Literature & Society

Lending "Sultan"

2012-01-24T20:23:00.001+01:00

My novel A Gift for the Sultan is now available in the Kindle Lending Library, which means that anyone who owns a Kindle can "borrow" it and read it for free. There's a catch, though: You have to sign up as a Kindle "Prime" member — after a one-month free trial membership, you have to pay US$79 a year. Here's how Amazon describes the program:

“With Prime, Kindle owners can now choose from thousands of books to borrow for free including over 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers – as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates.”

Amazon has established a fund to be divided among authors in the program, according to how many times one's title is borrowed, which seems like a good idea. As they explain it,

“Your share of the Kindle Owners' Lending Library Fund is calculated based on a share of the total number of qualified borrows of all participating KDP titles. For example, if the monthly fund amount is $500,000, the total qualified borrows of all participating KDP titles is 100,000, and your book was borrowed 1,500 times, you will earn 1.5% (1,500/100,000 = 1.5%), or $7,500 for that month. ”

Or if it's borrowed 50 times, which seems more likely, $250. Or 5 times, $25, which in any case is more than I would make from that many sales (I'm selling the book for $4.99, of which my share is $3.44). In fact, this month's fund is $700,000, so (assuming 100,000 "total qualified borrows") my 5 book-loans would bring $35, more than 5 sales. My real motive, however, is to reach more readers, so even if there are a million readers and my share only comes to 70¢ per "borrow", I can live with that.

To make my book available, I had to offer the electronic version exclusively through Kindle (for at least 90 days), which means I had to "unpublish" from Smashwords. Amazon is so much more visible on the web, I think it's worth it.

Wikipedia:SOPA initiative/Learn more - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2012-01-19T19:22:00.000+01:00

It's a complicated issue, but they've convince me that SOPA is not good for the intellectual environment.

Wikipedia:SOPA initiative/Learn more - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Gift for the Sultan now available from Amazon.es

2012-01-13T14:23:00.004+01:00

For my friends (present and future) in Spain: My novel A Gift for the Sultan is now available as an e-book from Amazon.es, for just €4.02. (If you don't own a Kindle, you can download the free Kindle app to read any Kindle book on your computer or iPad.)

«Sieges by fierce armies, competing faiths and warriors, deception, love, and passion, everything delivered as high drama and a memorable read.»

A Gift for the Sultan eBook: Geoffrey Fox: Amazon.es: Tienda Kindle

Meanings and war

2012-01-04T11:16:00.001+01:00

War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It is indeed, but not a meaning that can endure in peacetime. War — like any life threatening disaster (tsunami, earthquake, volcanic eruption, plague) — makes priorities suddenly clear: first, to survive, and second to save whatever is most important to us. And when the bombs strike Sarajevo, what is most important becomes suddenly, magically clear, regardless of any existential doubts we may have had the nights before. The importance of this book is not that it tells us anything new — as Hedges reminds us, Homer and Shakespeare (especially in Troilus and Cressida) and many others have told us both the horrible and wonderful things that happen in the terrible excitement of war. No, Hedges does not claim to be saying anything new, but because he speaks not just from literature or watching CNN but from his own personal and often terrifying experience as a war correspondent for The New York Times and other media in many wars, of the addiction of violence, the intense but entirely circumstantial camaraderie of combattants, and the deliberate distortions and mythologizing by those at the homefront that make such destruction possible and recurrent, he makes us believe. We have to be grateful to him for living these experiences on our behalf, and for recounting them so vividly.

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Chase Whiteside: Has the Occupy Movement Passed?

2011-12-21T20:18:00.000+01:00

Chase Whiteside: Has the Occupy Movement Passed?

Another terrific video by Chase Whiteside. We haven't seen anything like this in the US for some 40 years, when the antiwar and civil rights mobilizations joined forces. And simultaneously, other mass movements are rolling forward even in China and Russia (and Spain and Greece and Portugal ..., not to mention everything that's happening in North Africa and Western Asia).
Chase Whiteside: Has the Occupy Movement Passed?

AbeBooks: AbeBooks' Most Expensive Sales in November 2011

2011-12-07T10:46:00.000+01:00

Thanks to friend Dirk van Nouhuys for this curious note.

AbeBooks: AbeBooks' Most Expensive Sales in November 2011

We suspect that the person who bought it is not a communist. But, who knows?

