Eregli (pron. “Eh-ray-lee”):

We are staying at the Summer apartment of D’s childhood, in Eregli, on a bay of the Marmara sea, about an hour and a half from Istanbul. D—grew up in Izmit, a small city not far from here, which was close to the epicenter of the huge earthquake that killed tens of thousands of Turkish people maybe ten years ago. In Eregli, during that earthquake, only one building collapsed, taking with it the lives of one of D's friends from high school, the friend’s husband, and his entire immediate family. They were sitting on the balcony, eating, at the time.

Eregli, when D- was a child, was a remote and primitive fishing village. The only Summer residence was the apartment building we’re staying in, which was built as a collective project by her father and a group of his close friends and family. An architect relative designed the building, whose balconies all face west, so you can see the sunset from every apartment. The balconies are adjoining, and have rolling screens for privacy. When these are lifted, which they usually are, you can see and talk to all of the neighbors in either direction, which creates an effect something like watching television while looking into an infinitely reflecting set of mirrors. I have become friends with Iris, a four year old girl who lives two apartments over. From her open balcony-wall, when we are on our respective balconies at the same time, she displays all of her posessions one by one: a mirror, a toy pony, two seashells and a coloring book, for me and D- to admire.

Last night there was a village wedding, or circumcision party (we’re not sure which) at a restaurant across the street which is basically a wooden tent (like a big sukkah, for the Judeophiles out there) with a kitchen and fluorescent light-rods hung in the trees. We sat on a neighbor’s balcony with maybe ten people who have known D- since she was born (some of her parent’s generation, some contemporaries, and some of their children), listening to the gypsy music and Turkish folk songs coming from the restaurant. Somebody set off fireworks—big, impressive ones—on the beach and everyone came running, thinking it was gunfire.

A neighbor said that every time the villagers have one of these celebrations, there is a fight. People get drunk, and, inevitably, late in the evening, there is a dispute that ends in violence. Last night’s iteration was a little disappointing: around 11 pm some guy yelled something, and was thrown out of the party. He did a kind of face-saving stagger/strut down the road beneath out balcony, muttering to himself.

Here I am “the American.” People are very kind to me, and burst into peals of joyful laughter whenever I say anything in Turkish. Two nights ago, on our way to Eregli, we ate at the Summer house of the architect relative, Ghengis (“Cengiz” in Turkish. “Atila,” as in “Attila the Hun,” is also a common Turkish name…). His four year old grandson, who had a plastic lightsaber and Spiderman pyjamas, was scared of me because he thought I was Peter Parker, and because I'm foreign. While we ate dinner, he hid inside the house, burying his face in the couch. After dinner, I chased him around saying “The American is Coming!” in Turkish, in a Zombie voice, and we became great friends. He told me, with D- translating, the entire plot of “The Lion King III,” which I did not even know existed.

Eregli is an amazing place. Everybody knows everybody. The young kids, the teens, and the adults are all living their separate realities in full view of one another—the kids running around in packs, shouting, swimming, kicking balls around—the teens drinking, smoking, or just huddling around sullenly in groups of three or four on the beach. The adults sitting on balconies or in the backyards, talking, laughing, and drinking either alcohol or tea.

Last night, D- and I went to sit on a bench by the water, on an unlit stretch of beach. Under two trees behind us sat two groups of villagers at two tables, one for men and one for women (the women all wearing colorful headscarves, as they do), drinking raki (a grape and anise liquor—very much like Greek Ouzo). The men started singing a folk song with a lot of vibrato, one of them doing the stringed instrumental part with his voice, because they didn’t have any instruments. The song, D- told me, is sung by a man to a dark-haired woman who has rejected him, and basically says: “I have built bridges and fountains. Don’t think you’re so special.” And we, the audience, understand why the woman has rejected him.

Ours is no longer the only building on the block. The street is now lined with vacation apartments, delis, restaurants and “tea gardens” (outdoor tea places). The town still feels isolated, peaceful, and primitive, though—you see at least as many headscarf-wearing village women in the streets as you do Istanbul vacationers, and an American in Eregli is still an almost freakish oddity: A couple of teenagers in a tea garden asked me yesterday, incredulously, “why did you come here?”

This situation here is almost inconceivable to me, as an American and the product of a not-very-social suburban family——three generations of people, some of whom have known each other for thirty years, coming to the same place every Summer, watching each other and their children and their children’s children growing up. It is exactly like a huge, extended family. D- has not been here for eight years, yet she fell immediately back into the rhythm of the Eregli lifestyle, running from apartment to apartment to talk to people and to their relatives on the telephone, sitting outside with the “aunts” (the generic term of affection for any woman at least 20 years older than you. If she’s around your age, you call her “sister.”) talking about flowers and what everybody has been doing lately.

A guy just drove by selling peaches. Yesterday a guy drove by selling bleach. I couldn’t understand that. There are delis here—why do you need a mobile bleach salesman? My mother-in-law bought some bleach from him, which was a 20 minute process involving chatting and laughing with the guy so he would give her a better price. In Turkey, you must develop a personal relationship with the salesperson, or you get imperfect products at an unreasonable price. I have been told, by Turkish people, that trying to take advantage of others through trickery is a part of Turkish culture—that salespeople and customers alike delight in gaining the upper hand through small acts of deceit. Caveat Emptor.

A car just pulled up outside with a two year old boy at the wheel, steering, on his father’s lap. D- and some of the ladies are swimming. I think I might join them. So let me end with a story that my father-in-law told me last night—a kind of Turkish Zen koan about Nasrattin Hoja, a wise figure of legend who lived around 500 years ago.

Nasrattin Hoja was walking along the street when he saw two men fighting. He stepped in and pulled them apart. “What are you doing?” said one of the men. “You don’t know what this man has done! He has stolen my cow and insulted my mother!” “You are right,” said Nasrattin Hoja. “Wait just a minute!” said the other man—“You haven’t heard my side of the story! This man is a liar!” “You are right,” said Nasrattin Hoja. A third man, who had been standing nearby, witnessing these events, spoke up: “Nasrattin Hoja,” he said, “It is not possible that this man and that man can both be right!” Nasrattin Hoja considered this. “You are right, too,” he said.

Memoir—Summer “Exchanges” to Finland and France As An Impressionable Youth

Because I’m living right now in a kind of “insider’s” Turkey, I’ve been thinking a lot about two Summer experiences I had when I was an early teen—total immersions in foreign environments. When you’re living outside of your native country, you do a lot of thinking about yourself and how much of it is a product of your native environment—you make a lot of comparisons between where you come from and where you are, trying to figure out the differences, and probably also making a lot of mistakes—identifying as “cultural” tendencies that are specific to the individuals with whom you have contact. In any case, it is an experience of disorientation that sometimes, especially if you don’t know the language well, feels like being a child again, listening to and observing everything for clues as to what is really going on.

In the Summers after ninth and tenth grade I was sent on “exchange” to Finland and France, through a program that connected families with prospective young visitors from other countries. In reality, there was no “exchange”—a family just took you in for the Summer. Nor was there any special structure to the program—whatever the family did, you did.

In Finland I stayed in Helsinki with a family that claimed to be the second richest in the country. The father, who was originally Swedish, proudly drove me around his two underground parking garages (beneath downtown shopping malls). These were the only underground parking lots in Helsinki at the time, and brought him great wealth, with which he and his wife would travel around Europe, shopping.

For most of that Summer, they were abroad, shopping, leaving me and Sebastian, their son, in the care of two ancient grandparents who lived in the basement apartment with their equally ancient, mop-like dog. I believe that these were Sebastian’s father’s father and mother’s mother, who, having been widowed by their respective mates, had hit upon the convenient solution of becoming a couple themselves.

The house was a five-story, rectangular, wood-faced structure like an apartment building (which it may originally have been). Sebastian (or “Seba,” as he was called) and I lived on the top floor and almost never saw the grandparents. Occasionally the grandmother would come up in the elevator to check on us, calling out “Se-e-b-a-a!” “Se-e-b-a-a!” while I hid in my bedroom, for fear of having to talk to her in my very limited French (she spoke Finnish and French, but not English). We saw her maybe three times the whole Summer.

Seba and I were, I guess, around 14 years old. He was more experienced than I was in the ways of bad kid-ness, probably because kids in Helsinki, from the age of around 10, begin spending their evenings and weekends gathering in large, asphalt youth-parks, with maybe 100 other youths aged 10-18, drinking and skateboarding around.
All of Seba’s friends were from the projects of Helsinki, and in addition to drinking and skateboarding while listening to the Beastie Boys, they liked to break into these octagonal kiosks that are all over the city and steal candy and money.

The first three things I was ok with: I drank a lot of Carlsberg and Elephant beer that Summer, created elaborate grip-tape designs (spider web with spider for myself, and Marijuana leaf with Playboy Bunny for Seba, at his request) for two skateboards that Seba and I would use to skate all over Helsinki, listened to the Beastie Boys on somebody’s boom box that had been painted pink, and whose speakers had stolen VW symbols affixed to them, and enjoyed Seba’s father’s sauna, swimming pool, projection tv and vast collection of VHS films to the fullest.

