Returned to life

I feel like April 1 of one year to February of the next is a reasonable blog posting schedule, don't you think?

Anyway, sorry. I've had an astonishing number of people tell me that they enjoyed reading this blog– far more than it deserves. I also just noticed, coming to this website, but I've had something like 3000 page views, which is far more than I could possibly have imagined. I don't feel particularly guilty that I've had nothing to say about turkey for something like the last nine months: I was, obviously, pregnant. Actually, not so much. (Although, of course, many of my colleagues seem to be living by the maxim "the world must be peopled." I recently dragged three copies of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, as well as the tres riches heures of Sandra Boynton, across the Atlantic. This is hardly a complaint.)

You'll notice that this blog stopped updating at roughly the same time that the Gezi Park protests started, and Turkish politics became, shall we say, complex. I would walk to my Turkish lessons past people going to the vast protests that happened in the middle of Ankara, and feel–I really don't know how I felt. Mildly apprehensive, more than anything else. One astonishing fact of the protests, to me at least, is that, right before their allotted times in the evening, you would see police and protesters chatting quite amiably, often behind the water tanks– that's military-type tanks – used for crowd control. I've never seen anything quite like it in my life.

Terry Eagleton makes a famous argument that one reason literature formed differently in Ireland was that it was simply too hard to represent what was actually happening in the country, under English, in normal generic forms. I will admit that I am more sympathetic to this position than I have ever been before. Nothing that I write feels to me like an adequate response to what is happening–and again there're others you know far more about this than I do. But do I want to write a shopping blog in the meantime?

I genuinely don't feel that I understand Turkish politics well enough to give an informed– or at least useful– opinion about what's been happening here. I would remind those around the world that Turkey is a country that has reasonably deep set of civil institutions– although, depending on whom you ask, these may or may not be in a state of erosion. My university is still one that I love. I have, additionally, many colleagues who have been here for very long time– some of them Turkish themselves, many long-time expats--that know so much more about Turkish politics than I do. This is not to say that I don't have opinions: for example, I take what I had thought was the relatively uncontroversial view that the government should not teargas, en masse, its people. (This seems to be a more controversial view here than I had anticipated.) It is a cliché to say that the sight of young people taking to the streets to protest for political causes inspiring– and indeed on some level it is. But I teach students– some of whom were in those protests, all of whom look like the students in those protests–and my primary concern was just that they seemed to be getting hurt, sometimes critically. Never in my life have I seen anything like that the Internet live streams of police blind firing tear gas into crowds of people, and then eventually into the crowds of smoke that resulted from the teargas. I do not know how much of this made it (speech-to-text says "mated") outside of the country. I would actually be interested in hearing what did.

With that being said, I think it is worth noting that– compared to what you may be hearing on the news– daily life in Turkey continues. The building of malls, the primary activity of our Ankara civic entity, continues apace– I think you really are something like two or three new ones within about 4 km of where I live. These, of course, are all the same: the same chain stores, several of them brands you'll know from North America, exist in various configurations. Semi-relatedly portion of the country, and it is emerging that this is quite a large portion, still wants EU integration to go ahead, even as it seems absolutely impossible to predict whether or not this will currently happen. I'm learning things about the quotidian existing alongside perpetual crisis; of course, I do so because of the stability of where I live.

Indeed, the news about Turkey leaks to the outside world seems to picture this as a country in a more or less perpetual state of crisis. And, on some level, this is true. But the distance between what is happening in Turkey. What is happening in Syria– a glib comparison, if a nearby one– is entirely different. Please don't worry about me, at any rate: I feel absolutely secure here, and not just in the protected gated community where I work. As to the overall situation in Turkey, I have been saying to many people that if you know someone who feels they understand the situation completely, please send them here– we certainly don't.

To the other state of siege, which is of course the Modern Language Association conference, the bane of every academic's life. For the first time, I can say that I had a good MLA. This came about, I'm sad to say, because I have a job. The job paid for me to attend the conference; it gave me the time to write my talk, and the research support to make it happen; and, by being stable, it gave me the payoff matrix (if that makes any sense) in which my work could help me in a professional context. I love my job, and what I do with my research. I am aware, though, that this position that I love– and, yes, I will use the word love– happens in the midst of the professional misery of many. This may again be glib, but there is a mild analogy to be made to my situation in Turkey: things are good for me, and for those like me, in a situation that floats above turmoil and a possible collapse of institutions that I feel I have just escaped, like Indiana Jones with the huge stone door in "Raiders of the Lost Ark." (That this analogy involves a hat pleases me.)