How to change the world

2011-12-05T19:47:00.000+01:00

How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism by Eric J. Hobsbawm

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Marx is back. Even finance capitalists like George Soros are re-reading him with attention, and — more tentatively, after the terrible experience of Stalinism — leftists are rediscovering him. Hobsbawm notes two main reasons: 1st, the collapse of the Soviet Union "liberated Marx from public identification with Leninism in theory and with Leninist regimes in practice," and 2d, "the globalised capitalist world that emerged in the 1990s was in crucial ways uncannily like the world anticipated by Marx in the Communist Manifesto." Hobsbawm himself has been liberated from identification with Leninist regimes (though long active in the British Communist Party, he became increasing critical of Soviet practices beginning in the 1960s).

In this collection of essays, one written as long ago as 1957 and others published here for the first time, he stresses the "enormous force" of Marx's thought "as an economic thinker, as a historical thinker and analyst, and as the recognised founding father (with Durkheim and Max Weber) of modern thinking about society." But he also points out that Marx never completed his magnum opus, Capital — volumes 2 and 3 were put together by Engels from Marx's notes after Marx's death in 1883 — and left many important issues unresolved. No theory of literature or other arts, though he and Engels were obviously interested and commented on these in their correspondence. Engels' anthropological theorizing, based mainly on the flawed research of Lewis Morgan, doesn't hold up today, though we can still learn something from the questions Engels posed if not his answers.

But the lack most seriously felt by later Marxists has been a theory of politics, despite what Hobsbawm calls (correctly, I think) many "brilliant" political insights in Marx's journalistic writings, especially "The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon" and the pieces gathered by Engels under the title "Civil War in France". How exactly were revolutionaries supposed to make the revolution? And how would the new socialist or communist society be organized? Marx and Engels chose not to say. Lenin, a great pragmatist more than a theoretician, made up theoretical positions on the fly as he tried to solve one problem after another. But according to Hobsbawm it was Antonio Gramsci who "pioneered a Marxist theory of politics." Gramsci was not only the founder of the Italian Communist Party but also a rare intellectual who knew both the rural (Sardinia) and urban industrial (Turin) proletariat. Hobsbawm's two essays on Gramsci will not only remind you of his brilliance and originality, they will no doubt make you want to reread the Prison Notebooks.

Now as then (in the 1880s or 1930s or 1960s) if we are looking for answers for our current economic crisis, we're going to have to make them up ourselves — but Marx and Engels, Gramsci and others can help us formulate the questions we should be asking. And this book by Hobsbawm should help us understand those thinkers.

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The longest dynasty

2011-12-04T19:55:00.000+01:00

Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire by Caroline Finkel

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Covers the entire Ottoman dynasty from the original Osman (14th century) to the last sultan (exiled in 1922). Focus is narrowly on the reigns of all of them, some brilliant (Mehmet the Conqueror, Suleyman the Magnificent), others bumbling and at least one of them mad. Probably because a full accounting of all the intrigues involving the sultans requires so much space, Finkel offers only scant contextual information, for example on how the society and the many cultures gathered into the Ottoman empire were evolving (Anatolian Muslims, Balkan Christians and Muslims, Greek and Armenian Christians, Kurdish Muslims, Arabs and others in Syria, Egypt, etc.). This makes the book dense with data that seem disconnected and hard to follow — for example we read that a certain Sheikislam (highest religious authority) or upstart Janissary officer conspired in a certain way, but what drove that action and what did it mean to others (besides the sultan) in that time? Reading it straight through is probably not the best approach; it will be an invaluable reference source for anyone investigating particular aspects or episodes in this very long history.

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Honoring the Enemy, A Lesson From Gallipoli

2011-11-22T17:54:00.002+01:00

Thanks to our friend César Chelala for this article from his series International Perspectives with Dr. Cesar Chelala in Epoch Times.

Honoring the Enemy, A Lesson From Gallipoli | Viewpoints | Opinion | Epoch Times

As César points out, there are many lessons from Gallipoli, for all the countries involved. Also several films and books, memorials and cemeteries, and political careers destroyed or enhanced. This history, and the magnanimous gesture recounted by César Chelala, go far to explain the reverence for Mustafa Kemal in modern Turkey.

Our anonymous friends at Wikipedia offer a detailed and thoroughly researched article which lists films, books, etc. Gallipoli Campaign

Map is if from the Gallipoli Guide — Anzac Day for New Zealanders, which offers a virtual tour of the peninsula.

Why the 1% Love "Anarchist Violence"

2011-11-21T13:48:00.003+01:00

A good friend just sent me this article by Steve Weissman, which roused memories and emotions or not-so-long-ago.

