On Rooftops and in the Bazaar

A brief series on my recent Mediterranean trip. Part four: Istanbul.

We were on the top floor of a restaurant on Istiklal, a bustling pedestrian thoroughfare in the Beyoglu neighborhood of Istanbul. It was our fourth and final stop of an afternoon eating marathon, and our harried but very professional waiter dropped a plate of baklava and other Turkish desserts in front of us. All of the other tables in the room were full and every diner had food in front of them, but most were not eating. They sat, quietly talking, some with napkins over there plates, waiting for sundown.

Though we had heard the muezzins and the call to prayer in Bitez, it hadn't sunk in that it was in fact the most important month of the Muslim year, Ramadan (or as the Turkish called it, Ramasan). When we arrived in Istanbul, however, the signs were clear. During the day, restaurants were sparsely populated but as the afternoon wore on, tables would be adorned with bowls of olive and cheese so that there would be food on hand when Maghrib, the fourth prayer of the day, was called at sunset, the signal to all that they could break their fast. Strings of lights were strung between the spindly minarets of the city's many mosques.

Throughout the day, the Ramadan fast hung over everything. "Forgive me, I am fasting," said a man, sitting outside his tourguide office near Topkapi Palace, when he got befuddled trying to give us directions. Emre told us to be discrete with our bottled water and snacks, which made sense to me. If I hadn't eaten or drank all day, I might get a little miffed at seeing tourists walking around swigging drinks and noshing on kebab.

In fact, though, Emre said that Ramadan in Istanbul today is much different from what we might have encountered only 15 years ago. Even though reminders of Ramadan were present everywhere (whereas they had been nonexistant at the seaside), there were still many, many people in restaurants during the day, secular Turks, expats, and visitors among them. However, in earlier times, we non-participants in Ramadan might not have been as easily accommodated.

But then Istanbul, it seemed to us, is a true cultural crossroads, layered with history, and a central city over the millennia for Romans, Byzantines, Ottmans, and Turks. It is also, very visibly, a thoroughfare. The Bosporus, the key waterway that connects Europe and the Mediterranean to the Black Sea and Asia, is in many ways the city's focal point. It is at every hour of the day plied with ships numerous in size and function, from ferries to fishing boats to oil tankers and container ships to cruise ships large enough to be floating cities. Emre told us that anyone who grows up on the banks of the Bosporus becomes familiar enough with the nautical traffic to be able to see a ship and know its tonnage.

In Istanbul, we took our last boat trip of many on our two week vacation, a ferry ride from beside the Galata Bridge up the Bosporus to Bebek, the neighborhood were Emre grew up. Istanbul has subways, buses, trolleys, and trains all interconnected, but it also makes ample use of ferries, with boats leaving from the busier stops seemingly every 20 minutes or so and laden with commuters destined for parts of the sprawling city.

And Istanbul is huge, over 11 million in the city proper, according to Wikipedia. Like in Athens, pedestrians do not have the right of way, and just because you are on a sidewalk doesn't mean a motorcycle or car won't come driving down it. Unlike Athens, however, Istanbul is thronged with people. Istiklal, the big pedestrian (reminder: cars drive on it) boulevard that was near our hotel, was packed with people for its half mile length. Wikipedia claims it can be visited by nearly 3 million people on a weekend day. On its south end, side streets are lined with sidewalk cafes that in the evenings would reach peak capacity. The plentiful waiters, bearing food and raki, darted between the tables. Vendors (including the mussel sellers we had seen at the beach) passed by, and vehicles of all shapes and sizes, all the way up to large trucks, squeezed through the narrow thoroughfares between the endless rows of tables. A simple dinner in Istanbul can border on a circus to one more accustomed to an American dining experience that is sedate by comparison.

Interestingly, our dinner on the sidestreet off Istiklal was one of the few we ate in Istanbul with both feet planted firmly on the ground. Istanbul is not unlike San Francisco in that it is very hilly and offers plentiful views of crowded waterways. The minarets, however, make it easy to differentiate the two. Istanbul's restaurateurs have made ample use of the views the city offers -- a fairly recent trend according to Emre -- particularly in the Buyoglu district across the Golden Horn from Sultanahmet, the oldest part of Istanbul. Nearly every meal we ate was preceded by a long climb up five or six flights of stairs or a ride in a slow, cramped elevator. But we were rewarded with spectacular views.

