A woman of courage in a ravaged land — Somalia

Thanks to colleague and friend César Chelala for writing and sending this example of courage in the face of terrible violence.

The Middle East Times - International

We have to try to understand the men who would so furiously destroy life-chances for women. We must try to understand, not to forgive them but to know better how to confront them and what to do so that the next generations can be free of such rage.

Istanbul memories

A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar
Tr. by Erdağ Göknar

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This lyrical evocation of Istanbul on the eve of the second world war may help us understand this increasingly important country, Turkey, now again —as it was in the time of A Gift for the Sultan — playing a key role in relations between Christian Europe and the Muslim East and North Africa. It is experienced through eyes, ears and mind of a young man especially sensitive to the terrible conflicts of its recent past, the city's two-faced identity (looking toward Asia and toward Europe), the country's economic backwardness, the beauty of the Bosphorus and of the homes, some splendid, some ruinous that border it, the sharp class divisions and the powerful ties of family. The young man is Mümtaz, orphaned in the war against the Greeks in 1923 and now, in 1939, 27 years old. Besides the city itself and its music, especially the traditional türküs and Ottoman classical music, the chief influences on him are his much older cousin İhsan, his professor and his guardian since his early ophanhood; Nuran, a beautiful divorcée with a lovely singing voice, two years older than Mümtaz, who was his fiancée in the previous summer but now has abandoned him and left him hopelessly forlorn; and Suad, another cousin, terribly smart, cynical, and tormented. Their conflicting passions and their doubts are a gigantic, complex metaphor for Turkey itself.

The translation is elegant, though the translator has a penchant for some unusual English words ("luculent" is a favorite) and resorts often to the Turkish words in the descriptions of boating on the Bosphorus and other passages. It is a moving and ambitious book, that can be appreciated by any reader but will be most fully appreciated by those familiar with the music that Tanpınar evokes almost throughout.

Here is an example of a mahur, sung by Ahmet Kaya. Perhaps my Turkish friends can suggest other (or more) appropriate examples.

Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962) is an author we should get to know better.


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Becoming an elder

Sunday I turned 70. That means that I am now one of the elders. I do not take this responsibility lightly. You and all the other members of our tribe — the entire human race — have a right to expect more of me now, and I shall try to satisfy your expectations.

I am probably not any smarter than I was when I was 20 or 30 or 40. Maybe even less smart, in the sense of grasping new information, like, say, all the technological changes that come so fast these days. But — unless we have been really dumb all these years and actively resisting knowledge — we elders are bound to be wiser than we were. That's just the way the brain works, accumulating experience, transferring new knowledge grasped by our quick left-brain to our more meditative right brain. Elkhonon Goldberg has explained how all this happens, the physical changes in our brains that make us maybe a little less quick to grasp new information, but nevertheless able to react more quickly and surely (without all that youthful Hamlet-like doubting) because almost anything we encounter is somehow like something we have seen before.

The job of youth is to change the world. Then — in our 30s, 40s, 50s — to understand it. And now, as elders, to accept it.

But accepting — I mean seeing reality as it is, without the screen of wishful thinking — is not enough. That could just be depressing if we didn't also remember our younger selves. Our job as elders is to share what we've learned so that all of us, young, mature and elders, can change things better.

That's been my story, and the story of others I have known and admired, including some who reached elderhood long before me. Those who were in their 20s back in the 1930s, for example. We Americans who were in our 20s back in the '60s did change the world, very substantially. We broke down some fierce racial barriers in the US, we changed the gender rules, we forced our government to accelerate the end of its war in Southeast Asia, we created new art forms in all the arts. Some of the changes came so fast that we who had been pushing for them were perplexed and confused, because the terrain was changing. And some of the changes were unexpected, and not all of them were good.

