المتغطرس

بهترین آلبومها ۲۰۱۱

2011-12-23T17:17:00.000-08:00

برای موسیقتل(یعنی موسیقی مستقل یا روک دناشگاه) سال ۲۰۱۱ خیلی بارور نبود. ولی باید اعتراف بکنم که هیچ سال بعد از یک سال مثل ۲۰۱۰ نمیتواند برانگیزنده باشد. شاید من فقط جرات می کنم چنین چیزی ادعا میکنم تحت تاثیر نوستالژی (ایا دیرهنتر، بیچ هاوس، ثا واکمان و ارکاید فایر برای به خاطر آمدن در احتیاج نوستالژی دارد؟) ولی این سال کمی ارام بود.  به هر حال در طی اول سال من در نو یورک این آلبومها گوش دادم:
بهترین - پاپ کامل برای سفرهای در ماشین
Yuni in Taxco - Sanpaku

بهتر - رویایی وبسیار مناسب برای پاییز
Real Estate - Days
خوب - یادآور موسیقی وزوز از سال 1990
Big Troubles - Romantic Comedy
هم خوب
Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost
شوخ
Destroyer - Kaputt
احساسی
Papercuts - Fading Parade
نیرو
Iceage - New Brigade

و در این فهرست دو آلبوم دیگر خواهم گذشت حتی اگر تنها دیروز در مورد آنها شنیدم چونکه مطمئن هستم که  گوش دادن به آنها ادامه خواهد دادم.

youth lagoon - year of hibernation

war on drugs - slave ambient       

Sleep by Sabahattin Ali

2011-11-20T11:49:00.000-08:00

My friend and I were on our way from Yildizeli to Sivas, waiting on the side of the roadway for an automobile to come. The evening was just beginning. The smarter one among us had recommended that rather than wait for the train expected to come in the middle of the night, that we try to hitch a ride with one of the frequently passing trucks on the roadway. And so for the last hour and a half, we had looked out hopefully at every dust cloud that appeared in the distance thinking to ourselves that the expression “frequently” didn’t quite describe the hour long intervals between passing trucks. Finally, once it was completely dark, a pair of car lights shone through a dust cloud approaching the place where we were standing. We stood out in the middle of the road with our flailing arms in the air making help signals like we were escaping from a fire or a flood. The truck stopped in front of us. After bargaining a little and agreeing to pay fifty each to sit next to the driver we got in.

As soon as we started moving, the result of the inexperienced and curious series of questions that us enlightened men cut each other off to ask, was that this this old trusty packhorse of a truck that looked to be from some bygone era had started off three days before in Erbaa and had taken a load to Turhal where, upon finding a load of sugar destined for Sivas, had thus far reached us. As I turned my head above my neck I saw the massive pile of sacks which seemed to me like they contained white crystal and whether it was the shaking of the automobile or what have you, I was struck by a strange queasiness.

I asked the driver “do you have any other customers?”

After a few minutes of silence he gently threw his head back and said “three woman…they’re sleeping on top of the sacks.”

At this point from amongst the sacks above my head came an added explanation by the driver’s assistant.

“we came across them on the road. It’s not clear what they were doing, but they paid cash up front so we picked them up.”

He spoke about these women, who were probably laid out on the same sacks and perhaps even whose legs were touching one another, describing their clothing and shape and faces as if he had never thought that they might take offence at what he was saying. The automobile sped over some bumps and the assistant stopped prattling on to excitedly shout: “ Chief!”

We immediately turned our eyes to the driver. He looks as he lurched about in his seat and with one hand rubbed his eyes while tightly clutching the steering wheel with the other.

My friend and I looked at each other without understanding a thing. The assistant gave us another explanation.

“It’s nothing, don’t worry about it…he hasn’t slept in two days, tonight will make his third…once in a while he dozes off.”

Then, without caring whether or not the person being talked about could hear him, he added:

“I hope nothing happens to us…we'll have died for nothing, if he nods off just poke him”

We looked at each other again, but this time it wasn’t from not understanding anything, but from knowing too much…

The automobile stopped suddenly. A few meters in front of us the truck’s high beams illuminated a spring on the left side of the road. In a voice groggy with sleep the driver cried:

“Rahmi!”

“What’s up chief?”

“Run, put water in the machine”

At back there was movement. The sound of a tincan. Then we finally saw the assistant whose voice we had just been hearing. Well to the tell the truth it wasn’t him exactly, rather the mask that he had gotten from his journey and his profession. His powder white eyelashes and hair weren’t always like that I’m sure, and his real face, which wore a plaster of sweat, engine grease, gasoline and dust must have had a different appearance and color all together. After filling up the can in the fountain he emptied it in the radiator. As he approached where the driver sat he spoke

“all set chief”.

On his face was an expression that was, although tired, in no way suggestive of ever losing its cheerfulness.

At this the driver, who had been apparently napping shortly with his head on the steering wheel, vaulted from his seat.

“huh? All set?... did you close the cap well?” he said.

The assistant’s eyes lit up with cheer.

“Everything is good to go chief!”

“Look again!”

The driver put his head back on the steering wheel. After the assistant checked the cap on the radiator again, he called out wearing a relentless smile.

“All right Chief, all right!”

Knowing he hadn’t been saved, the driver groaned and lifted up his head. After giving out a slightly louder groan once more, he took to the road.

As the night wore on, the driver’s fight with sleep got worse. Not wanting to say anything too direct I asked “are there accidents often on this road?” making sure to emphasize the words “this road”. The driver gave an incomprehensible answer, but from behind us came the pert voice of the assistant “Not always!..”

One of the women who we had up until that point not been able to make out, in a broken and gruff Central Anatolian accent asked:

“the other day where did the wife of that finance office boss die?”

the assistant replied

“we passed it already I think”

Through his sleepiness the driver revised the statement.

“no we haven’t gotten there yet pal”

I worriedly asked

“what happened? Did a woman die?”

I hoped to wake up the driver by getting him into this conversation. He explained the ordeal in broken sentences. Occasionally the assistant would cut in to fix things“no it wasn’t like that, what happened was that” and as the travelling women joined in the conversation it really picked up steam.

The driver:

“the wife really was a cranky one…it was obvious something like this would happen one day”

The assistant pounced on this:

“The husband was even a bigger pain…he would tell drivers “if you rolled over into this ditch you wouldn’t be able to save me.”

The driver shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know him…Once I took him to Sivas. That time though it was more like I was taking him on an excursion. He made me stop forty times on the road. We’d go a hundred paces and then he would shout “Driver stop, I want to take off my coat! Driver stop! I want to put on some powder. Driver stop! I’m rocking back and forth too much, it’s making my head spin, let’s wait here a little bit. Ugh, I regret not having taken my own car…”

“So how exactly did the crash happen?” I asked cutting in. The assistant said:

“they were returning from Sivas in a truck “the wife and husband together. The truck belonged to that little wimpy kid we know…fifteen years old… the day before the right wheel rod had come off and he had tied it back on with string…without fixing it in Sivas he picked up his passenger and set off again..”

“The municipality, don’t they inspect vehicles?” I asked.

The assistant didn’t answer. The driver answered while half looking at me: “The municipality gives out penalties to drivers whenever it’s paying their salary, otherwise they leave us alone!”

We were quiet for a moment. The driver tried to shake off sleep that he so desperately wanted, and the assistant continued the story.

“The wife was just as big of a pain. She made the truck stop a bunch of times on the road. Maybe this time she actually sensed that there was something wrong. Anyways, her, the husband, and the driver were all sitting together. Just like you guys are!”

This unpleasant comparison made our hair stand on end.

“the wife was on the side of the door. As soon as the truck made a small noise, she would tell the driver to stop. This time there really was a crunching sound in the back and the woman opened the door and jumped out the door.”

“did she fall under the wheel?” I cried.

“No!” he said “even worse…the back wheel rod really had come off . Because the truck was carrying a load this time the tire popped. The woman, not knowing where she could run too at the side of the vehicle, just stood there, and the truck slid to the right, the woman was caught on the fender as it capsized over onto her in a ditch”

Then, after trying to sound a little more mournful, he continued.

“She was gone in an instant, there wasn’t a thing left of her.”

The woman in behind’s voice cut in:

“the husband covered her with his jacket and didn’t stop crying. The villagers performed a mourning ceremony!”

The assistant didn’t agree:

“No dear…the next day I saw that guy in the park, head thrown back, he was laughing!..”

The driver, shook his head and in a sympathetic voice added:

“Maybe, I mean both crying and laughing…If your wife…if she dies you cry, but you’re happy to have made it out alive!”

For a long while none of us opened our mouths. The automobile kept rumbling on.

I suddenly noticed how forty or fifty feet in front of us the road was abruptly cut off by darkness. I hadn’t noticed until that moment how quickly the vehicle was driving and it looked as though it was driving into total darkness.

“Good lord!” I screamed clinging to the driving wheel and turning to my left.

“Ha!” said the driver as he woke from his sleep and hit the brakes. “We came to a curve, man” he muttered. The front lamps illuminated the field covered in short grass and the deep ditch directly in front of us. With a white dust that made it look like a shiny dirty ribbon, the road meandered away from us on our left. Not being able to contain myself I yelled: “get yourself together man! You were about to flip the truck over!”

The driver, knowing it was his fault, said in a lightly apologetic voice “nothing would have happened.”

The assistant, trying to contain the mockery in his voice said “we wouldn’t have flipped over. The front wheels would have gone into the ditch. We would have just stopped suddenly.” He then added with a slightly more cheery tone. “But I guess when we stopped suddenly the rear tires would have popped up into the air and the sugar sacks would have come down on our heads!”

