Egypt

What will matter most in the long run is that the popular rising in Egypt, even more than the earlier one in Tunisia, changes the way we must look at the world. What T. S. Kuhn might have called the paradigm of world events. (You will remember his Structure of Scientific Revolutions.) This shift feels as momentous as the shift from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican way of perceiving the universe.

Yesterday, or last week, people were still willing to believe that East and West were irreconcilable, that principles of democracy were unimaginable in Muslim societies, that the alternative to tight police control of the Muslim population would be a turn to Muslim extremists, sharia law and the rest of it, with mass popular support. There's been plenty of evidence against this view all along, but it was a convenient view to many western politicians blaming Asian or North African immigrants for local woes (France and Holland most notably) or seeking to justify pointless but terribly expensive wars.

Of course there are some people still holding to that view, but it's going to be harder to sustain than in an earlier age when the Church could command Galileo to deny that the earth moved. Thanks to the hundreds of thousands of Egyptians of all ages and classes waging their energetic but peaceful demonstration in Tahrir Square, we know it just isn't so. The "clash of civilizations" is not between East and West, or between Islam and Christianity, but between authoritarianism and free thought, free exploration, free invention. Give the people a chance — no, that's wrong, nobody gives the people anything. Let's say, when the people seize the chance to meet one another, try out new ideas or ideas borrowed from elsewhere but new to them, they can get along. Copts and Muslims and Armenian Orthodox and agnostics and atheists. And they can figure out how to keep order without the “help” of the police, like protecting the archaeological museum, or cleaning the street, or directing traffic, or taking care of their wounded.

Liberating the energies of the Egyptian people will go far to liberating all the peoples of the region. And it will mean the death of Al Qaeda, which is nourished by fear, hate, and the impossibility of other options.

Wouldn't Naguib Mahfouz be proud!

Interviews on "A Gift for the Sultan"

My thanks to Kipp Poe Speicher and his blog, "Closing My Eyes…," for posting this interview of Geoffrey Fox about A Gift for the Sultan and about writing generally. Sharing ideas and writing habits with colleagues can be really useful to writers — not only to pick up some new trick or technique, but so we don't feel quite so alone in our struggles to get the words right.

And here is another intervew (in Spanish) that appeared in our local Carboneras newspaper Campomar, by our friend and very good local journalist Inma Caparrós. Photo at right is from the event she describes: 
Geoffrey Fox presenta su último libro "A gift for the Sultan"

Your author in Greece

Leo & Gef team up in the Archaeological Museum of Athens

Two images, both by Susana, from our trip to Greece at the end of December.

In the harbor of Nauplion

The lion reminds me of Leo Arslan who works with me on my writing.


We had to stop in Nauplion, even if briefly, because I'd heard so much about it from my friend and expert on all things Byzantine, Diana Wright. (Check out her blog, Surprised by Time.) It's a small town in a lovely setting.

Story: From a Trolley Stop in Amsterdam

I've just posted this story, originally published in InkPot #5 in 2004, a reflection on migration and displacement, where it can be viewed for free on Scribd:

From a Trolley Stop in Amsterdam. 

I hope you enjoy it. While there, you may want to look at the other essays and stories I've posted on Scribd, which can be seen here.

Whims of the wind

Violeta Parra By The Whim Of The Wind by Karen Kerschen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


For all of us who saw her country's struggle as part of our own for personal and social liberation, Violeta Parra was the raw, honest voice of Chile's poor. Her collections of songs from the remote hills and woods of Chile and especially her own compositions — Volver a los 17, Gracias a la vida and others — became anthems for activists around the world in the late 1960s and 1970s.

But from what human depths sprang these strange songs, at once laments and celebrations? And why did this brilliant, much loved artist take her life in 1967, at age 50? Karen Kerschen's vivid and well-paced biography goes far to explaining these things, and also tells us much about the social conflicts in Chile that led to that country's tragic experiment with socialism. And it also gives us glimpses of her admirers Pablo Neruda and Pablo de la Rokha, the "Nueva Canción" artist Víctor Jara, and Violeta Parra's most famous relatives, her musician children Ángel and Isabel and her elder brother, the equally famous mathematician and poet Nicanor Parra.

