dave Thomas, Founder of Wendy's, has done more for human happiness than, say, Louis Althusser, postructuralist Marxist. I don't want the Great Books to leave them stranded in some sort of Socrates-reeking fug, unable to find employment out of concern for not finding the Platonic form of what they want. (I'm more Aristotelian--or, to be least pretentious, more Canadian--than that.) I'd rather they be Mete and Merve at the table above than not, I suppose--or Merve and Merve, if they wish.

Take my wife, please.

But I also want them to know why they want these things. And to know that these aren't the only things they can want. Hell, I don't want to be at that fucking table, chugging figurative Coke and making smalltalk to my figurative father-in-law-with-a-moustache, all of the time. This can all get a little bit grandiose. But I want them, I suppose, to be able to make small adjustments in the fabric of things as they are, rather than overturning everything as this year's local variant of the philosopher king. Today, I was very pleased with what my students wanted; for the sake of all sorts of people, including Merve and Merve, I hope they get it. 

Please help me

At the moment, I am "writing."

Let me break down precisely what this means. A moment ago, I found myself using my "Muppet"-branded plastic oven mitts as castanets, clicking along to a gentleman named Calvin Harris. (He did that Rhianna song--love? Hopeless place?)

Now, I a blogging about this.

Turkey: A Backward Country

This is going to be a little bit unfair to America in general, but: when I lived in Texas, I saw a brilliant iteration of a particular kind of American politics--to wit, the Houston light rail system. Houston--a city of which I remain very fond--is basically 85% sprawl, with the traffic problems that you would expect that to entail. Houston desperately needs public transportation, above and beyond what it actually has. (I am pretty sure that I'm the only person that I know who lived in Houston and took buses semi-regularly.) 

Aaanyway, in its wisdom, the city of Houston decided to build a light rail system. Unfortunately, in and around Texas state politics at that time was Tom Delay, who, along with a variety of other critters, arranged for federal funding to be cut from the METRORail project. Over a series of years, the city battled to fund the project on its own. Finally, it managed to build one light rail line, which runs from the downtown (where no-one lives) to the football stadium (where no-one lives.) It does stop near the Rice University campus, which was nice for the few thousand of us who lived there. But it was not particularly useful--and, it seems had almost been dealt the committee death of a thousand cuts to be that way. Outside of a few places, Americans don't really like public transit. Texans hate it with the fiery heat of a thousand suns--go to Houston some time and watch the SUVs navigate the completely flat, completely paved Houston roads.

(But, oh, Houston, I miss you so much: your restaurants, your relaxedness, your wonderful people, your salads with cheese, your apparent reluctance to sell food that was not delicious and deeply unhealthy. Have I mentioned the food? I miss you like I miss forty pounds of thigh fat--you were soft and warm and welcoming, like forty pounds of thigh fat. I have lost part of myself, having left. Both literally and figuratively.)

Stuck in the fumes of the old world, the Turks do believe in public transit. Non-car transport here is cheap, convenient, and incredibly comprehensive--from lines that the city runs to private companies running buses and dolmuses. (A dolmus is a sort of private cab/bus that runs along a fixed line; the most I've ever paid for one was about five lire, which took me the entire way across Istanbul.) Turkey has some of the most expensive gas in the world--something to consider, when I see my students in their BWMs, themselves the recipients of a 100% tax. (This is levied on all foreign luxury cars, as I understand it, not simply on douchebag chariots; still, it warms the cockles of my heart.)

So, as a result of this backwardness, last weekend I found myself proceeding from Ankara to Konya on a YHT train, one of the new high-speed lines that are being built throughout the country. At about 250 km/h, we did a trip that would have taken by some estimates about six hours in an hour and forty-five minutes. Like (seemingly?) all transport in Turkey, the train was spotless; I discovered only in my last few minutes that there was a bar car, but that would have been an absurdly pleasant way to spend the trip back. The ride was nearly silent--which I will confess as an ex-Chicagoan, and veteran of the L, sort of disappoints me--and ludicrously pleasant. With a teacher discount, which I qualify for, the whole thing cost forty lire. (American friends reading this: do the expat currency game, and divide that number by half, then add a little bit. I guess round trip it cost $24.)

That teacher discount--which I get at museums, the movies, and for all I know with simit-sellers--is another sign of Turkey's backwardness. To an extent that continues to surprise me, this country reveres its teachers. Mustafa Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey (about whom much more later), exhorted teachers to be what he believed them to be: an essential part of moving the country forward. One further piece of evidence for this was the place that I stayed, called an Ogretman Evi--literally a "teacher's house," a subsided hotel for teachers. (Yes! These exist in Turkey!) I paid twenty-five lire for a pleasant room with a bathroom, flat-screen TV, and complimentary Ogretman Evi slippers, which now have pride of place in my apartment back in Ankara.