I turned my head and tried to give a look to let him know how inappropriate his comment were, but besides darkness and a few stamped sacks I couldn’t see a thing.

After this the driver, sleep, and the engine began another epic battle. This poor man was half way through his third sleepless night and his hands were shaking on the driving wheel. A few times he even had to hold onto himself in order to wake up. He looked at us with pleading eyes.

“Please help me, let’s stop somewhere and let me sleep for ten minutes…after that we can keep going.”

I was fine with that. My friend was a little more experienced.

“no way.” He said. “if he sleeps a little we won’t be able to wake him up before noon. If we have to force him to wake up there will be all kinds of trouble. Forget it, we have to keep going”

All of a sudden the engine stopped and the driver cried out.

“Rahmi, put water in the engine”

On the side of the road there really was a spring flowing that looked as wide as a rope. In the silence of the night you could hear the slight eerie sound of babbling water. The driver put his head down on the driving wheel and stayed motionless. The same thing happened about two or three kilometers down the road as well. The man’s exhausted, half-open eyes didn’t miss even the smallest spring he could find on the left or right of the road. The truck would stop with a jolt and his voice would mix with the smell of gasoline and the dust cloud.

“Rahmi…” his voice would echo off the walls in the darkness. Every time we would wake up the driver he would repeatedly ask us with pleading looks “Please help, just let me sleep five minutes!” We would stop again. Even though I looked all around I didn’t see any spring. Nonetheless you could hear the light babbling of water coming from somewhere off in the distance.

“Rahmi, put water in the engine!”

“I just put some in Chief”

“Quiet man…the road is bad…the engine is upset!”

A lot of drivers in fact would have described this road as “very good” with its lack of curves, or slopes, and only a little bit of gravel sprinkled on the road, but he was in such bad shape that he was willing to rely on a little lie in order to get two or three minutes of sleep.

Rahmi got out with his tin can and started looking for the spring on the side of the road. But there was nothing there. Finally he descended the slope on the left side of the road, walked down the muddy little channel between weeds, and found a pathetic little stream of water flowing into the ditch. It was impossible to fill his little can with this water, but the purpose wasn’t to put water in the radiator anyways but to stop for a few minutes. Rahmi seemed to understand this as he poured the water from his cupped palms into the tin can, looking like he too was being overcome by sleep. Trying to walk on his own numbed legs he shouted his merciless phrase again:

“Alright chief!”

This time it didn’t look like the driver would wake up. His hair which had turned white with dust peaked out from under his cloth cap and sprawled out over the driving wheel. His head looked like a block of wood as he lay there totally gone. The assistant repeated.

“alright Chief let’s go!”

When this looked like it wasn’t of any use, I cut in, prodding the driver:

“Come on…wake up…we’re almost there”

I hadn’t the faintest idea how much longer we had to go, but I wanted to give the poor man a little bit of encouragement.

The driver picked up his head.

“I can’t go anymore my good man!” he said and then fell back forward. I looked at my friend. There was no mercy on his face. In a stern voice he said “No way with this “I can’t go anymore”…sit up, throw a little water on your face, you’ll wake up!” The driver stirred, opening up his side door. With the way he moved it looked like he had rocks tied to each of his limbs. With these invisible rocks attached to his feet he stumbled as far as the edge of the ditch. There he stood for a moment. It looked as though he thought getting to the water on the other side was some important and difficult journey. Finally he collapsed in the spot where he stood and while waving his hand towards us he said. “Give me five minutes guys…I’m going to sleep for five minutes!” and there in the dust he spread out lengthwise. We stood there helplessly looking at each other. Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes we waited. Rahmi put his tincan down and climbed up onto the sacks. You could no longer hear him or the travelling women. There was only the sound of the babbling of water, flowing out from in-between the weeds and mud of the ditch out into the chalky steppes. Not knowing how long we would be waiting there, all of a sudden from the hills across from us we could hear the sound of a truck followed by two headlights. The driver, who was sleeping so soundly one would have thought he wouldn’t wake up to the sound of a cannon, suddenly sprung up, rubbed his eyes, and sat up. I asked him confusedly:

“What happened?”

“Let’s move the truck to the side, a car is coming!”

“How did you hear it?”

“If the world were to crash down I wouldn’t hear it, but the sound of an engine, even my corpse would hear it!”

The car whose lights we had seen passed by us leaving us inside of a huge dust cloud. We were on our way again. The mix gasoline vapor and dust left us in a daze. Six hours later we were still travelling down the road we had been told would take two hours. It was past the middle of the night. We were scared of sleeping and of leaving the driver unattended.

A short while after going down quite a steep slope I noticed that the driver had almost fallen back asleep and had shaken himself awake and rubbed his eyes. He was looking straight ahead, I too squinted and looked out of the dusty windshield, not able to see a thing.

The vehicle stopped again. The driver spoke in an even more exhausted voice:

“Rahmi!”

My friend reached his hand over my back and poked the driver:

“Forget about it…there is no water in this spring, don’t make the kid get out for nothing…”

Then he turned to me:

“Let’s go, I see Sivas. Before anything happens to us, let’s just start walking!”

We opened the door and got out. In front of the headlights I pulled a lira from my pocket. Then I said to the driver who had collapsed in front of me:

“Take the money!”

He didn’t make a sound. I poked him.

“Come on man, take it…I’m not going until you take it.”

The driver was at pains to lift his head and didn’t seem to be affected at all by my threat. He stretched out his hand like it was carrying a thousand kilo weight.

“Take care gentlemen.”

Stretching out again on the driver’s wheel I saw the green banknote fall to the ground. I slowly closed the door. I looked back at the darkness of the back of the truck full of sugar sacks. Afraid to wake anyone I softly called out

“Rahmi!”

Nobody answered. Not even the smallest motion or sound. The automobile, the living beings it carried, the sugar sacks, and every other part covered in dust, was in a deep sleep. There was only the soft crackling sound of the engine cooling off like the sound of insects crawling over leaves. The headlights were giving off double and triple shadows off of the small rocks spread out on the road in front of it and the light shuddered as though it was taking quick breaths. My friend and I locked arms and headed towards the stray lights of the city in the distance. The light at our back spread our shadows far out in front of us into the endless darkness. Feeling somehow that we could be pulled back into that situation we had managed to escape, we quickened our steps.

Tales from the Seljuqid Caravansarayi: Episode 5: the hike

2011-11-02T06:21:00.001-07:00

Spatiality and Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-21T21:30:00.000-07:00

With its disheveled tarpaulin landscape punctuated by groggy youth, the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zucotti park doesn't seem like a very organized place. However, as you approach the table with the wilted cardboard placard reading "outreach", and take a look at the map on display of the camp, you realize just how organized this beachhead of radical democracy has become. There is the medical tent, the legal advice booth, the comfort station, the kitchen, information tables in English and Spanish, a cigarette rolling station, and at the center of everything the staircase which serves as the forum for the nightly General Assembly meetings. On my first visit to Zucotti, I had come on a particularly wet morning and so came equipped with a donation of packs of dry socks. I was met at the information booth and immediately directed to the comfort station where my donation was quickly filed away into the proper waterproof tub. When I went over to the OWS library there were two librarians on staff but the donations were so neatly organized into history, foreign language, and gender studies that I didn't even have to solicit their help to find a book. It might be under a layer of tarp, but everything has a right place at Zucotti park.

A few months prior, at the first night of the Bloombergville protest at city hall in New York, a precursor to Occupy Wall Street, I overheard someone joke that the slowly widening patch of city hall inside our drum/protest circle was liberated territory. It seems now with the Occupation of Zucotti park, that territory has not only been liberated, but colonized.

Once inside the space of the park, you can almost feel the tangible excitement of walking into a completely new environment. It is an inclusive democratic space. Nobody asks for an ID to pick up a book, no one asks you if you agree to the principles of the movements in order to schmear a bagel. Everyone is talking about politics and picking up trash and doesn't seem have anywhere in particular to go. It is like some alternate dimension progressive utopia.

It got me to thinking about space. The idea of space in terms of political practice is much more important that the immediate experiments in community and horizontal democracy on display at Zucotti park and at other encampments around the country. It is also more important than the ability to have an attention-grabbing presence to show discontent against our putrefying political and economic situation. No doubt I am tickled pink at having a politically galvanizing camp-out mere blocks from the very belly of the beast, but it is more important than that.

First of all, the Occupations offer a centralised but unheirarchical space to bring together various progressive movements and individuals who are often plagued by factionalism and isolation. Before OWS I remember the constant efforts to bring about coalitions and solidarity amongst the cities great diversity of progressive campaigns and movements. Sometimes the very choice of location for a political meeting could be contentious. As recent as last May Day, the various leftist groups gathered in Union Square (some after deciding against meeting down in Battery Park with the unions) hovered very closely to their own color-coded cliques. And that is not even to mention the attempts as outreach outside of the leftist bubble. I have never felt more invisible than trying to talk to the average passerby in Union Square while tabling for socialism just a few months ago.
Now it seems like occupy wall street has created a neutral space able to host and bring attention to a whole variety of progressive causes. This Monday I attended the GA and the people gathered heard from Jesse Jackson, a representative of the CWA asking for support in their march against Verizon, and members of the "Stop and Frisk" campaign before voting on the approval of a budget for providing hot tea to people in the park. Many people I know have scoffed at the idea of this freewheeling 'demand-less' jamboree until they themselves go and experience firsthand how different things are being done down there. Then they can see how the park acts as a forum for all voices and opinions. For example, it was remarkable to see the equal reception of sympathy and solidarity given to each of these speakers who usually have to compete for the attention and enthusiasm of the saturated 'market' of political engagement. I believe that the occupation spaces create an important environment because they are creating a new ideological space which is much more receptive to the idea of politics as a constructive social activity rather than as a decisive statement of identity. We spend most of our days in a frantic, individualistic consumer obsessed ether where we often force ourselves to dart past the Greenpeace spokesperson or turn our heads away from the living wage campaigner like so many of the other marketing ads continuously bombarding us. The park, then, is like entering a decompression chamber of political consciousness and empathy. Which brings me to the most important, and indeed most radical, spatial aspect of these protests.

