verbal privilege

moving day

2008-10-25T11:28:00.000-07:00

I have finally packed up my bags and moved to Wordpress! Verbal Privilege is keeping its name (though some other changes are in the offing) and can now to be found at

http://verbalprivilege.wordpress.com

(RSS feed here)

Archives are no longer here, go to the new site! And please change your blogrolls too. Thanks.

the biblioburro

2008-10-22T21:06:00.000-07:00

Remember that marvelous story from last fall, about a group of 'illegal restorers' from a Parisian secret society who snuck into the Panthéon, set up a hidden workshop under the dome, and painstakingly fixed the monument's broken clock? Well, the way I felt about them is pretty much how I feel about Luis Soriano, the man behind the Biblioburro.

Sweating already under the unforgiving sun, he strapped pouches with the word “Biblioburro” painted in blue letters to the donkeys’ backs and loaded them with an eclectic cargo of books destined for people living in the small villages beyond.
His choices included “Anaconda,” the animal fable by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga that evokes Kipling’s “Jungle Book”; some Time-Life picture books (on Scandinavia, Japan and the Antilles); and the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language.

The donkeys are named Alfa and Beta. Boo to the NYT for dragging in the obligatory García Márquez reference (oh these quaint magical realist Latin American villages &c!) but it's still a wonderful story.

i'd take that class

2008-10-20T22:40:00.000-07:00

Upon viewing the linked clip, via Sepoy here: Maybe it's just the combination of sleep deprivation/insomnia, and too much time spent reading books with titles like Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, but "Sexuality and Cricket" strikes me as an entirely plausible title for a graduate-level postcolonial studies seminar, don't you think? I'd call dibs on a reading-response presentation for Netherland. Just for the title-related puns alone, though I should add (for Szerelem's sake) that I've seen Joseph O'Neill in person, and he is indeed "rather hot."

(dear readers, in case it is not obvious, I am buried deep beneath the flotsam of grad school at present. But I'll be done with all my class presentations for this semester--and my Hindi midterm--by the end of the week, so there's hope of resurfacing then.)

It is 1:58 am, but I should really do my oblique pronouns worksheet or finish this essay on Talal Asad's proposal for an anthropology of secularism before going to sleep. Or, I could write some more seminar questions about the historiography of the Armenian genocide. Sweet dreams, right.

what are you playing at?

2008-10-09T16:55:00.000-07:00

It's always a pleasure to read James Wood on literary matters; here he turns his fine sensibility to matters political, in this week's New Yorker: "The Republican War on Words":

In recent elections, the Republican hate word has been “liberal,” or “Massachusetts,” or “Gore.” In this election, it has increasingly been “words.” Barack Obama has been denounced again and again as a privileged wordsmith, a man of mere words who has “authored” two books (to use Sarah Palin’s verb), and done little else. The leathery extremist Phyllis Schlafly had this to say, at the Republican Convention, about Palin: “I like her because she’s a woman who’s worked with her hands, which Barack Obama never did, he was just an élitist who worked with words.” The fresher-faced extremist Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator, called Obama “just a person of words,” adding, “Words are everything to him.”

[....]
Doesn’t this reflect a deep suspicion of language itself? It’s as if Republican practitioners saw words the way Captain Ahab saw “all visible objects”—as “pasteboard masks,” concealing acts and deeds and things—and, like Ahab, were bent on striking through those masks. The Melvillean atmosphere may not be accidental, since, beyond the familiar American anti-intellectualism—to work with words is not to work at all—there’s a residual Puritanism. The letter killeth, as St. Paul has it, but the spirit giveth life. (In that first debate, McCain twice charged his opponent with the misdeed of “parsing words.”) In this vision, there is something Pharisaical about words. They confuse, they corrupt; they get in the way of Jesus.
But we all need words, and both campaigns wrestle every day over them. Words are up for grabs: just follow the lipstick traces.

Read the rest, as they say. And then, perhaps, go back and (re)read Stoppard:

Rosencrantz: What are you playing at?
Guildenstern: Words, words. They're all we have to go on.

--Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

(hat tips to dear S.--now flourishing at the publication in question--for the link, and to AL, who's got the Stoppard quote embedded at the end of her email, thus ensuring I never forget it.)

also found at

2008-10-02T21:11:00.000-07:00

I've been better lately about updating twitter (er, particularly during VP debates) than the blog--blame it on grad school. But it reminds me that I should point to that incarnation (you'll need to request approval to follow, but as long as I have some idea of who you are, it's fine). I'm kitabet in several places now--that's originally because a friend complained that 'verbalprivilege' was too long to type easily, but the alias has grown on me. It sounds a little like my grandmother's nickname for me as a child, but it's also a Turkish/Ottoman word that means 'rhetoric, the art of writing well, scribesmanship.'