Why the 1% Love "Anarchist Violence"

Astute analysis. It makes me think back on my own experience, which was different because my theater of operations then was the Chicago area.

There our movement started out on the campuses — I had founded an SDS chapter at Northwestern by bringing together three or four separate single-issue clubs already recognized —but reached out to link to community groups, especially (in Evanston IL and Chicago) black, mostly church-based organizations. They got us to contribute to demanding better housing and better schools by sit-ins, marches and heavy leafletting, and we helped them make their constituents more aware and more angry about the toll theirs sons were paying in the US's futile and odious Indochina war. Such days. We, or some of us, also made contact with young labor activists. These were workers and mostly union members from those other ethnic communities — Polish, Italian, Ukrainian, Czech, even some Irish — some of whom were discovering Marxism-Leninism through the small, short-lived W.E.B. DuBois Club, where I came into contact with them.

It was during the Democratic Party Convention of 1968 that for the first time in the most dramatic ways we did face the issue of provocateur violence. And especially the absurd plots that the police attributed to the Chicago Seven and the even more absurd (and much funnier) fantasies that the Yippies invented in reply.

We continued to draw on students from many Chicago-area campuses, but the twin issues of racial and ethnic discrimination and the Vietnam war brought us together with young labor activists and then, increasingly, other non-student youth from the several ethnic communities (Appalachian whites in the "Young Patriots", Puerto Ricans in the "Young Lords", Mexicans in a couple of separate "Raza" groups) systematically and intelligently politicized by the Black Panthers, under the very capable leadership of Fred Hampton.

The Panthers made a display of self-defense, but that was mostly a pose; the real violence always came from the police. They assassinated Fred in his bed shortly before Christmas 1969, but he had established a strong enough base that the movement survived and gathered new support — since the murder had been so blatant. (For much more on this, including video clips of Hampton showing why he was such an effective leader and thus such a threat to the likes of Atty. Gen. John Mitchell, FBI chief Herbert Hoover and Nixon, see this 2009 broadcast The Assassination of Fred Hampton on Democracy Now.) The day Fred's lieutenant Bobby Rush sought and received refuge in the church of Jesse Jackson, icon of ML King's non-violent movement, marked a major breakthrough for all of us, a joining of hands of dissheveled young radicals and well-groomed, church-attending family folk who just weren''t going to take it any more.

In sum, what I've taken from all those experiences is that nonviolence must be the preferred strategy — as it was for Fred Hampton — but not an unwavering principle. Not when, as Hampton put it, the enemy doesn't even know what "peace" means, when like the US's Cointelpro then or Bashar al-Assad's tanks and planes today they threaten to wipe out your whole community. But that is not (yet) the nature of conflict in Oakland. As long as possible, nonviolence has to be the preferred strategy because it is the most effective, because the victory sought is not a shift of rulers over the same system but a social transformation, making the blind defense of privilege impossible. But you knew that already.

Red dervish

2011-11-20T12:20:00.004+01:00

I could not resist buying this miniature by Özcan Özcan last Tuesday in Sultanahmet, İstanbul.

The Ottoman script forming the dervish's skirt and tunic says "Ya hazreti Mevlana" — "Oh! Most holy Master" (i.e., the Mevlana Rumi).

I suspect he has been watching the news of all the street demonstrations, from Tahrir Square to Homs and Madrid and Oakland and Wall Street. Its enough to keep you spinning, Oh! Enlightened Ones.

Or maybe he just been reading Rumi's Divani Shamsi Tabrizi. That too is well worth a whirl.

This Is What Revolution Looks Like | Common Dreams

2011-11-20T09:57:00.002+01:00

Perfectly said, by Chris Hedges:

This Is What Revolution Looks Like | Common Dreams

When I described myself as a "red dervish" a little while back, this is what I meant: red (as in revolutionary), and like a Sufi dervish personally drawing strength from my vision, the vision of our latent collective power — that of all humanity — to conquer the evil within and among us and release our more powerful impulses of love and solidarity. A Sufi would call that evil "Sheitan," a more modern name is "capitalism." Or as the great Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet (himself something of a red dervish) put it, to live "like a forest in solidarity, / this is our yearning."

Yaşamak bir ağaç gibi tek ve hür
ve bir orman gibi kardeşçine,
bu hasret bizim.

Davet (Invitation); for the complete translation, see this Wiki version.