I drew the line, however (for some reason), at breaking into kiosks, which was done by climbing on top of them and opening the roof-panel. On those occasions when Seba and friends would decide to knock over a kiosk, I would politely excuse myself and walk home. I can’t clearly recall my thoughts at the time, but I think I knew it was “wrong” and was scared of ending up in a Finnish jail and being bailed out (or being unable to be bailed out) by my furious parents.

One evening, early in the Summer, Seba and I were in the youth park with a bottle of Gin. I had never tasted Gin before, but this did not daunt me from drinking half a bottle while sitting on a bench, talking to random Finnish teens about America. When a third of the bottle was empty, I announced to all the girls who were present that in America, all girls want to sleep with me, and suggested that they might like to do the same. When half of the bottle was gone, I vomited, rolled off the bench, and lay there, where I remained until Seba and a group of his friends grew tired of the youth park and carried me home. Somebody gave me a bath and put me to bed.

The next morning I awoke to find Seba leaning over my bed, grinning and holding out a cup, which I took and drained. The contents, it turned out, had been 120 proof rum from South America, which Seba claimed would instantly cure my hangover, which I guess it did. I then walked out into the hallway, where many Finnish youths were sleeping or slowly waking up, Seba’s parents being in France or somewhere. They all leered knowingly at me and I knew, although I could not remember anything, that I must have made a complete idiot of myself.

It is a testament to my good sense that I did not drink myself into oblivion ever again that Summer, and to the good sense of my stomach that I couldn’t touch Gin for maybe a decade after that night.

Seba’s family (like all Finnish, middle and upper-middle class families) had a Summer house about an hour’s drive north of Helsinki (I forget the name of the town). We went there once or twice during the Summer when his parents were back in town and stayed for a couple of days each time. I remember the place as a woodland Paradise, where Seba’s grandma made the best sausages and bread I have ever tasted. These we ate hot out of the oven with a delicious, sweet-hot Finnish mustard from a tube (which I have often thought of but have never seen since that Summer).

About thirty feet from the house there was a wooden sauna and a lake. The men and the women of the household would use the sauna in shifts, for modesty’s sake, stripping naked and turning beet red as somebody poured water onto the burning coals and the little wooden house was filled with steam and the spicy smell of seasoned wood (from the fire below the coals). When you had become as red as you could endure being, you would run, naked, out of the sauna-house and jump into the cold lake. Every nerve in your body would then experience a kind of screaming momentary epiphany, leaving you energized, calm and focused. Then you would repeat the process all over again.

Seba’s family also had a motorboat on that lake, and they put me in a wetsuit and taught me to waterski. I picked up the basics after four or five attempts, and was happily upright and skiing around the lake for the rest of that day.
There was also a girl there—a cousin of the family, I think, with whom I would lie in the sun on a rock and hold hands. She did not speak English and I didn’t know any Finnish. Seba made a lot of fun of me for this mini-relationship, because he thought the girl was ugly.

There were other things too—side trips to Denmark (with the family) and to Leningrad (with the exchange organization), but what I remember most vividly is being a kid on my own, with Seba, skating around, drinking, eating pancakes, and living as free as any kid could wish to be from the (perhaps not unwisely) oppressive rules and requirements of grown-ups. All told, I survived pretty well without any supervision, and learned some things about my own resilience and limits that I couldn’t have learned at home.

Simultaneously, though I was only dimly aware of the fact, my sister was in the early stages of diagnosis of a cancer that would almost kill her that Fall, and would leave her with a prosthetic knee-joint. In retrospect, I think this was my parents’ main motivation for sending me away.

France, the following Summer, was a completely different experience. My host family, who lived in Paris, were a couple in their mid-sixties. The man was retired from the World Bank, skeletally thin, possessed of a long, wispy beard, and very serious about Astrology, which he practiced with elaborate, detailed charts and maps, casting the futures not only of friends and relatives, but of whole nations and Humanity itself. For most of the Summer he sat in a chair, smoking unfiltered Gaulois cigarettes, reading his way through the Complete Works of Freud in eight or ten volumes. He said almost nothing to me the whole Summer, aside from offering once to read my future, which I refused because it (and he) scared me.

That Summer, for me, was mostly about reading. I spent a lot of time alone, reading Big Books and feeling deep, vague stirrings of meaningfulness. I “read” Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness (from which I understood and felt only a dark and primitive sense of ancient, scary impulses), Nietzche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (from which I understood nothing at all), and The Lord of the Rings (the book I understood best and enjoyed most that Summer). I also watched (in French) the movie “Le Grand Bleu” (“The Big Blue”) about an air-tankless competitive diver with an almost mystical relationship with the sea, which, along with Lord of the Rings inspired me to write sprawling, pompous metaphysical poems which I would send to my then-girlfriend, who had moved to Kentucky that Summer for good.

My host mother was more talkative and physically energetic than her husband, and she would involve me in all kinds of physical activities, especially when we were staying in their family’s ancient “chateau” in the South of France. We spent most of the Summer in that house, which was built in the 1600’s and was really more like a one-story monastery than what I think of as a chateau. The walls were made of cool, smooth, white stone and bore old wooden crosses. All around the place was the vineyard country of Savoie, where Vins de Table are produced—miles and miles in every direction of rolling hills covered with rows of grapevines, with the occasional white house in the middle of them. Nearby, on one side, were the French Alps, separating France and Italy. Every Friday a farmer would come to the house in a wagon, bringing a big wheel of cheese (usually “Tomme De Savoie”—a semi-soft, musty, delicious cow’s milk cheese), fresh bread and eggs, and a cherry tart.

The rest of the time, the couple (and I) ate 1) wheat bread spread with vegetable lard and sprinkled with flaked yeast and 2) brown rice. That was pretty much it. As a result of this diet, and the fact that the mother was always making me hike and bike to the point of nervous collapse, I was always in a state of semi-starvation, and would frequently sneak into the kitchen at night (in between chapters of Lord of the Rings) to steal delicious savory biscuits—crumbly, salty, buttery boxed crackers with burnt edges. I stole so many of these that, on my departure at the end of the Summer, the mother gave me two boxes to take home with me.

The physical component of the Summer involved mainly hiking and biking. My host mother was in incredible shape, and would ride or hike for long distances, very fast, without the slightest sign of fatigue. I, on the other hand, was a pathetic, soft, non-athletic kid who began each excursion panting and sweating, and ended up almost always in tears, saying (in French) “it’s too much!” “take me home!” “I’m dying!” The French cast a cold ear on such complaints, basically ignoring them altogether.

One time, on the way back from a biking trip, I either rode ahead or fell behind and got lost. I ended up in a tiny wine-country village, and went into a restaurant to ask for help. I told the owner the names of my host parents, he found them in the phone book, and they came to rescue me.

The main difference between the French Summer and the Finnish one was that, in France, I was living the solitary, alienated existence of a little Hamlet or Young Werther, very conscious of my own identity as a young intellectual/mystic, penetrating the realms of the inner consciousness, and the mysteries of Philosophy and the Ocean. My daytime identity, by contrast, was that of the solitary, alienated Pathetic Wimp, being dragged, whimpering, all over the countryside. In both cases, I had no companions of my own age, and could not really relate in any way to my host parents, who were old and very weird people.

In Finland, on the other hand, my life was outward-directed. I was constantly interacting with other people, people my own age, and doing exactly whatever I wanted to do. Actually, I had a great time in both places. France was strange but exciting: I was opening up to a kind of isolated, personal, intellectual life that was new and mysterious to me. I felt misunderstood, and I kind of liked it, because I was coming to a new kind of understanding of myself as distinct from (and ultimately, inaccessible to) other people. In Finland, self and identity were not really at issue, because I was constantly involved in some kind of social activity. There was no separation between myself and other people because from the moment I woke up until I went to sleep (and sleep was rare that Summer, with only two or three hours of darkness per night) I was part of a Group (almost a gang, come to think of it, what with all the theft).

The structure of this piece feels like it is pressuring me into deriving some kind of cutesy lesson from all of this. My fault—I have a tendency to fall into these kinds of fascistic narrative structures that leave me, at the end, rebelling against the corner I’ve painted myself into: “Finland and France: Two Contrasting Lessons in Extroverted and Introverted Living.”

No lessons, please. At the end of the Finland trip, Seba’s parents took us to Tivoli Gardens in Denmark, which is a kind of outdoor park with lots of stores, flowers and ferris wheels. Many of the stores there sell handmade pipes and tobacco. I bought a little pipe on a keychain and some tobacco to smoke in it. As I was packing to go home, it suddenly hit me that, in America, I would not be able to wander around with my friends, smoking this pipe. That, in fact, if I brought the pipe home, I would be in Big Trouble. With deep regret, I buried it at the bottom of a drawer in the room I was staying in, underneath a pile of old, unused, miscellaneous things. It’s probably still there.