Violeta was one of 9 children of a poor peasant couple with a strong love of music. Though she would later prosper both as a performer and a visual artist, she always identified herself with the poor, playing their homemade instruments, composing songs of their pain and joys, depicting what she thought were their lives and their dreams in her colorful arpilleras of yarn woven into rough jute backing. (To see examples, search for "violeta parra arpillera".) This choice of thematic material made it very difficult for her to break through as a performer in urban Chile, where "top 40" type tunes, mostly foreign had begun to dominate commercial radio and the clubs, but when people had a chance to hear her many of them became entranced by the uniqueness of her style and the directness of her language. In 1954, when she was 37, she seized the opportunity to perform in Europe at a folklore jamboree sponsored by the Polish government, and in Europe — especially and for the longest period in France — she found an audience fascinated by her delivery and also by her arpilleras.

Though she considered herself ugly because of her pockmarked face, she attracted many men, including one tyrannically jealous husband (he stopped her from publicly performing for years), another husband who was more tolerant and forgiving of her impetuous and unpredictable behavior, and many other lovers, all of them younger than she. She blamed herself for the death of a baby daughter she left behind when she had the chance to go to Poland, grieving to the point of desperation, but always — with her children as with her lovers — her artistic expression and desire for attention to her art took precedence over any other obligation. Her love for her surviving children and perhaps her fear that something terrible might befall them (as it had to the baby she had left behind) caused her to interfere in their lives in ways that must have been intolerable, including her loud and vehement condemnations of Ángel and Isabel's performance of "Nueva Canción" protest music that was less "folkloric" (rural-based and traditional) than her own. The poverty of her childhood had so marked her that when she did begin to make money, she regarded it as extraordinary and ephemeral, either to be spent quickly before it disappeared or hoarded for her children. Her last big investment after her return to Chile, "La Carpa de la Reina", a huge tent on the outskirts of Santiago where she hoped to attract audiences for her music who would also dine on her (equally folkloric) empanadas and sopaipillas was a disaster. She had violent mood swings, from exuberance to blind rage that could be provoked by the slightest contretemps.

It was after she realized that her last long-time lover, Swiss-born musician Gilbert Favre, was not going to return to her, that at 50 she was not going to maintain the kind of idyll she had imagined (and that she was not going to "return to being 17," as one of her songs puts it), that she wrote her most famous song, "Gracias a la vida," one of the saddest, most poignant celebrations ever written. And it was not long after that that, after two previous suicide attempts, she stuck the barrel of a pistol into her mouth and pulled the trigger.

Karen Kerschen has done an enormous job of interviews and documentary research, and treats this much-loved figure with great affection but also with the distance to recognize the pain she caused herself and many of those around her. Her short, vivid chapters are enlived by the author's pen-and-ink illustrations.

View all my reviews

2011: Resolutions

Seeing how spottily I fulfilled my 2010 resolutions, this year I'm making them simpler: 1 -Write more, 2- read more, 3- write better.

I did get my novel published, though not by February as I had resolved, and I did write several blog essays about Spain, as promised. Now I'll have to work harder on those other things, the architectural history book and new fiction. Write more, read more, write better, that sums it up.

Çok teşekkür ederim—Thank you in Turkish

As Susana reported here a couple of days ago ("Olives for breakfast…", 2011.1.8), our travels through Greece and then Istanbul culminated in a reading in that city from my novel, A Gift for the Sultan, before a literary circle of the Alumni Association of the Middle East Technical University (METU), a prestigious Turkish university serving the whole Middle East and where the language of instruction is English. This group of alert, widely-read professionals engaged me in a lively discussion from which we all learned some surprising things.

Even the history buffs present were surprised by some of what I told them about this crucial period, the tumultuous years of Ottoman and Orthodox Christian relationships just prior to Mehmet's conquest of Constantinople. Collaboration of all kinds, including marital, was at least as frequent as conflict. When I said that I thought that what had really happened in 1453 was that Constantinople had conquered the Ottomans, they understood what I meant and I think at least some of them were inclined to agree with me. What I meant was that, by seizing that great city and making it theirs, the Ottomans turned themselves from a mostly nomadic and anti-urban force into the great cosmopolitan polity that eventually extended over three continents and ruled in splendor for over 400 years.

Miniature of horse-archer, Topkapi Museum

And I learned that the meaning of "gazi" has changed dramatically since then: in the time of my novel (beginning of the 15th century), it was a heroic term that a warrior had to win in battle, used by fiercely independent war chiefs who were leaders of their own mounted bands. Today it means simply a wounded soldier, not heroic at all.