In the meantime, still trying to figure out what to do with this space, which I seem to have outgrown. I'm tempted to just start a whole new blog with a different name, and chuck the contents of this one into an archive somewhere. We'll see. In the meantime, I have pictures and stories from California to share, but there's all this Foucault to read, and potential voters to register, and gelecek Pazartesinde bir Türkçe sınavı olacak. Soon.

mother city

2008-09-24T11:18:00.000-07:00

Gandhi and the Bay Bridge, December 2006

Off to San Francisco for the first time in almost two years. I'm going to Berkeley for the Orienting İstanbul conference and will hang around for a few days to see friends and family, visit the painting of Mr. Ahmedinejad that lapata so kindly dedicated to me, and spend a bunch of my stipend at City Lights.

classroom vignette, election season

2008-09-21T21:37:00.000-07:00

I've been sticking to my vow not to write here about domestic politics--others say it all it better than I could, and in any case I'm getting a little tired of how thoroughly the subject dominates so many of my conversations these days. But to tell it slant--during last week's session of the Gramsci/Foucault seminar, we read this passage from the Prison Notebooks, and while not a word was said about lipstick or pigs, the subtext was palpable.

Imagine the intellectual position of the man of the people: he has formed his own opinions, convictions, criteria of discrimination, standards of conduct. Anyone with a superior intellectual formation with a point of view opposed to his can put forward arguments better than he and really tear him to pieces logically and so on. But should the man of the people change his opinions just because of this? just because he cannot impose himself in a bout of argument? In that case he might find himself having to change every day, or every time he meets an ideological adversary who is his intellectual superior. On what elements, therefore, can his philosophy be founded? and in particular his philosophy in the form which has the greatest importance for his standards of conduct?

The most important element is undoubtedly one whose character is determined not by reason but by faith. But faith in whom, or in what? In particular in the social group to which he belongs, in so far as in a diffuse way it thinks as he does. The man of the people thinks that so many like-thinking people can’t be wrong, not so radically, as the man he is arguing against would like him to believe; he thinks that, while he himself, admittedly, is not able to uphold and develop his arguments as well as the opponent, in his group there is someone who could do this and could certainly argue better than the particular man he has against him; and he remembers, indeed, hearing expounded, discursively, coherently, in a way that left him convinced, the reasons behind his faith. He has no concrete memory of the reasons and could not repeat them, but he knows that reasons exist, because he has heard them expounded, and was convinced by them. The fact of having once suddenly seen the light and been convinced is the permanent reason for his reasons persisting, even if the arguments in its favour cannot be readily produced.

-Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Hoare & Smith.

So, time for some praxis, y'all: anyone want to come along with me to register voters in Pennsylvania the weekend after next? I am trying to organize a posse and maybe even an actual carpool, though that is complicated by my lack of a) a driver's license; b) a car. There's always the Chinatown bus, though.

oh taste and see

2008-09-21T19:29:00.000-07:00

via Baraka, this stunning set of Ramadan photos from the Arab world and South and Southeast Asia is well worth your time, especially after the grievous news of recent days. The images from Palestine and Pakistan are particularly striking. As I scrolled down, I was hoping for an İstanbul shot or two, but there were none to be found (and I was amused, when looking at the comments, to find several Turks complaining about just that).

So, in keeping with the sweet-toothed tendency of that collection, here's some Osmanlı macunu (a sugary taffy swirled around a stick in multicolored strands) from one Ramadan night:

I left İstanbul around the end of Ramadan in 2005, and find myself missing the city most sharply at this time of the year, remembering how the drummers kept me up at night (is that post the first appearance of a Hikmet poem here?) and how the local ekmekçis would sell out of their great rounds of ramazan pidesi half an hour before sunset. Here's something I wrote, a year after leaving, about the Ramadan fairs in Sultanahmet--with a few images taken with that awful cheap camera that all my Istanbul photos are from. If I stay late enough next summer, I'll go back to the fair and take some better ones.

muslin gauze

2008-09-12T17:49:00.000-07:00

When Manan posted this, my first response was exhausted outrage (and the impulse to make snark in the comments) but then in short order, I found myself wandering off to my bookshelves in search of The Half-Inch Himalayas, because my strange little mind works like that.

The Dacca Gauzes

“…for a whole year he sought
to accumulate the most exquisite
Dacca gauzes.”

– Oscar Wilde,
The Picture of Dorian Gray

Those transparent Dacca gauzes
known as woven air, running
water, evening dew:

a dead art now, dead over
a hundred years. ‘No one
now knows,’ my grandmother says,

‘what it was to wear
or touch that cloth.’ She wore
it once, an heirloom sari from

her mother’s dowry, proved
genuine when it was pulled, all
six yards, through a ring.

Years later when it tore,
many handkerchiefs embroidered
with gold-thread paisleys

were distributed among
the nieces and daughters-in-law.
Those too now lost.

In history we learned: the hands
of weavers were amputated,
the looms of Bengal silenced,

and the cotton shipped raw
by the British to England.
History of little use to her,

my grandmother just says
how the muslins of today
seem so coarse and that only

in autumn, should one wake up
at dawn to pray, can one
feel that same texture again.