Turkish Drivers and the Concept of Risk

Do not attempt to drive in Istanbul. Do not attempt even to cross the street. To say that Turkish drivers are insane would be a fantastical understatement. If Turkish drivers could somehow induce their cars to drive up lampposts, the sides of buildings, human flesh, trees, the air…if they could drive straight upwards, out of the Earth’s atmosphere and into the heart of the Sun, they would do so without hesitation. They simply do not care. There are rules, laws and police, but somehow they do not adhere to actual people in actual cars. This may be because the police, when they appear, restrict their role mainly to shouting authoritatively into a megaphone, barking commands like: “Stop talking on that cellphone and drive!” Also, all traffic police are bribe-able, so in the event that a driver is stopped for, say, running a red light while driving on the sidewalk, 50 lira (about $30) will usually put him back on the right side of the law.

People say that New York drivers are crazy. New York drivers are not crazy. They will, for example, stop if a person enters the road in front of them. Here, the pedestrian does not have the right of way, and if you should die under the wheels of a taxi, the taxi driver’s conscience will not be disturbed, because you are the idiot that stepped out in front of him. Seriously. It is NOT his problem.

You can cross the street in front of cars if, and only if, you are in a very busy, heavily trafficked area where the cars are moving slowly and there are a lot of pedestrians. In that case, there is a kind of uneasy negotiation between walkers and drivers—an edgy détente of sorts in which cars nudge forward and people nudge across, almost, but not quite bumping into each other.

Turkish drivers will, and frequently do, drive the wrong way on a one-way road. My father-in-law, while doing this, explained to me: “In Turkey, we can do this, if it is only for a short distance. In America it is not possible. Turkish people like risk.”

Indeed. Turkish people seem to like risk almost as much as Americans dislike it. One huge cultural difference between Turkey and America is that, in America, the legal system—more specifically, the litigation system—works very very well, whereas in Turkey it is almost non-existent. This is the reason that it is possible, in America, to have a sign on the wall at a public swimming pool that reads: “Management is not responsible for the discoloration of swimming suits due to chlorinated water.”

In Turkey, on the other hand, you are free to injure or destroy yourself in any manner that suits you. Should you wish, for example, to burn a heap of explosive solvents in your front yard, or fumigate your livingroom with gaseous clouds of poisonous insecticide, you are free to do so. Should you die in the process, Turkish society will mourn your passing as a regrettable but inevitable twist of fate. “Ah, what can you do?,” they will say. “He was a good man…but this Summer was so damp, and there were so many mosquitoes…The climate was not like this when we were children…”

As an American in Turkey, I have mixed emotions about this risk-oblivious culture. What I like about it is the freedom. In America, elaborate safety precautions stand between you and everything fun. It sometimes feels like you are living your life inside a giant condom. The thing is, you want the freedom for yourself, because you know you are trustworthy, but not for the other guy, because the other guy can kill you. That’s the dilemma. There’s a lot of unwarranted trust in Turkey, and a lot of unwarranted paranoia in the States...

At any rate, I implore you: stay off the roads in Turkey. Take planes, boats, balloons, whatever—but do not drive or try to cross the street. If you have ever seen “Road Warrior,” or “Mad Max—Beyond Thunderdome,” you have some idea what it is like. Remember Mel Gibson, clad in black leather, shooting at improvised jeeps with an improvised bazooka. Remember the molten, smoking heaps of twisted metal fulminating by the roadside. Think of the massive, wizened-headed vultures hunching over the carcasses of those who were not Man or Mad enough to survive that apocalyptic highway and you will understand that you are better off staying at home…

En Buyuk, Turkiye!! ("Turkey, the Greatest!!")

It is a week since I arrived at Attaturk International Airport, bedraggled and road-begrimed, and managed to recover the (very big) mini-pool table (a wedding gift) I had checked as luggage by asking the first official-looking guy I saw, in Turkish: “Where is the big cardboard box?” Whenever I manage to use Turkish successfully, it feels like I have performed a magical incantation, putting a string of sounds together and making a dragon or lightning appear out of the air.

We are staying at my brother-in-law’s apartment, which has a mind-boggling view of the Bosphorous. From the balcony you can see a mile-wide swath of outrageously blue water with boats of all sorts, from giant Russian tankers to megayachts to tiny sailboats, drifting peacefully along at all hours of day and night. Across the channel, which is maybe half a mile wide, you see the low, rolling hills on the Asian side of Istanbul, covered with fuzzy, round trees that look like piñons from here, and the red, clay roofs of low, whitewashed apartment buildings.

Waking up in the morning and sitting on this balcony with tea or coffee, you feel like you are floating in golden, sparkly fairy-clouds of benevolence and peacefulness. Like the world wishes nothing for you but contentment and happiness forever.

My brother-in-law’s apartment is situated in the middle of a very unusual Istanbul neighborhood. Surrounding his small apartment building are dwellings of varying degrees of architectural soundness, made by squatters from Eastern Turkey who, because they have been here so long (30 or 40 years, in some cases) and constitute an important voting constituency for local politicians, have not only been allowed to remain, but have been provided by the State with telephone service, electricity and running water. Still, there is a strong “village” atmosphere here. Our immediate neighbors, for example, have a rooster that crows all day, calling and responding to another, faraway rooster. I have been trying to figure out what they are saying to each other—that is, what a rooster has to gain from contacting another rooster in this way. The best I can figure is that they are telling each other “stay out of my territory!” The neighbors are also collecting “dut” (white mulberries?) from trees in their yard with blanket-nets, and growing many fruits and vegetables.

My first or second night here, we met “Maryam,” a charming and confident eight-year-old neighbor girl, who came by to collect the rent for her mother (the landlady) and stayed to chat with us on the porch. She told us (in Turkish) that she is very curious about America and would love to visit it sometime, but that she has to go to Qu’aran school this Summer. I taught her a few words in English, which she continued repeating to herself over and over as she walked down the stairs toward home.

This morning there was a regatta on the Bosphorous—dozens of small sailboats gathering in preparation, it seemed for a race. I slept like the dead last night, because the last few days have been a Job-like whirlwind of visits with friends and family—the most surreal being last night’s—um—event. First of all let me say that Turkish culture is much less formal than American culture is about social plans. People just drop by. An intimate dinner can quickly turn into a massive potluck feast. Last night we were supposed to be having dinner with Demet’s cousin and his fiancée. We brought two bottles of wine, looking forward to a quiet evening of food and conversation, and to getting to know the fiancée a little better.

We entered their apartment and were greeted by eleven members of the fiancee’s family: mother, brother, uncle, and cousins. Chairs were arranged in the living room in a great circle as if for a community meeting or civic welcoming banquet. Tables were laid out and groaning under the weight of fifteen or twenty traditional and very elaborate Turkish entrees and desserts, all prepared by the fiancee’s mother.
The room was white, the lights bright and threatening. We sat in a circle, all thirteen of us, looking at each other. Somebody asked me in English about teaching—whether I like it, what I like about it. Two people discoursed, at length, in Turkish, about Modern versus Classical art. At one point I played and sang Pogues songs and “Stagger Lee” for everybody on a guitar, and the uncle played a classical Ottoman song. At eleven, everybody got up and left.

I still have no idea what it was all about—why all those people were there. D—says that it wasn’t because we were in town from America—that it was a surprise even to her cousin, who had also expected a quiet, intimate dinner. Something about how the uncle is in town, and is leaving for Ankara tomorrow and people wanted to give him a nice sendoff. I must have looked very stunned for the first hour or so after arriving, because the predominant thought in my brain was “Where am I? What is happening?” Like Bob Dylan’s Mr. Jones: “You know something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is…Do you, Mr. Jones?” No. Mr. Gots did not know what was happening. He just tried to smile and look harmless—an American appreciative of Turkish hospitality.

At the party I saw D-s cousin’s husband, who is a modern artist (of some international fame) and one of the more unique personalities I have ever encountered. I have met him twice before, at our engagement party in Turkey and at our wedding. He does not speak English and I do not speak Turkish, but somehow we always end up spending hours talking to each other. D- says that she does not understand what he is saying even in Turkish, so abstract and strange is his manner of speaking. In English, he says things like: “The box! Symbolic!” and then, when you ask what he means, repeats them, nodding. Yesterday he told me that he has it on authority from his friend in the Swedish Parliament that Bob Dylan is an International Spy. He wants to make films for a couple of my instrumental tracks and to publish a Turkish-themed comic I have invented but not yet written in his new online Zine (called “E-Benzine,” I think). According to D--, although he is frequently incomprehensible, he is incredibly confident and productive—constantly at work on film, painting, and installation projects, of which he has completed hundreds, if not thousands. His website (www.simulasyon.net) describes his work (in English) as follows:

“Simulation of my production was formed through creating inflation of installation in works which may be based as vanishing art. My works were built upon understanding to understand (commenting on meaning--Hermaneutics) in the present form.
Seek of art here involves a deep ‘reconstruction’ process in the context of forming relation between the inspected and inspecting devices and research purposes.
Interdisciplinary—intermethodical relationships were formed. It is based upon forming new perception systems by fastening the vanishing process of the art.”

Notwithstanding a few translation-related grammatical errors, this is, D—tells me, pretty much what it says in the Turkish version.

After a week’s worth of living, eating, visiting and struggling to understand Turkish, it is strange and wonderful to be writing in English again. If the past week has been any indication, it will be difficult to maintain any kind of regular schedule with this blog while I am in Turkey, but I will post as frequently as I am able, and record the highlights and the lowlights of the Summer’s experiences. Hadi gorusuruz…

Sometimes I Think I Am the Last Classical Humanist Left in America, if not the World.