Konya itself is a vibrantly mixed bag. I went through a long walk through the city, which was--I really, really hate to write this--pretty charmless, as a whole. (And I live in Ankara.) There were pleasant restaurants and again good public transit, but the city tended towards the fume-drenched and dirty, and had obviously been built up quickly and cheaply. It made me miss my little lojman in the hills outside Ankara.

Konya is known as one of the most devout cities in Turkey--which leads me to something of an amusing story. Late my first night, I was somewhat lost in the city, and wanted a beer to bring back to my hotel room--I know, the glamor. Turkey's primary beer is the inevitable Efes, an "alcohol delivery system" (to quote one of my colleagues) that tastes of diabetic cat piss. But that evening in Konya--and this, friends, is irony--I was looking through teetotal storefront after storefront for that familiar logo. When I did find a store selling it, the lights were on, but it was closed. I was dismayed; the four teenagers who followed me into the alcove where it was located were also displeased. Reader, I was as close as I have been in my life to asking teenagers where to find alcohol, but alas I did not.

(I finally found alcohol, as I should have known all along, across the street from the Teachers' House. Some things transcend cultures.)

On the other hand, Konya features a number of wonderful things. You've never heard of the Seljuks, who were a Turko-Persian dynasty flourishing around the year 1,3000BCE. They produced some of the loveliest buildings I've seen in Turkey--you have my permission to copy their teal-and-white color scheme, if you wish, for your next bathroom remodel. I was particularly struck by the Ince Minare, a former madrassa now beautifully convereted into a museum. (A madrassa is, of course, a school--the Turks have clearly been backwards for millennia.) Someone needs to key Target in to Seljuk architecture with a quickness--I see a Kardashian (any will do) relaxing in front of a Seljuk kitchen panel, smiling gamely.

My primary focus in Konya was going to see Catalhoyuk, a famous Neolithic site near the city. Believed for a while to be the oldest such site in the world, Catalhoyuk has been displaced by other locations--I think the oldest known habitation is actually somewhere else in Turkey, and will no doubt show up in a future blog entry. But Catalhoyuk is a very early instance of art in the Neolithic world. Here, you can read about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Çatal_Hüyük

That seated female figurine is one of the oldest pieces of human art, period--it dates to about 6,000 BC. Many signs from the site point towards matriarchy, or at least to women enjoying some sort of roughly-equivalent-maybe-surely status. I had always been rather skeptical about people looking for spaces of utopic feminism in the past--I'm fine with the idea, not so much with twisting the facts to go looking for such moments--but I will admit that there's something sort of agreeable of the notion of some little settlement, way the hell back in the past, where at least one aspect of how people were organized wasn't just ghastly. Benjamin's Angel of History might have allowed them the tiniest of fist-bumps.

The site itself, at least the parts of it open to tourists, are covered in two wood-frame structures, which protect the excavations. I had the place to myself that morning.

How to describe Catalhoyuk? I happened to be reading "Anna Karenina" on my way to the site and back. Early on, during an argument between Karenin and his wife, the narrator describes him as talking "with her in his habitual tone, which was a mockery of those who would talk that way seriously. And in that tone it was impossible to say what needed to be said to her." This is about how I feel about writing about Catalhoyuk. I realize that you read this for my goofy enthusiasms about walls, and not for anything serious. But this--this was thousands of years of human life, wall by wall, uncovered for us to stare at. I don't want to get all spiritual--this isn't the end of Anna Karenina--but this place has presence. I thought of the "Temple of the Winds" in Hardy's Tess, but this was different: it felt warm and engaging. These people buried their dead in their houses, suggesting reverence for families and for living together. A chart showed where they started using milk, where they started domesticating animals, and so on forward.

I'm projecting here, of course, that this was docile family life. As the reconstructed Catalhoyuk house showed, most of these people had the head of some sort of animal mounted on the wall; for all I know, the fumes from the fires made them think it talked to them, and they spent their lives telling the children to beware Uncle Ugh's spirit, come back to life in the right antler and angry about getting crushed in that mine collapse. Nevertheless--and this comes from teaching Great Books--I felt a kinship to people for whom things like walls and families seemed to matter. These things appeal to a deracinated Canadian, thousands of miles from any sort of previous home, typing on an iPad in a Starbucks in what is no doubt as characteristic of our time as worshipping the antlers on the wall was to them.

The Archaeology Museum in Konya was great in the way that so many local archaeological museums here seem to be great, with so much stuff--Roman and Byzantine, primarily--that they have to put some of it in lines in the courtyard. I will never be able to think of the Romans without imagining them as covered in their clutter, wives complaining about those seven herms making it hard to get into the breakfast nook.

I was sort of the wrong person to see Rumi's tomb, another major Konya attraction: I'm mostly unfamiliar with his poetry, unlike those who were literally crying at the site of his tomb. The location is lovely, and I have documented it extensively with pictures--I feel like i should write more about this when I actually understand what it was that I was seeing. Around it was the all-too-freequent mess of Turkish road construction, umpteen lanes of unpaved chaos.