I began to get an inkling that things were more complicated than I had first assumed when I was still in my 20s. Work as a community organizer in what for me was a foreign culture, the poor barrios of Caracas, Venezuela, was a bath in a different pond. When I got back to the States I started grad school in sociology, still focused on changing the world but also recognizing that I needed to work harder to understand it. I thought I could do the two things simultaneously, coupling my sociological research and courses and readings with very active participation in the antiwar and civil rights movements, trying to bring those things together.

The shift into a new phase of consciousness didn't happen all at once, but suffered some big jolts when I was in my 30s. First, the coup in Chile (September 11, 1973, when I was 32) made it clearer than ever how hard the democratic struggle was going to be. And then the rapid deflation of the anti-war movement in 1975 drove a lot of us activists back to the books and into ferocious debates over political and revolutionary theory. And a lot of it turned out to be wishful thinking. The proletariat that we had imagined didn't even exist, the capitalism we were confronting was not the caricature that had been drawn for us, the people we thought we were liberating didn't always (if ever) behave the way we had expected. 

Which didn't mean that we shouldn't try to change the world, to make it more just, to open more opportunities to more people. Just that it was going to be harder than we thought, and maybe there would never be a final, total victory, but rather the unceasing struggle to widen justice and keep injustice from encroaching.

I've learned some things, I think. And now that I am one of the elders of our tribe, it will be my honor and especially my duty not just to share knowledge already acquired, but to use my new elder skills to seek out reasonable strategies in the face of all our several crises of war, contamination, and continued injustices of all kinds.

By the way, the birthday party on Sunday was a blast. Thanks to all my good friends who participated, and all the others who couldn't be present but sent their good wishes.

(Check out my earlier blog comment on Eros and Thanatos for more about Goldberg's thesis.)

Do ebook consumers love bestsellers, or does it just look that way? – The Shatzkin Files

Another intelligent analysis of our changing lit industry by the insightful and very experienced Mike Shatzkin.

My latest book is now available both as paperback (Amazon's Createspace) and as an e-book through Kindle or Smashwords. The amazingly versatile and well-organized Smashwords makes the same text available in a whole variety of electronic formats, including the open industry format Epub, LRF for Sony Reader, and .mobi for Kindle (as well as PDF, RTF, etc.). Thus if you are a Kindle user, you can get and read my book either through the Amazon Kindle site or from Smashwords.

The Amazon and Smashwords editions are very slightly different; in the Smashwords edition, which I just uploaded, I was able to correct a silly error (miscalculated Hegira dates in the three final chapter headings) and I added a reader review by novelist Jan Alexander as a blurb. (It'll be the first thing you see if you download a free sample of the book). I set the price exactly the same, $4.99. I get 80% from Smashwords, 70% from Kindle, so both because of the correction and the price, I would be happier if Kindle users got their copies from Smashwords. But I don't think that's going to happen: Amazon has so much huger a presence on the Internet, is so much more visible, and if you've bought a Kindle reader, you're already connected to their store. Shatzkin's essay confirms that guess. Of course, if you want to read an e-book on something other than Kindle, Smashwords is the place to go.

The other thing that is clearer now from Shatzkin's analysis is that it will take a whole string of lucky breaks for a book like mine to become a big seller. The on-line sellers aren't set up to make it easy to find the unusual and unconventional works. So far I have been lucky in two ways: readers' reviews (on the Amazon site) have been wonderful, and the book is being translated for publication in Turkey.

Do ebook consumers love bestsellers, or does it just look that way? – The Shatzkin Files

Oh well. I'll just have let happen whatever happens. And meanwhile go on to write the next thing.

"Sultan" now a Smashwords e-book

A Gift for the Sultan is now available in all possible e-formats, for your Kindle, iPhone or iPod, Nook, PDF, or whatever, through Smashwords, priced at $4.99.

I've also reduced the price for Kindle through Amazon, also now $4.99. (Higher outside the U.S. due to different taxes, but $4.99 is the price I set.)

Check out the new listing at Smashwords.