The food was quite impressive as well. We ate fish, cooked whole, and
sliced into cylindrical pieces, on a rooftop in the shadow of the second bridge across the Bosporus. We ate several varieties of kebab on another roof overlooking the Yeni Mosque and the Golden Horn. We ate monti, a Turkish homestyle favorite that resembles tiny ravioli and is served in a yogurt sauce, on the top floor of a building on a bend of Istiklal Avenue. From the window you could see the masses of people five stories below making their way down the street. And this leaves out our frequent stops for tea, or an Efes, or a gin strike (gin, lemon, cucumber), nearly all of which found us on a rooftop, looking over other rooftops, the horizon punctuated by minarets. With an aphonic buzz, the call to prayer would commence, and the wailing, intermingled with car horns, was our soundtrack of Istanbul.

We visited a pair of mosques in Istanbul, the world famous Blue Mosque and the Bayezid II Mosque near the bazaar. As we had been instructed, Lauren and Heather brought scarfs to wear over their heads, and Roland and I wore long pants. We entered the enclosed courtyard of the Blue Mosque in the midst of a cloudburst (the only rain we saw during our two weeks on the Mediterranean), and huddled under the overhang in
front of the mosque's dome. We were accompanied by easily 100 European tourists, the combined mass of several tour groups mingling together.

Having been coached beforehand by Emre and his parents on how not to offend, it was disheartening to see that our fellow tourists had clearly not heeded any such advice. The men and women all looked fresh off of cruise ships (which was likely the case), and the attendants at the mosque handed out large blue swathes of cloth to use as extra cover. In many cases it took more than one, so much skin they were showing. Once inside there was much jostling and posing for photographs as well as a steady murmur of inane tourist chatter. On the other side of a railing were a handful of men in poses of supplication.

Blocking out the tourists, however, the Blue Mosque was remarkable. The building is about 400 years old, but having been in constant use and frequently restored over that time, it looks impeccable and almost new inside. The Bayezid II mosque near the bazaar has a quieter feel. It is frequented by the workers in the bazaar next door. The mid-afternoon sun filtered in and there were a few men in the space having a moment before heading back to the bazaar. Behind a screen near the back was a woman praying.

The Hagia Sophia, meanwhile, has been given over almost entirely to tourism, and in a way I am grateful because we visitors had the run of the place. The Hagia Sophia is perhaps most spectacular in the scale of its interior space, which is so massive -- about 15 stories -- as to challenge the brain's ability to fathom it. As it happens, the central dome of the Hagia Sophia is currently occupied by scaffolding, but far from a blemish on the experience, it offered some scale by which the eye could judge the dome's height.

In Istabul, history is palpable in the architecture all around you, and that's certainly true in the Hagia Sophia. The bulk of the building was constructed in the early sixth century and it bears many signs of age. On the mezzanine level, reached by walking up a stone ramp that winds back and forth a half dozen times or so, the marble floors have settled into curves and are worn with age and webbed with cracks. The intricate mosaics have been bitten away by time, though what remains is ample suggestion of the Hagia Sophia's former splendor. The same is true of gold leafed walls and ceilings. Contrasting with the decadence of the building's original purpose as a Byzantine church are somewhat more austere decorations that date to the Ottoman Turk's conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and after. The Turks restored the building, added minarets and other of the
architectural elements of mosques, as well as Islamic caligraphy.

More recently, massive disks were hung on the Hagia Sophia's columns bearing the names of Muhammed and other key figures in Islam.

Though spectacular, the Hagia Sophia isn't even the best that Istanbul has to offer. That distinction would have to go the city's famed bazaar, a labyrinth of shops that constitute a city within a city. Emre worked with his father and grandfather in a gold shop there
growing up, and so he was once again an indispensable guide, using his connections to find what we were looking for.

The main attraction of the day we spent at the bazaar was the carpets. We hadn't had any intention of buying one, but realizing this might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, we quickly decided to go for it. We went to a shop owned by Alender, a friend of Emre's, where we were offered tea, which we drank sitting around a small table.