The idea of public space, or rather the value of space as public, has not only been continually eroded by ideology, but literally paved over in this country. Before OWS, if you were upset about fracking, or police violence, or the whales, where would you think to go to hear and be heard? Nowadays there seldom exists, in the average American built environment, a center where people naturally congregate to anything other than shop. Where would one instinctively go in the suburbs, for instance, to stage an impromptu rally? You certainly couldn't walk to that space even if it existed. Driving to a mall certainly wouldn't fire you up to fight for your rights. The potential for political engagement has been built out of our communities. We find ourselves confined into atomistic environments, only ever brought together in groups to participate in passive acts media consumption. Political values and connections made through books or on the internet never seem to find a corresponding reality when we step out into 'public'. We feel cut off and unable to envision another world outside the neo-liberal doldrums because our spatial reality seems so seamlessly in-line with the logic of commodity production. According to the Marxist geographer Edward Soja, this is no coincidence.

"The very survival of Capitalism... was built upon the creation of an increasingly embracing, instrumental, and socially mystified spatiality, hidden from critical view under thick veils of illusion and ideology."

In order for Capitalism to ensure continued accumulation, it is paramount that it control the use of space not only at the level of production and reproduction, but at the level of ideology as well. It must structure every space to serve its logic of accumulation for accumulations sake. This helps explain what makes the 99% camps popping up all over the country are so novel. Rather than creating an episodic protest in the form of a march, or a virtual movement that must still exist at some point in capitalist space, these camps pierce through the very fabric of capitalist spatiality by erecting permanent outposts of non-commodified social space. Now there are places where things are being built and people are coming together for higher goals than making money. The more sustained and interactive these spaces can be, the greater will be its challenge to the spatial hegemony of Capitalism. Again, Soja says it best:

"there is a growing realization that labor, and all other segments of society peripheralized and dominated in one way or another by capitalist development and restructuring, must seek to create spatially-conscious counter-strategies at every geographic scale, in a multiplicity of locales, to compete for control over the restructuring of space. "

In order to move beyond capitalism, we can begin by literally stepping beyond it into new social spaces. We can accustom ourselves to thinking about public space as a place to meet strangers and to think of it as normal and civic to engage them in political discussion and activity. We can create built environments not erected upon the logic of commodity production or consumption. We can assert our right to the city and refuse to see it as an urban factory but rather as a common home. The Occupy Wall Street movement is a great way to practice. Each time I return to Zucotti park to participate and volunteer, it feels like stepping for the first time into a new World. By understanding the novelty of Occupy Wall Streets from a spatial perspective, I understand that it truly is.

Tales from the Caravan Sarayi episode 4: Haram!

2011-10-12T07:23:00.000-07:00

Tales from the Caravan Sarayi Episode III

2011-09-13T20:58:00.001-07:00

Tales from the Caravan Sarayi Episode II

2011-09-13T19:16:00.001-07:00

Tales from the Caravan Sarayi Episode I

2011-09-13T19:12:00.001-07:00

Persians love obscurities

2011-08-30T07:47:00.000-07:00

written in Calcutta in 1919, Higher Persian Grammar by Lieutenant-Colonel D.C. Phillott is a treasure trove of orientalist kitsch and that kind of dated knowledge of Persian literature and history (you know the type, using rhyming translations of Omar Khayyam poetry to illustrate adverbial usage) that makes me squeal like a teenage girl. Even the transliterations date themselves. the whole PDF is available online. here is the section on Abjad, treated as it were, like just another aspect of Grammar, literally arranged in a section between solar and lunar letters and numeral figures:

11. Abjad (a) the following meaningless words give the letters in their numerical order:- 1000,900,800,700,600,500,400,300,200,100,90,80,70,60,50,40,30,20,10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 ا بجد هوز حطي كلمن سعفص قرشت ثخذ ضظغ The use of letters as numerals is confined to mathematical works, almanacs, and chronograms. The sum of the letters in the name of a work, or of a brief sentence or verse recording an historical event, gives the year of the Hijra in which the event took place. The practice of commemorating events by chronograms is common in all Muslim countries. The system is called abjad ا بجد and hisab-i-jummal حساب جمل , the Arabic word Jummal جمل signifying "cable; addition" A letter marked with Tashdid تشديد is reckoned as a single letter. (b) Examples:- When Nadir Shah proclaimed himself sovereign of Persia, he struck coins with the Arabic inscription as a chronogram الخير في ما وقع al-khayr fi ma waqa'a "the best is in what happened" the sum of these letters = 1148 (A.H.) = A.D. 1735-6 The date of Taymurlang's death is in the dramatic words وداع شهرياري vida'-i Shahryari "farewell to Royalty" this 807 (H.) = A.D. 1404-5. A new gate to the mosque at Kazimayn was constructed by Farhad Mirza, an uncle of Nasir-d-din, Shah of Persia, in A.H. 1300 (=A.D. 1882) and an Afghan poet of Baghdad, who wrote under the Takhallus تخلص or 'nom de plume' of Shihab, immortalised (as his son says) the event in a poem, the chronogram of which, according to custom, occurs in the last, or the last two misra' مصرع (a line of verse) شهابش از پی تاریخ گفت با دل شاد بود بجانب فردوس راهت از این در "Shihab in a happy frame of mind fixes its date - "May your road to Paradise be by this gate". The sum of the letters in the second misra is 1299, but the writer says at the end of the first line "ba dil-i-shad" and these words may also be translated "with the heart of shad": now the heart of Shad is alif which = 'one' so this makes the total 1300. Persians love obscurities.

Telmih

2011-08-16T19:19:00.000-07:00

In Walter Andrew's approach to analyzing Ottoman Poetry, he tries as much as possible to include terminology for terms in Prosody, Rhetoric, etc using their original Ottoman titles, sometimes to amusing effect. Ighraq fi-l sifat (drowning in description), husn al-ta'lil (attributing a serene cause), and my favorite Telmih, which refers to literary allusion. All of the things that I've been reading lately, especially books on Persian literature and poetry, show an enviable depth of references to folklore, Islamic mythology, puns on Arabic Grammar, indigenous forms of fortune telling, Sufi symbology, Jurisprudence pissing contests, and the recitation of poetic verses so ingrained in the public conscious (at least for those supposed to know) that only either the first or second hemstitch is ever needed as reference. A few examples for fun:

- In Muhammed Ali Jamalzadeh's memoir of his youth in Isfahan, he visits a Zorkhaneh and explains how while doing exercises, the group calls out numbers by using stand-ins that either have phonological similarity (instead of saying three (seh), they say "causer of all causes" (sabab-saz)) or Islamic references "five people of the cloak, six corners of the grave of Hussein, the seventh Imam"

-In Sa'di's Gulistan he makes an elaborate pun using the coinciding of the word for 'dragging' and the Arabic term for putting a noun in the genitive case with 'raising' with the term for putting a noun in the nominative case so that the two meanings for:

بليت بنحوي يصول مغاضبا

علي كزيد في مقابله العمرو

علي جر ذيل يرفع راسه

و هل يستقيم الرفع من عامل الجر

1) I have been afflicted by a grammarian who attacks me in anger like Zayd beating amr. Despite dragging his skirt he will not lift his head. Can it be right on the part of one who has done such dragging to raise his head?

2) ....on putting the word skirt in the genitive case the word head cannot be put in the nominative case. Can the nominative case be correct in a construction that demands the genitive?

A part of what I want to explore, and have tried in my novella (to what success I don't know, I have an MIA Turkish proofreader), is to explore the effects of having an anachronistic foundation of cultural references. The protagonist explores a well-worn landscape (from my cultural-historical reference point) of hip New York of today using references to Ottoman novels, Persian poetry, and Arabic neologisms. I'm sure this sort of prank has been pulled before, but it's a fun exercise. Here is an extract, the quote is transliterated from Persian, it's from the Blind Owl:

Bu şehirde kaç yarı sarhoş çocuk parti gittiğini merak ettim. Apartman çıkmadan önce, sıkıcı tren yolculuk dayanmak için buzdolabımızdan başka bira aldım ve sokakta olmadan önce hepsi içmiştim. Sabahta cam şişe ve alüminyum toplanan bir hispanik göçmen bulacak bunu diye kaldırımda yerleştirdim. Hayal kırıklığı verici parti geri dönmediğim önce bu isimsiz kişi, gelişgüzel içtiğim bira şişesini kocaman plastik çantasında koyup, bushwick’in butün çöp dolu, graffitileşmis, bu-ı fasâd kokan sokaklar tarardı. Sarhoş hissetim. Hafif hissetim.

Misal inka kanun-ı sakil baray man vucüd nadaşt ve âzadane dunbâl ifkârım ki buzürg, lütif ve mevşkâf şode bud.