One morning, she says, the air
was dew-starched: she pulled
it absently through her ring.

-Agha Shahid Ali

(“Muslin is a type of finely-woven cotton fabric, introduced to Europe from the Middle East in the 17th century. Its first recorded use in England was in 1670. It was named for the city where Europeans first encountered it, Mosul, in what is now Iraq, but the fabric actually originated from Dhaka in what is now Bangladesh.")

bookends

2008-09-02T17:54:00.001-07:00

The key to happiness is access to a ten-million-volume academic research library. Okay, perhaps not that only, but it's an excellent start. Friday was my last day at work, and today was my first day as a doctoral student at Columbia. Academia has welcomed me back into its embrace in characteristic fashion, by which I mean to say my stipend check is missing, my library account isn't working yet, and crucial emails from the departmental secretary are going astray en route to my inbox: so really, I feel very much at home.

It's a little giddy, a little uncertain--the transition's happened with no time to reflect. A few days ago I was in a cubicle writing memos about the crisis in Georgia, and now here I am: sitting in introductory Hindi-Urdu, learning to write vowel sounds in Devanagari and say aapka naam kyaa hai? (except I knew that one already, and also most of the vocab words on our vowel handout--half of them being the same in Turkish/Arabic.) Today I successfully prevailed upon the gentleman listed as "Reformed Hindoo" in the credits of Mira Nair's last film to allow me register in his Gramsci and Foucault course; tomorrow I'll go talk my way into a history class with the author of one of my favorite books on another Ottoman/post-Ottoman city. The four students taking Advanced Turkish will soon huddle in a hallway with our instructor, whom I met once at a conference in DC in 2005, and devise a schedule for our studies; and my missing words will come flooding back to me. I've already gotten half-drunk in the company of (most of) my doctoral cohort; they seem lovely. We're a small group, but I'm sure we'll turn 'Questions in Anthropological Theory' into a rollicking good time somehow. I saw a kid on campus in a 'restore the judiciary!' black flag t-shirt, and another in a shirt with the Blue Scholars logo (oh please, I hope you are my future students!) And I satisfied the Health Services with proof of my vaccinations, and located the nearest purveyors of ginger tea and secondhand textbooks.

***

Something happens when I get off the D-train at 125th street and head up the hill, and catch sight of the scaffolding-shrouded tower of Union Theological Seminary. Ten years ago this month, I came to New York for the first time. I had just turned seventeen, and it was a few weeks before the start of my junior year of college back in Seattle. I'd come out to visit my friend G., a classmate from the early entrance program who had transferred to NYU. But her dorm room was tiny and crowded, so we camped out in the quarters of a friend of hers who was a student at UTS. I found my way there from the airport alone--I'd never been to the East Coast before, never ridden a subway, but I lugged my suitcase and my wide-eyed self from train to train and emerged finally into the sunshine at 116th street. My first encounter with this city was scattered across those few blocks of Broadway and Amsterdam: the Hungarian Pastry Shop, St John the Divine, Labyrinth Books: indelible impressions. One night, we climbed to the top of the seminary tower as a thunderstorm lowered itself over Manhattan, and stood looking southwards at all the stretching skyscrapers--my only visual memory of New York with the Twin Towers standing.

Two years ago, when I was newly arrived in the city, and dating someone who lived on 121st & Amsterdam, I'd occasionally find myself coming out of an apartment building on that block early in the morning, glancing westwards at the tower, always pleased to be making its acquaintance again. Brooklyn was already my home by then, and it's even more so now, but Morningside will always be where I met New York. When I walked through these same streets a decade ago, I never dreamed I was mapping out my own future. And yet, unexpectedly, delightfully, here I am.

other places

2008-08-24T21:53:00.000-07:00

I'm also using my convalescence to try to organize several years' worth of photos, and hope to update my flickr account soon. I have every intention of buying a digital SLR with some of next summer's grant money, if I can get away with it.

(Respectively: the facade of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the banks of the Isis in winter, the courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, and a young spectator at the Taungbyon nat pwe, the largest annual spirit festival in Burma.)

gratitude

2008-08-24T19:53:00.000-07:00

So, that was harder than I expected, especially the first few days. The surgery went well, but the medications they gave me when I came home from the hospital made me sicker. After hearing that I'd been puking up my meds, the surgeon told me to stop taking codeine, so since the second day I've had nothing stronger than ibuprofen. Over-the-counter painkillers only took the edge off, and the pain and nausea left me too miserable to even read for a few days. I'm much, much better now--left the house for the first time today--though my face is still swollen and bruised, and I've noticeably lost weight. I have several new metal plates holding my upper jaw together, eight stainless steel screws in my gums (temporary, thank god) and some thirty or so stitches in my mouth. I am mightily resenting the liquid diet (a sure sign of improvement) and dreaming of all the things I will eat when the bands holding my teeth shut are loosened, probably in a few days. I'm on a soft-food diet until mid-October, but as soon as I can open my mouth again there will be masala dosa, and misir wat, and polenta with parmesan.