Alender showed us a few carpets to get things started. Of the ones we liked, he asked, "More like this?" and with that sent his assistant off to there warehouse just outside the bazaar. Minutes later the
assistant returned, weighed down by a stack of carpets on his back, and flung them out one by one, as Lauren and I separated them into our "yes" or "no" piles. He would point to one we liked. "More like this?"

All the while, Alender kept us entertained with steady salesman's
banter. When Lauren and I and our fellow shoppers Heather and Roland were all wowed by a particular carpet, Alender said, "Oh, that one's not available, we just sold it last week" with a grin, before letting us in on the salesman's trick for trying to inspire a bidding war. In the midst of all this, Lauren mentioned that her
watch battery had gone dead. No problem. Alender, the shop owner, sent his helper to a jeweler elsewhere in the bazaar. Thirty minutes later she had the watch back, good as new.

Eventually, after a few hours, several cups of tea, and hundreds of
carpets, Lauren and I had narrowed it down to three finalists. Alender and the rest of our group exited the little shop so that we could discuss. It ended up not being a very difficult decision. We were enamored with a deep red, carpet bearing a vaguely tribal pattern and floral accents, fringed with a bluish thread rather than the more typical white. Alender and his assistant, ever resourceful, managed to pack up the carpet into a surprisingly small bag so that we might avoid paying a hefty shipping charge. After two weeks with our two backpacks, we suddenly had a third piece of luggage.

Post Script
Ahead of this trip, both Lauren and I had been overtaken by an intense wanderlust. We have both traveled, but not very much and the parts of the world we have seen seem dwarfed by the parts that we haven't. We had hashed out plans for many potential trips over the last four years
or so, but they were too easily swept away by other obligations, not to mention a lack of funds, and the gnawing wanderlust grew.

Just this week we were reminiscing about our trip to Turkey and Greece again, and we both commented on how that feeling of wanderlust is gone, sated by our travels. I expect it will return. We have plenty to remind us of this trip -- our carpet, hundreds of photos, these journal entries, and the shared stories of our traveling companions -- but I can already see how they will soon become not just reminders of our last journey, but exhortations to go on another one. Once that happens, it will be time to be off again.

See Also: Part 1, 2, 3

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Nobel Prize for Literature 2008... What a Joke!

Sure, sure... I've heard all about it. It's all over the Internet about how one of the main Nobel Prize for Literature judges called Americans "too insular, too concerned with their media trends" to produce any good literature. "Ignorant, vernacular..." I mean, he called us everything from here to Sunday. It's no surprise that the Nobel Prize has become a massive Geo-Political game. That's no secret. But come on.... imagine that, an American winning the Nobel for Literature? Not with our unpopular foreign policies and our military endeavours, a cowboy for a president and a hockey mom for vp candidate. My God, am I the only one seeing the hypocrisy here?

Go figure. I still have TWO horses in the race... 1) Paul Auster and 2) Haruki Murakami. Yes, yes... I am aware that one of them is American.

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Alligator Baby - Munsch - Book Review

Alligator Baby
by Robert Munsch
Illustrated by Michael Martchecnko
Scholastic 1997
The Alligator Baby

When Kristen's mother comes home from the hospital with a new baby, the mother asks Kristen if she wants to see her new baby brother.
Oh yes, said Kristen.


Kristen lifted up the bottom of the blanket, saw a green tail.
Thats not a people tail she said.
Kristen lifted up the middle of the blanket, saw a green claw.
Thats not a people claw she said.
Kristen lifted up the top of the blanket, saw a green face with lots of teeth.
Thats not a people face. Thats not my baby brother.
Now Kristen, said her mother. Don't be jealous.

The baby reached up and bit Kristen's mother on the nose. Then the baby reached up and bit Kristen's father on the nose.
That's not a people baby. That's an alligator baby, said Kristen.
Goodness said her mother. We've got the wrong baby.

So Kristen put the alligator baby in the fish tank and the parents went to the zoo to find their baby. They came back with a new baby.

Kristen lifts up the bottom, the middle and the top of the blanket to discover a seal baby. The seal baby gets dumped in the bathtub and the parents head for the zoo to find their baby.

When they come back, Kristen lifts up the bottom, the middle and the top of the blanket only to find a gorilla baby. Which is soon hanging from the chandelier.