باب الشمس - ألياس خوري

2011-04-01T11:35:00.000-07:00

لا اعرف بضبط ماذا استطيع ان اقول عن هذه الروية بعد ان انتهاءها. اي واحد يستطيع ان يشير الى المقارنة الواضح بين صياغ السردي في هذه الروية و بين شكل السردي في الف ليلى و ليلى (على فكرة بحسب محسن المساوي يمكننا تمديد هذه الموازية الى معظم الأدب العربي). حببت هذا الكتاب و فكرت ان شرح ناجحا تعقد الموقف السياسي في لبنان بدون انحياز او ابتذال (لا اعرف اي من الميلين كان اصعب للكاتب في التجنب) قال ادوارد سعيد ان يتقدم هذا الكتاب عصر جديد في الادب العربي : ما يسمي ما بعد عصر نجيب المحفوظ . انا اتفق مع هذا الاقتراح لأن مع ان نري في ادب ألياس خوري تاريخ عائلة عادية و كيف تؤثر علاقات هذه العائلة بحوادث في العالم الاوسع كماذا شفنا في الثلاثية القاهرة, في نفس الوقت يضطر الوقع السياسي علي الاشخاص في باب الشمس ان يعتامل مع انهيار التمييز بين الامور الشخصية و الامور السياسية. اعتقد ان هذا الانهيار تقدم تغيير أساسية في الهوية العربي و ابتكار خوري هو تصوير هذا التغيير بشكل دقيق, صادق, و عاطف

review of PostModern Geographies

2011-03-14T18:30:00.000-07:00

Verso books has made available one of Edward W. Soja's first published works as part
of its radical thinkers series. Postmodern Geographies is an early meditation on the question
of space in capitalism and geography in modern critical theory. One might wonder about the
relevancy of this to radical politics while wading through passages on spatialized ontology, but
in fact the refocus on this work comes at a perfect time to help rethink political upheavals that
have occurred in just the last few weeks.
In the recent uprising in Egypt which ousted the octagenarian thug Hosni Mubarak,
Tahrir Square became the symbolic and literal center of the aspirations of a wide-range of
Egyptians hoping to awake from the oppressive doldrums of 30 years of emergency laws and
neo-liberal social decay. World-wide television viewers were treated to daily images of endless
crowds of protestors, dramatic street battles, and eventually the jubilation that filled the
square when Mubarak begrudgingly stepped down. Reporters were on hand to record the
slogans, the acts of social solidarity, and the faces of Egyptians themselves; many of whom
were experiencing the freedom to assemble freely for the first time in their lives.
For an uprising that is credited as having been originally started online using social
media, it is remarkable to see how important a physical geographical place became in deciding
the fate of the movement in Egypt. Despite any praise on the part of the media that served to
fetishize technology and the role of these new online forms of communication in reshaping
social movements, in the end it was people on the ground, occupying central squares and
factories across Egypt, which brought about tangible change. Further revolts have brought to
our attention similar locations in other World capitals. And in America, the capital building in
Madion, Wisconsin has become a focal point by being occupied by public employer unions
and supporters staging a protest against anti-labor legislation meekly disguised as budgetary
policy measures. It seems as though taking control of public space in order to create a central
point of resistance has done more in a few weeks in these situations than merely blogging and
tweeting could have ever done.
There is something refreshingly old fashioned about seeing this kind of street politics
reemerging. Of course we cannot be grateful for the outrageous injustices that have brought
people out to the streets. But seeing the classic images of marching columns of protestors,
barricades, and grassroots rallies is something never seen before by a young leftist raised
almost entirely after the collapse of the USSR. There was an aspect of immediacy, something
so human, about seeing people stare down the institutions of state oppression face to face.
And in reading Soja's insights into the ways in which oppression is now veiled more by
geography than history, we can begin to understand the novelty of seeing direct political
confrontation in public space.
Postmodern Geographies is a collection of 9 essays which each deal with aspects of
space in critical social theory. Starting with a history of the resistance to the conceptualization
of space in critical theory, Soja explains how geography was often neglected for being
considered to be stilted, empirical, and thoroughly undialectical as opposed to the preferred
focus on time and history. He gives a thorough summary of why space has often been pushed
to the side by the injunction to “always historicize”. Showing the extent of this resistance, He
is able to exhibit the originality of Henri Lefebvre's thought in approaching space as well as
tracing the awakening of Michel Foucault to the usefulness that geography would have in his
own investigation of social institutions. We are also shown how other big names in critical
theory have incorporated spatiality into their works. In a motif that continues through the
book, in this historical explanation we begin to see for ourselves how thinking about space
offer new perspectives on understanding how the survival of capitalism depends on the
creation of space. At this point it is at the micro-level of everyday life, what Lefebvre calls
the “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption”. The essay offers a wealth of academic

sources for anyone interested in how an individual exists within a space constructed to induce
consumption and quiescence. Anyone raised in the suburbs can find a fair deal that resonates
with this approach to thinking about space.
In following essays, Soja goes on to narrate the various debates that come with
incorporating the concept of spatiality into critical theory. For instance, in the chapter on
the “Socio-spatial Dialectic”, we see how difficult it is to conceptualize how exactly social
relations of production produce space. Is the built environment a product of this process, or
merely part of the “superstructure”? How do we understand a struggle over public space, or
rent, using the Marxist form of analysis which is more immediately concerned with the
struggle going on in the workplace? Soja provides some fascinating viewpoints and directs our
attention towards an understanding of why controlling public space is still important in our
contemporary age. Political power is not only interested in controlling what goes on at the
point of production or in the realm of ideology, but indeed aims to create a built environment
conducive to the survival of capitalism. Class struggle, therefore, must include a fight over the
production of space and its “territorial structure of exploitation and domination”. By taking
over public space, these recent uprisings in places like Wisconsin and Egypt have made a
powerful assertion that a democratic and free sense of space is not one in which capitalism is
able to roam “freely”, but instead one where democratic deliberation is present and central.
Soja's strengths definitely lie in bringing together theories of space that have as their
subject the urban environment. At other levels he doesn't seem as convincing. Although
necessary to the stated goal of a comprehensive reassertion of space at all levels of critical
theory, his passages on “spatialized ontology” and Anthony Giddens' concept
of “structuration” seem particularly unhelpful. He also takes a step in the opposite direction
by becoming less theoretical and applying his and other critical theorists' ideas on spatiality to
a geographical portrait of Los Angeles. Soja offers some spectacular figures on the immense
economic output of Los Angeles, and shows empirically just how fractured and unequal the
built environment is. However, after such an excellent explanation of the dialectic of space in
capitalism and a strong critique of the resistance to the role of space in critical theory, it seems
ironic that his move to exhibiting the real-life example of the capital of postmodern geography
seems much more like dry empiricism than dynamic analysis.
As political struggle goes forward, Edward Soja's book will be useful by giving us
another approach to envisioning resistance to the logic of capitalism. Using his excellent
examination of how capital produces and controls space, it is up to us to work out the
implications. Especially given the preliminary and open-ended nature of Postmodern
Geographies, the ways in which we can reassert space into our political strategies is ample.
When thinking about a fight over use of a public square, or the fate of a marginalized urban
group, foreign wars, or even our own individual place in everyday life, it will be fruitful to
remember a new injunction: always territorialize!

I heart NYPL

2011-01-23T17:15:00.000-08:00

bakmakla öğrenilseydi kediler kasap olurdu

During a weekend in Beirut and a few unemployed days in Kadıköy, I was able to fill my bags with what I hoped would be a little survey course for myself in modern Turkish and Arabic literature. I had a much easier time being comprehensive in Turkish since Turks themselves have an ingrained pantheon which is pretty easy to spout off. Hatice also gave me an anthology of the writings of Murat Belge from who to rip opinions off of for years to come. I finally got my hands on Reza Aslan's Tablet and Pen and it seems like the editors of the Turkish section are equally educated in the accepted narrative of modern Turkish fiction.
In Beirut the man at Antoine wasn't very helpful, and neither were my smug, practically Kemalist assumptions on the paucity of Arabic fiction. I was left almost choosing at random, buying even more books by Muhammed Choukri, Sonallah Ibrahim, and Ghasan Kanafani.
Now having a New York Public Library, I don't have to stumble around so blindly trying to figure out 'what to read' in either language. I'm hoping Matti Moosa's "the origins of Modern Arabic Fiction" and "Arabic literature: Postmodern perspectives" will help. Through the latter I already have two books each from Elias Khoury and Rashid Da'if, and have finally found some academic writing on Sonallah Ibrahim. I used to think that Ibrahim's reoccurring theme of political nostalgia was what made him so unique, but it's quickly coming to appear to be the one thing that makes him like everyone else.
Anyhow, as the Turkish proverb says, if you could learn by watching all cats would be butchers. I wonder how the self-study survey course I'm hoping to read through this semester in Modern Turkish/Arabic's greatest hits will prepare me if I, if I, if I, get into a program. I guess when people are in school they don't really have time to read all of these things, too busy reading about them. If nothing else it will be a super fun project, and the NYPL is sure being a big help. I'll try to write about the experience, if nothing else to have a record of my initial impressions of modern Turkish/Arabic literature before the academic intervention, my orthodoxification.

