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.