This time Kristen says she will go and find the baby.

Kristen hops on her bike and pedals to the zoo. She eventually finds her baby brother in the gorilla cage with a large mommy gorilla. The mommy gorilla refuses to give the baby back. Until the baby reaches up and bites the mommy gorilla on the nose. Then the gorilla gives the baby to Kristen.

Kristen rides home with her new baby brother. The mommies of the alligator, the seal and the gorilla babies follow her home and break into the house to get their babies back.

And everything is ok...until Kristen's mom has twins.

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Rose-coloured Reviews *Nellcott Is My Darling*

Golda Fried's first novel, Nellcott is My Darling is the story of shy, self-absorbed teenager who moves from Ontario to Montreal to study arts at McGill and live in residence. Everything about life and school d in Montreal simultaneously alarms and beguiles her, and every trip to the film society or the cafeteria is both anxiety-provoking and an adventure.

*Nellcott* is yet another book that I can't really give an unbiased review to, this time because it is my unauthorized biography!

Ok, not really. But in many ways, Alice Charles sees the world in a shockingly similar way to how I did. Or maybe it's just universal at that age: "Everyone at the university was the same age, so riding the bus with Nellcott to the suburb of Laval was like being in the Twilight Zone." "Seeing your friends onstage was like seeing them with silver makeup on in front of a tinself backdrop...And that was only the beginning. They actually played too." "She loved slumping in a chair and just listening to professors talk and talk about all this stuff she didn't know and all she had to do was listen and take a few notes."

Less universal is Nellcott, the handsome, moody, older record-store clerk who falls for Alice the second he sees her (her feet, actually) and almost instantly becomes her (over)attentive boyfriend. He's eccentric in a fun undergrad way (even though he never went to university): he drinks creamers and throws pebbles at Alice's window to get her attention, plays guitar and judges people by their taste in music, smokes constantly and lives on dinner food and KD. Oh, and he's dreamy-rockstar attractive, has his own appartment Alice can hang out at, is devoted to her, and doesn't pressure her (much) for sex.

It's a high school girl's fantasy of her first university boyfriend!!!

Ok, so I found certain aspects of the romance unrealistic--but on the whole, Fried does a marvelous job of showing Alice's world and her hyperbolic, inward-facing view of it. Her floormates in residence are an artist and a rugby player, her classes include children's lit and abnormal psychology, her social life is watching old films in Leacock auditorium and drinking at the Bifteck, and it's all almost perfect, though at times there is a slightly obscuring gleam of sarcasm in the rendering of the rugby player who screams when she gets her period and despises all who eat meat. But h, the spot-on details: cafeteria workers hosing down trays while wearing shower caps! Vintage shops on Mont Royal where you have to wrestle the clothes off the racks, that ever-present glittery cross on the mountain.

A lot of the scene-setting is really a lovely love poem to Montreal. Alice is bedazzled by it, but lamely--"I could never leave this town... It's like when I'm here, I really want to conquer the town." How, doing what, going where? Alice goes where she's taken, generally by the hand. Alice really does appreciate--she has excellent eyes--but little else. This is enough for the reader, or this reader, who loves the descriptions of streets and buildings, meals and parks, although occasionally Fried does stray into Fromer-guide territory: "Montreal had a small but colourful China town." But Alice does little conquering.

Alice is not always a wonderful person--she would rather be passive than nice, and here again we start to see a bit of a an extreme parody of normal silly-girlishness. She adores Nellcott perhaps nearly as much as he adores her, but she is uncomfortable on the phone and therefore never calls him. She refuses to order for herself in restaurants because she wants to eat off his plate. She hangs out with her square, studious, sarcastic friend Bethany mainly because she wants company she doesn't have to impress, one person she can feel cooler than. Whatever, this is all typical 20-year-old behaviour (except the restaurant thing, which is pretty obnoxious) but there's no balance--Alice *never* does anything nice for anyone, or takes an interest in anything (I loved Bethany's snark, and after a while started waiting for her to come around and tell off the protagonist.)