İstanbul çeşmeleri

2010-09-30T11:37:00.000-07:00

In his article "The art of Rent: Globalization, Monopoly, and the Commodification of Culture" David Harvey uses Marxian categories of rent and commodities to take a refreshingly irreverent look at the idea of the' monopoly rents' to be garnered on the collective symbolic capital of cities and how they be used in the effort by capital investors, city planners, and other "Urban Entrepreneurs", to brand its own unique cultural identity. By stripping artistic and cultural artifacts of its revered status as some above the logic of commodification, he is able to show how they exhibit many of the same characteristics of other commodities whose scarcity or singularity inflates their value. Specifically, urban artifacts act as elements in the city's presentation as being unique destinations. Although landmarks might not in of themselves be made into commodities per se, they contribute to the wider campaign to bring economic activity to a city by being part of what makes a place unique.
The transformation of a city into a destination requires walking a tightrope between being able to accommodate the normal capitalistic activities of the the tourist industry while at the same time not becoming too homogenous to betray its unique monopolistic advantage. All one has to do is walk up Alemdar Caddesi in Sultanahmet, with its boutique hotels and hyperreal village woman making gözleme in full folk costume, to see this tension between these two tenancies.
Specific mention is made of Istanbul as being just such a place that offers an irreplaceable experience. Whenever I watch a movie or see some documentary photography from the pre-Özal days I'm always struck at how much the city has been disneyfied, the nostalgic trams, the t-shirts, the convenience. Much of Istanbul's landmarks have joined the monopoly capital popularity contest and have come under the administration of both national and international organizations like UNESCO and the Turkish ministry of Culture and Tourism (it's no doubt telling that culture and tourism are grouped together). For 2010, being one of Europe's cultural capitals, Istanbul has been getting a dramatic makeover and restorations projects are taking place all over the city.
For me personally, in the time I've been living here, the artifact that I've come to associate with Istanbul has been the Ottoman fountain. I think they are sort of magic anonymous relics of a very real past in which they served as the focal point of social life and social status. But apparently I am sort of alone in having that association. To me, they embody that almost farcical juxtaposition of historical majesty and modern nonchalance that makes Istanbul unique in a way perhaps too wonderfully ironic to be captured by Urban Entrepreneurs (at least I hope they're not in on the joke). Take, for example, the fountain wedged between my local bar and grocery store. Officially known as the Hasan Riza Pasha Cheshmesi and built back in 1845, it now serves the duel purposes of cat perch and garbage can. The hero of Schodra, who defended Albania in the Balkan Wars, has the marble tribute to his immortality stuffed with watermelon rinds, cardboard boxes, and even less flattering items on a daily basis. At the beginning of the 20th century Istanbul was home to 1,600 fountains (I honestly don't know where they put them all) but now can only claim 400, many of which are in states even more shamefully decrepit than the one outside my apartment.
To an extent, and in context of Modern Turkish history, this is understandable. From a civic, practical, standpoint they no longer serve a purpose as modern plumbing came to the masses a long time ago. To decry the loss of the religious endowment system of water distribution would make me some kind of infrastructure Luddite. But symbolically they must have fallen easy victim to a political order whose program was summarized by John R. Perry as being "simple: one villain-Islamic Ottoman Past, One Goal-independent westernization". With their calligraphic extravagance, almost indecipherable Arabic and Persian kitabe, and function to enshrine those members of the Ottoman Aristocracy wealthy enough to build fountains, they represent the most extravagant values of the old order.
But we no longer live in the heyday of Kemalism. Quite to the contrary, by all other indications Istanbul has embraced the new. Turkey's new ideology still retains Chatterjee's material and spiritual categories of non-Western nationalism but with a modern-twist: neo-liberal materialism and post-modern spirituality. Ottoman history is repeating itself, as Marx's adage goes, as farce. The Fez is back on the heads of ice-cream peddlers and new Köşk's are being built at a blinding place not on the shores of the Bosphorus but inside gated communities.
In his article on the reemergence of Arabic Calligraphy in Turkish culture, Irvin Cemil Schick says it has been driven back into prominence but has taken on different meanings for different groups. They act as ornaments of conspicuous consumption for the nouveau rich like Sabanci who exhibits his vast collection of calligraphy in his personal museums, conservative groups bask in its semiotic comfort, and graphic artists incorporate it into their own culturally bricolaged work. The spectre of Turkey's Islamic past has come back but now has been dispersed into symbols whose meaning is indexed only by its producer. In addition, as almost no-one involved with calligraphy in Turkey can read it, the meaning of the calligraphy has eroded from having any textual value into mere abstract imagery.
I think Istanbul's fountains have in large part shared in this fate. I would go as far as to say, although this is wholly subjective, that they have fared even worse in Istanbul's detemporalized renaissance. They are not only not understood, they aren't even noticed. Despite what to a foreigner with historical sensibilities like myself may think of them, almost all Istanbulites I know personally or see passing in the street, don't give two shits about Ottoman fountains. Sure, they are being restored and protected by the government, but on the popular level I have seen no appreciation to speak of. It is normal for any person to take for granted the built environment in which they rush through ever single day, but there is still usually a sense of pride for cultural landmarks in famous cities. The minaret pierced skyline is constantly featured on everything from memorabilia to merchandise. The cross-bosphorus ferries are beloved by visitor and resident alike. Even the Simit and tulip shaped tea-glasses are given star treatment. But I have never seen even one measly simulacra of an Ottoman fountain, not one shameless rip-off, only the one very tasteful stencil of a fountain pictured above. Given the two trends I've mentioned, monopoly rent on urban symbolic capital and the return of Islamic calligraphy (and by extension de-fanged Islamic/Ottoman identity), why haven't these fountains been given greater attention in the public conscious of Istanbul's identity? Why haven't they been mobilized in the machinery of touristic spectacle? Why haven't they been patronized by AKP billionaires or cherished by Islamic charities? The strongest sense of stewardship I've seen is hand-made signs asking for you to please not throw garbage in them. Can't they even make it onto a giftshop t-shirt?
If I wanted to make some smug empirically unfalsifiable conclusion as to why this is, I could say something like these fountains are overdetermined symptoms of underlying social relations registered in the built environment or that the fountains are a text whose meaning is carried off in the process of Différance but that would diminish the wholesome strangeness of the whole thing. If forced to give an explanation I would take a more traditional approach and say it was diving retribution for pride. I like to imagine a Pasha, elegant tipped moustached Pasha, gawking proudly at the fountain that would carry his name into eternity and so struck with love, he even contemplates cutting a deal with the devil that this fountain would never be destroyed. And the devil, always able to scheme past the letter of the law, has the fountains stand for centuries, even visibly and prominently, but without invoking any interest or even recognition by those who stand witness to its immortality, unable to even read its invocations.

mad smack talk

2010-09-21T01:31:00.000-07:00

apparently Jurji Zaydan thought Turks were a bunch of arrow-chucking know-nothings who were as strong and agile as they were intellectually incurious

“Türklerde o sıralarda vücut kuvveti ve şecaatte, maharetle ok atmakta, at üzerinde yolculuğun meşekkat ve zahmetlerine tahammülde, muharebelerde sebat göstermekte diğer kavimlerden mümtaz bir mevki’ sahibi idiler. Ul’m ve maarif ile, hususiyle felsefe ve tabiat ilimleri ile iştigale ise hemen hiç ehemmiyet vermezlerdi. Türklerden İslam medeniyeti devirlerinde ulûm ve maarif ile iştigal edenler pek nadir idi. Hatta bu hal büyük bir şöhret aldığı için bir Türkün tabiat ilmi ile uğraşması hayreti mucib oluyordu.”[10]

halid ziya uşaklıgil

2010-09-20T23:16:00.000-07:00

Ben mai ve siyah romanın Ahmet Cemil gibi hissediyorum. Türkçe'ye ilk bakışta Arapça'dan ne kadar etkilendiğini fark ettim. Sanki bütün o kalemler yarı görünen kumda görülmüş bir heykel gibiydi. Ve şimdi bir Rosetta taşı buldum. Bu romanda bütün eski Osmanlıca kalemler yanında parantezde çağdaş Türkçe kalemler yazmıştır. O yüzden bu abartılı metini sürekli okuyabilirim. ve gülümseyerek okuyorum. Osmanlı İstanbul tasvirleri ve süslenmiş arkaik dil birlikte çok mükemmel bir tarihi atmosfer oluşturur. Ve romanın hikayesi o kadar ilginçtir ki bu dilbilimsel oyun ayrıca bir roman olarak okumaya değer. örneğin

Taksim Bahçesi'ne girdikleri zaman, ellerinde tuttukları kitabın peşin lezzetiyle kalpleri güya bir esrarhanenin acip letafetlerine vusul (bilinmezlikler evinin garip güzelliklerine kavuşmak) için ilk adımı atıyormuşçasına tuhaf bir suretle mütehassis idi (duyguluydu)

Ömer Seyfettin

2010-09-19T11:11:00.000-07:00

I never had the opportunity to go to Turkish primary school so I missed out on reading Ömer Seyfettin. Delving into Late Ottoman history, especially language reform, pretty much necessitates reading him and so I picked up a little reader which gives you the whole low-down. People in the office figured out I was reading him when my vocabulary made a sudden 100 year regression (mecmua söylersam, dergi yerine yani, ne fark eder ya. çok ehhemiyetsiz) and when I told another co-worker I was reading a collection of his works instead of the Oğuz Atay I had been recommended to read, I was told he was nothing but bare chauvinism and Jingoist dribble. Fair enough. Ideology is so much more cunning these days, a mirror house of irony and the unsaid, it's a nice nostalgic diversion to read someone so unabashedly politicizing in his short stories. An Example:

The main figure of the story ("Ilk Dusen Ak") is a Turkish architectural engineer trained in Paris. After returning to what was then the Ottoman empire, he is assigned to a very-well paid position. He has no monetary worries. Now that he is comfortably settled in Istanbul a professional and as an adjunct professor at the school of Engineering, he is suffering from an ailment which he himself cannot identify. He is losing weight, observes that he is neither happy nor sad. He seeks medical help. The physician, after examining him, diagnoses "sinecure" (in this context, loss of aim due to accomplishment, excessive comfort). The prescription: to struggle for an ideal. The engineer is still at a loss. The physician then poses a question to clarify his point: "Are you a patriot?" Not receiving an answer, a second one: "Are you an internationalist?" The engineer, again cannot respond. He has never thought about such concepts.