While it's been a difficult week, it's also been one full of blessings. Being sick and vulnerable, especially when you're single and thousands of miles from any family, can be a frightening prospect--but the kindness and generosity of friends forestalled any fear. Thanks above all to my roomie RA, who held my hand and took such good care of me all week, and SF, who visited me in hospital and watched over me the night I got home, and P., who wrote his constitutionalism syllabus from our living room for two days so there'd be someone on call if I needed help while everybody else was at work. Manan (going above and beyond the call of bloggy solidarity!) sent an awesome pile of DVD goodness, and AK a thick and promising book, as well as this gorgeous CD. Mama and the girls sent flowers, and constant emails. Teju came and sat on the bed and read the first twenty pages of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland aloud to me, and last night LPG and Sashi dropped by bearing an illicit copy of The Edge of Heaven (English subtitles and all!) and a slim, lovely volume of Seamus Heaney. Today, the best cook I know brought homemade zucchini and asparagus soups (and more books). Thariel told me funny stories on skype and dear S. sent delightfully distracting texts about Forché poems and Woody Allen movies, and many more of you called and texted and emailed and facebooked and kept me company on g-chat even when my conversation mostly consisted of incoherent complaints. I feel extraordinarily well cared-for right now, and very, very lucky in my community. Thank you all so much.

the general goes

2008-08-18T06:27:00.001-07:00

Last night I actually asked a friend to text me with the news if Musharraf resigned while I was in hospital. But today I awoke to find out the General obligingly beat me to it. And yes, I know the judiciary hadn't been restored and the constitution's still in tatters and the current coalition leaves so much to be desired, but still, we are celebrating. Back in November, several of our colleagues and allies in Pakistan were sitting in jail, and people were saying they thought this would only end when Mush went out Zia-style. It's a rare and momentous thing anywhere to see a military strongman resign and slink away, amidst sky-high unpopularity ratings (now can we have a little of that for Zim too, please?) All congratulations to the many people who fought this battle. To borrow Manan's words--"Pakistan just had a slow-burning, people-powered, secular revolution and they forced a sitting dictator - who had the complete confidence and support of the only superpower in the world - out."

It sounds like he's staying in Pakistan for the time being, contra this highly speculative ToI piece about possible exile locations (not Büyükada, please! Turkey's got enough troublesome generals of its own, and Orhan Pamuk deserves nicer neighbors).

In April, B. sent me this clip--a recent addition to the long tradition of Pakistani protest song, based on a satirical poem of Habib Jalib and performed by the group Laal. I've been listening to it at my desk all morning--follow the YouTube link for the lyrics, and savour the last lines especially. Happy slightly belated Independence Day, and I'm looking forward to visiting a post-Musharraf Pakistan come January.

cochin synagogue

2008-08-15T21:39:00.000-07:00

Chinese porcelain tiles on the floor, Paradesi Synagogue, Cochin (January 2004). I'm thinking about journeys, next steps, where my feet will be taking me in the coming season.

september can't come soon enough

2008-08-14T19:00:00.000-07:00

We're only halfway through August and already it's one of those months you couldn't pay me enough to live through again--I've spent it stressed, sad, and sick, and I haven't even gotten to the part that involves a surgeon cutting apart my face.

(from the brilliant indexed blog of Jessica Hagy)

I'm scheduled to have reconstructive jaw surgery (round two) on Tuesday. The insurance process involved a nervewracking series of paperwork-hoops to jump through, leading to the kind of anxiety that causes sleepless nights, unwanted weight loss, sudden gray hairs, and bouts of blind rage at the state of the American healthcare system. And I've been lucky--the insurance approval finally came last week, although the out-of-pocket requirements wiped out my savings account and have obliged me to take on some extra freelance work.

The medical woes were compounded by some episodes of private distress, and topped off with a sudden bout of laryngitis on Monday. At least the loss of my voice saved my poor friends from having to listen to me cry and complain all week. I can finally talk again now, but apparently only in the voice of an elderly two-pack-a-day smoker who eats gravel for breakfast.

At this rate, I'm almost looking forward to post-surgical recovery; it might just turn out to be the most relaxing part of my summer. I am going to read a pile of books and watch TV on my laptop and play with the sweet stray kitty we're fostering on the deck. I may even get around to the long-awaited redesign/move of the blog. If you have any suggestions for distracting literature, cinema, music, etc, share away.

the last train

2008-08-09T14:53:00.000-07:00

Mahmoud Darwish died today in a hospital in Texas. I'm reminded of the sadness we felt after Said's death--too soon, too young, still needed--and at such a bleak time for the dream of Palestine. He'll be taken back to Ramallah for burial; may he and his resting place both find peace.