Though it was a cold and rainy night and off their usual schedule, we had a crowd of over a score of people who came directly from work for dinner and discussion. I have to thank — çok teşekkür ederim — a whole daisy-chain of METU alumnae for making this happen; Lale Eskicioğlu, who lives in Canada and hosts the Read Literature website; her former classmate in Istanbul, Zeynep Karaburcak, a businesswoman with great organizing skills, and Yasemin Civelekoğlu, moderator of the literary group, who distributed the pdf of the novel to the members.

I now know something more about contemporary higher education and about the literary establishment in that fascinating country, and began friendships that I hope to continue.

On not playing well with others: guest essay

Here's a contribution by fiction-writer and essayist Dirk van Nouhuys, a regular reader of the blog. He calls it

Cars & Freedom

Cars Mini by Stephen Bayley

The other day I was watching an American football game. A commercial came on showing a company of redcoats, that is British infantryman of the 18th century, assuming their positions to fire facing a charge. The camera shifted to the oncoming opponents. They were black pickup trucks, Dodge Rams, and driving the lead pickup truck was George Washington. Before the onslaught of streamlined and patriotic iron the redcoats fled. A resonate voiceover declared, “There are two things America has right: cars and freedom.”

A day or two later I found myself behind a Dodge Ram in traffic. It displayed three bumper stickers. One was for the NFL team I had been watching. One was an American flag in an extremely ornate setting, which suggested the label on a Budweiser bottle. The third read, “Doesn’t Play Well with Others.” For those who don’t know, this is a note stereotypically sent home from school with the report cards of surly and narcissistic children.

It seems to me that the voiceover was more wrong than right. These are two things America in important senses has wrong. First about cars: Americans have the idea that they should be an order of magnitude faster and more powerful than they need to be, and thus consume an order of magnitude more than necessary of the world’s resources and pollute the air proportionally. The American trucking industry, which after all does deliver the goods, figures 10-20 Horsepower per ton. That means that a reasonable horsepower for a private car is about 20. They run around 100 and more. Of course America is not alone in this self-destructive urge to build fast and powerful cars, it really originated in Europe, and is being embraced, sadly, all over the planet.

Freedom is a more complex issue, as we all know. What ‘freedom’ means ranges at least from childish anarchism to the idea in some theological contexts that true freedom is willing to do what God (or the state) has required one to do. But one thing that Americans consistently have wrong about freedom is that it is orthogonal to cooperation. In practice Americans often employ cooperation as a means to a sensation of freedom, for instance on the highway, where Americans report they often feel most free, yet observe an elaborate set of cooperative rules, written and unwritten, which allow them to survive in their powerful machines without killing themselves and others beyond reasonable measure. That important and self-defeating American ideal of freedom is perfectly summed up in the third bumper sticker, “Does not play well with others.”

— Dirk van Nouhuys

www.wandd.com

P. S.  Happy New Year

Olives for breakfast, rockin' in Syntagma, reading in Istanbul

καλή χρονιά!

 
Thanks to Susana for preparing this comprehensive (except that  she left out the part about the eastern Mediterranean breakfasts — yummy!) report on

SUSANA AND GEOFFREY’S HOLIDAY IN GREECE AND ISTANBUL

DECEMBER 2010-JANUARY 2011 

Athens’ Syntagma Square was ablaze with festive lights. The Municipal Band, clad in bright red uniforms, was entertaining the crowd before the fireworks started at midnight on December 31^st. When Geoff and I started dancing to the tune of Bill Haley’s old chestnut, Rock Around the Clock, the crowd parted, forming a circle around us. What I saw through the lens of my Flip as I turned around to record the human fence were the sad faces of lonely young men. Then I realized that they vastly outnumbered the families and few tourists. Their darker skin suggested they could be illegal immigrants entering Europe through Greece via Turkey. Just for that night, they dejectedly filled the country’s most important civic space. 

We would start the new year in Santorini, before going on to Istanbul. It was bereft of tourists, and very few restaurants were open, just like tourism-based villages on the Spanish coast near us, so we got to peacefully enjoy the beautiful view from our little hotel at the edge of the volcano’s caldera and the fast disappearing wine-producing landscape on the island’s east side. By the time 2010 ended, we had spent several days traveling to Mycenae, Nafplion, Epidaurus, Delphi and Meteora, using Athens as the base. Although it has about the same population as Madrid (3 million), Athens felt more provincial, its old center in Plaka retaining the flavor of the smaller town in the Acropolis’ shadow.