After all of earnest queries to everyone about which novels I should be reading as my time in Turkey draws to a close, it does seem a little bit of a scoff to be reading some foppish woman hating Ottoman, but when it comes to my interest in the specific morphological changes, neologisms, and ideological dimensions of the Dil Devrim, Seyfettin's work is an incredibly insightful example. The book even puts two of his poems side by side on basically the same theme, one so contrived with persian cliches that it's undecipherable, the other clear and simple Turkish.
The chapter on Language simplification was great, even having a numbered rule list for simplifying Turkish with fair and reasonable criteria for retaining foreign words. In an article in Genç Kalemler her writes:

1. All grammatical structures taken from Arabic and Farsi will be abandoned. There will be exceptions for certain cliches like: Fevkalade, hıfzıssıha, darb-ı messel, sevk-ı tabii.
2. Other than the Turkish structured for forming plurals no other foreign rules for plurals will be accepted. The plurals ihtimaller, mektepler, memurlar, hastalar will be used instead of ihtimâlât, mekatîp, memurîn, hastegân, etc.
3. Other Arabic and Farsi particles will be thrown out. for example, êya, ecil, ez, men, an, ender, bâ, berây, bî, nâ, ter, çi, çent, zihî, âlâ, fi, kâin, gâh, kâr, gîn, âsâ, veş, ver, nâk, yâr...However other partıcles that have become totally Turkified will remain such as ama, şâyet, lâkin, hemen, hem, can still be used. Let's not forget that even some of these particles have been completely assimilated into our everyday speech, like "Sanatkâr", and so can be written and said freely.

I think I have seen on the TDK website these same exact rules, and I have yet to map out for myself the relationship between the work started by the youngpens and the official Kemalist campaign but I'm sure there's a lot of overlap. We shall see.

Arabs and Young Turks by Hasan Kayalı

2010-09-06T05:38:00.000-07:00

Anyone who works to undermine the historical categories used to lump disparate people and associations into grand historical movements has my ear. Reading history always makes it sound like the Selcuks all wore name badges, or Butrus al-Bustani and Naasir were talking about the exact same kind of nationalism. When I did my independent study on Arabic nationalism as formulated by the Lebanese Christians in the mid-1800's it was easy to project onto them an idea of their being the neat and tidy genesis or Arabic nationalism (not like I came up with that idea myself, I think it's a pretty well-worn Narrative). I remember getting all of the people mixed-up, confusing Abduh' and the Salafis with Rifa'i al-Tahtawi, Jurji Zaydan with the mujma'a al-lughah al-arabiya, figuring they were just equidistant and equivaluable points on the timeline of Arabic language reform and Arab nationalism.
So this book by Mr. Kayali not only places all of those characters nicely on a more measured chart, but also works consciously to dispell the myths about Arab nationalism painted by Antonius, Hourani, and the gang. He states in the introduction that there is both a temptation by Orientalists and historicist nationalists of the 60's to rewrite Arabs relationship with the Ottomans as having a crystallized national identity as far back as the 1860's, whereas he shows pretty convincingly how opposition by Arabs fell under the centralization debate as late as the war with Libya in 1911. I'm only on chapter 4 now, but he really is a super help to someone trying to piece together the evolution of Turkish and Arabic language reform and the politics of language at the same time. I am trying to write something using the resources I have here in Istanbul to have a good paper to submit for my applications to school. Don't exactly know the exact topic yet, just going over everything there is about Turkish language reform and hopefully something will pop up. I wanted to do something like trace the ideological use of the Ezafet construction (banned by the 'young turks' (you see? Kayali even challenged the notion of the young turks thereby allowing me to put those little superior parenthesis' of historical accuracy) in 1911 according to John R. Perry) in the last 150 years, going from highfalutin Ottoman to disappearance under the strict TDK rules of Isim tamlamasi to its creeping neo-Ottoman use in conservative newspapers and religious discourses. Just the story of Modern Turkey told in a grammatical construction. Any ideas?

Fal, Gematria, Abjad, Adorno, Death and the Compass

2010-07-15T00:40:00.000-07:00

Working in a Turkish office with Turkish women, I often see people getting their Fal read. Fal is when someone ominously stares into the dry grounds pooled at the bottom of someone's else's cup of Turkish coffee and deciphers their fortune, love, work life, family, all there in the muck. I don't know what symbols Turks use when they look into the fal, because not anyone can do it. When someone mentions they read Fal, people act surprised and excited like if someone said "I'm a hairdresser, and I work for free". Then they all brew a cup of coffee, and wait impatiently for it to dry so that it can be read. The Falci (fortune teller) then stares, narrates, swirls the grounds a bit, narrates, and of course all in a hushed seriousness.
but I thought, as Adorno says, a “climate of semi-erudition is the fertile breeding ground for astrology”, and being semi-erudite, that I should give it a try. One time at a party with students I claimed that I could read Fal, and two minutes a later a cup had been drank and was sitting upside-down on its saucer waiting to dry. I pulled it up off the saucer, squinted, hemmed and hawed, moved the cup closer to the light. It's basically like seeing shapes in clouds. I saw two ghouls grabbing at each others throats, and mentioned something vague about a cat fight, which apparently was spot on. My reputation was sealed. I've had my fal read to and have learned from the falci that the only accreditation you need is a furrowed brow.
I think that is interesting how much Fal reading goes on here, and how it is both done at cafes. When you walk by they often have a sign that says "kahve sizden, fal bizden" (the coffees on you, the fortune telling is on us). Fal is also read between friends at cafes, offices and at home. One time I had a student who worked in International finance tell me that she and her husband had gone to have theirs read and this women who specialized in the all-too-real minutiae of currency swapping said the Falci shocked her into belief with what she said.
Adorno says this all comes from the drabness of consumer capitalism, and I think in a way consumerism is still relatively new to Turkey (I've heard you couldn't buy marlboro cigarettes until the 80's) and you could compare 1950's California to the excitement for consumerism here, but fal reading seems sort of harmless compared to his likening of the occult to fascism. Besides, it's not reader's digest housewives who do it, I've seen a feminist Freudian do it. I especially don't see the link between Fal and Fascism because people simply don't take it seriously. It's just something to do when you're bored in the office. I think it is more like the Zizekian object that believes in our stead. Anywho.
So I read my co-workers fal this morning (after declaring my oracle-like accuracy) and when I pulled up her cup I saw a rushing river splitting at a fork "there will be an important decision to make in your near future but you will not have much time to decide" and waited for her reaction. 'What will the decision be about?' I looked at the base of the river, and there, in plain sight, were four letters in Hebrew. Sure it was a stretch on two of them, but the Gimmel was sitting there, carved in coffee grounds, clear as day. I mentioned to her my casual relationship with Gematria (the idea that each letter in the Hebrew alphabet corresponds to a number and that deciphering those numbers can lead to mystical results) and said we should look at the letters to see what her future held.
(on a side note, I once read this fantastic article( Irvin Cemil Schick: the iconicity of Islamic Calligraphy in Turkey) about how the changing of the Turkish alphabet to roman instead of Arabic letters cut Turks off from a religious, literary, and mystical heritage. In one example it showed a Hilye (written description of the Prophet Muhammed (you know, since you can't draw him) which incorporated both letters that physically resembled things like ladders to heaven as well as complexly coded Abjad numerology (sort of the Islamic version of Gematria). The point being that I wonder how popular Islamic numerology would be in an alternate universe without Ataturk where Turkish was still written in Arabic numbers)
So the letters I saw were Aleph, Tav, Gimmel, and Lamed.
לגתא
which adds up to 434, which didn't have any significance to her, and I couldn't think of anything, so we looked up the word itself, which in Aramaic means plate or dish. Then we thought about all that that could mean. "something could be offered to you on a plate, you know like presented easily, but you will still have to decide quickly" "the decision will have to do with food". But I warned her, in order to add the ominous tone that makes any fal reading more credible, to not over think things or to pursue the mysteries of Gematria too much like Lönnrot does in "the death and Compass" and in which he is led by his cleverness into his own murder. I thought about the story and thought that when I read fal I should say really Kabbalistic things like "The second letter of the name has been uttered" or even better, from now on when I read Fal I'll use Abjad to spice things up. I'll sullenly look into their cup and then pronounce in Arabic (your one-stop shopping for mystifying a Turk)

في كل كتاب سر، وسره في القرآن فواتح القرآن

For every book there is a secret and all of its secrets are in the Qur`an in the

opening letters of the chapters

Now if someone read my fortune I hope they could divine that I have a bright future in charlatanism.

Ahlat

2010-07-12T05:58:00.000-07:00

In the kadikoy library today I was reading from a collection of Farsi texts and came across a travel journal by Nasir Khasro, who I had never heard of before, but who I will be sure to pursue (man, Farsi literature sure is rewarding) and I the selection they had described Khasro's journey around Lake Van, AND, to the town of Ahlat, which was where I saw all of those beautiful Seljuk tomb stones and spent the night outside of a restaurant waiting for a bus to come to take us to Doğubeyazıt. Little did I know I was taking part in the ancient cultural heritage of traveling through Eastern Anatolia. Here is what Khasro has to say about Ahlat.