I missed the dervishes, who perform Saturday nights, since I had to take the fast train back to Ankara--a bit under two hours later I was back, 'midst embassies and Simit Sarailer and a (frankly) higher class of Turkish rubble, clutter, and exuberance. But I'll be back to Konya, hopefully better able to say things about Rumi.

Istanbul arcade dialectics

Three posters:

(Right to left): Michel Foucault, Iris Murdoch, and a hardcore show featuring bands called "Disorder" and "Tampon."

I even saw a veiled woman using an iPhone

At the end of what I think is Bill Bryson's book about traveling in Europe--a book which, if nothing else, confirms that Bill Bryson should not write about traveling in Europe--he stands in Istanbul, on the European side, looking out at Asia. This, he says, would be too much: another continent, another trip; another chance to be trapped in his lower-middlebrow skull like you're in that Faulkner novel. Dude, I found myself thinking: it's a twenty-minute ferry. In real-world terms, not "going to Asia" while in Istanbul is like standing on one side of the Cuyahoga River and refusing to visit the rest of Cleveland. It's, like, right over the water. And it takes, I don't know, fifty yards or so before men in fezzes start screaming in Arabic while kidnapping your spouse over a meal of grilled rat testicle. You could have looked.

So, yeah. Istanbul.

Through the wonder of the Internet, I'm currently writing from a bus (and such a bus) driving along the Bosphorus, heading (if you like) back to that exotic continent that so mystified our Bill. I've had the usual range of travel-related freakouts; the man in the bowtie has distributed snack wave one. It looks like I'm going to make it back to Ankara, unless the lady who was screaming about not having a ticket is secretly clinging to the bus next to me, waiting to pounce. She looked fierce.

I've never really seen a city like Istanbul before. I'm pretty sure that, at this point, even writing that it's impossible to write about the city without lapsing into cliche is itself a cliche. (I'm hoping to start this new level of meta-cliche.) But, yes, it was extraordinary. The reason for the cliches in this case is, I think, the intoxicating-ness of the experience: everyone goes and is stunned by various things. So I'm happy to just be swept along by the cliches: old and new, East and West, great-tasting and less-filling. Cats and dogs, living together.

In fact, there are cats and dogs everywhere, some maintained by various universities, others by the city or by local residents. One can reach down and pet a small, furry animal every few steps, which is something I think more major world cities (along with malls and dentists' offices) need. The above is not a posed shot--I'm not entirely sure how you pose cats, really--but simply noon-hour at Boğaziçi University during a break. If I need to be reincarnated as an outdoor animal, I would like to put in a request now to be one of their dogs, who loll about in immense satisfaction during the day and (I am told) run about at night like yelping lunatics. There are worse lives. After a few days, you find yourself making googly noises towards, say, the six kittens who live in a railway terminal, maintained by the staff member who informs you that they are all siblings. I do not know how the entire population of Istanbul doesn't become a cat lady.

As you have gathered from earlier statements about walls, I tend to have sad geek orgasms when exposed to historical sites. And Istanbul is, it seems, one big historical site, to the point where all manner of buildings have historical columns sitting outside of them, not interesting enough to be included in the main exhibits. All of the umpteen major historical empires that the city housed are well-represented. I'm feeling truly guilty about not carrying on in Latin and Greek now, although actually finishing my PhD is a sort of consolation. But, there but for laziness and being rubbish at languages, that could be me sight-translating Greek inscriptions into blazing Turkish, making pursed-lip sounds about how difficult it is to get the nuances right. (In this scenario, I am wearing a beret.)

There is a hallway in the archaeological museum that lets you walk through all of the seven waves of habitation of the actual city of Troy: I may now say that I have seen Trojan pots.

But I'm not the only person with a formulaic interest in the national past! Turkey itself seems to be going through a phase of national self-confidence, parts of which seem to be centered on the Ottoman culture that preceded modern Turkey. Since Istanbul was the Ottoman capital, much of this Ottoman-fancying is in evidence. Two major city attractions, Topkapı Palace and the Basilica Cistern, have photo booths set up where you can dress yourself, or your entire family, as a variety of sultans, complete with all of the orientalizing paraphernalia a boy could wish for. (Alas, I did not avail myself of this opportunity, on the off chance that I ever want to appear in Postcolonial Studies.)

I walked around the city for five days slack-jawed and staggered, like a mid-century Mississippi yokel who has just wrapped his mind around plumbing. I will omit descriptions of the Hagia Sophia here only because I have nothing particularly insightful to say about it, other than the fact that it's stunning and that you should probably go to it and that, in my hideous home city of London, Ontario, we think Eldon House (Google it!) is impressive.

The above? An Ottoman footstool. 