Whirling to freedom

2011-11-20T00:03:00.000+01:00

The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The encounter and transforming love between Rumi and the wandering dervish Shams i-Tabriz in the 1240s is background, context and explanation of the transformation in 2008 and 2009 of Ella Rubinstein, Jewish American housewife in Northampton MA, through contact with their story. Shams turns the respected and sedate scholar Rumi into a poet and co-founder (along with Shams) of the whirling dervishes; their story turns Ella from a self-repressed, resigned wife in a loveless marriage into a free and adventurous woman. Alternating chapters are told from the points of view of Ella or Shams and the many people who come in contact directly with him in Konya, Damascus or Tabriz. His stern but gentle manner and his preachings of love arouse strong reactions, ranging from murderous hostility on the part of Islamic zealots to almost total identification by Rumi, from respect and devotion by outcastes whom he has consoled and aided to the one kind of love he cannot allow himself, the passionate, carnal kind. Which may be what you thought this book was going to be about, but no, Shams' 40 Rules of Love are Sufi rules, of accepting one's fate but aiding and preventing harm to others and trusting in God's overall just design of all things. The book is a welcome introduction to this moment in Sufism and the origins of the Mahlevi whirling dervishes ("Mahlev" or master was what Rumi was called), and the twin stories — of the 13th and of the 21st centuries — come to a satisfying conclusion.

However, Shafak's narrative structure and voice here are so limited that one longs for a little break now and then. Each chapter tells us the thoughts and observations of just one character at a time, often telling us things that they would be unlikely to say even to themselves, and everybody sounds alike, whether a drunk or a prostitute or enlightened one in Konya in 1246 or Ella Rubinstein in 2008. The drunk tells us he is drunk but he doesn't sound drunk, the angry zealot tells us he is an angry zealot but doesn't sound very excited about it, and so on. “"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," Shams kept saying.” (p. 268) He sounds just like Ella. These limitations are quite unlike Elif Shafak's approach in her earlier novel, The Bastard of Istanbul (see my review), where there are different voices and narrative points of view, including a genie and an Internet forum. But "40 Rules" comes to a good, perfectly Sufi ending, which goes far to compensate for other weaknesses, and in the course of reading it we learn much about why Sufism is so appealing to so many.

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Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will? - NYTimes.com

2011-11-15T09:05:00.003+01:00

Or, as Isaac Bashevis Singer used to like to say, we have to believe in free will; we don't have any choice.

Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will? - NYTimes.com

I find Eddy Nahmias' argument persuasive: "free will" does not depend on a "soul" or any other kind of self outside the brain, and is not incompatible with recognizing that all previous events are involved in shaping new ones (determinism). And like any good philosophical argument, his opens up new questions. One that interests me especially is how unconscious racism can influence conscious actions. And that suggests the further question, how to curb such tendencies, that is, how can our conscious decisions change our unconscious or pre-conscious predispositions? Can we train ourselves to respond "instinctively" in new ways?

Yes, of course we can, and we have all done it at some time — whether learning a new language, giving up (or taking up) smoking, setting ourselves a new exercise routine, or changing driving habits, etc. The fact that we can and do make such changes demonstrates (or at least implies) that our free will can change our "determined" decisions, that is, set new preconscious tendencies. New neuroscience investigations should help us understand how we do this and to do it better.

How we remember

2011-11-14T20:59:00.001+01:00

This experiment confirms what we already suspected: regarding the "ghost story", memory adjusts the past to fit what we think should have happened; regarding the sunken ships, memory also hooks past events to other already imagined or known events, which will be different for each person who is remembering.

How Psychology Solved The Mystery Of A Lost Shipwreck : NPR

Coming together in İstanbul

2011-11-12T10:27:00.001+01:00

Istanbullians Istanbullians

by Buket Uzuner

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This short (125 pages) graphic novel (adapted and translated into English from Uzuner's Turkish-language novel İstanbullular) illustrates contemporary Istanbul and its mingling of extremely diverse people. An attractive 40-something genetics professor and diplomat's daughter is returning with trepidation to her home city after years of working abroad, when she is trapped in Atatürk Airport in an emergency blackout along with İstanbullular (Istanbullian) of all backgrounds, including her Kurdish artist lover, a Turkish Greek professor, various Armenians, a Jew, a weary bathroom attendant, a wealthy entrepreneur, at least one fierce Turk and anti-Kurd nationalist, a headscarf-bearing young Muslim woman, a gay bartender, etc. Though their stories are never fully resolved, we know that this crisis will have changed all their lives in some way. Buket Uzuner is author of several other novels, of which this is the first graphic one. Illustrations of social types and places by Ayşe Nur Atsoy are realistic and vivid. The book is a charming and informative introduction to the complexity of this enormous (nearly 14 million population) city and tempts this reader to seek other works by Buket Uzuner.