و در روز دوازدهم جمادی الاول آن جا رسیدیم . و از آن جا به وان وسطان رسیدیم در بازار آن جا گوشت خوک همچنان که گوشت گوسفند می فروختند و زنان و مردان ایشان بر دکان ها نشسته شراب می خوردند بی تحاشی . و از آن جا به شهر اخلاط رسیدم هیژدهم جمادی الاول و این شهر سرحد مسلمانان و ارمنیان است و از برکری تا اینجا نوزده فرسنگ است و آن جا امیری بود او را نصرالدوله گفتندی عمرش زیادت از صد سال بود . پسران بسیار داشت ، هر یکی را ولایتی داده بود و در این شهر اخلاط ، به سه زبان سخن گویند : تازی و پارسی و ارمنی و ظن من آن بود که اخلاط بدین سبب نام آن شهر نهاده اند

and in the twelfth day of Jamadhi al-awwal we arrived there. And from there we went on to Buwan and Sutan. In the Bazaar there the sell pork in the same way as if it was mere mutton and Men and Women sit together in the shops drinking without fear. After that we arrived in Ahlat on the seventeenth of Jamadhi al-awwal. This city is the border between the Muslims and the Armenians and from Birkari it's a distance of ninety farsang. There was a prince there named Nasr Ad-dowle who lived to be more than one hundred years old and had many sons to whom he gave each their own state. And in this city of Ahlat they speak Arabic, Farsi, and Armenian and I think this is the reason why it is called 'Ahlat' (mixture).

novel

2010-06-23T14:51:00.000-07:00

We were playing Soccer in the oblong field next to the rose gardens, those roses, buxom rubies all leaning over each others shoulders like a gaggle of secret-sharing ladies, and I wondered who takes care of those roses, who not only lays the shovels of their hands into the earth and hunches down with their overall-ed knees pricked by thorns, but who draws up the budgetary allocations for maintaining the stocks of gossiping flowers, splaying out and sunning around the arch of that lovely trellis, what printing company was hired to laminate the sign with the well-intentioned but pesky German Shepard with the diagonal red line of prohibition laid over his lapping-happy face, who drives by in their fancy roaring car for fish dinner and ignores the packs of botanical bobbing babes, sucking on a designer cigarette and thinking about his co-pilots thighs.
Ertugral kicked the ball over my shoulder as I thought about the roses, and I pretended to be winded to sit in the grass, indian style and slightly turned away from the weird floating Ata-head statue to think about being not only a hawk circling over Umraniye, an electric buzzing Simurgh watching the city in fast forward, but the eye of providence seeing each and every social relation in synchronic voyeurism, average necessary labor time for tucking rose bulbs into the earth, canine talent agency office managers, building engine blocks for the new wealthy, cucumber scented lotion for thighs, the water down my throat.
This city would be lovely if stripped of its social mystery, if my super power was to know each hand that assembled the rubber tires of the city bus choking the E-5 at the metrobus stop, the hours of time spent zipping the blouses and pins clasping head scarves, and one two three four five blue jeans buttons, and stretching elastic underwear everyday a little more taut over the blubbery yağ-fed legs of the pack of public transportees, despite their heterogeniaty all united in their left-crooked dispondant public transportee gaze of impatience. The 155 lurches up and the crowds mitosis seems stretched between the simit stand and the already sardined swinging door of the weighted bus. As I whiz by in my service bus, what did the driver have for breakfast, who sold him the mirror he tied his company-logoed tie in this morning, what reklamlar fed his indecent dreams the night before.
Or how about a utopian bildungsroman set in the era when both sides of the E-5 come together to plant tomato plants, kiss inbetween the stalks, channel water with their shovel hands, up and down the lanes of highway. The two outer lanes left for tandem-paddle boats, tandem windskates, tandem longboards and tandem pogo sticks, anything that gets the job done. Children letting go of paper boats that navigate the safe clean channels of water under arches past chicken coops, gurgling under the old train tracks, betwixt the admiring stubby fingers of other amateur papyro-seamen. Lovers in rowboats in fenerbahce, now free of the yacht tyrrany, taking turns with the oars in the clean seaweed water. Unwrapping their aubergine picnics and rocking back and forth in their long summer kisses, sweat on their foreheads, feet over the sides as the lights come on in the apartment blocks with ivy creeping up the sides, vertical gardens framing the orange living rooms with families free from wage labor enjoying long dinners of e-5 tomato soup and mushroom bread.
Where is the narrative arch in a post-commodity metropolis? What does our brave heroine Ipek do between attending ideology bonfires in polonezkoy and voting on drip-irrigation projects with the other horticulture pioneers? Fighting the creeping Urstaat of the junk yard padishah, splashing greek fire on Bulgarian intruders, looking to trade their post-consumer recyclable earthenware, neon Çatal Höyük rip-offs.

SHP summer book challenge book 1: Amerikanli

2010-05-30T08:48:00.000-07:00

It is nice to finally be able to have both my very own copy, to have the linguistic competence, and the bookworm fortitude to finish one of SonAllah Ibrahim's books. He is a great first author to read in Arabic because his narrative is predictable, his language sparse and direct, and his cultural references are cosmopolitan enough to connect. I can say this from experience as the first book I actually finished in Arabic was, to my great misfortune (and a good lesson in doing anything braggartly), Twilight by Stephanie Mayer. Anyways, I finally finished Amerikanli and have lots of different reactions.

1) Exoticizing the other- My first experience in being a little sniveling ex-pat was in Egypt where every little thing an Egyptian did became a aggravating cliche acted as the plaintive adhesive of our Cairo Kabal. It took on fetishized dimensions. If a car-door handle didn't work, it was Egyptian incompetence materialized. I'm sure, just like everything I once thought was unique about me as a student of Arabic, there have been hundreds of study abroad students who have passed through AUC and bonded through mysoarabia. (In Amerikanli, there is a footnote about Maqrizi and with what contempt he held the native population of Egypt that I thought was funny, and would have probably loved to have found when I was there.)
In the book the author comes to San Francisco which is painted as a Sodom or Gomorrah and spends a large part of his narration listing figures and anecdotes about the drug culture, crime, rape and sexual harassment, racism, gutless hippy protestors, and anti-anti-semitic academic mccarthyism. At First I was like "Oh Come on, give me a break", but then had a little feeling of "serves me right". (maybe I'm only the 187 ME studies major to have that eureka while reading this book. I can no longer believe that anything I have ever done or learned dealing with Arabic or Arabs has not already been done, learn, or felt, by learned by an entire generation of myopically self-aggrandizing orientalist scouts) It is fun to read as the Egyptian history teacher goes around asking people their ethnicity ('I asked the Japanese looking girl what country she was from and she looked at me strangely and said "American"') and conflating American racism with immigrant identity (sometimes people here in Turkey ask me my ethnicity and I have that same strange reaction). I don't think this book has been translated into English yet but it should be, and then distributed to cross-cultural communication classes around the country to show Americans how annoying it is to be essentialized.

2) politics and academia: In the book Shukri (the Egyptian history professor) has several uncomfortable conversations with American academics who exhibit a curtain call of political eccentricities, from vegetarianism, to pro-palestinianism (eccentric in this case because it comes with its special brand of narcissistic/paranoiac martyrdom) , to anything else that reminds you of that movie PCU. Ever since reading Social Justice and the City I've reveled in my Marxist self-righteousness of being beyond the horizon of liberal leftism for yeaaaaars now
If, today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space — it will be an act WITHIN the hegemonic ideological coordinates: those who “really want to do something to help people” get involved in (undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins sans frontiere, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated, but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly enter the economic territory (say, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions or which use child labor) — they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity2: of doing things not to achieve something, but to PREVENT from something really happening, really changing. All the frenetic humanitarian, politically correct, etc., activity fits the formula of “Let’s go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!” (x)

and so reading the book from this smug angle was fun. It was also a little time-capsule to read a book that takes place in 1998 before Bush and climate change, and it's amazing to see both how historical amnesia (of a graduate in 2010 has trouble relating to the innocence of characters in a book 12 years ago and their naivity, nay luxury, of having pet causes in the ideology-free lichtung of the 90's) and blinding speed of modernity (they don't use cellphones, e-mail for them is an academic doodah, people put leaflets in their mailboxes, iwww, I mean like, come on, that is so ancient!) that makes a book from 1998 historical fiction.

3) sexuality of the other -The American for erotic is erratic, says Abdal Hakim Murad, and this book shares that same prudish queasiness. Someone is sending Shukri erotic secret admirer letters, his students tempt him with their supple breasts and exposed legs, gays kiss in the streets. It's like Sayed Qutb at a sock-hop! In another article by Murad we are told that not only is Islam gender-neutral (in fact beyond gender) but a staunch social-religious force for monogamy, an exaltation of coupling! It's interesting in this book to see the East looking Westward at the rampant sexual licentiousness and to talk to K about Islamic views of marriage, and feel sort of screwed by the false choice between Western, elementary particles, sexuality and Islamic rigidity. Let's just pretend there's a Marxist theory of marital bliss based on the condemnation of the commodification of desire and a materialist view of the historical foundation of marriage which validates its continuation. Sike, I'll get married out of pure will, theory is for bachelors.

Akkadian-Sumerian

2010-05-17T07:25:00.000-07:00

عربت شارّو دنّوتوم شا الام يپوشو ابویا
the four strong kings who built this city are my fathers

I don't have a cuneiform keyboard on my computer but I guess as a fellow semitic language, arabic letters will do. Yesterday me and Pooya went to the archeology museum in Sultan Ahmet and I was loving the section on Babylon. I remember writing about what an obscure and under-appreciated time in history babylon is (why don't the bengals write songs about them? No Disney movies take place in Ur ( I can see it now, a wise cracking stork helps Gildur find his way out of the swamps to stop Hammurabi from wrongly killing his kid-sister Ammu)) and it was so satisfying to see their collection of multiplication tables and debt receipts for pieces of silver and even a mini-Hammurabi's code. I looked up Akkadian and turns out it's semitic although has a lot of borrowing from non-semitic languages for large parts of its vocabulary. But to think they said قتل back 4000 years ago, and now use it in rap songs, that sort of unbroken semantic chain, well that's just neat.

also some more from the linguistic topology grab-bag. Sumerian was an Ergative language which means that the subject is what gets the special marker and not the object where the verb is transitive. As in:
the king-x improved the city walls
as opposed to say, Turkish:
the king improved the city walls-x.