Neither of these problems is going to be solved by my blog. What I hope to do in the months ahead, assuming I'm not just perpetually lazy, is give some account of the middle condition that exists in the midst of a number of states of crisis. It is my great privilege to be able to do so. The work of the humanities is important, think particularly in Turkey. I am happy to be doing my work,  and making use of what my institution gives to me.

More actual description, and less meta-commentary, as I write– I hope more frequently–in the weeks and months to come. And my earlier reservation, that anyone without an academic job is welcome to punch me in the face, remains in effect.

A note: an earlier version of this was speech-to-texted, and may have been unreadable. Many apologies--you don't have aphasia, if you were worried.

Was it worth it?

My Turkey blog seems to be turning into a teaching-in-Turkey blog, which I can only imagine is probably less interesting to the majority of you. For those keeping track at home, my 3-3 teaching gig got switched to a 2-4—fully with my consent, this isn’t a complaint, I’m very much still in love with my job. But this has kept me tied to Ankara a little bit more, since this is my first time teaching this load and my weekends have been spent relaxing and working on research rather than traveling. Look for Turkish wonders, or even anecdotes about colorful socks, to resume shortly.

            What I’m going to say at the outset is that I’m trending into dangerous territory here, and—I will say this in advance—I am not sure if I’m right about any of this. I’m completely open to being told that I’m an asshole about any part of this, and you will probably be right. I still haven’t sorted out my feelings about this subject, but I also—in my gut—know that something that I read is wrong, deeply wrong, in a way that made me want to respond. This may fall into the tl;dnr category for you, particularly if you’re looking for anecdotes about Turkish life—and my essay about finding bright-colored socks is upcoming, I promise.

What I’m going to write about is an article that’s been making the rounds, and which has been addressed at me a couple of times. For those who haven’t read it, the article is here: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2013/04/there_are_no_academic_jobs_and_getting_a_ph_d_will_make_you_into_a_horrible.html . (And you can pretty much get the feel of it by the hyperlink.)

So, was it worth it? My former teacher Sandra Macpherson made me want to write this by posting about her time at ASECS, the primary conference for eighteenth-century studies. (I do not want to deface that beautiful name by stating what it stands for.) She writes about academia, and I quote: “It's pretty amazing, and nice, nice work if you can get it.”

Sandra is bucking a trend, as the Slate article—and about a million other pieces I’ve read over the course of the last, oh, ten years—will demonstrate. People going to humanities graduate school exist as special sorts of idiots in the popular imagination in a sort of perfect storm of things generally disliked: believing one’s self to be cleverer than other people; not immediately applying one’s self to the most lucrative thing possible; and, of course, participating in an activity (the modern humanities) generally reckoned to be about as beneficial to mental self-development as, oh, membership in the Manson Family.

I worked, part-to-full-time, all the way through undergrad. Yes, poor me: suffering at one of the world’s major research universities. But when I started grad school, the choice really was this: work at a library for five-to-seven days a week (which I have done)? Or spend the next indefinite number of years getting paid to read in a new city? There never was a choice, on those terms.

Oh, but do I regret it now? Do I regret not going to law school? Sometimes. Years ago, a dear friend of mine, now a lawyer, told me to do what I most wanted to do—to follow my dreams, basically. I’m glad that I did: I think I’m happier—having gotten lucky-and-a-job—than I would have been as a lawyer.

So, was grad school worth it? I’m going to say that it was, although it needed to be validated by getting a job—although at first that job wasn’t a professor job. At the moment, with an Assistant Professor job that I love, an active research schedule, students I very much like, and assorted other trimmings, I’m very happy.

How can I possibly write the above statement, given the number of deserving people who don’t have jobs? I can’t. I shouldn’t. I’m deeply sorry. The depth of quality people in my field who would make huge differences in students’ lives and who don’t have jobs is just sickening. If you read this, and think that I’m prancing my privilege around like a trick pony, you have my permission to punch me in the face.

But what I do take issue with is the basic statement that humanities grad school training is just prima facie useless—that it destroys your ability to enjoy literature, trains you to hate humans and humanity, and leads to a job that will just make you miserable anyway.

Was I miserable during periods—long, long periods—of grad school? Boy howdy. Those of you who talked to me during that period probably, again, wonder where I get off talking about grad school as worthwhile. I don’t know what that person I was would say to this, either. He’d probably want to punch me in the face.