I also ate at a Krispy Kreme--as one does as a larger-assed North American--for the first time since living in Houston. It was a Krispy Kreme, down to that feeling that you could eat your weight in overprocessed flour and not be satisfied. (I am disinclined towards religious controversy, but every time I imagine a god the experience of whom is an endless, unquenching delight, I think of Krispy Kreme.)  I urge all Americans feeling homesick while living in Turkey to get themselves, post-haste, to Bağdat Caddesi, where you can find all of the brands that were the reason you left America in the first place. You can hear the call to prayer while sitting in a Caribou Coffee, as in some Michelle Bachman fantasy of St. Paul under Afghani occupation. You can purchase a seven-hundred lire hat (too much to pay for a hat USD) from salespeople cloned from the same awful people who work at the Chicago Neimann-Marcus. They even have a Muji! I had not thought that Istanbul would be a hideous international brand destination, yet there were velour jumpsuits on surgeried busts and disciplined abs a-plenty. 

Do any of you know how to write about taking a ferry over the Bosphorus without sounding like a bad travel magazine? Please write to me, care of this blog.

No account of a Strange Foreign City would be complete without an account of street food, so I will say that I had the best meatball sandwich of my life--"epiphanic" would not be too strong a description--cooked over a flame and sold by the meatball sandwich guy outside of the Turkish Archaeological Museum. I am not particularly inclined to use the word "sonnet-like" to describe a sandwich, but will do so now, since what I ate was essentially perfect. I even ate it, along with my Native Informant and life-long Istanbul resident friend Başak, while sitting in a thronged city park watching residents of the city go by. (You may, if you wish, hear the exotic oriental instrument of your choice playing while you read that ş in her name. I'm sure she won't mind.) 

A rest stop coming up: again the earthly paradise of techno and simit. More soon.

Rest station culture

Hello again. I may be entering middle age, because I'm about to tell you about a highway rest station.

But not just any rest station. This was a palace. If 99% of humans throughout history woke up, after death, in this rest station, they would assume that they had been sacrificing lizard testicles to the correct globular shape.

How clean was this rest station? A man was cleaning the fountain. The water jets were off, and there he was, on his knees, scrubbing. I should stress that this was already a fountain, and so already spotless. You could have built microprocessors on the bathroom surfaces. (And, as an added bonus, the bathroom was playing early 90s dance music--I believe I heard Technotronic. This is in no way a criticism.) One of the paper dispensers ran out of paper--and someone replaced it. 

How commodious was this rest station? There was a Burger King, of which I did not partake, but which I appreciated. There was a Simit Sarai, the wonderful national chain that translates as "Simit Palace." For three lire, I bought two bags: one of delicious corn, one of nuts coated in sesame seeds with a honey glaze. Then back on the eerily spotless bus. As I write this, the drinks man is coming around with drinks again.

Are you there, gods? It's me, Michael

I'm currently seated on a Turkish bus that is, as I cross-media promoted to my Facebook account, nicer than my own apartment, by a considerable margin. Through the immense, spotless windows, we roll through Anatolia, which is barren and lovely--sort of like the American southwest, but with more scrub-brush. It's probably the Turkish hospitality culture making everything just a little bit comfier. The wifi is working, something which America--the country that put a man on the moon--apparently cannot manage on its transportation networks. (England can't do it either, but, and I mean this with love, this isn't exactly a shocker.)

I realize that it's weird for me to be addressing you--or anything, really--from a state of contentment. Let it be known that the man behind me is doing a not-showering/cologne/cigarette thing. That's sort of icky. Nevertheless, I wanted to catch up on some antiquity-related events, since this is pretty much serving as my diary. Whether my diary proceeds in the Judy Blume or the R. Kelly directions, we'll see.

Anyway, a number of weekends ago, the university sent a busload of international faculty to Hattusa, which was the Hittite capital of Central Anatolia about 4,000 years ago. Greater (if probably more imperialist) minds than mine have grappled with just how old so many of the things around here are. As there are people living now in the same area, having even put up some mildly posh-looking hotels and whatnot, this means that the area has been continually settled since well before the Ancient Greeks. I'm told that some of the Epic of Gilgamesh manuscripts were found among these ruins--certainly, there are statues of characters from the epic that were found here--so that's primally festive, to those of us chained lovingly to teaching it.

Philip Larkin, at a moment of weakness, says that what will survive of us is love. Hattusha reminds us: in fact, what will probably survive of us is walls. The buildings survive primarily as walls, which give us the outline of the surprisingly (to me, anyway) vast city. Because I receive dozens of emails every day requesting photos of "old walls in Turkey," here goes:

This is from the Acropolis, the highest part of the city and, naturally, where the royalty lived. Reading "Ozymandias" in high school in London, Ontario, is a really dreadfully flat way to learn about the ends of empires: living in London, one couldn't help but feel that the end of civilization would be a sort of "meh" moment. I wish I'd encountered the thought for the first time at Hattusha: literally kilometers of old foundations, including literally hundreds of temples. Having had my look-on-my-works-etc. cherry popped soundly and early, my thoughts at Hattusha went more towards the similarly-minded imperialists of various nineteenth-century nationalities who must have crawled over the site, no doubt thinking that this time, we'll get it right. 