For more on and by this author, see her website Buket Uzuner.

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Is the Kurdish movement leftist or nationalist? - Hurriyet Daily News

2011-11-09T10:46:00.001+01:00

This piece of good investigation and clear argument by Ruşen Çakır helps clarify the context of a complicated political struggle. As he says, the Marxist rhetoric has become mere adornment of the movement — reminiscent of what happened to the Basque ETA after the end of Franco.

Is the Kurdish movement leftist or nationalist? - Hurriyet Daily News

Defying Turkey’s blasphemy law - Hurriyet Daily News

2011-11-09T10:36:00.000+01:00

Defying Turkey’s blasphemy law - Hurriyet Daily News

Edirne 2 : the red dervish smiles

2011-11-08T22:36:00.003+01:00

Eski Cami interior

Today as our bare feet padded on the thick carpet of Edirne's Old Mosque — the Eski Cami — and we looked up at its wide dome and laterally to the passionate calligraphy calling out from the walls, I thought again of the verses of the only Sufi dervish I know well, Yunus Emre. Which surely were not the verses being sung by the earnest young imam squatting before a flock of veiled, attentive young women.

Eski Cami, Edirne

The Eski Cami was completed in 1414, probably a century after the time of Yunus, but when Ottoman Islam was still young and its architecture exuberant in intent but simple in engineering. Yunus spent little or no time in mosques and regarded ritual with benevolent amusement as a distraction from faith. But I think even he would not have felt uncomfortable in this quiet place with its dome beckoning like a gate to heaven.

Selimiye Camii, Edirne (WikiCommons)

Only a few hundred meters away stands the Selimiye Mosque, completed in 1575 and designed by Sultan Suleyman I's master architect, Koca Mimar ("Architect") Sinan, who was then 80 years old. He had designed many mosques including Istanbul's famous Süleymaniye, completed in 1558, as well as other large, graceful buildings. But Edirne is considered (and was so considered by the mimar himself) to be his finest and most perfected work. It is an engineering marvel, with an immense dome with a diameter of 31.30 meters whose center rises 43.28 meters above the floor. That enormous structure is supported by an ingenious system distributing the weight to its eight external pillars, with no pillars interrupting is prayer space 1,629 square meters. The booklet from the tourism offices further tells us that "the entire mosque covers an area of 2,475 m2, the largest in architectural history." The proportions are beautiful and its generous space inspires awe.

But if I were to spend a longer time in Edirne, it would be to the Eski Cami that I would come, perhaps to stand, perhaps to kneel, to meditate on our world and my joyous place in it. Yunus Emre said that of course we must believe in God because otherwise He would not exist — or, as I interpret him, God is our creation and must be respected and preserved as such. As a god-fearing atheist, I feel akin to that smiling, gentle poet. And in the Eski Cami of Edirne, I feel myself a kızıl dervişi—a red dervish.

Edirne : music therapy

2011-11-07T22:31:00.001+01:00

It has been cloudy and chilly in this dusty city where Turkey's Thracian province reaches out to touch Bulgaria and Greece, a quiet day, the second day of the Kurban Bayramı or "Festival of the Sacrifice," and many businesses are closed.

Merely by looking at a map, even without any historical reading on the area, you will see why Edirne, the Turkish name for Emperor Hadrian's Adrianopolis, has been the site of so many battles and sieges. “Military historian John Keegan identifies it as 'the most contested spot on the globe' and attributes this to its geographical location,” says the Wikipedia article.

But there were also long periods of peace after Murad I conquered it from the Bulgarians (1365) to make it the Ottoman capital until his great-great grandson Mehmet II (the Conqueror) moved the capital to newly-conquered Constantinople in 1453. Edirne continued to be a major concern of the sultans, as a military and administrative district for their European territory and a pleasant retreat from the more hectic life of Constantinople/Konstantiye/Istanbul. They built magnificent mosques here, including one considered to be among the finest of Suleyman the Magnicent's favored mimar (architect) Sinan, the Selimye (1575) — and which we plan to see tomorrow.