Waking up the bear

All writers have to have some psychological trick to use when the going gets rough or when you just don't know how to confront the blank screen or page. For some, it can be a mood-altering substance like alcohol or opium, but that's dangerous and, from what I've seen from writers' bios, works less well the more you use it. Much better and safer is recourse to an alter ego. Jorge Luis Borges had one that he called Jorge Luis Borges, who he claimed was the one who really wrote his stuff. Me, I have a whole team to call on:

Lion I call on when I need a quick and ferocious response, especially when writing fiction; for example, in entering the consciousness of Arslanshahin (whose very name, "arslan," means "lion"), the quick and ferocious war chief in A Gift for the Sultan.

Mr. Glib is helpful when I just need a cleverer way to say not much at all, or have to summarize a complex idea tightly — as in the promotional text on the back cover of my novel.

And finally, for the really big challenges, Bear. He is harder to stir into action, but he is so big and lumbering he won't stop until the job is done. I've had to wake him up this week, because without him I could never deal with the job before me now. Too detailed and subtle for Mr. Glib, too ponderous and time-consuming for Lion. It's a serious review of a serious scholarly book, on a historical period that I don't yet understand as well as I must. As long as it was just me and Lion and Glib, I kept finding excuses to put it off, or to dance around the topic. But now that I have awakened Bear, he won't let me stop until we've found out all we need to and get the job done. (Sometimes I wish he'd just go back to sleep, but now that he's aroused there's no stopping him.)

All these characters live within me, like any good alter ego. You can read more about them here. All of us send greetings to you and your alter egos, too — you must have one or two at least, right?

Here's how Horst Bienek put the problem of the writer alone, without such an alter helper, in the last stanza of his poem about his worksite ("Der Arbeitstisch"):

In der Schreibmaschine ein weißes leeres Blatt
das mich verwundet
Ich starre darauf

(In the typewriter a blank white page
that wounds me
I stare at it)







(Bear image from Solar Navigator/Animal kingdom)

Distant disasters

Here in southern Spain, we're going on about our lives as though everything were normal. Japan is far away, and we haven't yet felt the effects of radiation, of a health disaster for millions, of the crash one of the world's most potent economies and a significant importer of our local products. We will feel all these things, though.

The convulsions in northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula are much closer, but not our problem, say the European leaders. Except for Italy, faced with the floods of refugees from Tunisia, the humanitarian consequences so far have not registered in Europe. The main concern (as Gadaffi well understands) is the price of oil, and for the leaders in the European Union a few hundred or a few thousand deaths, while lamentable, are an acceptable cost for market stability.

But the political earthquake in North Africa and the geological one in East Asia have changed the world, even if we don't know how. Gadaffi may survive, and his clients will still be eager to buy his oil, but his power must surely be weakened by this civil war. If Tunisia and Egypt can continue deepening their democratic unions, their weight will continue to push other Arab states to go beyond their timid reforms. What will happen in Japan and its neighbors and competitors in Asia we can hardly guess — but my bet is that Japan will come roaring back, because its people are so determined and so educated. But at least for a time, Chinese and South Korean manufacturers will have a competitive advantage.

And the future of nuclear energy? Up for debate.

Goodreads readers and A Gift for the Sultan

I was happy to see that 871 people participated in the drawing I set up in Goodreads for five copies of A Gift for the Sultan (paperback edition).

I've just let the five winners know that the book will be on its way to them next week, and I also want to thank the other 866 people who put the book on their wishlist. I hope that many of them do read the book (even though they didn't win a free copy). To encourage you all, I've also made it available in a Kindle e-book edition at a price that probably suits your budget.

If you haven't yet discovered Goodreads, check it out. You'll meet lots of other interested and interesting readers.