And Hattusha was the Hittite capital, remember: so, off in the Anatolian hinterlands, some eager young swineheard was looking away to the city, dreaming of running off to a bigger, more sophisticated placed. (Unless social mobility hadn't been invented yet.) It's so hard to keep them on the farm once they've seen what was allegedly called the "City of a Thousand Temples." (Actual Hittite conversation: "God, mom, I'm, like, so bored here. There's only pigs and fifty-six temples. We only have, like, two octopus gods. I hate you!")

Here is a picture of a green stone found in the middle of Hattusha. No-one knows why it was put there. (Those of you educated in and around the Anglo-American tradition are no doubt thinking "druids.")

Because we have no idea what it was, we can say the following things about it:

1. It was "clearly important," because it "came from a long way away." 
2. It was "probably used in ritual behavior."

Ritual behavior, as I learned at the Hattusha museum, is what anthropologists say when they don't have the faintest clue what something is. The ancient world was heavy in ritual, so what the hell: maybe they tripped over it during the feast of the moon-otter or something. (Our guide also told us that this stone was said to bring babies, which is why I now have a uterus.) In the comments, you may write your own suggestions for what rituals this stone was used in. Given its muted green-blue color, I think this was used as the basis for the Hittite equivalent of Ralph Lauren paint colors. I call it "seastone," and I think we're doing the study in it. 

Hattusha also has a series of absolutely stunning bas-reliefs, the best of which are in a chamber that was used for--wait for it!--accounting. By which, of course, I mean rituals. The clarity of these reliefs was preserved by being covered under river silt and only recently recovered; this was also, oddly enough, the process followed by my dissertation's prose. (Rim shot.) And here they are, some Hittite deities:

Seeing these, the Hittite cosmopolite knew that he had arrived: twelve gods of pointed hats alone! And he smiled a smug little smile and thought of those peasants back on the farm, with their cruelty and their limited set of ferret-themed deities.

Whereupon, he was devoured by locusts. The ancient world kind of sucked, after all. I'm glad I have wifi.

Great Books Inside Baseball: Live-blogging "Troy" (2004)

You really should probably avoid this one, unless you're currently in the business of teaching the Iliad to students. These are my notes from screening Troy at them this evening. It's a sturdy movie, in retrospect, and does some intelligent things with the Iliad--I'm not entirely shocked that David Benioff, one of the show-runners for "Game of Thrones," wrote the script, as it very much has the feel of that show, minus a certain trashiness that I actually think might have added something to the proceedings. 

6:34PM: There’s lots of generic “Eastern-Style” music. Generally, this would connote terrorists, although here I think it means that “Gladiator” had come out a couple of years ago.

6:35:   Brian Cox looks really silly dressed as Ming the Merciless.

6:37:   Given the fruit salad of ridiculousness that is this movie’s accents, I don’t know why Brad Pitt sounding like a skate punk and dressed like Kevin Sorbo strikes me as silly. But it does.

6:40:   Good for them for emphasizing Achilles as swift-running. I think this thing was written by one of the guys who directs “Game of Thrones,” and it looks as though he at least read the Iliad. (And he identifies himself as “Son of Peleus.” A sort-of Homeric epithet, only ten minutes in!)

6:41:   Menelaus has a broad Irish accent. Naturally.

6:42:   Dancing wenches! And it looks as though the set-dresser for Game of Thrones has been at work. I am confident that soon there will be nipples.

6:43:   Helen of Troy’s “you shouldn’t be here” is the single greatest understatement in the history of cinema.

6:44:   Weird movie device: Helen of Troy is topless, but the bottom of the screen cuts off anything interesting. I grow less confident of nipples.

6:45:   I note that all of the characters pronounce each others’ names differently than I’ve been taught to say them—clearly Warner Brothers doesn’t respect the antepenultimate accent.

6:46:   So it’s love that brings Helen and Paris together in this version. Ahem.

6:46:   Eric Bana sounds Australian.

6:47:   Dialogue sample: “I swear by the father of the gods, I will gut you here…” I can’t tell whether this is stupid or brilliant. 

6:49:   Hector says there’s “nothing glorious” about combat, neatly overturning the entire point of glory in the Greek world.

6:50:   On the other hand, at least Brian Cox looks like he’s having a good time. That makes one of us.

6:51:   “He thinks the Sun God will protect him.” So, one of the things that actually is interesting is the entire displacement of the gods from this production. Agamemnon says that he wants to “control the Aegean.” “I created a nation,” he continues. Is it weird to start noting anachronisms?

6:53:   Achilles’ off-season tunic is very “gay Jedi.”

6:54:   Achilles notes that the Trojans never harmed him—I think he’s quoting Muhammad Ali?

6:55:   Patroclus is very firmly Achilles’ “cousin.”

6:56:   Achilles’ Mom gives him the prophecy—fight and earn “glory,” or stay here and have a family—that he receives in the epic. A little bit odd that she says that he’ll “never come home” if he fights, but I guess she’s just supposed to be a bit weird as opposed to, you know, prophetic.