Yet—again, yet—talk to any young professional, or indeed anyone beginning a career. This might seem a somewhat random comparison, but read chef memoirs: something like Bill Buford’s Heat, or (bless me) Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. We just sort of live at a time when getting the interesting jobs requires a lot of work. Cooks, in these books, are told to suffer endlessly for no money and maybe they’ll make sous-chef. It’s a terrible deal, and one that I would encourage no-one to take—unless, sigh, they really loved what they were doing. And then I would say try to find a situation that lets you follow what you love while still making some sort of living.

That’s what grad school gave me for probably too many years. What ended those years was luck. I got lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky. Let me say that right now. The only thing separating me from fifteen other candidates, and I mean this literally, is that someone else took a job elsewhere and my program hired me rather than them. I am convinced that any one of those people could do my job as well as I could, and they are welcome—this will be a leitmotif—to punch me in the face. It took me four years—four years!—to get this lucky, but in the end I’m just as lucky as anyone else who gets one of these jobs.

(Here’s a depressing thought for you academics: imagine the fields that won’t get changed, the paradigms that won’t get shifted, the ideas that will die stillborn because of the depth of talent that’s not finding academic work.)

So, what did I get out of graduate school? I’ve been teaching Adam Smith—the Smith of the Wealth of Nations, alas—to my students, and I realize that all of the following would simply be off the axis of what he considers interesting. But, here’s what I got from graduate school: a PhD., which, contrary to what you may hear, people respect. I was as paralytically depressed as I have ever been, or will ever allow myself to be again. I got to live in a tremendous city for two years, and then eight years in another tremendous city, during which I was steadily paid, had health insurance, and even—for the last sixteen months—a full-time job. I learned to read and write to a level of precision that still amazes me. I nearly had any number of nervous breakdowns. I saw tremendous amounts of opera, theater, classical music, author readings, and dance. I got to take a class with Sandra, and other similar people, and learned things I would never have come within a parsec of knowing otherwise. I ended relationships because I was bitter and paranoid and jealous of other people finding work. I once, in a recreation of a historical riot, was invited to dress up as a police officer and had foam bricks thrown at me. I have savings. I was never bored.

Also, I got to know the best people. Really and truly. There were moments when the intellectual atmosphere at [Graduate University] was harsher than the Mean Girls lunchroom—and there were moments where I’m sure I didn’t help with that. There are things that I might, as a faculty member, do differently than some of the things that I saw—and, in fact, get to do those things now. But I was never without people who believed in me, and never for a moment doubted that I was among the smartest people. (To watch the best minds of your generation being destroyed by a terrible economic crisis is, of course, to know the best minds. Who are, of course, free to punch me in the face.)

Is this work worthwhile? Yes, yes, a thousand times. There a moments in the classroom that feel as close to any experience of the "holy" as I've felt, and yes I do full well know how inane that sounds. Fuck it. I spent the last six months writing about a poem: reading it, sending it out, getting feedback, sculpting it, thinking more deeply about it. Again, fuck it: those were six good months.

Also: to say that “you will never get…monetary compensation from a stable, non-penurious position at a decent university” (I quote the Slate article) is false. I did. You can punch me in the face again: many didn’t. But, during the sixteen months when I used my PhD. to find alternate employment (again, by getting lucky), did I “withstand the open scorn of everyone [I] kn[ew]?” Christ on a butterscotch sundae, no. My friends, colleagues, and—yes—the institution that gave me my PhD. felt bad for me, and tried to help. And I got a job.

One thing that this Slate article really gets is the hermeticism of academia. Michel Foucault, theorist of self-specularity, is popular among academics for a reason: he theorizes being your own worst enemy, harshest judge, jealousy fiend, substance-abuse-recommender, and so on forward. The notion that you will come to hate yourself if you do not find a job in your field is true. I wish I had anything to say to that.

My own recent happiness—and, let me tell you, I am extremely happy, thank you—comes at the same time as getting a job. I would like to think it is somehow separate, but I suspect this is not the case. Yet with this comes a sense of something I didn’t have in grad school: an ability, I guess, to start valuing things on my own, rather than because other people value them.

Here’s advice I was too dumb to listen about grad school and, I suspect, any professional career: you have to learn to make yourself happy. (And oh, look at me, with my new job, telling you this now that things have stabilized for me. Again, I really do mean it about the face.) I do not have a tenure-track job, because there is no tenure in this country. And four years ago I would—I mean, I hope not, but I might have—been one of those people who sneer at anyone without a particular sort of job. But four years ago I would have been too stupid to imagine that I would fall head over heels in love with something slightly, just slightly, off the beaten path.

