literature « Ramblings of a Hopeless Khowaga

Tag: ‘literature’

Overheard

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

I’m going to try to be a better blogger–last month was just flipping insane. I was trying to come up with a deep topic to write about, but I think I’ll start small by relating two conversations I had or overheard today, much in the vein of my new favorite guilty pleasure Texts From Last Night (aka: “I’m so glad I’m not that young and stupid anymore.”)

Conversation #1: in the kitchen at work. I am refilling my water glass from the cooler, and one of the grad students has sauntered in and is far more chatty than normal.

Me: “Well, you’re certainly in a good mood today.”
Him: “I just got laid.”
Me: “Oh?”
Him: “Yeah, at the gym.”
Me: “Okay, then.” <leaves>

It’s not that we’re strangers, or even that I don’t know that this particular student is gay (and a bit of a slut). However, he’s more of a person that I say hi to in the hallway (usually without breaking stride) and I don’t feel that our relationship is at a level where these things should be shared.

Also, I’ve seen what the floor in the gym locker room looks like, and I can only hope he has a really strong antibacterial soap. Possibly anti-microbial. In fact, I’m kind of hoping he didn’t touch anything in the kitchen.

Conversation #2: in the hallway. There are a number of students sitting outside of Professor K’s office because it’s getting close to finals time, and they clearly don’t have a firm grasp on whatever post-Zionist Israeli literature they’re supposed to be writing about in their term papers.

Student 1: “I think I’m going to take up smoking again.”

Seems to me the only appropriate thing to do with that comment is to blog about it.

Tags: art, bla, blog, fes, gay, ice, israel, literature, me, men, smoking, work, writing
Posted in Home, Just. Plain. Weird. | 2 Comments »

Borricua

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

“Horse,” Ray said.

We were driving down an expressway in the middle of San Juan on our last afternoon in Puerto Rico. Instinctively, I slammed on the brakes.

“Why are you stopping?” Ray asked.

“You said ‘horse,’” I said. “I thought you meant there was a horse in the road.”
“When have we ever seen … never mind, I withdraw the question.”
Frankly, by that point, a horse in the middle of an expressway in downtown San Juan wouldn’t have surprised me at all. Not one bit.

I went to Puerto Rico for a conference, held at one of the glitzy five star hotels near San Juan Aiport in the Isla Verde area. Puerto Rico is, officially, part of the United States of America. It’s a Free Associated State (Estado Libre Asociado), which is emblazoned on a number of license plates and bumper stickers.

Culturally, however, Puerto Rico is quite distinct from the US. To begin with, the primary language on the island is a weird language that kind of sounds like Spanish, except that they use interesting words for things that I’ve never heard before. A naranja (orange) is a china. A frijol (bean) is either a gandule or an habichuela. The letter j is pronounced as … well, as a kind of “zh” sound instead of the usual “h”, so the stickers on all of the doors say “hale” (pull) instead of “jale.” Anything good is “chevere.” (On the flip side, batteries are baterías, instead of pastillas, which is what they call them in Spain. Pastilla also means “pill.” I’m a little uncomfortable with the analogy.)

I’d heard that Caribbean Spanish is kind of the worst-case scenario for speakers of Spanish as a second language — now I know why.

I had a rental car. This may have been a mistake–it’s hard to tell. Taxis are expensive (one could literally walk from the airport to our hotel in about 30 minutes–a taxi is $12, flat rate), but free parking is both risky and hard to find.

The road signs are made to the American standard, but they’re all in Spanish. Given that Spanish is the primary language of the island, that’s understandable. What’s less understandable is this: speed limit signs are in miles per hour. (Apparently just as a suggestion: I tried to slow down in a school zone once and … well, when the sign says “15 mph,” it apparently really means “40 mph.”) However, distances are measured in kilometers, and gas is sold by the liter. I gave up trying to figure that one out, and am much happier for it.

Traffic lights are hard to figure out, so when the light turns green, all of the drivers waiting for the light start honking immediately, to helpfully let the driver in front of them know that the light has turned green in case he’s fallen asleep or decided to get out and walk or something.

Cars in Puerto Rico are equipped with an archane lighting system. There are four lights on the car: one at each corner. They are connected to a lever on the steering column. When you push the lever up, the two lights on the right side of the car light up and blink. When you push the lever down, the two lights on the left side of the car light up and blink. Archaeologists are uncertain as to the original purpose of this lighting system. Modern drivers simply ignore them.