Today we visited an earlier mosque-complex ("küliye"), built in 1682 under the auspices of Sultan Bayezid II, a 30-minute walk from the center to the outskirts of town. This II. Bayezid Külliyesi is famous for its hospital and medical school, which served patients free of charge from its founding until 1916. (The text on the linked page is all in Turkish, but its the best site I've found for photos.) It is now a health museum, with displays of of medical instruments and mannequins representing medical procedures illustrated in the textbooks of the 17th-18th centuries, some of them pretty scary. One orthopedic procedure involved strapping the patient to a kind of rack to manipulate his vertebra back into place — he didn't seem to be enjoying it. And then there was all that cauterizing.

But best of all, and most pleasant to contemplate, was the music therapy, part of an ancient Turkish tradition from well before they reached Anatolia from the Asian steppes. By Bayezid II's time it had developed from shaman's drumming and humming to a professionalized and elaborate practice, with trained musicians on a variety of instruments performing the specific musical modes prescribed by the physician. There were particular modes for particular illnesses, their effects enhanced by the sound of water — in the kulliye produced by a fountain in the center of the domed inpatient pavilion.

At the moment, in our hotel, we are listening to a collection of İsfahan Makami ("makam" is a musical mode) that might have been prescribed to sharpen "intelligence and clearness of mind" (as well as to cure illnesses accompanied by fever) and is said to be especially effective on Mondays. A group called Tümata has recovered this musical therapy music and performs it on instruments like those used in Bayezid's time. It seems to be working. After all, it is Monday.

In İstanbul: a 5-star jail and other wonders

2011-11-06T09:26:00.002+01:00

We love this city, and since we had already seen the top 3-day tourist attractions on previous visits (Hagia Sophia, Topkapı, etc.) and since we're spending more than a week here (of the 3 we're devoting to exploring Turkey) we feel free to stroll around, take the feribot up the Halıç (the "Golden Horn") and take in some of the museum exhibitions aimed mainly at a Turkish public.

Thursday evening was my talk about my book A Gift for the Sultan before a gathering sponsored jointly by the Harvard and MIT alumni organizations where, fortunately, everybody could understand my English —though I started out with a couple of sentences that I had prepared in Türkçe. My accent is probably all wrong, but they were tolerant. Thanks to Şeyma Yavuz (president of the Harvard Club of Turkey) for organizing it and to all those who came out on this rather inconvenient evening, as it was close to the eve of the Kurban Bayramı (Eid al-Adha in Arabic countries) or festival of the sacrifice which is the beginning of a week-long holiday.

The event was held in the Blue Room of the Sultanahmet Four Seasons Hotel, which is the former Sultanahmet Jail, which from 1919 to 1969 "served mostly as a prison reserved for writers, journalists, artists as intellectual dissidents sentenced," according to Wikipedia. After years of abandonment (the prisoners had been transferred to another jail), it was converted into this luxury hotel that opened in 1996. What was then the exercise courtyard is now an open-air restaurant, and unless you knew this history you would never guess that the penthouse rooms at each of the four corners had been the guard towers. It was the best jail I had ever visited, and I've visited several, a couple of times (in a Venezuela mix-up and in Chicago after a civil rights sit-in) as an unwilling guest. None of the others offered such a splendid array of olives and cheeses along with the wine. One thing did continue from the old days: the people gathered around me on Thursday were indeed writers and intellectuals, and posed very interesting questions and new thoughts regarding my book and other things. I hope and plan to see them all again on future visits.

On Friday, we spent almost all of the day at two exhibitions at the İstanbul Modern art museum. One was the biennial featuring works inspired by the Cuban-American artist Félix González Torres (check out the links for more detail). González-Torres' own works were not presented but were described and alluded to, for art from many countries aimed at making us painfully aware of violence and censorship. Many women are included amont the artists, but the other big show in the main building was exclusively of women with explicitly feminist themes. A good way to celebrate a Muslim holiday, it seemed to us. The pieces by Turkish women were especially interesting to us. One by Asıl Sungu is a pair of videos, featuring her first with her father and then with her mother, asking opinions on what to wear — pretty funny, the differences between the way her father and her mother wanted her to look: he, favoring a more professional, businesslike style that might be more protective of her, and she (the mother) urging a sort of little-girl costume. But on the whole the works that impressed us most were the old ones: Tina Modotti's marvelous photographs in Mexico, and Martha Rossler's more satiric portraits combining scenes of the Vietnam war (occurring at the time of these works) with consumer paradise images from the US.