I admit it. I want to rewind the clock to 1850, when there was some kind of consensus in Universities about what the “Great Books” were in each discipline. I want to sit in dusty libraries in Oxford, studying the Roman poets, Milton and Shakespeare. I want a high, leather-backed chair, a pipe, a tweed coat and mahogany furniture. Things are too confusing nowadays…

I want people in academia and society at large to come to some kind of agreement that we are all, in some sense, working together to make sense of the world. I want people to stop calling each other racists and sexists and promoting the idea that nobody can understand or relate to anybody else’s experience—the idea that there is no such thing as common Human experience (Love? Death? Youth? Aging? Fear?) and dismissing the past as something wrongheaded, dangerous and best forgotten.

I admit, too, that I believe that some books are better than others because they manage to encapsulate experiences and feelings that most people can relate to--even though these are rarely the most popular books, because the majority of the people don’t read much and therefore lack the skills necessary to make sense of complicated sentences, or are so preoccupied with their own lives that they cannot connect with the experiences of fictional characters whose lives, on the surface, seem different from their own.

The charge of “elitism” that has been leveled again and again at the traditional canons of literature is both valid and not so. In Maoist China, the People’s Army threw doctors out of hospitals and replaced them with ordinary, medically untrained citizens on the grounds that specialization was “elitism,” and that everybody is “good enough” to be a doctor. These new “doctors” performed operations: patients bled to death or died of infections.

It is certainly true that past canons of Western literature seriously underrepresented just about everybody except Anglo/Christian and Helleno/Pagan men. It is true also that they tended to favor certain forms and themes to the total exclusion of others. This has been changing, albeit slowly, and must continue to change. But it is not necessary to burn something to the ground in order to improve upon it. Shakespeare may be a “dead white man,” but his plays are only as dead as we are deadened to their language and meaning. Have we produced more powerful expressions of the emotions connected with young love than Romeo and Juliet? Have we managed to capture the alienation of old age better than King Lear does? Falstaff, Richard III, Hamlet—has anybody come up with more complex and living characters than these? Maybe. But cultural artifacts aren’t like computers—obsolete after four years and replaceable. The best ones hold their charge, because they say something we may once have known, but have forgotten, or have never heard said in quite that way before…

I grew up without much of a sense of history. I dropped out of AP World History because the book was just too dense. All I remember from High School Roman History is Caligula's "minnows." My seventh grade American History class, which was taught by the football coach, was a disaster: I spent the whole year occupied with trying (and failing) to memorize details like whether the “Shot Heard Around the World” was fired in Lexington or in Concord.

In fact, most of my reading over the years has been limited to fiction. Much of what I know about history comes from novels: I learned some of the history of Russia from Tolstoy, Gogol and Dostoevsky. From Dickens I learned a little about Victorian England. Faulkner, O’Connor, and McCullers showed me the American South, pre- and postwar. Most recently, I’ve been seeing the Old West through Cormac McCarthy’s eyes. Getting your history this way has its obvious disadvantages, in that some of the work of interpreting the past has been done for you, but it does teach me how people, wherever and whenever, shape and are shaped by external circumstances.

Increasingly, I’m becoming convinced that studying actual history is essential, too, if we don’t want to be blown around aimlessly forever in the winds of political and social fashion.

Even if the formal discipline of history has become the same kind of theoretical quagmire everything else is, it at least has the advantage of being in the past. Time has passed, people have thought and written about what any given historical event meant to the people who lived through it, and what new meanings it may have acquired over time. Historians may debate the causes leading up to the dropping of the A-bombs on Japan, but there is a finite and immutable sequence of events and pile of evidence there for us to interpret.

I understand that things get more complicated the more closely you look at them, and that just about everything has multiple causes and meanings. But causes and meanings are not infinite—they cannot be, because they are limited by the factors that give any thing its thing-ness. “Ulysses” will never contain one word more or less than it now contains. The trap into which I fear we have blithely pranced during my lifetime (though the foot was lifted maybe 10 years before I was born) is one in which, because everything is possible, nothing is possible. Because everything is equally valid, nothing has validity. People call each other names—speak from within mutually unintelligible frameworks.

This has recently manifested in the form of attacks on the media by both “Liberals” and “Conservatives.” Three times in the past two weeks I have heard somebody say that the New York Times is “the liberal media.” The Republican government has (unsuccessfully, thank God) tried this year to shape the content of National Public Radio’s programming to include more “conservative” messages, so that each program would be “balanced.” And every good liberal knows that Fox News can’t be trusted because it is run by Rupert Murdoch, an arch-conservative.

The bottom line of all this is the total erosion of the idea of “objective” reality. It is one thing to problematize objectivity—it is quite another to utterly annihilate it. The “trustworthy” source of information, in this climate, becomes the one that reinforces whatever subjective beliefs you already hold. Those who deny that the Holocaust ever happened in Germany have websites supporting and reinforcing their “position.” Those who, in the face of incontrovertible, carbon-dated evidence of the biological development of species, continue to insist that Adam and Eve populated the Earth 4000 years ago, are publicly defended by our president and by powerful lobbyists, who feel that “all sides of the issue” deserve a voice. There is no “issue.” Carbon-dating is not a matter of faith. By being “fair” to Creationism, you render science meaningless: simply another “choice” among many.

If the Great Libraries were to burn to the ground tomorrow, would we be hard pressed to decide between saving “The Canterbury Tales” or Stephen King’s “Pet Sematery”? Some might answer: “Yes. Absolutely. There is no empirical qualitative difference. The judgment that “The Canterbury Tales” is superior to “Pet Sematery” is the result of class-based aesthetic and moral tendencies that are relevant only to a small portion of the population.” But I would maintain that humanity would profit more by the preservation of “The Canterbury Tales” than by that of the Stephen King book, simply because the former is more densely packed with human nature and experience. “Pet Sematary” is scary and fun, but “The Canterbury Tales,” if all else were lost, could remind us of who we once were and re-teach us how to communicate.

I’m talking about criteria, both aesthetic and philosophical, for what constitutes badness, okayness, goodness and greatness in, well, in anything, but for now let’s stick with literature. I don’t pretend to believe that I am in a position to establish these criteria; they must represent the consensus of as many readers and writers as possible, and they must be flexible, so as to accommodate future development--so as not to become a kind of “Academie Francaise” of snooty culture police.

“Consensus” is the key word here: If we could begin with some kind of agreement that everything is not completely relative, the next logical step would be to try to outline what we do know. Then, at least, we could have a conversation...

A Crazy and True Vignette. I Swear That This Really Happened, and That I Was Witness to it…

It was 1992 or 93. One Summer day, my then-companion and I were in the East Village, on the Eastern side of Tompkins Square Park (Avenue B, I think it is). She was in a used furniture store (a garage in which a man was selling furniture he had found on the sidewalk, in front of the garage), browsing, and I was waiting outside.

From a deli adjacent to the garage there suddenly sprang a young black man, running like a bat out of hell. Several seconds later, the Chinese storeowner burst forth in hot pursuit. The latter, in an attempt to fell the kid, leapt into the air, poised to deliver a mean-looking flying sidekick. The kid, by this time, was out of range, and disappeared around the corner. Meanwhile, the Chinese storeowner, who had hung, suspended in the air, for what felt like a minute or two, descended, delivering his powerful kick straight through the grill of a truck parked in front of the used furniture garage. His foot was stuck in the plastic grill, which now had a foot-sized hole in it, and from the base of which coolant was now pouring out onto the street. With some difficulty (and, I'm thinking, embarassment), the storeowner extracted first his foot, then his shoe from the broken grill and limped back into his store.

Paradise Delayed

So it is Tuesday, June 20, and I am not in Turkey. At 2:30 PM last Friday, two hours before D—and I had to leave for Newark airport, she discovered that my passport had expired on May 19th of this year. I blanched, began trembling, and almost burst into tears. After many months (years, even—we tried to arrange this trip last Summer, but couldn’t get out of the country due to D’s pending green card status) of meticulous planning, I stood, once again, face to face with the big red hand of Denial. “No,” said the Hand. “You shall not pass.” “Nay, Hand,” said I—“I am Man, and would be master of material things: warden, protector, and landscape designer of the Earth. It is my birthright as the thinking animal—the one with the opposable thumbs. Stand aside.” The hand was silent, immobile, unimpressed.

Well, what you can’t hack through or climb over, you have to walk around. D—flew to Turkey. I came down to Maryland to spend the week with my folks and resolve this passport situation. If all goes as planned, I’ll fly out this Friday from Dulles.
Yesterday I went to a 24 hour Passport Procurer in Silver Spring. The man, whose name was Steve, weighed at least 400 pounds and was in a kind of Humpty Dumpty costume: Red suspenders being the axis about which the outfit revolved. Behind him, to his right, sat a silent business associate with a prosthetic arm that might have been borrowed from a department store mannequin. The two men sat there, hemmed about by stacks of papers and files and strange historical bric-a-brac like traffic lights and an enormous brass motorboat throttle, as if some huge, insane child had placed them there long ago as centerpieces of a mad diorama.