The night we arrived, I woke up with a splitting headache at about 2 am. It was the kind of headache that has physical presence: it was a third body in bed with us. I tried to ignore it for a bit, but when I heard Ray stirring a little later on, I asked it he’d brought any aspirin with him.

“No,” he mumbled. “Go ask at the front desk.”
I threw on shorts and a T-shirt (and no contacts, having left my glasses at home, naturally), and trudged down to the empty lobby where “The Girl From Ipanema” was clinking over the speaker system (of course it was “The Girl From Ipanema.” Why wouldn’t it be?).

The concierge had no medical supplies, but I was helpfully informed of the existence of a Walgreens “5 minutes away.”

I’m supposed to walk to Walgreens at 3 am along a deserted street in San Juan? Does this sound like a good idea to anyone?

I went up to the room and tried to go to sleep, but now my head was throbbing on a level that had me quesitoning whether I could remove my eyes temporarily to reduce the pressure. Ray finally insisted that we go to Walgreens, and so, at 3:30 in the morning on our first night in San Juan, we strolled up the street filled only by us, the frequent passing by of the tourist police, and the bouncers at the clubs that never close.

Back to the horse comment.

On Friday morning, the day after my marathon four presentations at the conference, Ray and I decided to take a cue from the Lonely Planet guide I’d brought with me and drive to Loíza, the next town over. According to LP, one could not wander around the town square without stumbling over makers of the vejigante masks. We have a small collection of masks that we’ve bought on trips, and we’re always looking to add, so we got in the car and drove along the rambling road to Loíza.

There were, in fact, several horses along the way–although, to be fair, none of them were actually in the road.

To make a story that seemed longer at the time rather short, LP was an epic fail. The town square was not where the guidebook said it was. There were no mask makers. We found a (singular) establishment — Centro de Cultura, Inc. — that had some (pretty ugly) examples on display, but when I asked the nice lady if one could find the artisans, she shrugged. “Maybe on Sunday,” she said.

At some point, while driving around, we noticed that some of the expressways through San Juan were labeled with little icons. There was one of a tree, one of a parrot, one of a coquí frog, and one of a horse. We never found out what the icons stood for — they weren’t in the copious amounts of tourist literature in the hotel room (directed at the sort of tourist for whom money is not an issue, natch), nor was there ever any explanation in writing on the signs themselves. At one point–possibly on the drive back from the Bacardi distillery in Caguas–we got giddy and started calling out “parrot!” “Tree!”

And, the next afternoon, Ray called out, “Horse!”

As I said, by that time … the presence of a real horse in the road would have failed to surprise me on every level.

Would I go back to Puerto Rico? Sure. Just not sure I’d plan to drive there again …

Tags: art, bla, cars, china, class, conference, driving, Friday, Home, horses, hotels, ice, khowaga, literature, me, media, men, money, Photos, police, press, Ray, SHE, spain, taxis, tea, traffic, weird, words, writing
Posted in Travel | 5 Comments »

Rest and Relaxation

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

My wanderings around the state have come to an end, and not a moment too soon. I do enjoy the traveling, but there comes a point when you’re in yet another hotel chain that looks like any other hotel chain (LaQuinta? Fairfield Inn? Hampton Inn? Is there a difference?) when you realize that you simply can’t face one more morning with Faux News blaring in the background over another styrofoam plate and plastic fork breakfast featuring KAW-FEE brand coffee bean product and individually wrapped English Muffins (which are neither English nor muffins. Discuss).

There is the occasional quirkiness to be had. Despite the fact that San Angelo–which only two years ago was proudly putting in all of its tourist literature that it had the highest murder rate west of the Mississippi between 1850 and 1870–is now trying to bill itself as the culture capitol of the Panhandle Plains (a title that is disputed by … well, no one), the town is relatively uninteresting. A tour around town on a Sunday evening revealed a frightening number of businesses with Christian names (such as: Bible Automotive. I’m not kidding.) and a dearth of business actually open to the public. After eating Mexican food from a restaurant that clearly used to be a service station (the food wasn’t bad — Bobby Flay had apparently been there at one point), Natalie and I wound up at Baskin Robbins … along with half the town because, as I may have mentioned, there was nothing else open at 7 pm on a Sunday.

Then there was the unexplained psychedelic van (above) that I stopped to photograph on the way out of town. And this place:

This place practices false advertising: there are no man’s for sale in the man’s shop.