Movies in Madrid

We just spent the past week in Madrid, got back to Carboneras yesterday morning. Mostly what we did in Madrid was see movies. The Coen brothers' "True Grit" (here in Spain called "Valor de ley") was fun (very convincing acting by Bridges, Damon and the girl, Hailee Steinfeld). "Pa Negre" (Catalán for "black bread") won lots of prizes in Spain, has two excellent child actors, but the story disappointed me — the Spanish Civil War is just a pretext, the real violence centers on a dark personal secret. "Ispansi" (Russian for "Spaniards") is about the plight of a large group of Spanish children sent for their safety to the Soviet Union during the civil war and the adult Spaniards who are trying to take care of them, now all caught in the much bigger war when the Germans invade Russia. The encounters between Spaniards and Russians, their misunderstandings, and hardships of the convoy of children and adults trying to avoid German aircraft strafing and snipers and contending with cold and hunger — I was glad to be made aware of that episode.


The great thing about seeing foreign (non-Spanish-language) movies in Madrid is that we can see them in "versión original", that is, not dubbed into Spanish (almost impossible in smaller Spanish cities). Besides Pa negre (where we could listen to the actors in Catalán while we followed the meaning in the subtitles, we also watched a sublte, quiet, moving story in Turkish, Bal ("Miel" in Spanish, "Honey" in English), winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin and the third of a series of films about a character named Yusuf at various stages of his life; Bal shows him at about age 7, in a remote, wooded, mountainous area of northeastern Turkey where his father makes his precarious living by hanging bee hives and gathering honey from the rare black bees that live high in the tree tops. Sweet, sad, charming, with a wonderfully expressive child actor.

We also saw a curious, low-budget film in Catalán (with subtitles in Castellano) that interested me because I had read the collection of short stories it was based on: Mil cretins, by Quim Monzó. It was screened in the aptly named Pequeño Cine Estudio in Madrid (truly pequeño — at most 50 seats), where Susana and I were the only viewers on a Friday afternoon. It's a mix of pointed vignettes, clever and ironic skits and dumb jokes. But if you have read the book, you will surely enjoy seeing how some of your favorite stories are played out on the screen. My favorites include "Un corte" ("A Cut") and, best of all, "La alabanza" ("The Blurb"),  about what happens when an older, established writer drops a mildly favorable remark about a younger, aggressively ambitious new writer. One story not filmed, but that I strongly recommend you read (the collection should appear sooner or later in English) is "Miro por la ventana" ("I am looking out my window") — where the narrator's refusal to tell us what is bothering him ends up making it extremely obvious what is bothering him. Look for other works by Quim Monzó.

Guest post: From Animal Farm to Tahrir Square

Author Dirk van Nouhuys  fears that Orwell's 1944 allegory may foreshadow events in North Africa.

It is by chance that I happened on the fine recording of Animal Farm by Bill Nighy on BBC audio at this time. The reading includes a rousing choral rendition of the animal’s anthem, Beasts of England. It is a piquant time to reconsider Animal Farm. So many revolutions seeking democracy and/or social justice are sweeping the Middle East. Animal Farm, an allegory written out of Orwell’s righteous bitterness over what had developed from the Russian revolution, reminds us of how many such hopeful revolutions have accomplished regime change but failed to deliver democracy or social justice. Can we not count the ones that failed on our fingers and toes, whereas for the ones that succeed hands and feet will do?

 I can’t exactly remember when I first read Animal Farm, but at the time I was aware of the allegorical level, but did not focus on it. It seemed a moving animal fable made richer by its social implications.  I remember reading it later with a key and admiring how exquisitely he plotted in the politics of Russia -: this pig is Trotsky, that horse is the working class, etc., though the correspondence is not exact, for instance no pig corresponds to Lenin. Later yet I read it to my children, which they liked, and again was most sensitive to the animal fable. The prose is always Orwell’s decent writing that is clear, a little flat, and does not call attention to itself. The animals are figures, not characters. In every reading, what stuck me most was the dedication and sincerity of most of the animals. So uncritical, so increasingly wrapped in lies by the pigs. Hearing it now I confess it seemed somewhat forced and mechanical, the faults for me of allegory. But it was moving because of my fear and hope for the people of the Middle East.

 [Editor: The Nighy recording may be unavailable. But check out this amusing video of Animal Farm by Scott Pettersen.]