I’m onto the third page of writing, and I suspect I’m not any closer to reaching a crisp conclusion about this subject than I was three pages ago. I guess in the end any advice I would give on the subject of grad school would be: don’t go if they’re not paying you, and if they don’t have on-campus jobs after your funding runs out.

Posting this to Facebook lets me conclude by saying something that is off-topic, illogical, but also deeply true: you people, my friends and mentors who put up with me during my grad school years, are maybe half of my reward for choosing to do what I did. And I suppose this is what makes me want to post this ungainly monster of a reply to a routinely stupid Internet article: because you all, and everyone trying to do the “nice work” that I get to enjoy, deserve better. This is a great job that more passionate people need to get.

You may still punch me in the face.

Less game than "Sophie's Choice"

(I will stop doing this, but: recommended soundtrack for this post, Alan Partridge-style:)

For those of you looking for information about Turkish burial customs, this is probably going to be one to skip.

So: those of you who know me well know that, in 2001, I was chosen by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as the World's Least Successful Heterosexual. (And, for those of you who point out that I've been making this same joke for a while, I say: it was quite an honor.) Anyway, although I generally try not to make this the exclusive topic of my conversation--anymore--I do occasionally so distinguish myself in such a way that I feel I should share it with a wider public.

The semi-screenplay version: the local hipermarket. Vegetable-weighing counter. An attractive young person says "Michael!" I look confused. "We met at the American embassy thing!"

Ah, yes--the embassy thing! I remember vaguely. But an attractive person is saying hello to me. So, naturally, my instincts run in two directions. Firstly direction: I say, pompously, "remind me again what department you work in?" Such a charming thing to say! Not at all like I was raised on a woman-less ice floe! Bear in mind that I have no idea what this person's name is, so I decide to relate things back to work, like the charmless drone that I am.

But! I get an answer! This conversation could continue!

Obviously--obviously, even--this cannot be allowed to happen. So, instinctively, through some long-dead lizard-brain instinct, I say "Well, nice to see you again!" as though she had just announced that, since she had stopped taking her pills, she could taste Jesus when she saw clouds. I shut things down like Seal Team 6. And then I wander the hell off, rudely--that Coca Cola Light isn't going to buy itself, apparently. I then spend the next few minutes sadly watching this person wander around the store, before she--to paraphrase my rnb doppleganger, Ne-Yo--faded into the background. There was no further meet-cute opportunity. I was left to my shame and sparkling water.

Anyway, another day in the life.

Some last days of disco

(Belated soundtrack for this post...)

So, this is actually some months ago, but nevertheless a little vignette of Turkish life.

My beneficent employer is built into the side of a hill. When I'm completely well and organized enough to be on time, this is great: I have a thirty-minute walk up a hill every morning, and a lovely view when I get there. Were you here to cup my vigorous thighs, you would be impressed.

Towards the end of last semester, however, I was shamefully running late to a class--we're talking a 1:20 departure for a 1:40 class, something not really ideal in the physical universe in which we live. The sad truth is, reader, that I had to use one of the ubiquitous university cabs to ferry me up the side of what I just actually wrote as "the side of the mountain." (It is not a mountain--it is a small hill. Nevertheless.)

Speaking of commanding heights, I've mentioned before the extent of my Turkish skills, which were actually quite a bit worse back then. To add to the fun, I instinctively seem to look foreign to most Turkish people. From my cabdriver, I heard what I also hear from, say, mall security guards, bus drivers, random people in the street, etc.: "Where are you from?" Which is a perfectly nice, welcoming sort of thing to say--I'm not complaining about that, or at least about the spirit behind it. I will say that after a few months, one does sort of begin to feel rather more exotic than one probably should feel, given (as I've mentioned before) how close one lives to a Dockers store.

Now, at this point, I didn't speak very much Turkish at all--I couldn't even properly say "Kanadalıyım," a very basic way of saying "I am Canadian." (I'll practice my Turkish, possibly making a grammatical error, and inform you that saying "Kanada'dan geliyorum" would also be acceptable--although that means "I am coming from Canada." Additional verb tenses as lessons permit.) So it took me a couple of tries even to establish that I was from Canada ("Canada. Canada! Canada?"), of which my driver approved. We were, even on our short trip, deep in smile-and-nod territory. But I was trying to be friendly, and he was trying to be friendly, and we were nearly 1/3 of the way up the hill. This could be a successful social outing!