Unlike Istanbul, where the physical layers of history are commingled, in Athens every fragment of a ruin within the city, however small, is isolated and identified, making me think about Victor Hugo’s archdeacon’s famous phrase: “The book will kill the edifice”, meaning that the printed word would kill architecture. Clearly, Greek ruins are an example of the opposite. Were it not for the endless printed words about Greek mythology, history and the romantic experience of ruins before the advent of mass tourism, we would not be able to summon up a resonant experience from the forlorn reconstructed column barely erect on the ground littered by smaller stones waiting to be identified. The Acropolis was an exception, not only because the masterful spatial sequence followed by the Panathenaic procession to the Parthenon can still be retraced, but also because site and building collaborate into a powerful experience where perception and knowledge are indissolubly entwined. 

Bernard Tschumi Architects

The new Acropolis Museum, which provides all the services of a modern institution, uses the dimensions of the Parthenon to form a core around which replicas of the Elgin marbles are displayed. But, whereas the Parthenon is angled on its site so that visitors immediately see both length and breadth, the museum is a structure with heavy-handed proportions and a rigidly frontal, axial composition. Then as a gesture to acknowledge the three-dimensionality of the original, the museum’s upper floor is simply cranked to correspond to the Parthenon’s siting on the Acropolis, but with no spatial or visual connection to the levels below, making the gesture awkward rather than elegant. 

The significance of place and natural landscape was reinforced at the other major archeological sites we visited, including Meteora, where six medieval monasteries continue to be occupied atop impossible rock formations of very difficult access. Some of them preserve the woven baskets used to raise people and supplies to the top, while others have modernized, using service elevator platforms to supplement the hundreds of steps carved on the rock. The monks hire staff to deal with the visitors in their monasteries, while the nuns do the dirty work themselves. Geoff was delighted to find the Archangel Michael, who causes the janissary Mehmet to have an identity crisis in his A Gift to the Sultan, depicted in one of the churches’ Byzantine frescoes, which are mostly devoted to scenes of gruesome martyrdom.

In Istanbul we were comfortably ensconced in a huge Teşvikiye apartment loaned by a dear friend. This was a good place to come back to after hours of walking in the rain and record cold weather, and to be able to imagine what if would be like to live in this extraordinary city. Geoff already had a mild flu when he presented A Gift for the Sultan to a literary circle of university alumnae. Most of them had already read the book in a pdf version Geoff had sent to the event’s organizer. It was a very pleasant and rewarding evening, with intelligent, probing questions – and a man who identified himself as a writer and translator who will try to interest his publishers in Geoff’s book. When we returned to Madrid via Athens we both had runny noses, sore throats, and happy hearts.

A mini-odissey and a Great Idea

We're flying to Athens this evening, and plan to see as much of Greece as we can between now and the 2nd of January, when we continue on to Istanbul. We're excited about this adventure: our first view of Greece (I'm sure it won't be our last), and a return to Istanbul, a grand city.

All my research into the Eastern Roman ("Byzantine") Empire in its last decades has made me especially sensitive to the complicated, many-layered relationships of Greeks and Turks, adding to my excitement about this visit. I've been trying to learn a few Greek phrases and to familiarize myself with the alphabet at least well enough to be able to sound out street signs. I hope to understand their thinking a little better, and being in the original homeland after trying to understand their "Byzantine" phase should help, before I resume thinking about the explosive implications of the Μεγάλη Ιδέα — the "Megali" or Great Idea that emerged in the 19th century, of recovering under Greek control all the lands their ancestors once held, including Constantinople and most of Anatolia.

On that "Idea", as experienced by Turks in their fierce "War of Independence" of the 1920s , I've begun reading Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar 's exquisitely written novel whose protagonist, Mümtaz, is orphaned and thereafter deeply affected by that war. If I ever return to the themes of A Gift for the Sultan, it will be to take them up in a later period, perhaps the 20th or 21st century.

We've never been in Istanbul in winter, and we see that it will be even a little colder than Madrid (it's almost one degree further north). But no matter. We have friends there, and even the loan of an apartment, and I'll be doing a reading from A Gift for the Sultan before a group of Turks who surely will catch all the subtle references in the book.

I'll tell you what I think I've learned when I get back. Until then, Happy New Year!