The Last Train Has Stopped (from Fewer Roses, 1986)

The last train has stopped at the last platform. No one is there
to save the roses, no doves to alight on a woman made of words.
Time has ended. The ode fares no better than the foam.
Don't put faith in our trains, love. Don't wait for anyone in the crowd.
The last train has stopped at the last platform. But no one
can cast the reflection of Narcissus back on the mirrors of night.
Where can I write my latest account of the body's incarnation?
It's the end of what was bound to end! Where is that which ends?
Where can I free myself from the homeland of the body?
Don't put faith in our trains, love. The last dove flew away.
The last train has stopped at the last platform. And no one was there.

(translated by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché)

update: see also these memorial posts, with more excerpts, at Cassandra Pages, Szerelem, Szerelem, and 3QD.

"a tiny White Devil, namely Tom Cruise"

2008-07-23T15:41:00.001-07:00

Sepoy wins for blogging. That's all, the rest of us can just pick up and go home. It may be some time before I can eat shelled pistachios again, though.

seattle eating and drinking: where to go

2008-07-17T17:00:00.000-07:00

This got rather long: in case you hadn't guessed, I love food. And Seattle. My roommate R. is headed there for her first visit next week, so I've been motivated to put together a good list of places to eat and drink. Nothing very fancy here; I was a broke-ass teenager and college student when I was living in the city, and it shows. But this is delicious food, on a reasonable budget, with a few opportunities to splurge. While my photos yesterday weren't especially vegetarian friendly, market produce aside (I eat mad amounts of seafood whenever I'm home, and that trip was no exception) this list should be good for veg and non-veg alike. And all the farmer's markets are miraculous this time of year; I recommend the U-District and Columbia City ones in particular.

First, a few places I have not dined myself, but keep hearing excellent reports about: renowed vegetarian restaurant Carmelita; Tilth, a local-seasonal organic Northwest cuisine place in Wallingford that Frank Bruni recently named one of the US's "ten most intriguing new restaurants outside of NY"; Salumi, a hole-in-the-wall cured meats paradise whose lunchtime sandwich queues stretch around the street; and Hidmo, an Eritrean cafe/community space that's a hangout for the international hiphop community in Seattle, esp the Mass Line crews (one of the sisters who runs Hidmo contributed vocals to a track on Bayani). I hope to check them all out the next few times I'm home.

Coffee and tea:
Don't go to Starbucks, for chrissakes. You can visit the original one down at Pike Place Market if you want to see what spawned the empire, but there's much better coffee all around you. Favorites include Cafe Allegro (my no. 1 college hangout) and Cafe Solstice in the University District; Victrola Coffee, Espresso Vivace, and bauhaus books & coffee on Capitol Hill; Zoka in Wallingford (study-group central for my Jackson School posse); Caffe Ladro in Fremont; and Zeitgeist in Pioneer Square. Pegasus Coffee on Bainbridge Island is great (and now has a downtown Seattle location as well). Teahouse Kuan Yin in Wallingford is the place that got me addicted to Kashmiri-style chai (their version is a little idiosyncratic, but delicious) and they have a wonderful range of green, black, oolong, and herbal brews. The tea house at the Panama Hotel is a great place to spend a few hours--not only for the tea, but because it is also an unusual and complicated memorial to the 'Japantown' that was ravaged by internment in the 1940s.

Seattle fast-food institutions:
The last meal I want to eat before I die is a bowl of pho tai (beef noodle soup with thin-sliced raw eye-round steak) from Than Brothers, a local chain of dirt-cheap and delicious Vietnamese joints, each of which serves basically just 16 varieties of pho (veg, chicken, and beef with 14 different assortments of cuts) and cream puffs. I love my banh mi, but French colonialism never produced so happy a culinary marriage as the pho and cream puffs at Than Bros. A standard size bowl, which is a filling meal, is $4.25 (cream puff and garnishes inclusive).

Ivar's, down on the waterfront, was founded by a Scandiavian folksinger turned aquarium-entrepreneur in 1938. There's an indoor restaurant with oyster bar et cetera, but the thing to do is go to the open-air Fish Bar counter and eat on the outdoor tables along the pier, while fending off greedy seagulls. They have the best clam chowder ever, and the fish and chips (assorted varieties; try the salmon and chips for something different) are delicious.

Dick's Drive-in (several locations) has been feeding delicious burgers, fries, and milkshakes to the people of Seattle since 1954. I've never been to a White Castle, so during all heavenly-burger scenes in Harold & Kumar, it was a Dick's Deluxe that I was dreaming about. Dick's also rocks because they pay their employees well above minimum wage, and provide them with health insurance, paid vacation, and childcare support. Moreover, high-school graduates who work there in the summers and then part-time while attending local colleges can get up to $15,000 in college scholarships; a lot of kids have graduated from my alma mater over the years thanks to Dick's.

Uwajimaya Food Court: Uwajimaya is a monster-sized pan-Asian grocery store in the International District, with a Japanese bookstore and food court attached. The latter has stalls for sushi, teriyaki, Korean barbecue, Filipino food (oh lumpia!), Hawaiian, Chinese bakery, tapioca pearl-tea and ice-cream, etc. All very tasty.