6:58:   Troy looks a lot like the set for Intolerance, which—if it’s deliberate—is awesome. I think the soundtrack is quoting Korngold.

7:01:   Priam says that “everything is in the Gods’ hands,” or somesuch—he actually seems to welcome Helen as a daughter-in-law. The movie is really pitting this as a battle of realpolitik against overconfidence and religion: “How many battalions does the sun-god command?”

7:03:   So much dialogue. I’m seriously bored. Helen of Troy is very in touch with her feelings.

7:05:   Somehow I never picture the Trojan War happening on a nice beach, but this one is really lovely.

7:08:   I’m starting to grudgingly respect this movie, actually—it’s doing a workmanlike job with the materials. (And then Achilles tells Patroclus “you’re not a Myrmidon yet,” and that sort of washes away.)

7:09:   I don’t know what I want these people to sound like—but maybe not like this? Hector tells his soldiers to “Honor the gods, love your woman, and defend your country”; Achilles yells “Immortality! Take it! It’s yours!” It’s John Wayne vs. Tony Robbins.

7:11:   Someone gets a spear right through the head—just like in the Iliad, actually.

7:13:   The entire Greek army in the ships is cheering him on, just as in the prologue scene. I think the movie needs to do this to establish why Achilles is such a big deal to the Greeks later on.

7:15:   Aaand Achilles cuts off Apollo’s head.

7:16:   One thing they do very well is Achilles’ being eerily calm in the face of fighting people. There’s much to be said for an actor with limited emotive range in the right part.

7:17:   So much discussion of “a thousand years from now.”

7:18:   “It’s too early in the day for killing princes.” Dude, killing princes is the “Miller Time” of the Iliad. It’s five o’clock somewhere.

7:19:   Ajax to Achilles: “I love your work,” basically.

7:20:   We know this is an adaptation because Briseis is talking and has a personality.

7:22:   “I want what all men want. I just want it more.” There’s something awesome about the compression of the dialogue.

7:25:   Briseis stops Achilles from killing everyone, which is narratively convenient and only mildly out of keeping with the historical context.

7:28:   Aaaand Paris just sort of veers off of Homer’s script—he’s going to challenge Menelaus, and then all of the Greeks will go home.

7:29:   So, the main issue in the war so far, on the Trojan side, is whether or not Paris really loves Helen. Oh, and the Sword of Troy (!) makes an appearance.

7:40:   Blah blah blah—dutiful boring dialogue. Troy will never submit, Freedom!, etc.

7:42:   It’s great how movie swords make noise just moving through the air.

7:43:   Paris fighting Menelaus really, really, really doesn’t happen in the book.

7:46:   And Hector kills Menelaus, just ‘cuz.

7:49:   Hector kills Ajax.

7:50:   It’s kind of jarring to hear “Apollonians: now!” These are I guess the palace guard? But to me, this suggests an elite guard of French playwrights (onward, Parnassians.)

7:54:   Helen remains in touch with her feelings: “I don’t want a hero, my love; I want a man I can grow old with.”

7:55:   One consequence of retreating: “How long before the Hittites invade?”

8:00:   Briseis tries to kill Achilles in his sleep, another in our list of things that Didn’t Happen in the Iliad.

8:01:   And now they’re, um, making love. Brad Pitt’s ass has received about as much screen time as Odysseus.

8:09:   Achilles returns to combat during a general rout of the Greeks, thereby missing something like the entire point of chis character…

8:11:   Oh snap it’s actually Patroclus. Actually, that was pretty well done. And now the weird fact that he and Achilles look alike makes more sense. And now Hector’s killed him.

8:12:   People on both sides keep saying “enough for one day”—apparently this is flag football.

8:17:   I’m really, really sort of enjoying this pragmatic, dickheaded Agamemnon.

8:21:   A daft, original, and really quite commanding moment: Achilles shows up outside of Troy and just starts screaming for Hector.

8:24:   The movie does a lot of things with stillness, which is effective in parts, as in the lull before the fight between Hector and Achilles. On the other hand, this movie is also eighteen hours long.

8:27:   Hector trips; Achilles lets him up, saying “I won’t let a stone take my glory.” Sort of interesting in light of the Homeric gods’ repeated seizings of glory from characters—they’ve really thought about where the gods enter this story, and what their purposes are.

8:30:   Interesting that the Achilles/Briseis “love story” has taken the place of Achilles’ alone-ness. She’s his interiority, I guess.

8:32:   Priam and Achilles happens very suddenly, and the hand-kissing is genuinely shocking.

8:34:   Here Priam says that one can’t change the will of the gods.

8:36:   Achilles breaks down crying over Hector’s corpse—I think, again, they needed to add these moments of emotion to make sense of his character. He calls Hector “brother,” which reflects how they’re generally trying to make these characters seem like equals.

8:37:   “If I hurt you, it’s not what I wanted.” Achilles goes all Ryan Gosling for a second.

