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.