Steve does passports, notarizing, faxes, printing, stamp-making and ID cards. Prominently posted about the office are signs reading:

1) “Only Robinson Crusoe gets his work done by Friday.”

2) “Your carelessness and lack of planning do not constitute my emergency.”

3) “Our credit manager is Helen Waite. If you want credit, go to Helen Waite.”

Let me address the first two: Steve’s Yellow Pages ad says “Passport in 24 hours!” “Emergency Passport service!” So, as I understand it, my carelessness and lack and planning should, by definition, constitute his emergency. Especially since he charges $200 on top of the $120 the government takes for an expedited passport. Also, if I come in on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday and pay for 24-hour passport service, won’t Steve have to get this “work done by Friday”?

I sat on the couch awaiting my turn, next to the oxidized copper bas-relief of a lighthouse and an...island(?), my confidence eroding gradually but irrevocably, like the Pacific Coast Highway, as Steve shuffled about looking for lost passport applications…but what choice did I have? I, like all of Steve’s customers, am desperate, helpless. I will pay whatever he asks. I will run the risk of having my passport sold to Azerbaijani arms dealers because Steve has an “in” at the State Department, which will not give Joe Citizen, if he should walk in there, a new passport in less than two weeks. Me, I got to get to Turkey. I have to get it done by Friday. Please, Steve, bury not my papers amid thy towering stacks. Wrap not thy sandwich in it. Use it not to line thy cat box. I am in your swollen, meaty hands…

Bound For Distant Shores

Tomorrow morning, at this time, I will be in Istanbul, Turkey—which, as near as I can estimate, is around 8000 miles from here. It boggles the mind. The mind can’t process it. Like in the Summer of my seventh grade year, when I went out West on a trip with some classmates and Mr. Dyroff, the geology teacher, and remarked that the mountains in the distance looked like a painted backdrop. They still looked that way to me in 2003, when D—and I circled the country on our honeymoon.

Last night friends and I saw “The War Tapes”—an Iraq documentary pieced together from footage shot by soldiers during a yearlong tour of duty. Looking at the dead, dismembered bodies of “insurgents,” I was struck not by the intense, visceral reality of it all, but by the sense that, somehow, I was still disconnected from the experience. Watching the twin towers fall on CNN had a similar effect. Even going to Ground Zero, looking at the twisted, smoking metal felt somehow like being on a movie set. Strangely, what hit me most intensely was the sight of a shoe display in a store window near the site, all of the shoes covered in a thick layer of white dust. I thought all at once about the fact that some of that dust was once people—people who might have passed this display on their way home from work and stopped in to try on a pair of shoes.

The Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC is a brilliant exercise in trying to make people really experience an event that is removed from them in time and space. When you go in, as I remember, they give you a card to wear, which bears the photo and vital information of an actual person who died in a concentration camp. In a sense, you become that person for the duration of your visit.

You start at the top floor of the museum and gradually descend, stepping at one point through a boxcar that carried people off to Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. Piled next to the car are the real suitcases of deportees, who marked them with their names in hopes of claiming them again at journey’s end. In one empty, white room you sit on a wooden bench and listen to recordings of camp survivors telling their stories. There are piles of shoes, children’s drawings done in the camps, and an airshaft running from the top of the museum to the bottom, its walls filled with thousands of family photographs of victims.
Nobody talks. I was there with four other people and yet I remember it as an intensely solitary experience. Mostly I remember the kids’ drawings: Hanukkah candles, hopeful, happy stuff. Typical kids drawings that could have been done anywhere in the world, at any time, but happened to have been done inside a concentration camp, by kids who would not live to see their next birthdays.

So what controls how fully we experience things? Even things that are really happening to us, in present time, sometimes feel unreal and cinematic. And even those things that feel most real to us in the moment fade quickly into a kind of unreality in our memory—so that, when we try to recall them, we remember at most a flash of emotion, or a couple of isolated, seemingly random snapshots of related scenes. You try in vain to summon up the time, the place, the people, as a complete, organic reality. Complicating this even further is the almost unconscious way in which we reshape our memories into a sensible, more aesthetically pleasing narrative. I do this, I think, to an unusual extent: I don’t trust my own memory of events at all—of when, why, or how they happened, because in rethinking and retelling them I am always trying to make a better story. I’ll give you an example:

I remember the first time I got drunk. I was 13 years old and my parents had gone out for the evening, leaving me alone in the house for the first time. For some reason, they did not have their keys with them, so I was going to let them in when they got home.

I sat down in the family room to watch a rerun of “16 Candles” on tv (already, as I write this, I’m thinking that the release date of “16 Candles” may prove that I was older than 13 when this happened). I liked anything with Molly Ringwald in it. I thought she was cute. Suddenly the idea occurred to me to go get a full glass of Maneschewitz (sp?) Passover wine (the only alcohol I had ever been given before) and see what getting drunk felt like. I watched “16 Candles” and drank maybe 16 ounces of Maneschewitz. Then I got another glass and drank it, immersed in Molly Ringwald’s freckly cuteness. Then I started tasting other things—vodka, whiskey.

I passed out on the white couch. I woke up. I threw up purple wine all over the white couch. Drunkenly, I staggered to the kitchen, where I procured Glass Plus and a paper towel. Back in the family room I swabbed in vain at the spreading purple stain. Then I overturned the pillow, not noticing that the zipper side was now facing out. I passed out again. I awoke to the banging of my father’s fists on the glass family-room windows over my head. Remember, they didn’t have their keys with them. I let them in. Drunkenly, I muttered something about being very tired, excused myself and went to bed. The next morning I awoke at dawn, filled with terror, and ran into my parents’ room. Eavesdropping, I heard them discussing me, and drunkenness. I burst in: “I could not help overhearing,” I said, my voice dripping with righteous indignation, “the accusations you were making against me. I was not drunk last night. I was tired. I am shocked, amazed and disappointed that you would accuse me of such a thing!”

The matter was temporarily dropped. That day, I had a play rehearsal at school. My dad drove me there in silence, and afterwards he drove me home in silence. Entering the family room from the garage I saw my mother, my grandmother (what she was doing there I don’t know), and my sister standing around the overturned, deeply-stained couch-pillow. “It smells like wine,” said my mom. “Can I talk to you guys alone?” I said to my parents. My sister and my grandmother left the room. “Mom, dad,” I said, “I have been feeling depressed. Last night, I ate a bottle of aspirin. It made me throw up. I was drinking cranberry juice before, so that’s why it’s red. I didn’t want to tell you.” Their anger melted into compassion. Therapist visits were arranged. I went, every Wednesday night for the rest of that year, to an office in a man’s house, sat on his leather couch and talked about feeling depressed.

I have no idea which parts of this story are true and which I have made up completely or stitched together from other, unrelated events. Actually, I do know that I got drunk on Maneschiewitz, and that I passed out and threw up, and that my parents couldn’t get into the house. And that I did go, at one point, to a therapist with a leather couch and an office in his house. Beyond that…? I’m going to ask my parents for their version of the story, and publish it here in a later post.

9:40 pm, Newark Airport…D and I will be in Turkey for the next two months, but I’ll have Internet, so more thoughts, memories, and impressions are definitely forthcoming. Please stay tuned…

From a Letter To A Friend

My Dear Man,

Yes—I called around Memorial Day weekend, in order to remind you not to forget our troops. Personally, I never forget them. Not for one second. Even as I write this they are hacking through the vines of my brain with machetes, bivouacking in my cranial folds, rationing biscuits among my neural dendrites. Our troops are cursing up a storm in my medulla oblongata, playing Texas Hold ‘Em with erotic playing cards. An ectoplasmic Bob Hope is doing a USO show in my frontal lobe, while Rita Hayworth shimmies in a floor-length Hermes gown. I try not to forget about our troops because if they were to forget about me, even for an instant, I would not be here writing to you. For it is by the will of our troops only that I have air in my lungs, and by their dispensation that blood courses through my veins. Who, gazing upon a peacock-blue sky or the distant, crenellated mountains, cannot discern the mark of our troops upon them? Why, even the tiniest flower bears their seal, their signature!

Lately, though, I have been somewhat troubled by certain...signs. For example, yesterday, while commuting to work, I was standing upon a streetcorner upon which it is my custom to stand of a morning, awaiting the bus. Yesterday, as you may remember, there were heavy rains throughout the morning, and the gutters were flooded to overflowing. All of a sudden, as I stood there, a minivan passed by close to the curb, splashing me with water, ruining my merino wool pants and my fine English shoes. At first I thought nothing of it, so occupied was I with wiping the mud from my shoes...but as the day progressed, an impish thought nagged at me, drive it away though I would: If, I reasoned, our troops are both Good and Always Thinking About Me, and if having one’s merino wool pants and fine English shoes ruined by a passing minivan are Bad, as I think you will agree they are, then how could this event ever have occurred?

With considerable mental effort, I managed to expunge this thought, but it left me badly shaken. This morning I arose early and headed for town, where I purchased a large quantity of yellow adhesive ribbons reading “Support Our Troops.” These I have affixed to many of my belongings, including my priceless T’ang Dynasty sugar bowl, in case doubt should again overtake me, and I forget by whose leave I live to enjoy these possessions. I advise you, as your friend, to do the same.