8:40:   Odysseus sees someone carving a horse, and…

8:43:   The Greeks fake their departure via plague, so we’ve taken care of that element of the story.

8:44:   “It’s an offering for the gods” is used to explain why no-one burns the horse.

8:47:   Nothing glorious in the final battle—it’s just a slaughter.

8:48:   Achilles spares someone because they have a son, and is going after Briseis. Even my students are giggling.

8:50:   Aeneas receiving the Sword of Troy is like getting fist-bumped by history, when history's been drinking a little bit. On the one hand, that's one more Aeneid reference than appears in, oh, the remainder of cinema; on the other hand--well, fine, it's just awesome.

8:51:   Helen of Troy escapes because, why not?

8:53:   Agamemnon kills Priam in the sanctuary. My inner twelve-year-old acknowledges this as bad-assed.

8:54:   Briseis stabs Agamemnon, which also doesn’t happen.

8:54:   Paris shoots Achilles through the heel. And then through a number of other places.

8:58:   Odysseus at the end—“let them say that I walked with giants.” This is actually super-intelligent: c'est a dire, there were no real giants, and the Odyssey is actually just an inflation of things he did. I'm sort of giggling in appreciation at this.

"New York Signifier," cont'd

There's a disappointing lack of Engrish-like language on signs and whatnot here in Turkey; I blame the education system, frankly, and (locally) the cosmpolitanism of our campus (where, for those turning in late, all classes are conducted in English.)

Nevertheless, one thing I do notice increasingly is the number of students with t-shirts that have [American Signifier] written on them: "CALIFORNIA" in big block letters across three lines, say, or "NEW YORK." In this way, I guess they're the equivalent of our Chicago students carrying around Strand bookstore bags. (And, yes, I did see one of these in Turkey--I probably shouted in glee a bit much, bit it felt like home.)

Anyway, today brought the oddest t-shirt yet: a young man wearing a shirt that said "Baseball Caps," underneath which were rows of baseball caps. I'm concerned that there's a concept here that I'm missing, as there was with the "100% Pure Virgin" Absolut-styled shirt that I saw on a young man earlier this year.

Oh, and there's a Dockers store in the mall, for those of you concerned I might lack access to one.

Iliad Barbecue Update

Book 15, line 439 (in the Fagles translation): Nestor protests to Zeus that the Greeks always used to "burn[] the fat thighs of sheep or bulls" in sacrifice, which apparently wasn't too useful now that Zeus is slaughtering Greeks. Thigh meat is, of course, tastier, due to the amount of muscle involved--and, again, some fat for texture. But maybe Zeus is a wing man.

Radical absence

Yesterday evening was a big day in every bachelor's life: the first time scrambled eggs (washed down with exactly one half-glass too much wine) is made for dinner in a new apartment. In my previous life, this would have been tarted up with bacon or, ideally, pancetta. However, lacking access to the Ankara sausage underworld at present, I substituted sucuk.

Now, sucuk and I have a past: it is one of the vocabulary words listed in the very first chapter of Teach Yourself Turkish. Devotees will recall that this is the book that told me that public displays of affection were frowned upon in Turkey, a piece of ethnographic observation I find puzzling. At the time, I thought this was hilarious: an indication of how stupid language-learning books are with which I regaled all of my friends. Similarly hilarious was "motorcycle," a word that I feel I've learned about fifteen times, including in Attic Greek. But then I went out for what was literally my second at-a-restaurant meal in Turkey, and there was sucuk. My mastery of the word proved useful.

Now, on a pide,* sucuk is a lovely thing. But in eggs? Even with pepper and much bachelor-cooking expertise, they tasted--very specifically--like the absence of bacon. Bacon's non-union Mexican equivalent. That thing you put in your food because you can't find bacon. So, I may be closer to chartering a submarine to order pork products than I thought.


*Turkish flatbread, usually covered with cheese and a topping--absolutely unlike pizza, which is to say mostly like it. Thrill to the exotic food landscape of Modern Turkey, where Corn Flakes also come in bags rather than boxes.

A Sausage History of Greek Epic

I have been offering value to my students this semester is by offering running commentary on the quality of cuts of meat discussed by the “Iliad.” In Book Eight, for example, when the Greeks send all of their best people to maybe get Achilles—that whiny bitch, frankly—to come out of his tent and do some fighting, Achilles has Patroclus (man-friend and butler) prepare a cut of pork “marbled” with fat. In the Fagles translation, the language of the high-end steakhouse comes to the ringing plains of Troy: “marbling” is, after all, about the most desired thing one can have in one’s meat, ensuring that the fat will mix evenly through the tougher (but tastier) muscle tissue. Here as throughout the epic, the Greeks seem to be eating suspiciously well: Achilles either knows a guy on the Trojan beach, or he’s been getting regular shipments from the mainland.