Alice was a protagonist that I did really empathize with, but I felt like I couldn't completely, and I wasn't supposed to. This book is very very funny, and I think some emotional resonance was sacrificed to satire. The novel is written in the 3rd person, and although there is nothing of other characters' perspectives, somehow, the narrator still has some distance from Alice, some ability to comment and judge. Then the sparseness of the narrative--Alice often does things "more" or "again" that we don't see the first time; conversations one would predict would be pivotal are elided; readers are assumed to know things and by and large we can figure them out. I began to feel that the narration skipped over all the times Alice ever asked anyone a question out of genuine interest, thought anything insightful about a book (she says, "I love him, I love him" of Charles Bukowski, but not why or which book, and I got a feeling it didn't matter).

Is it a bad thing to be a little realistic and little satirical? Well, I laughed out loud when, at a family Thanksgiving dinner, Alice's dad says, "So, everyone at this table who's had sex before raise their hands," and her parents' hands shoot up. Poor Alice, in that scene, surrounded by these punchline characters. She's a smart creation, and if she were real she'd someday grow into a smart human. She deserves a little better than punchlines. If you enjoy looking back on your naif years, especially if they were spent at McGill, this book will make you happy. But I found it easier to read if I offered the protagonist the same retrospective forgiveness I give myself.

If it were real or in a dream
RR

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Filling the Bookshelves

Part of the organizing that I meant to do today was to make room in the bookshelves for a few new books that I’ve received recently. Granted, I started looking at the books, looking through the TBR stacks, reminiscing about books I have read and before you know it, the day is gone and I [...]

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Florida honors Harry Crews

Finally. Harry Crews is selected for induction into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.

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Tina Fey Writing Humor Book

Tina Fey is writinga humor book.

According to two publishing officials with knowledge of the negotiations, Little, Brown and Company will release a book of humorous essays by the 38-year-old Fey. Her many writing credits include "30 Rock" and the "Saturday Night Live" sketch comedy series, as well as the feature film "Mean Girls."

Tina Fey won an Emmy for 30 Rock and has helped boost Saturday Night Live's ratings by 46% with her impersonation of Governor Sarah Palin. We're thinking her book will be a bestseller.

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John Wesley's boots under glass

A delightfully ghoulish story about the exhumation of Cardinal Newman's remains, with further commentary by Libby Purves. (Thanks to my father for the link!)

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How To Generate 3,000 Angry "Contributors"

Earlier today, one book editor asked how to blog. Over the weekend, another editor discovered how not to blog.

The website for godot recently released a 3,785-page pdf "book" that contained thousands of pages of apparently computer-generated poetry, all of it attributed to real people--including Walt Whitman, blogger Ed Champion, and poet Ron Silliman.

On his blog, Silliman called it "an act of anarcho-flarf vandalism" and warned the editor to think about angry "contributors" and potential lawsuits. Finally, he listed the name, phone number, and email address of the anthology editor.

The editor responded that the phone number was actually his parents' line, and described the work as a publishing experiment.

"I expected its size, format, and (to my eye) clearly algorithmically generated content to make our intentions clear. I wholeheartedly support the world of small press publishing and small press writing. Following the distribution of Issue 1, I would consider myself to be a member of that community on some small scale."

(Thanks, Ed Champion)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media

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Andrew Martin on BBC4

Andrew Martin who writes the Jim Stringer railway series set in the early part of the twentieth century is presenting a programme on BBC4, Between the Lines: Railways in Fiction and Film:

Novelist Andrew Martin presents a documentary examining how the train and the railways came to shape the work of writers and film-makers.

At the beginning of the railway age, locomotives were seen as frightening and unnatural - Wordsworth decried the destruction of the countryside, while Dickens wrote about locomotives as murderous brutes, bent on the destruction of mere humans.

Martin traces how trains gradually began to be accepted - Holmes and Watson were frequent passengers - until by the time of The Railway Children they were something to be loved, a symbol of innocence and Englishness. He shows how trains made for unforgettable cinema in The 39 Steps and Brief Encounter, and how when the railways fell out of favour after the 1950s, their plight was highlighted in the films of John Betjeman.

Finally, Martin asks whether, in the 21st century, Britain's railways can still stir and inspire artists.

The first showing is 9pm Thursday evening but there are several repeats and presumably iplayer if you don't get BBC4.

I've also discovered an interview with Andrew Martin on his publisher, Faber & Faber's site.

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