Well, that was exhausting. Hours on our feet at two big exhibitions requiring a lot of attention. So next day, yesterday, we took the feribot up the Halıç to Bilgi Üniversitesi, near Sülüce on the far shore of the Halıç. The ferry is large, with two interior decks and and an upper exposed deck, a coffee and snacks stand, comfortable seats, and the fare is the same as for other public transportation, a mere 2 TL (less than 1 euro). Susana was interested in Bilgi for its setting and its architecture, and also for an exhibition on LeCorbusier. It has a good, kind of funky (colorful and intentionally inelegant) restaurant, Otto Santral. And from there we took a taxi to the huge Eyüp mosque complex. "Eyüp" is the Turkish version of "Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, the companion and standard bearer of the Prophet Muhammad",who is said to be buried there. (Wikipedia). From there, we took the teleferik up to the Pierre Loti Cafe, where the French novelist is said to have hung out. Great views, good Turkish coffee. I bought a couple of Loti's boks there. I'll let you know more after I read them. He was a very curious character, whose Turkish experience I hadn't known much about. I'd only read his Pecheur d'Islande, about a very different part of the world, when I was in high school.

Now we're off to Edirne. Talk to you again soon.

Among the Turkish Kurds

2011-11-01T18:55:00.005+01:00

We are in Sultanahmet in İstanbul now, at 6:30 pm Salı (Tuesday) and the muezzin is calling out from the Blue and other mosques. Despite this medieval throwback (amplified by 21st century loudspeaker technology), this is one of the most sophisticated, diverse and populated (nearly 14 million people) cities in the world. We landed here yesterday after a 6-day tour of a very different Turkey, as sharp a contrast as one can imagine to İstanbul: southeastern Anatolia, the provinces of Şanlıurfa and Diyarbakır. Kurd country, with pockets of Arab-speakers, mostly poor and rural, but changing rapidly — too rapidly for many nomadic herders and pastoralists to comprehend. The famous old city of Diyarbakır, military stronghold and site of repeated mass violence from the 13th century BC to the massacres of 1925, has burst out from its ancient walls as the swelling population spreads out to the west, and new construction is everywhere, in some places knocking down millenial neighborhoods.

Diyarbakır grew from 30,000 in the 1930s to 65,000 by 1956, to 140,000 by 1970, to 400,000 by 1990, and eventually swelled to about 1.5 million by 1997. Today the intricate warren of alleyways and old-fashioned tenement blocks that makes up the old city within and around the walls contrasts dramatically with the sprawling suburbs of modern apartment blocks and cheaply-built gecekondu* slums to the west. (Wikipedia)
*Turkish for "built overnight".

The children now have opportunities that their parents had never imagined — not all of them healthful. The rapid changes here, as they always do, create such disparities in knowledge and wealth that corruption and crime grow along with everything else. Much of the change is spurred by the huge GAP, Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi or "Southeastern Anatolia Project", a huge scheme centered on the building of the Ataturk Dam on the Euphrates. Jobs, construction, hydroelectric power and irrigation are among the more positive effects, flooding of ancient sites and rapid influx of population are among the more problematic ones. Places that had water for millenia suddenly went dry as rivers were diverted, other places went under water. The flooded sites are lost forever, but gradually water is coming back, through pipes, to villages that had lost it. Rapid development is always an uneven and unsettling process.

The GAP is not the only thing changing peoples lives. The kids are all (or mostly) in school now, all learning to speak proper Turkish regardless of what they speak at home. Although it cannot be used as a medium of instruction, as far as we could tell there are no restrictions on using Kurdish outside of government-sponsored institutions. There are now newspapers and radio stations in Kurdish (for a while they were outlawed), and Kurdish is what most people (except those Arabs) speak most of the time, but at least in the bigger towns everyone understands Turkish.

And the Kurds we spoke with consider themselves "Turks", not as an ethnic label but in its relatively new — invented at the time of the founding of the Republic in 1923 — sense of "citizen of Turkey". But clearly our limited experience in the area leaves out a whole lot of the story of tensions between Kurdish-speaking and Turkish-speaking Turks, which a glance at Hürriyet Daily News will show you are still high. Those tensions, and ethnic conflicts generally in what is now Turkey, are not ancient or inherent, but were energetically fostered by foreign powers aiming to split and seize parts of the old Ottoman empire, beginning in the 18th century. But that's a subject for another, longer essay, which will in part be a reflection on Caroline Finkel's massive Osman's Dream, which I just finished reading.