Pagliacci's Pizza (many branches): I know, I know--I live in NYC, and I'm complaining about missing the pizza somewhere else? Pagliacci's sells thin-crust pizzas with delightful toppings, some traditional, some anything but. I love the AGOG, which features goat cheese, kalamata olives, whole cloves of roasted garlic (this is not date food) and fresh chopped tomatoes. They have seasonal offerings, like smoked salmon with ricotta and red onion, or heirloom tomato, as well.

More inexpensive deliciousness:
Agua Verde Cafe & Paddle Club down on Boat Street along Portage Bay was a college favorite, and remains one now--their speciality is seafood tacos, Baja-style. The bagre (spicy catfish) is especially good. They also make delicious margaritas (now served in biodegradable 'plastic' cups that say "Made of Corn"! Ah, Seattle). In addition to selling tasty food, Agua Verde also rents kayaks, which I recommend, though not post-margarita. Also, for good American-ish healthy burritos, try Gordito's in Greenwood or Bimbo's Bitchin' Burrito Kitchen on First Hill (I hear the quality of the latter has declined since my college days, though).

Cafe Septième: red walls, lattes in bowls, European/American comfort food, a glass display case full of cakes and pies, and butcher-paper to top the tables, with crayons to draw while you wait for your order. Dan Savage and the Stranger folks used to hang out here all the time; AR and I used to pitch up here late nights in college when we failed to sneak our underaged selves into a bar.

I complain all the damn time about the lack of decent, cheap Thai food in Brooklyn, having been spoiled in my Seattle youth. There are certainly duds, but a few reliables are: Thai Tom in the U-District, tiny and cheap with surly service but wonderful food that is actually spicy; Kwanjai in Fremont is good too. Sawatdy on Bainbridge Island is out of the way, but is one of the best Thai restaurants I've ever been to outside of Thailand (and also, the first.) And in a strip mall near the foot of Beacon Hill, there's a wonderful Laotian/Isaan Thai place called Viengthong, which makes excellent som tam, larb and a roasted whole fish with ginger. My favorite non-pho Vietnamese restaurant is the adorable Green Leaf in the International District.

Cafe Paloma, Pioneer Square. There isn't much in the way of good Turkish food in Seattle, but this pan-Mediterranean joint is owned by Sedat, Turkish guy, and thus a number of lovely things (havuç salatasi, mücver, stuffed peppers, grilled lamb, etc) have made their way into the evening menu (at lunchtime, it's more of a panini place). And they make lovely fırın sutlaç, the baked rice pudding that might just be my favorite Turkish foodstuff ever. But watch out, they have an odd schedule and only serve dinner Th-Sat nights.

And while specific names are eluding me, there's also lots of good sushi, Ethiopian/Eritrean (especially on Capitol Hill and in the Central District), and Chinese--some of big dim sum joints in the heart of the ID stand up well to their San Francisco and Vancouver counterparts. I've had mixed luck with South Asian food in much of Seattle proper, but there's good stuff available on the Eastside--stripmalls full of dosa restaurants all over Bellevue and Redmond, catering to the booming desi population in the tech sector there.

A splurge:
Boat Street Cafe: a French Provençal bistro that makes marvelous dishes with local, seasonal ingredients. Gorgeous, unfussy, satisfying food. My other roommate is actually friends with the owner, so we have a Boat Street Cafe apron hanging in our kitchen here in Brooklyn. That roomie also has a Dick's Drive-In teeshirt, and occasionally manages to make me hungry and homesick through sartorial means alone.

Bakeries:
Top Pot Doughnuts, Le Panier for excellent croissants and patisseries, Essential Baking Company (the walnut bread, yum), Grand Central Baking Company (all the sandwiches). Bainbridge Bakers makes these incredible wholegrain pullaparts that I love so much, and there is nothing like them in New York at all.

Desserts:
Dilettante Mocha Cafe on Broadway, Mora Ice Creamery on Bainbridge, B&O Espresso on Capitol Hill, and the Dahlia Bakery. And the above mentioned cakes at Septième.

Drinking:
The Collins Pub downtown has an amazing list of brews, Big Time Brewery in the U-District brews their own, Brouwer's in Fremont is a massive Flemish palace, and the College Inn Pub is still my favorite student dive bar. The Tractor Tavern has good beer and nice music, and I love them so much I have a t-shirt to proclaim it. Suggested regional microbrews (none of which are available out East) include Mac and Jack's, Fat Tire, Alaskan Amber, Pyramid Apricot Weizen, Pike Place Kilt Lifter, and Big Time's Atlas Amber. I didn't become much of a wine drinker until grad school, and when home I'm usually too busy revisiting above microbrews--but some Washington wines I like are Pitch Cabernet Sauvignon from Walla Walla, Tamarack Cellars' Firehouse Red, and Bainbridge Island Vineyard's Madeleine Angevine, along with their raspberry and strawberry dessert wines--I spent the first half of my childhood running wild on the land adjacent to the field that produces those berries.