My most recent trip ended a scant three hours ago with a flourish and flutter (literally: the woman sitting next to me apparently cramming for a medical school exam who had refused four requests to put away her book and notes for landing seemed surprised when it all flew up the aisle upon touchdown. That’ll learn her).

We were over in El Paso, the one place in the state that, it is regularly agreed upon, we must fly to. I’ve heard rumors that you can drive it in under eight hours now, with the speed limit on I-10 through west Texas now legally at 80 miles per hour, but I’m more happy to reduce it to an hour and twenty minutes on Southwest Airlines.

I have always liked going to El Paso — in fact, I’ve enjoyed all of our trips to the border area, both in West Texas and down in the Rio Grande Valley (for the uninitiated among you, even though technically El Paso is on the Rio Grande, the term “Rio Grande Valley” seems to only apply to the part between Laredo and Brownsville, on the Gulf of Mexico). We usually get groups that are really energetic and happy to learn, and this was the case with our session yesterday. One of the guys was so enthusiastic that he engaged me in conversation in the men’s room. I am not a particular fan of the conversation-while-I-pee. If you see me in the men’s room, please don’t strike up a conversation until I’m at the sink, OK?

It’s also saying something about the sort of people that Natalie and I are that we kept coming back to the five or so really negative evaluations we collected at the end of the day. There were 68 people in the room–our largest audience ever. The vibe was overwhelmingly positive, but we still kept coming back to those negative ones. I think somehow we just need to validate that the criticism isn’t valid–we’ve gotten unenthusiastic comments before, but this time the people who didn’t like us really didn’t like us, and they weren’t shy about expressing it.

At the end of the day, though, this last trip was a good note to end the late summer training sessions on. We had a new audience, and they seemed to be happy with what we were doing. The people who invited us were effervescent. And then it was off to have a nice drink in the historic Dome Bar in the lobby of our hotel, the historic Hotel Paso del Norte.

And now … I’m home. Next up is a trip to a conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico toward the end of September. Technically it’s work. I just wonder if I can put sunscreen on my expense account

Tags: advertising, airlines, art, Bible, bla, coffee, conference, eating, english, flu, food, Home, ice, khowaga, literature, me, men, mexico, murder, Natalie, news, Photos, press, rain, summer, texas, Travel, work
Posted in Home | 3 Comments »

12 of 12: July 2009 / ١٢ من ١٢: يوليو ٢٠٠٩

Sunday, July 12th, 2009

It’s time once again for 12 of 12! This 12th of July, I’m in Cairo, capitol of the Arab Republic of Egypt. I’ve been out of the US since June 29 — I was in Turkey for 10 days and flew down here on the 9th. (For the record, and if you’re interested, there are photos from Turkey here).

I’ve been in Cairo many times — I studied here for a year in university — and it’s one of my favorite places in the world. This is my first visit since 2006. I’m here on a combined business / vacation trip. Although today is a business day (the work week in Egypt is Sunday through Thursday, since Friday is the communal day of prayer in Islam), I didn’t have any meetings scheduled, so it was kind of a fun day.

7:52 am: Skyping with Ray

I’ve been waking up kind of early since I got here, and I caught Ray up late at home so we talked by Skype for a bit. Mocha was in the picture for a bit, but she never quite looked at the camera. Sorry, Mocha fans, there are no photos of her this month

10:00 am: Errands

After pretending to go back to sleep for a bit, I finally wandered out around 10 o’clock to go pick up my laundry from the place down the street. The laundry is in the same complex as the supermarket, so I stopped in to pick up some water and soda first, and then carried it all back to the hotel. It was warm in Cairo today (102 F/41 C), and unusually humid. This is, lamentably, still cooler than it is at home in Austin. Tomorrow it’s going to be cooler – by Tuesday, it’ll be 91 (36).

1:56 pm: Christian Cairo

I met up today with Tarek, our junior professor in modern Arabic literature, and we went down to the so-called Christian quarter. It’s in the oldest part of the city, which actually predates the city of Cairo by 300 years. A little-known fact: around 10 per cent of Egypt’s population is Christian, belonging to the native Coptic Church. In an area of town called Mar Girgis, there are a number of churches and one of the few synagogues remaining in the country, all clumped together.

Tarek and I first hit the Coptic Museum (no photography allowed), and then wandered through the rest of the complex. Although it’s a tourist draw, most of the people there were Egyptian, which was OK by us.