Sincerely,

Jason Gots

Brooklyn

When I was at NYU, nobody I knew lived in Brooklyn. Crossing the East River was like crossing the Mississippi must have seemed to the first settlers who did it: a scary and irrevocable transgression. Across the water lay, to my knowledge, only “Domsey’s”—a multi-storeyed used clothing store in Williamsburg to which friends and I would occasionally venture, passing on the way through the Satmar Hasidic neighborhoods, whose residents we would eye with voracious anthropological curiosity. Who could live there? It would be like moving onto an Amish farm! Good pretzels, but where’s the bar? Furthermore, we reasoned back then, who wants to have to take a subway across the river after late night rehearsals? No, no…Brooklyn simply wasn’t done.

In 1995 I moved from New York to Santa Fe (more on that later), and from there, two years later, to Jerusalem (more on that later, too.). Then to DC for three years, and finally, inevitably, back to New York in September 2001—three days or so before the Two Towers came down (coincidentally, I assure you.)

By 2001, everybody was living in Brooklyn. Rents in Manhattan were ludicrous, laughable! Mostly people lived in Williamsburg—an industrial wasteland suddenly peppered with very hip restaurants, nightclubs and art galleries, many featuring indoor ponds, for some reason. I was prejudiced against W-burg from the outset, having heard about its recent explosive hipness and fearing that living there would be like moving back into an NYU dorm. My first post-NY-homecoming visit to the area (to see a friend) immediately confirmed my worst suspicions: Stepping out of the subway in Williamsburg before me was a young man in his early twenties with an Atari symbol tattooed on his upper arm.

These days I just think Williamsburg is ugly. I go there now and then to see shows or eat at a restaurant, and the shows and the food are always good, but the place still feels like a graveyard of warehouses: everything square and brick and industrial—no trees, no parks, no kids laughing and playing.

The neighborhood I moved to that September, and where I live now, is called Kensington. It has no definite character—being a collage of “All In the Family” style townhouses and postwar apartment buildings, demographically a mixture of recent immigrants from China, the former Soviet republics, and Bangladesh, alongside more entrenched, working-class Italians. No one nationality dominates—it is truly the American Melting Pot, or Mosaic, or Tossed Salad, or Jackson Pollock painting. Recently the “artisten” (a Yiddish term used by the Hasidim to disparagingly describe the young, mostly white hipsters that are invading their neighborhoods), of which I suppose I am one, have begun discovering this place. Why not? It’s affordable, 30 minutes from the Lower East Side, clean and safe. Park Slope, which is within walking distance, has extended its pseudopod up 7th Ave. as far as 20th St., which borders this neighborhood, and will no doubt continue seeping our way.

Some of my Kingsborough students said recently of Brooklyn that they would feel less comfortable here, walking hand-in-hand with a lover of a different race, than in Manhattan—the lines between neighborhoods and cultures, in most of Brooklyn, being so deeply drawn. My Grandmother Beatrice, who died two Thanksgivings ago, used to say that when she was a kid here, an Italian kid crossing into a neighboring Jewish block would get beat up, and vice versa. A West Indian student of mine last semester told me that there is some kind of cultural pride parade every year on Kings Highway, and that if you happen to try to party on the Hatiian float, and you happen not to be Haitian, they will stab you with a knife. So I guess times haven’t changed all that much.

Still, go to Prospect Park on any sunny day in the Spring or Summer and you will see Brooklyn in her full glory—the whole world in microcosm, every continent, culture, and sexual orientation in evidence—everybody playing, laughing, enjoying the sun the trees and the sky. Nobody’s stabbing anybody. Some kids might be throwing water balloons at each other, but that’s as aggressive as it gets.

But Brooklyn is changing, fast. The developers are all over the waterfront. Coney Island is getting a multi-million (billion?) dollar facelift. Bruce Ratner and Frank Gehry will soon be building this massive complex downtown: a stadium encircled by jutting, crystalline towers…people I know have already started to make the unthinkable, irrevocable pilgrimage across that little tributary of the East River, into Queens.

Eulogy For Joseph S. Gots, My Grandpa--Died this Easter

My grandfather, who we always called Pop-Pop, was a man of few words—the cliché “still waters run deep” might have been invented for him. As far back as I can remember, he presided over our family’s Passover table: Passover was always magical—never perfunctory, never boring or rushed. When Pop Pop opened the door and announced that Elijah was coming to drink the wine, you believed it—and the surprise on his face when we all opened our eyes and saw that the cup was empty—was always real, even though, being the curious soul that I was, I had peeked once and seen Pop-Pop quickly downing Elijah’s cup.

I remember him as strong, solid, sometimes formidable, often very funny. For some reason so many of my memories of Pop-Pop are connected with Passover. Here’s another one: every year, when he would hide the afikomen (the matzo at the end of the meal), the hiding place would become more difficult, the riddle more complex. I wish I could remember some of the hiding places—I think one was behind a mirror and another was in a book—what I remember is that he was playful and smart. He was challenging our intellects (mine and my sister’s). He deliberately made the thing progressively more challenging to push us to think harder—to use our brains. I think I always knew, even before I had much of a concept of intellect, that Pop Pop was a very smart guy. That meant, and means something to me—it lends a kind of genetic reassurance to my own sense of self.

Also, he and Mom-Mom traveled all over the world, and were always showing us slides and seashells. That, without question, inspired and continues to inspire me to see life not as a mindless, money-making venture but as an opportunity to reach out and to learn—as an adventure. I have traveled, often thinking of his and mom-mom’s legacy, to Finland, France, Turkey, Mexico, Costa Rica, Leningrad and other countries, and travel will always be an important part of my family’s life. I also want to learn to scuba dive—maybe this Summer in Turkey where it’s easy to get certified because they’re not as concerned as we are about safety.

I am a teacher, like he was. Although my work is more in the realm of words and ideas and imaginary people than in cells and Petri dishes, I am motivated, as he was, by curiosity and the firm belief that, if you pay close enough attention, there are things to discover in this world. I do not exaggerate when I say that Pop-Pop’s life and work lend me a sense of deep entitlement to stand in front of students and teach. Like him, I try to make them laugh. Like him, I push them to think, to ask questions, and not to trust easy answers. Unlike him, I don’t throw worms at the students, or mix the occasional nude lady in with my slides. But that’s only because the former wouldn’t make much sense in a Literature class, and the latter would get me summarily fired.

Beyond all of this, I loved him—he was and always will be an enigmatic, powerful, and inspiring figure to me. I remember his kindness, his patience, his stillness, and the sense he always had of a deep wisdom mixed with playfulness—as if he were somehow very ancient and very very young at the same time. I believe he was a good man and I’m proud that he was my grandfather. He was what I think grandfathers are supposed to be to grandsons: a good example of how to be a man.

The Squid Is Not Conventionally Handsome

The squid is not conventionally handsome.

His sliminess and tentacles are strange.

And then there is the matter of that one enormous eye

Staring at you quizzically as he’s floating by

Who would conceive of such a thing? Or more precisely, why?

But much as we might like him to, the squid will never change.



The squid is really very sweet and tender

If you can see beyond his ugliness

He finds transcendent joy, I’m told, in memorizing Yeats

And sometimes stops and weeps, it’s said, at cemetery gates

And cares much more for intellect than sex appeal in mates

But sadly, I admit, he is repulsive nonetheless.

Family Vacation Minicomic!

A drawing I did in 2001

Age 13: The Michael Jackson Phase

When I was in Six and Seventh grade, which are universally recognized to be circles of hell worse than anything Dante could imagine, I was obsessed with Michael Jackson. Nowadays, people throw that word "obsessed" around a lot: "I'm, like, so OBSESSED with Wittgenstein!"--but this Michael Jackson thing was a true, possibly clinical obsession.

Nothing sexual here--at the time I was a budding (though still closeted) heterosexual, nursing crushes on 1) the cute and very popular blond girl in the class and 2) the cute and very popular curly redheaded girl in the class. My thing with Michael was more identity-worship: wanting to BE him. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense to me why a sensitive little fella like myself, adrift in the maelstrom of adolescence, would want to be somebody else. BUT WHY HIM?? Well, this was the Eighties--"Thriller" had come out recently and, to the rest of the world outside of my Six and Seventh grade classes, was one of the coolest albums ever. Michael was the man. I wanted me some of that cool. Thing was, all the people in my life who were in a position to acknowledge or deny my coolness--i.e. my schoolmates--thought Michael Jackson was gay, and that anyone who liked him (or worse, wanted to BE him) was gay by association. Being gay, in the worlds of most 13 year olds, even in these more enlightened times, is very much like being a leper was in the Bible. If 13 year olds had the power to create a "gay colony" and exile to it anyone suspected of this offense, they would definitely do so.

But for me, in my world, Michael Jackson was BAD. I videotaped his performance of "Billie Jean" on the Grammys and rewound it a thousand times to learn the moonwalk and that leg-shaking move (anybody know what that was called?). I dressed, for Halloween, in a costume my mother had made (Enabler!) of that sort of glittering international diplomat outfit he had, with the epaulets. I had the Thriller jacket, which I reluctantly purchased from the women's department of Hecht's because that's the only place you could get it, and lived in fear that somebody might one day notice that the zipper was on the wrong side.