And now I'm really hungry.

speaking of seattle light

2008-07-16T22:14:00.000-07:00

I did not mess with the coloration in the below photos at all. Taken from a ferry departing Colman Dock, the day after the summer solstice.

seattle eating and drinking: photos

2008-07-16T19:51:00.000-07:00

(As promised to sepoy, after this. Links and recommendations to follow in a separate post.)

Featuring: latte from Cafe Allegro, phở tai and cream puff from Than Brothers, radishes from a farmers' market, cappuccino from Victrola Coffee, salsas, guacamole, and tacos de bagre from Agua Verde, Dick's Deluxe and fries from Dick's Drive-In, asparagus at the market, rose and lavender gelatos in Fremont, salmon, shrimp, and halibut with fries and clam chowder from Ivar's Fish Bar, strawberries and scallions at the market, pink Kashmiri chai from Kuan Yin Teahouse, mussaman curry, noodles, and vegetable takeout from Sawatdy's, rainier cherries at market, and tuna sashimi and mixed rolls at Dragonfish, with a pint of Alaskan Amber. And both of my little sisters (or at least, their hands.)

poppies

2008-06-30T20:18:00.000-07:00

I've got so much to write about, and many photos to share (from recent travels and otherwise) but right now I am just utterly swamped with all the freelance editing work I've taken on, which is going to amount to the equivalent of an intermittent second job this summer. I owe my poor, patient clients their drafts back, and have no time to write, at least not until the three-day weekend arrives. In the meantime, here are some California poppies for you--like other migrants from that state, they're enthusiastically colonizing the Northwest. You'd think some florally-inclined Johnny Appleseed had flung fistfuls of poppyseeds all up and down Puget Sound.

hometown

2008-06-19T21:36:00.000-07:00

I'm out here for a week, spending some quality time with family, old friends, real mountains, and a few million pine trees. My flight landed just before midnight; by twenty hours' time later I had ridden three metro buses and a ferry, consumed 3 astonishingly good espressos and one pink kashmiri chai, and also a Widmer Hefeweizen and a Pyramid Apricot Weizen, complained about the weather, had lunch on the Ave with two JSIS faculty and ran into a third in the bookstore a few minutes later, spent a combined 3 or so hours in University Bookstore, Magus Books, and Open Books, walked from the UW campus to Wallingford, seen both my sisters and my mother and the cat, eaten clam chowder, counted upwards of 50 Obama posters/buttons/bumper stickers, and picked California poppies from the sidewalk.

Today involved pho and cream puffs, more public transportation (with Blue Scholars on the headphones), more superlative coffee, this time in the company of one of my Turkish TAs whom I hadn't seen since Orhan Pamuk's reading at Elliot Bay Book Company way back before he got so famous, EBBCo. itself, a photographic hour in the Seattle Central Library, actual progress on some freelance editing work, a Lebanese movie, and the best Thai food I have had in six months.

I love New York tremendously and have no intention of leaving anytime soon, but it's nice to be reminded how sweet life is here, too.

summer music

2008-06-14T18:00:00.000-07:00

I'm in for what's probably going to be a tiresome summer (for reasons medical, financial, and work-related). But I intend to seek consolation in what promises to be an excellent summer concert lineup, free and otherwise.

Tonight Miriam Makeba was supposed to headline at the Celebrate Brooklyn festival, in the park. She apparently hurt herself in a fall the other week (fingers crossed for a speedy recovery, and I hope she's able to come perform again--as I understand, this was supposed to be her last American tour) but Sibongile Khumalo has taken her place. I saw Khumalo perform in Cape Town years ago, and she's marvelous. And LPG has got us passes to the BRIC tent.

Tomorrow, we'll head into Manhattan to see Outlandish at the 168th St Armory in Washington Heights--some halal hiphop for a hot afternoon. And in other moro-musical news, Rachid Taha's on the Summerstage lineup in Central Park next month. (I wrote about Taha and Outlandish last year.)

And best of all, a birthday present: the Blue Scholars come back to New York the day after I turn twenty-seven. So there's no question of how to celebrate; we'll be at the Highline.

There are lots more, but other highlights include: Kiran Ahluwalia has concerts scheduled in August, Vieux Farka Touré and Beth Orton will be free in various parks (Central; Prospect) in June and July, The National is doing one of the Summerstage benefits, and the Brooklyn posse is going to hear the irresistibly-named "Oxford Collapse" and "Frightened Rabbit" at Southpaw, because how could we not?

back in the saddle

2008-06-14T16:40:00.000-07:00

So this week I got a summer membership at the Y, because although I've managed to start running again (if not enough) this spring, the recent heatwave has evaporated all desire to be in Prospect Park for the purpose of anything more exerting than lying on the grass (preferably while drinking illicit alcohol). I've been missing the strength and flexibility I had when I was a rower, and know it will take more than running to resurrect those abilities. I haven't been feeling very at home in my body lately, and need to do something about that.