2:11 pm: St George’s Cemetery

That’s Tarek taking a photo of the mausoleums in the Greek Orthodox cemetery behind St. George’s Church. There are a bunch of mausoleums and family plots back there. I was a bit surprised to find the tomb of someone with the same name as my grandfather — how many Neoklis Triantafillides’s could there have been in the Greek speaking world?

2:16 pm: Water from the Holy Well

Although it’s not spelled out in the Gospels, the Egyptians have an entire itinerary set out for exactly where the Holy Family (Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus) traveled during their flight into Egypt. In the cemetery is a crypt built over a cave where the Holy Family is said to have sheltered and drawn water from the well above. As Mary (as Meryem) and Jesus (as ‘Issa) are both revered as prophets in Islam as well as Christianity, you can see adherents of both faiths making pilgrimages at these shrines.

2:51 pm: … you crazy, adorable fool

The oldest known synagogue in Egypt still in existence, the Ben Ezra Synagogue, is in Mar Girgis as well, although, once again, no photography allowed. Tarek and I got the royal tour, and were shown to the ‘Ayn Musa, the spring of Moses, located behind the synagogue. This is said to be the spring where Pharaoh’s daughter drew the baby Moses from the Nile (the synagogue is said to be on the place where Moses pleaded with God to stop the plagues inflicted on Egypt).

3:12 pm: Off to Lunch

OK, by this point in the day it was really hot in the sun and time for lunch. Tarek and I had made plans to meet up with some students who are here for the summer, so we set back off for the area where I’m staying and several of the students live.

I am routinely asked by people if I feel unsafe traveling to Egypt as often as I do. The answer is no – I have been coming to Egypt for 15 years, and I’ve never hidden the fact that I’m American, nor that I’m Christian (I don’t mention the part about being gay, however — that’s one barrier I’m not willing to cross here). I’ve never been greeted with anything but kindness by people here.

The one place I do feel unsafe is on the road, however. Egyptian taxis are built like tanks, but it doesn’t stop me from flinching often when riding in them. Cairo is horrifically congested (by most unofficial estimates there are 20 million people in the Cairo/Giza/Shubra el Khayma metropolitan area) and it can take ages to get anywhere. The Metro, wisely, is more for local use than tourists (it’s also not air conditioned), so we decided to cab it.

3:44 pm: Decisions, Decisions

We met up for lunch at Abu Sid, a local upscale Egyptian restaurant. You can get just about everything they serve on the street, but without the nasty side effects afterwards

5:38 pm: Towel Art

Back on my own, I headed back to the hotel — a small, unassuming place run by a lady who governs with an iron fist. I had forgotten that I’d hung my socks on the towel rack to dry after handwashing them in the sink this morning. Hence, the guy who cleans the rooms at the hotel got a little creative with towel placement and left me a duck!

8:05 pm: Sunset

In my food coma haze, I checked e-mail quickly and read while half watching episodes of the less successful Law and Order franchises (Trial by Jury; Trial by Fire; and Parks and Recreational Petty Crimes Division). I lose track of the time until I hear the call to prayer wafting in through the window, meaning that it’s sunset.

8:45 pm: Evening Traffic in Zamalek

I wander out, mostly from sheer boredom, and it’s traffic as usual in Zamalek on a weeknight. Cars and pedestrians going every which way.

10:06 pm: Dessert before dinner

One of the students calls to see what I’m up to and invite me to tag along to dinner (they eat late here). I’m not that hungry, but first we stop in at a local bakery/sweet shop that I’ve frequented since my student days. They churn out really nice baked goods–baklava, basboussa, kinaffeh–and ice cream as well.

For the record, we didn’t actually eat this stuff until after dinner (the shop was on the way to where we were going). That would have been totally crazy … *innocent look*

And that was my 12. How was yours?

Tags: 12 of 12, art, Austin, baklava, bla, blog, boredom, cairo, cars, cat, christianity, churches, coptic, crime, decisions, dinner, egypt, family, fes, food, Friday, fun, gay, god, greek, Home, ice, islam, khowaga, law, literature, me, meetings, men, Mocha, nile, photography, Photos, Ray, SHE, stuff, summer, taxis, traffic, Travel, turkey, university, vacation, Will, work, zamalek
Posted in 12 of 12 | 13 Comments »

My (lacking) Sense of Snow

Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

And now we come to the part of my blog where I review a book I’ve recently read.