This, unfortunately, is where my driver chose to give me his opinion of our students--specifically, our female students. "Sexy," he informed me. "Disco party." His facial expression indicated that he imagined I was a regular attendee at said parties, lithe nubiles draping my arms.

What to do? The Turkish for "Well, actually, I don't really objectify my female students, it's sort of unprofessional, ha ha, we're all friends here, though, and incidentally here's a copy of some early Kristeva I think you'll really find enlightening although maybe you should also have a look at Lacan first" was years away--still is, of course. And I didn't have the forethought for "Evet, erkekler çok sexy!," which is some approximation of "yes, very sexy men!" And I had that smile-and-nod inertia going. Weren't we all friends? Sexy disco party friends?

Reader, I smiled and nodded, waited for the remaining ten seconds, paid, and exited the cab--feeling, might I say, that I had let multiple parties (as it were) down. I worry that I had just confirmed a general feeling that our female students were open for all manner of leering sexual adventure, and worse that our faculty were somehow along for the ride. I worry that, given the choice between being pleasant and spineless and severe and vertebral, I had gone for the jellyfish option. But I'm still adrift as to what I could have done. Somewhere on earth there is someone who would be able to communicate, nonverbally, that they disapproved of what had been said, and that the driver could do better than referring to our female students as easy. (Could that person please write to me, c/o this blog?)

Of course, this could also have happened anywhere--I have had far, far more insane conversations with Chicago cab drivers, all of which also started pleasantly. You all know, yes, the feeling of the agreeable cab ride that suddenly veers into insane-opinion territory? Compared to the man in Toronto who talked about taking mushrooms and coming face-to-face with Jesus, my disco gentleman was quite mild, and trying to be friendly. But I'm an employee here, and it's my job to represent our students as best I can. This was pretty much a total failure, in that regard.

I did arrive to class on time, at least, if pantingly. "My driver seems to think that you like disco parties" I told my students, who seemed to find this amusing. I left out what else he thought of them--and, of course, my shame. That goes on the blog.

Bloggus interruptus

Two months. This usually, um, doesn't happen to me...

I don't really have any good excuse for not speaking to you, notional second-person pronoun addressee of this blog, more frequently. When we last talked, we were in the springtimes of our youth; now we are brittle with eld.

Or, at least, I am. I'm sicker'n'a southern stereotype involving an elderly dog. I spent a delightful weekend dehydrated and somewhat delirious; high points included shaking so hard with cold that I could get out of bed to put on an nth layer of socks. On Monday, the sad-eyed Turkish physician told me that I had a severe throat infection, but that this would be entirely cleared up by Thursday, allowing me to teach.

I'll let you, second-person addressee, in on a little secret: I like teaching, and--because of that, and because it is my job to do so--I hate canceling classes. I once taught in Chicago with about a million-degree fever, and I like to think my students barely noticed, outside of the occasional moment when I would run out into the hallway and have a coughing fit suggesting I was birthing a goat orally. I would then return demurely inside to lecture on Greek lyric. (I'm sure that there is a Greek account of language  originating in a man orally birthing a goat out of his mouth--don't ask how it got there in the first place--so no doubt I was adding ever-more value to my students' educations, even if what they probably remember is a living corpse telling them incorrect things about ephebes.)

But the living corpse was not trotted out for the students this week. I don't actually have a voice at the moment, and my throat--although better--is still sort of a river of pain. It is Thursday, and the illness still has the run of the temple (e.g. ruined, clammy, possibly used for "ritual activities") that is my body. If I put my head basically on top of my new humidifier, I will cease coughing. If I decide that I don't want to perch directly in front of the spume hose--for so I have named it--I resume with the oral goat-birth. It is a living.

(This humidifier, too, is a Thing. Although all of the interior materials show happy babies gurgling appreciatively, the thing itself has what look like underlights--those things you put on your 'roided-up Civic in 4 Fast 6 Furious--and suggests that it might be able to support Lazer 'Floyd. Updates to follow.)

I am anguished--this is not too strong a word--that I have had to cancel this many classes, as well as a screening of Macbeth. But I have received many lovely messages from my students--no, that is not cynicism--so I suspect we'll all live without the megawatt illumination that is my teaching.

Anyway, regular blogging to resume--maybe tomorrow? I have many things to talk about: Marxist bombings, Ottoman soap operas (read: filmed catfights), and cab drivers subtly implying that my students are whores. But, before that, I am to the spume hose.

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.