I signed up after work on Thursday, and being late for dinner with a friend, had no time for a real workout. But I found the rowing machines, and decided to do a 2k before leaving.

It was the first time in years that I've touched an ergometer. I always hated the erg--working out on a rowing machine is all the painful effort of the sport, and none of the pleasure. Technique is boring, all timing and pacing and fitting your body to a machine: none of the joyous unpredictability of contending with the water, the wind, the other eight people in the boat and the rhythm you create together. I always regarded erging (balefully) as nothing more than a means to an end, that end being every minute spent on the river.

But it's been three years (!) since I've set foot in a racing eight, and maybe it's only because I yearn so much to be back on the water that this pitiful substitute suddenly feels so good. My body took to the machine with an excitable familiarity, and the mental side of it came too, unbidden, effortless: the posture, the pacing, the coach-in-your-head coaxing you down through the last 250 metres, the calibrated regard to split and rating. All of it flooded back in the first few strokes.

My 2K time was still pitiful in comparison to what I'd have expected three years ago, but I kept the split in a respectable range, and impressed myself with a nice ten-stroke surge at the end. I'll be working on this for the rest of the summer. Columbia has a boathouse on the Harlem River--and while I have no idea if there's any intramural or informal rowing for those not in the university team, I'll have every intention of best trying to start something if it doesn't already exist.

I walked out of the Y on legs of jello, breathless and smiling. It wasn't until few minutes later that I noticed my palm smarting, and looked down to see the telltale redness and the swell of blisters, at the ridge where the fingers meet the palm--the kind that won't break, if I'm careful, but will instead heal into a ridge of rough, thickened skin. I don't miss the bleeding blisters and the ragged nails, or the band-aids patched across my hands, but I've missed my calluses. For three years everything I touched, every book and every body, was felt through that roughness, evidence of the palm's familiarity with the oar handle. The loss of them, in the months after I left Oxford, was a tangible sign of a certain bereftness: for the people I'd left behind, for work unfinished, for the river and the sport and all that they taught me.

Since Thursday, my right thumb has been absentmindedly tracing the sore spot at the base of my ring finger, as if to say welcome back. And I went back again yesterday and rowed another 2K, faster and better.

verde que te quiero verde

2008-06-12T08:20:00.001-07:00

This poem showed up in the comments here some time ago (via the usual suspect) and has been reappearing elsewhere of late. Lorca, like Borges, makes me regret never learning Spanish, although I can muddle somewhat through the original (scroll down) with guesswork and half-remembered French.

Green has been my favorite color since I was old enough to speak, and there's no sign of that changing anytime soon. It's the wrong season for this kind of green, though--I don't think Lorca's verde is a June green. But anyway.

Romance Sonambulo

Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.
With the shade around her waist
she dreams on her balcony,
green flesh, her hair green,
with eyes of cold silver.
Green, how I want you green.
Under the gypsy moon,
all things are watching her
and she cannot see them.

Green, how I want you green.
Big hoarfrost stars
come with the fish of shadow
that opens the road of dawn.
The fig tree rubs its wind
with the sandpaper of its branches,
and the forest, cunning cat,
bristles its brittle fibers.
But who will come? And from where?
She is still on her balcony
green flesh, her hair green,
dreaming in the bitter sea.

--My friend, I want to trade
my horse for her house,
my saddle for her mirror,
my knife for her blanket.
My friend, I come bleeding
from the gates of Cabra.
--If it were possible, my boy,
I'd help you fix that trade.
But now I am not I,
nor is my house now my house.
--My friend, I want to die
decently in my bed.
Of iron, if that's possible,
with blankets of fine chambray.
Don't you see the wound I have
from my chest up to my throat?
--Your white shirt has grown
thirsy dark brown roses.
Your blood oozes and flees a
round the corners of your sash.
But now I am not I,
nor is my house now my house.
--Let me climb up, at least,
up to the high balconies;
Let me climb up! Let me,
up to the green balconies.
Railings of the moon
through which the water rumbles.

Now the two friends climb up,
up to the high balconies.
Leaving a trail of blood.
Leaving a trail of teardrops.
Tin bell vines
were trembling on the roofs.
A thousand crystal tambourines
struck at the dawn light.

Green, how I want you green,
green wind, green branches.
The two friends climbed up.
The stiff wind left
in their mouths, a strange taste
of bile, of mint, and of basil
My friend, where is she--tell me--
where is your bitter girl?
How many times she waited for you!
How many times would she wait for you,
cool face, black hair,
on this green balcony!
Over the mouth of the cistern
the gypsy girl was swinging,
green flesh, her hair green,
with eyes of cold silver.
An icicle of moon
holds her up above the water.
The night became intimate
like a little plaza.
Drunken "Guardias Civiles"
were pounding on the door.
Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea.
And the horse on the mountain.

Federico García Lorca