I finished reading Orhan Pamuk’s Snow some time ago, and I’ve been putting off writing my review of it because I didn’t have much to say, and somehow I figured that was because I hadn’t finished absorbing it yet. I’m not sure I’ve finished absorbing it yet, but I have at least come up with some things to say.

Orhan Pamuk recently won the Nobel Prize in literature, for being a bigger-than-life contributor to the world of the literati, and for putting Turkey on the map, culturalistically speaking. (I know that’s not a real word). His books bridge east and west, pulling together the various cultural forces that have combined to create the modern Turkish nation, etc etc etc.

The problem is that I also have yet to read a single book of his that hasn’t made my eyelids extremely heavy. His prose varies from lyrical to convoluted to turgid, and he is one of the few writers that I have ever read that can make sex scenes boring. Granted, I’m not really into the boy-on-girl action and tend to skip over it anyway, but comparisons to worshiping at temples are a dime a dozen, and the last thing we need is a discussion of sacred temple architecture.

The last book of his that I read – My Name is Red (Benim Adım Karmızı) was reminiscent of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (another book that cured me of insomnia). I did enjoy it – it was like visiting a carnival. Every chapter of My Name is Red is told from the point of view of another person. Also, there’s a murder that must be solved, and it sort of pushes the plot forward.

Everything that I didn’t “get” about Snow can best be summed up as follows. The protagonist (I almost called him a “hero,” but that would be awfully inaccurate) is named Ka. The title of the book in Turkish is Kar. The book takes place in a town called Kars. There’s a link between these three, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it is. The obvious one would be that Kars cannot exist without Kar, and neither one can exist without Ka. Except for the fact that this isn’t a true statement. Ka doesn’t live in Kars, and his visit there (the plot of the book) can best be described as a near disaster. Also, snow melts. However, it’s the snow that’s keeping Ka in Kars for the duration, but then it would have made more sense to name the protagonist Karsı or something … you get my point.

The plot of the book can best be described as this: Ka, a Turkish writer who lives in Germany, arrives in Kars in the midst of a snowstorm. He has ostensibly come to Kars to write for a European newspaper about the recent suicides of several young girls who all wear headscarves (more about that in a minute), but he has actually come to find an ex-girlfriend, İpek, who has recently divorced her husband who happens to be one of the local Islamist politicians.

The girls have been killing themselves rather than remove their headscarves, despite the fact that the local politicians have decided to bar girls from wearing headscarves to school. Aha! You think. Here’s a plot ripped from today’s headlines: Turkey in the grips of Islamism versus westernization, the girls are a metaphor for the struggle, etc., etc.

And you might have a point, right up until the entire town gets locked into an auditorium and shot at, which seems to happen with frightening regularity in Kars. Also, there’s a subplot involving İpek’s sister, Kadife, and her Islamist underground cult figure leader boyfriend, Blue (Mavı in Turkish – there’s no wordplay going on there. I checked.) who may or may not be guilty of stuff. Then there’s the local militia leader, who wants to be a great actor, and his wife/girlfriend, who actually was a great actress for about 20 minutes three decades ago and won’t let anyone forget it.

Weaving in and out of all of this is Ka, who is a poet of great acclaim (or so we are told), who writes all of these poems with names like “To Be Shot and Killed” that we are told are great and epic, but we never get to read any of them. (On occasion, the poems are described to us, which I find extremely irritating.) The problem with Ka … other than his name – as anyone who has read a Stephen King novel published since the mid-1980s knows, King over uses a concept called ka as a rather annoying plot device in all of his books, and finding a character with the same name doesn’t make me want to like him on principle. The problem with Ka is not that he’s not likable — it’s just that after 300 pages, you realize you don’t know a damned thing about him. He’s a robot. He has no emotions. He has some attachment to İpek. He loves her (or so we’re told). He wants to be with her (or so we’re told).

Tragedy swarms through the village. Girls die. People die. Children die. But Ka is a stranger, and seems to feel that none of this affects him because he can leave someday. And he can. And that’s the problem — he’s so detached, that I wanted to detach myself from his story by putting the book down and walking away from him. In the end, Ka seems to be as cold, blank and featureless as the snow.

Oh. Wait. I just figured it out.

Tags: Books, literature, orhan-pamuk, snow-(kar), turkey
Posted in Books | Comments Off

Tag: ‘literature’

Overheard

Borricua

Rest and Relaxation

12 of 12: July 2009 / ١٢ من ١٢: يوليو ٢٠٠٩

My (lacking) Sense of Snow

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