Zeus and friends atop Mt. Nemrut (Virtourist)

We covered some 1,400 kilometers, from Şanlıurfa to Mardin and Diyarbakır, with our very patient and punctual driver Mehmet Tanık. Our starting and end point was the very poor village of Yuvacalı, where Alison Tanık has organized the whole extended family around these tours. We saw some amazing ancient sites, from Göbekli Tepe (thought to be the most ancient temple anywhere) to the relatively recent — a mere 2,000 years old or so, from the time of Julius Caesar — statues atop Mount Nemrut, still more recent (13th-16th century AD) Seljuk and Ottoman structures, and all that 20th and 21st century building and Lake Ataturk. I'll tell you more about our adventures in future posts. Meanwhile, if you are interested in doing something like this, check out Nomad Tours Turkey.

Türkiye'ye gidiyoruz

2011-10-21T18:47:00.002+02:00

"We're heading for Turkey," is what that says.

We leave from Madrid on Tuesday, first for a week in the towns and villages of the Kurdish region in southeastern Anatolia (Şanlıurfa, Diyarbakır, Nemrut, Yuvacali), some of the time staying in villagers' homes. I probably won't be able to post anything on the Internet from there (this is really rural territory), but I'll let you know about our adventures when I can.

Then we fly from Şanlıurfa to İstanbul, in time for the presentation of the Turkish-language version of my novel A Gift for the Sultan by its publisher, Nokta Kitap, at the big Tüyap International Book Fair in İstanbul in November. In connection with this publication, I've been invited to speak to the Harvard Alumni Association (Harvard Mezunlar Derneği) and, a few days later, students of Koç Üniversitesi.

You think maybe I'm a little excited? So excited I've begun learning Turkish. Fortunately, the Harvard alumni and the Koç students will be able to understand me in English, because I'm not yet ready to deliver a lecture in the language.

These are busy times of big changes in Turkey, and now of renewed troubles in some of the Kurdish areas, so I should have a lot to tell you after this trip.

Meanwhile, my thanks to Amy Miles for her work in helping us self-published authors get a little more exposure. Here's the interview she has just posted on her blog:

Self Published Authors: Author Interview: Geoffrey Fox

My case is a bit peculiar. A Gift for the Sultan is self-published in its original, English-language version, but is about to published by a major trade publisher in a Turkish-language version, in Istanbul. The translation has been completed, and the book should be coming out in just a couple of weeks. I'll be letting everybody know when that happens.

Signing ebooks

2011-10-21T18:18:00.001+02:00

I mentioned here a while back that I now could sign your copy of my ebook on Kindle, thanks to a clever app developed by Evan Jacobs. He has now added other possibilities: I can give you a personal dedication of your e-copy of the novel on any device (not just Kindle) you use. Here's what he says:

== Kindlegraphs are now available on all Kindle apps ==
Your most requested feature was "Support for other reading devices and platforms". There are Kindle apps for every major platform (e.g. Windows PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone 7) and now your readers will be able to view their Kindlegraphs directly inside these apps. A reader who doesn't have a Kindle device can simply enter a regular email address during the Kindlegraph request process. When her Kindlegraph request is fulfilled, the reader will receive an email with links to download her Kindlegraph (in both PDF and AZW formats). If she has a Kindle app installed and she clicks the AZW link, her Kindlegraph will open inside her Kindle app.

== Readers can send comments to authors when requesting a Kindlegraph ==
This was the second most requested feature and it allows your readers to provide context about themselves so that you can better personalize their Kindlegraphs.

So if you have a copy of A Gift for the Sultan on your iPad or whatever, I'll be happy to scribble my signature and a personal note. I'll also be glad to see any comments you send along.

Speaking in tongues

2011-10-15T19:58:00.001+02:00

Here is a fascinating discussion for somebody like me who is an avid language-learner:
Pimsleur review by experienced language learner | Fluent in 3 months

Irish polyglot Benny Lewis is even more devoted to learning new tongues than I. And that's saying something. Check out his 8-language pitch for his learning guide.

Currently I'm learning Turkish. I've been invited to give a talk next month to students at Koç Üniversitesi in Istanbul about A Gift for the Sultan, which will by then be published in Turkish, and I want to be able at least to converse a little in that language while we're there. I've been using (mostly) Rosetta Stone, which is marvelous for my way of learning: simultaneously aural and written, but intuitive, no rules spelled out. I cheat, and look in books when intuition fails. Each of us has his/her own learning techniques, but for me it's been working. After reading Benny Lewis's review and listening to the Pimsleur sales pitch (it's online), I'm sticking with Rosetta.