I had two "the glove"s: one, from Spencer Gifts (anyone remember that place? I remember scratching my head as a, like, 10-year-old in front of the edible underwear and the 2-person "funderwear"), was covered in rhinestones, and was less ghetto (and therfore more highly prized) than the one onto which my mother had painstakingly sewn thousands of sequins.

In Michael Jackson drag I went one time to a roller rink with my friend Jason Smink. I had on the diplomat outfit, Porsche Carrera sunglasses (fake), and "the glove." As I skated around to "Eye of the Tiger," which always filled me with an undefined sense of optimism and power, I caught the eye of a young lass, who I remember as being somewhat rabbit-toothed (my aesthetic demands being all out of proportion to my reality, given that I was a complete and utter Geekazoid from the Planet Geekzor). She approached my friend, as was the custom in those days, and gave him her number to give to me. Of couse I never called her: rabbit-teeth notwithstanding, I was terrified of girls.

My Sixth grade year culminated in a thing called "Punk Party," a party I co-hosted in the gameroom of my house with a popular boy from our class (this alliance being a well-advised political move for me). We decorated the gameroom in crepe streamers, spelling out "Punk Party" on the wall, and people sprayed their hair with temporary green and blue dye from this place in Georgetown...something Lizard...repository of silver skull rings, dog-collars, and all things subversively cool. I dressed as Michael Jackson at the Grammys (bowler hat, sparkly sash, yellow pants, loafers). Everybody from the class was invited--this party was a very sweet attempt on the part of my mom (who wore a kind of Pat Benetar/Olivia Newton John getup to it, with a t-shirt that said "Get Physical") to popularize me with my peers.

For hours we danced to the soundtrack to "Footloose" (this being, after all, a Punk Party), ate chips and m&m's, and had a good time. I kissed the curly redheaded girl and we were "going out."

At a predetermined time, the party transitioned to the Family Room, where, in front the big screen tv (one of those early, three-color projection numbers) playing the video of Michael Jackson's Grammy performance of "Billie Jean," I dance-synched the same routine. It was received ok: the crowd was feeling indulgent, having gorged itself on Kenny Loggins and m&m's. They clapped, we took photos, and everybody went home flushed and happy. It was a kind of drunkenness--all that glitter and music and junk food and dancing and punked-out hair...

PART TWO--IT ALL COMES CRASHING DOWN

So the Fall saw my entrance to St. Albans School For Boys, a gothic, Dickensian, ivy-covered bastion of Anglophilic education in the shadow of the Washington Cathedral (the school was started for choir boys around the turn of the last century, after, I believe, they had stopped castrating them). At STA there was a pretty strict dress code: Jackets, ties and slacks were the norm, though turtlenecks and sweaters were also permissible. Any kinds of shoes were ok, which in Eighth grade resulted in my accompanying a navy-blue ensemble with multicolored, fluorescent Vans hightops. But we're getting ahead of ourselves...

Seventh Grade, Halloween. I dress as MJ--the Grammy outfit again, I think. At lunch the MC (a teacher) calls me up to the microphone to be introduced to the school and to receive the prize for "the costume we least want to see ever again." Everbody laughs and laughs. I slink, lizardlike, away.

This experience puts me in mind of the scene in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (one of the greatest films, EVER, as far as I'm concerned) where Sir Richard Burton gives a drunken monologue (did he ever give any other kind?) about when he was a kid, how he went out to a drinking hall with his classmates, taken there by the "gangster father" of one of them, and ordered "bergen"--and how, for the rest of the night, people were ordering "bergen" and laughing, and pointing at him and laughing again.

As a 13 year old kid, new to the school, I didn't have a sense of humor about my little affliction. I was a morbidly sensitive little dude, which is not a good thing to be at St. Albans (or any boy's school, I imagine), where things can get way Darwinian--very "humiliate-or-be-humiliated." I went home crying to my folks, who promptly called the teacher who had given me the prize and demanded a public retraction.

This was the worst thing imaginable. The next day, at lunch, I was called up to the mic again to receive a Michael Jackson puzzle and a public apology. If it were possible to evaporate at will, I would have become a faint gaseous trace and drifted up through the roof of the Refectory and into the Washington sky.

But negative publicity is still publicity, and all of this put me on the St. Albans map, laying the groundwork for a future coolness and sense of belonging that, at the time, I could only dimly imagine. People forgot about the incident, but they knew who I was. All of the Michael Jackson paraphenalia were consigned to a dresser drawer, the posters came down and were replaced by John Lennon, U2, the Who and the Cure. When the album "Bad" came out, I didn't even buy it. Over the next few years, I would do some more shape-shifting, becoming a "preppy," a "hippie" and a "goth," but never again would I stand before a poster, praying to wake up as somebody, anybody other than me.

What I'm Reading Now

I suspect that this post will be of limited interest to anybody but, um, me--but maybe the topic will serve as a springboard to broader ramblings. I just finished "The Varieties of Religious Experience" (subtitled "A Study in Human Nature"), which is a series of lectures delivered by William James in England (I think) around 1902. Basically, he is analyzing religious experience--people's individual, private, widely varying experiences of the divine--and asking the question: "Is there anything in this religion thing?" He believes that there definitely is. Not in organized religion, whose political will to power/survival he blames for many of the atrocities that besmirch the name of "religion," but in the "purer," more "original" experiences of saints and musts and holy madmen/women from which religion's baser forms are derived.
He is a "pragmatist," in that he looks first at religion's effects on the lives of the religious-- and at their effect, in turn, upon the world. If, he says throughout the book, we discover that religiosity is fruitful for life in a positive way, then metaphysical speculation about what form exactly God should take (a six-armed goddess, an invisible force, many gods) is irrelevant. That is, if religion "works," then "how" it works is a secondary consideration.

But he does end up by considering this, too, and concludes that there is, indeed, something like God, which is somehow connected with our subconscious minds, and that prayer (or any act of active communion with that Something) can connect us to and imbue us with positive, powerful, healing, creative energies that we can use in our lives. He bases this on the numerous cases he has examined (many of which are excerpted in the book) of individuals who claim to have had a personal experience of God (in whatever form).

James is a tremendously enjoyable writer, and the case studies he includes are fascinating to read. His writing style (in this book at least) is warm, colorful, engaging, natural, informal, and often very funny. He also offers a devastating (and incredibly prescient) critique of what has recently come to be known as the "intelligent design" theory--pointing out that the human mind has a tendency to arrange reality into patterns--noticing and remembering only those elements of reality that organize themselves neatly. If you gave me a pile of beans, he says, I could take them away one by one until only a neat grid of beans remained on the table, and I could tell you that the pattern had been concealed there from the beginning. He points out that, in reality, there is infinitely more chaos in the world than order.

But he does not deny anybody the right (or the necessity) to experience religion according to their nature and abilities. Quite the opposite, in fact--James suggests that the variety of religious experience is in accordance with the variety of human nature: happy-go-lucky natures tending toward a Disney-fied kind of religion (which he calls "the religion of healthy-mindedness") and more dour, and according to James, deeper natures tending toward a more problematized, complex, graver view of God (he calls this type of nature "the sick soul," and accords it more respect than the "healthy minded" nature--pointing out that the "sick soul" is keenly aware of both the beauties and the horrors of the world, and must somehow reconcile them. I must confess to taking a certain narcissistic pleasure in the fact that I am definitely of the psychological type James describes in this lecture. Go Hamlet!). In both cases, also, there is the matter of degree/intensity of religious experience, and both "types," James points out, have their destructive and productive extremes.

Sometimes when reading this book I found myself scoffing at ideas that seemed antiquated or just silly--like when the author explains that alcohol and...it was either nitrous oxide or ether...put the human mind into a semi-mystical state of connectedness with a higher, unifying power. Also, I generally found it hard to swallow his belief that the religious state creates positive, healing energy in people's lives. But then again, I am definitely to some extent a product of the materialist scientific schools James criticizes as being blind to any aspect of reality that is not right in front of their noses. He says that religious experiences, and for that matter "God" (in its many forms) are FACTS, in that people have experienced and can describe them, and that the limiting of the definition of "fact" to things that are objectively visible, cold, and dead, is a mistake. Facts, he says, do not have to be objective.

A great book--I will definitely be dealing with the ideas in it for a long time to come.

Now that I've finally finished it--it took me a couple of months (what with school and doing absolutely nothing every day after coming home from school except reading blogs and playing "Super Mario Bros")--I'm starting Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" (God I love that title...). It is AWESOME (If I may be permitted to revert to middle-school Valley Girl for a sec). I'm just 50 pages in and am already in utter awe at the man's explosive use of the English language--like Pynchon self-limited to the use of black, white, and red. It is beautiful and violent and breathtaking--poetic and vulgar--the Western raised to epic, universal status. I'm even starting to like the quotation mark-less dialogue. The only thing that kinda sticks in my craw (though I might end up liking it, too) is McCarthy's constant use of weird, archaic terminology I've never heard before--architectural terms, names of now-defunct tools--I don't know where he learned all of it. I don't think anybody else has ever heard of a "guyrope" or a "vernier sight" or a "tang." On the one hand, it's cool--it lends the book atmosphere--authenticity. On the other hand, I have no idea what the hell half these things are and it would sort of disrupt the aesthetic pleasure of reading the book to go running for a dictionary of Western vernacular every five minutes. Happily, McCarthy obviously just doesn't give a shit: an essential characteristic of every great artist.