In terms of pork, we foreigners are significantly less lucky, at least in my little corner of Turkey. I should be clear that coming to a Muslim country and expecting pork is elementally stupid—but then I lived in America for ten years, so the notion of a consumer good not instantly available to me becomes hard to take, particularly if bacon is involved. I’m not even a bacon obsessive to the level of, say, the Chicago norm. But I am told that in a few months I will be craving nitrates like a pudgy vampire. (Which is handy, since “pudgy vampire” is my skin tone already.)

There is, multicultural gods be praised, a pork section in Real, the local “hipermarket" at which I spend 1/3 of my waking hours and the entirety of my discretionary income. But it is the saddest, weirdest place you’ve ever seen: one refrigerator case set off exclusively for pig products, each one more shockingly expensive than the last. The bacon, which looks pretty generic, is ninety lire (about forty-five dollars) per kilogram; the prosciutto is a little bit better, but still priced like medium-grade opium.

Rumors abound of a British “sausage guy” who sources product, apparently, from Russia. However, word is also that he has “disappeared,” no doubt into the encased meat-products underworld of Ankara. Judging by how it is priced, the “pork” at Real might well be former British national—so we pray for the sausage guy’s safe return.

"Stupid Foreigner"

Well, I’m a panicky idiot on a new continent.

***

Istanbul Airport is a place of wonder and enchantment, where old meets new, east meets west, and so on forward.

Except that everything I just said is totally false. Instead, I feel like Thomas Friedman. There really was was a Doritos ad (NACHO—how foreign) within fifteen yards of getting off the airplane. I really am sitting opposite a Starbucks—which is to say, I am on planet earth—and in front of a place called “Bakes and Cakes.” The Starbucks is offering Organic Ethiopia Yergacheffe, and hasn’t bothered to translate “organically grown organic certification” out of the same sort of semi-English it would be in Akron into, you know, Turkish. There’s an SUV being raffled to my right, and a couple making out to my left.

This last detail rankles. One of my useless Turkish language textbooks told me that public displays of affection are frowned on in Turkey; I saw three of them in this very airport. If my Turkish were better, I would have told those involved that they were being culturally inappropriate, according to Teach Yourself Turkish. Alas, I don’t know the Turkish for “get a room.” (Yet.)

Oh, and I wasn’t bright enough to figure out whether my luggage would be sent on to my final destination, or whether I’d have to pick it up after customs, just like I would at the dozens of North American airports where I’ve had similar heart attacks. And, you know, this was a particularly difficult airport to navigate, what with all of the signs in English and an English-speaking staff. Because I am a moron, I did not trust them when they said "OK," even though they were right and I was, well, a moron. 

 ***

That was me, about forty-five minutes after arriving in Turkey, in Istanbul airport. What I did next: lose the small cardboard tube containing my BA and MA diplomas, which I had to take out of a bag when a security guard requisitioned my corkscrew. (There's a metaphor there, probably.) Also my favorite hat. This blog was for a brief time going to be called "Turkey by Hat," until I lost my hat. And my diplomas.

***

Today’s Turkish expression: "tam istedginiz gibi Frappuccino blended beverage." There’s a little sapka (hat) accent over the g in “istedigniz”; I’ll put that in once I figure out how to type it.

 ***

I'm sort of hesitant to start blogging again, because, clearly, I'm going to write about three posts and stop again. (I had written "reticent" for "hesitant"--if you are one of my students, note that this is Bad Usage.) But I have some free time, and I'm promised my home Internet will be on within the next five years. Plus I have visions of the movie rights to this blog, about how a well-intentioned foreigner comes to modern Ankara to discover enchantment, diversity, and a series of increasingly scorching romantic encounters shouted in demotic Turkish.

Speaking of which: one month into my time in Turkey, and I still have not been able to successfully communicate in Turkish with another human creature. (The Bilkent cats, who wander through our campus, are similarly unimpressed.) It is almost as though, as I was saying to friends, the Turkish language was not set out for my benefit: it has practically no vocabulary overlap with English, has an entirely different structure from same, and is spoken rapidly.

A typical evening out: I needed matches, so I go to the vast German Wal-Mart equivalent obligingly located near campus. Having spent days wandering the teensy Chicago supermarket near my previous campus, trying to find out where, say, pizza sauce was located in its classificatory system, I was intent on finding "tebrikler," which I believed to be the Turkish word for matches. 

Those of you who speak Turkish will be, of course, howling in laughter at this point: while "kibrit" is the Turkish word for a match, "tebrikler" means congratulations. I am actually surprised at how patient the staff was as I asked them repeatedly, and with no-doubt increasing agitation, where the congratulations were. Finally, I went to the cigarette station at the front of the store, where there were--amazingly--no matches (or congratulations.) But, the far-too-polite staff person pointed out, they did have lighters! This she showed me by taking a lighter out of its case and, in a moment I will remember for the rest of my life, flicking it on. "Fire?" she was saying, implicitly. "You have fire where you come from?"

Honestly, at that point, I didn't remember: do we have fire in Canada? It's been ages.