It would be hilarious to write a book "designed by committee"--that is, on the premise that you, the writer, had taken into consideration the individual critical opinions of hundreds (or thousands) of readers, and tried to please all of them. It is hard to imagine what such a book would look like. Actually, this is how most Hollywood movies are made...

I've been meaning to read McCarthy for a while now. A guy I used to live with in Santa Fe ten years ago was reading “Blood Meridian” and got me interested in it. Then my mom bought me The Border Trilogy but, for some reason I found it too dense to get into the two times I tried. I'll definitely be trying again. Then, recently, the New York Times polled a couple hundred writers and thinkers about the "best 25 American books of the 20th century." While many of them agreed that this was a ridiculous and impossible task, they did manage to vote, and "Blood Meridian" was way up on the list. Toni Morrison's "Beloved" was number one. I remember reading it in high school at the behest of my then girlfriend, and liking it--but I haven't read it since. Also high on the list were Phillip Roth's "American Pastoral" and "The Human Stain"--both of which are on my Summer reading list.

I have two other reading projects going on simultaneously: 1) The Great Religious Books of the West and 2) American Studies.

1) I started this project sometime last Fall--the idea being to read the New Testament (which I had never read cover to cover), the Qu'aran, and The Tanakh (a.k.a. the Jewish Bible, or the Old Testament with the books in the pre-Christianized order and maybe plus or minus a text or two). I read the NT and maybe 150 pages of the Qu'aran and had to drop it for school-related reading (Orwell's 1984). I will definitely be getting back to it...

2) I picked up a number of non-fiction books, mostly collections of essays, that fall under the heading of "American Studies," an academic discipline whose existence I have recently learned of, and in which I'm very interested. Interestingly, one of the books, by Louis Menand, begins with an essay entitled something like "the meaning of William James' nervous breakdown."

I'll be taking these books with me to Turkey. Between studying Turkish on CD-Rom, reading them, visiting with people, and traveling when my folks and grandmother get there, it looks like I'll be keeping busy, which, for me, is a very good thing.

Music, the Poconos

So I just spent the past two days in a resort/timeshare in the Pocono mountains, near the Delaware Water Gap, sitting with my father and my brother-in-law David on plastic couches, swapping cds and talking. This was technically the "Manis Girls' Weekend"--an annual event (as of last year) brought about by the passing of my Grandma Bea and her imprecation to my Aunt Judy to "keep the girls together." Somehow the men of the family ended up as part of the whole thing--we get our own townhouse and do not see the females for three days. It's kinda silly, but kinda fun too. It's really the only time I ever get to spend basically one-on-one with my pops.

Last year it was just me and him in the Boys' house. We canoed down the Delaware river for four hours, which caused me to get heatstroke (because, like a complete idiot, I failed to put on any sunscreen) and be confined to my bed for the rest of the day and night. This year, it was me, David (my sister's husband) and my Dad, and outside there raged a biblical storm--so it was vinyl, beer, whiskey and music, punctuated by a couple of meals out.

My dad just got an ipod--60GB--and is in a process, not unlike the Google/Library of Congress Scan Everything Project, of putting all of his music into it. Mostly he has jazz (an extensive collection based on recommendations by a dour but aesthetically acute uncle of mine who sometimes writes Jazz criticism in magazines) and old musicals like Brigadoon. On this visit, he was open to new influences, so I chose a stack of my CDs for him to rip, including some fairly challenging (for my dad) material ( Gogol Bordello, Radiohead) , and some tamer stuff (Beth Orton, Nick Drake).

While we were ripping CDs, we talked about why I hate Frank Sinatra: how our generation has a completely different sense of authenticity in music from my dad's generation--I find most crooners (johnny Hart, Johnny Mathis, Sinatra, Bennett) soulless and difficult to tolerate. My dad, on the other hand, can't seem to get into Bob Dylan. "That voice! It's like nails on a chalkboard! How did that guy ever get a recording contract?!"

We also talked about musical self-education: how David and I, when we were kids, systematically bought and listened to everybody IMPORTANT (to modern music)--Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, The Velvet Underground, the Sex Pistols. How nowadays we just listen to whatever we have any reason at all to believe we might like--because the foundational understanding is there to anchor anything new that comes along. That sounds kind of fusty and square--like all new music must somehow be contextualized within the neural net of everything that's come before in order to have meaning...but I suppose it's true, for me, that most worthwhile pieces of art can be understood better in relation to their influences, than simply on their own terms.

We listened to Kurt Vonnegut being interviewed on the radio. His advice to writers was something like: "Write in such a way that your reader will not feel that his time has been wasted."

On the way back home, we passed a kind of Bosnia of roadside deer corpses, including that of a very tiny fawn. It was quite sad. I don't understand why there were so many recently dead deer along that one stretch of route 80--there were six or seven.

In other animal news, there was a family of groundhogs living in a huge hole/tunnel at the foot of the steps to our townhouse. Every time we would come home, they would run out from under the house (God knows what they get up to under there...) and disappear into the hole like three fat croquet balls in quick succession. Also, there was a small bird with a worm in its mouth who kept trying to peck through the sliding glass door this morning. When that failed, he tried running against it a couple of times.

What else shall I tell you, dear reader? Let's leave it there, for now.

--Jason

Letter to the World

(Note, this and the two posts that follow it were originally hosted on MySpace, hence all the baffling references to MySpace.)

I have wanted for a long time to "blog," at the risk of (or perhaps for the purpose of) making a complete fool out of myself by putting my words out there for anybody to see. This is going to be one of those blogs where the guy just writes whatever the hell is in his mind, and the reader be damned (no offense).

For some reason "advanced text editor" won't work on Safari or Firefox (Anti-MacIsm, I guess), so I can't use Italics, which sucks because they are totally integral to my writing style. Without them, I feel like I felt in France, age 13, as an exchange student trying to talk to girls: like my personality is buried beneath an alien facade that in no way resembles me.

MySpace is very strange. I mean, actually it's pretty mundane. What's strange is that I and so many other seemingly reasonable people have MySpace pages. It seems like something that only 13 year old girls would be into. Actually, I joined it to post music, so that random passersby could find it. Only after creating this non-music page did I realize that there's a separate kind of MySpace music page. So I made a page there, too (www.myspace.com/jasongots). The trouble is, you can't post any of your interests to a myspace music page, so I kept this one, too.

Actually, it occurs to me now that I have no idea which of the two pages I am blogging on right now.

Ok--so--a little about me. Among other things, I'm what David Foster Wallace describes as a "SNOOD" (Syntactic Nudniks of Our Time)--one of those people who gets inordinately irritated by public misuses of grammar ("Ten Items or Less") and by those cutesy little phrases that seem to appear out of nowhere and infect advertising and public speaking with incredible virulence. Phrases like "It's a No-Brainer" and "At the end of the day,..." and neologisms like, well, "blog" for instance, drive me up a tree.

Its a very private pain, though, as nobody wants to hear about it (except for the rare fellow SNOOD one runs into occasionally). I announced to a roomful of writing tutors at the college where I work, several weeks ago, that the television ad for this college, which I had seen the day before on TV, makes the less/fewer mistake. "It says 'Twenty five students or less!' I shouted, expecting the room to collapse with laughter. Instead, everybody looked confused. 'I don't get it,' said one guy. I tried to explain the concept of countable and non-countable nouns. More silence and confusion. NOT ONE PERSON IN THAT ROOM OF PROFESSIONAL TUTORS UNDERSTOOD WHY "LESS THAN 25" IS WRONG.

Whatcha gonna do? Just sigh and prepare for the day when we end up back where we started--communicating via grunts and clicks.

Even as I write this I am aware of how impossibly snobbish it would sound to 99.9% of the English speaking world.

I wonder whether your "blogvoice" evolves over time, as you get used to the idea of sending messages out to the entire world. In reality, I have no idea how many people will read this. Most likely only a couple of my close friends. Still, this blogging is interesting--it's like writing a novel knowing that it is definitely going to be published--knowing that you have an audience. Or speaking into a microphone that is hooked up to an extended network of hidden speakers all over the world, any of which may be switched on or off at any time.

There's no question that blogging appeals to a person's vain, inner middle-schooler--that scrawny little kid who used to fill up spiral notebooks with solipsistic rants about how mean and stupid his parents and teachers were, with obscure metaphysical sonnets and creepy drawings of trees. But so does any kind of writing or act of creating something to be seen or heard publicly--it's always a tension between showing off, trying to connect, seeking approval, doing the thing for the love of doing it...there's not much sense I suppose in trying to pin down which one of those forces is dominant at any given time.

And although someone might stumble across this blog, read it, and think that it is the most boring, self-centered piece of shit imaginable, somebody else might find it entertaining or informative (or Shimmeringly Brilliant and Razor's-Edge Witty). And, basically, I'm going to do it because I feel like it.

More to come...