I think that my focus in Lundinish, from the beginning, has been the focus on the ease and logic of forming verbal nouns, Like John Perry says in his immortal essay "Language reform in Turkey and Iran" the importance of a flexible and inventive morphological structure is crutial. I think that in Lundinish it comes at the expense of what are still problems to be worked out in syntax, especially with the role of Adverbs as a stand-in for verb tense.

This is why Lundinish is always a work in Progress. In other language news I found a copy of for whom the bell tolls in Farsi yesterday at a Sahaf.

the privatization of higher education

2010-05-15T13:50:00.000-07:00

a study in compare and contrast.
Socialized university (the Nazim Hikmet Academy) and their aims and principles v.s. a PBS documentary about for-profit universities. I feel thrilled about NHA's ideas about education and their aggressive hatred of privatization. I was a student there and the only emphasis was making students understand the World better. The shit eating fat-cats who are peddling education like its an x-box or a hummer. shout out to Kaznowski working in the trenches! They should show this at the next workers film festival here in Istanbul.

Nazim Hikmet Academy

Goals and principles

"Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it"

(Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, Thesis 11, Brussels, 1845)

The Nazim Hikmet Culture houses were first launched in 1996. The Nazim Hikmet Cultural center has been open in Kadikoy, Istanbul, since 2004 and we are now in the process of widening our efforts to include a series of provincial and district culture houses.

In the fall of 2009 we succeeded in launching a Center for Marxist thought and intellectual output: the Nazim Hikmet Academy.

Under one roof the NHA will include both an educational program including a Literature, Music, Cinema, and Social Sciences branch as well as organizing work and research groups that will form an integral part of their activities.

-The World's intellectual sphere is under fire by the free market. According to those who complain of being affected by it in various ways, the main cause of this attack is marketization and its various effects. The NHA aims to go beyond mere complaining and to educate a group able to defend and develop humanity's scientific and artistic knowledge.

This phenomenon of marketization is caused by Capitalism's tendency to commodify everything. This general tendency of Capitalism is always at work, although some areas have been able to keep a level of autonomy apart from the usual demands of profitability and the pressures of market relations. In the last ten decades, however, these walls have come crumbling down and this has led to a liquidation of the public domain. Scientific and Artistic production, must take a stand against the market that is being imposed on it.
Taking a stand is not limited merely to protecting Science and Art from commodification. Intellectual activity is a vital element of the struggle for human liberation. In fact, there will be no place for Science and Art to participate in the struggle unless marketization and its own commodification is resisted.
This task cannot be fulfilled in the 'official centers of academia' neither if they are semi-public or wholly privatized. (The NHA does acknowledge the output of these intellectuals from official academies, regardless of whatever un-scientific ideologies they possess, be it liberal, nationalistic, or religious, as being part of their intellectual heritage.)
The mission of this organization, within the framework drawn up here, is to shape the dynamics for the emergence of a new intelligentsia. The NHA aims to contribute to this process.
Presently, there is an overriding tendency to partition and confine the different disciplines of science and art. Specialization of scientific and artistic production without a holistic understanding of such renders the World incomprehensible. The NHA, in its definition of Art and Science, will avoid this. Instead the NHA will champion an all-inclusive conception of intellectual production that combines thought with practice, science with art, and an interactive relationship between their different branches.
When we speak of an intellectual dynamic we are speaking in the sense of creating this type of holistic approach to intellectual production.
The NHA will aim to integrate the curricula of its different departments, even at the level of individual lessons, to achieve this type of holism.
The NHA will use Marxism as its intellectual foundation as it is the most advanced and scientific method for both understanding and struggling to change the World. Marxism also fosters the type of holistic scientific understanding mentioned above.
The purpose of the NHA will not be to ready minds for the free market. It is rather to contribute to the formation of knowledge by NHA's members of their respective disciplines. To put it concisely, NHA's goals is to contribute to the emergence of educated individuals who will strive to change the World.
Intellectual activity in the capitalist system has a tendency to work according to market rules. The age in which we live sees this tendency going beyond even its own limits. Education, culture, and science, is being consciously restructured along market lines. The NHA aims to fight against this trend and to strive towards building an entirely different alternative for society than what we now know.
The NHA refuses to see a distinction between teacher and student. The structure of the NHA will be such that those with thorough knowledge of a subject, “experts”, will work together and produce together with those who want to gain from their experience. The NHA will avoid being artificial in the process of learning, intellectual production and working towards change.
Today's intellectual production is characterized by its selfishness and destructive competitiveness. The NHA aims at being an environment of solidarity, communion, and collective production.
NHA courses will be for two years and will be offered to enrolled students in order to ensure the integrity and quality of its courses the different departments. In addition to this they will host concrete, production-oriented workshops aimed at ensuring participation.
NHA will not merely provide educational services, but will also make a call for collective production in the social sciences and arts.
This call if for those who want Scientific and artistic activities to be central to their lives and who have sufficient background to be able to make such a decision. During the candidacy process, students will be evaluated by which school they graduated from or where they went to school as much as it bears a relationship with their respective scientific/artistic field.
Nowadays there is an effort by the market and institutions to constrain intellectual work within borders in order to be able to exploit it. Instead of a system of international cooperation based on a superficial and formal academic standards, a drive towards higher profits and compensation which is opposed to scientific and artistic quality, another mechanism for motivation and reward is possible. The NHA is aimed at building international relationships with a global character.
NHA's work will strive to connect, share, and work with the community. The NHA will stress in its agenda the development of the necessary tools for the publishing and the organization of meetings and activities according to its own principles and perspectives.
Those who have worked in founding the NHA are aware that we are only part of Turkey's scientific, artistic, and intellectual community who shares our perspective. The NHA hopes to bring together these others under its roof with an ever increasing amount of activities undertaken with their contribution, education and production. We who have worked since the inception of the NHA, now hope to share with those artists and scientists who share out outlook and goals .

This text is both a statement of our principled approach and a call to work in this direction.

weltanschauunging the NYtimes

2010-05-15T00:23:00.000-07:00

My friend has been having a blast recently posting every article about Islam from the NYTimes and that seems to be a good definition of a weltanschauung, the thing that makes. you post certain articles on facebook and not others. Well now it's my turn.
I was thrilled to read this article in the New York Times about conventional jobs being dissolved during the recession not because it satisfied my sadistic fears about not being able to get a job when I get home but because it so excellently shows all kinds of Marxist phenomenon. The more I clicked on links, the more "he told you so" moments popped up. Here is a sampling.

from: In job market shift, some workers are left behind -

For the last two years, the weak economy has provided an opportunity for employers to do what they would have done anyway: dismiss millions of people — like file clerks, ticket agents and autoworkers — who were displaced by technological advances and international trade.

now from limits to Capital-
the problem for Capital in general is somehow to stabilize the value composition in the face of a perpetual tendency to increase the organic composition through technological change within the enterprise. what Marx will ultimately seek to show us is that there is only one way that this can be done: through Crises. The latter can then be interpreted as the forced re-structuring of the labour process so as to bring the system as a whole back into something that roughly conforms to the conditions of balanced accumulation.

This sets off all sorts of different questions about the OCC of a firm (does the blackberry actually reduce the OCC of a firm and therefore counter the fall in the variable capital caused by booting Cynthia?, what is the value of Cynthia vs. a computer program, how could their values be measured, is the logic of her firing better explained by the increased rate of exploitation of the other people in the office who will now pick up the slack, the decreased constant capital-input costs (which, if people are using their own blackberries, would be none) of office communication, the imperative for innovation (can an insurance company garner superprofits by kicking out cynthia?). I think her case shows how many different tendencies (technological change, devaluation, crisis caused at the macro level playing out, OCC) are acting just at the level of her firing. Is this a good example of Althusserian overdetermination? Her bum fucking life being the slightly more understandable instance of the "determinant contradictions of capitalism"?

Then there is a cute article about people buying canoes in Florida instead of X-boxes during the recession and it was a good example of the tensions of effective demand in America and the habits of consumerism.

Barbara Koricanek, 73, a retired nurse in rural Texas, said she cut back on shopping after a recent mission trip to Nicaragua made her realize that “we don’t need half of what we got.” Over the past few months, Ms. Koricanek has started purging her closets and baking bread from scratch, partly because it tastes better, she said, partly to become more independent.

Dangerous! Heretical! Marx says in Capital vol. 2

"The capitalist, as well as his press, is often dissatisfied with the way in which the [laborour] spends his money' and every effort is then made...to make a more rational consumer of him"

The article explains how certain firms are benefiting (events and places, museums and cinemas) in the recession while others should probably be shitting their pants (retailers). Maybe wal-mart has a secret hit squad it sends out for people who figure out what the meadow looks like at dusk.

the last article, that I have to admit was a little bit sadistic to read, was about cutting teachers salaries in the NY region. well this one was just plain good old fashion Class struggle. duh.

THE SUPER HYPER-POLYLITERATE SUMMER BOOK CHALLENGE!

2010-05-11T10:06:00.001-07:00

20 books....
6 languages...
3 month...
1 man...
this is THE SUPER HYPER-POLYLITERATE SUMMER BOOK CHALLENGE!

And here is the list:

Critique de la vie moderne- Henri Lefebvre
سباق للسافات الطويلة - عبد الله منيف
yağmurlu sokak - Melih Cevdet Anday, Arif Damar
Siyasal Marx - David Fernbach
Anti-oedipus- Deleuze & Guattari
A history of the Arab Peoples - Albert Hourani
Capital volume 1 - Karl Marx
Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory - Ernesto Laclau
Eros and Civilization - Herbert Marcuse
بوف كور- صادق هدايت
Godan- Premchand
موسم الهجرة الى الشمال- الطيب صالح
Gavur Mahallesi - Mıgırdiç Margosyan
طعم أسود... رائحة سوداء - علي المقري
Revolutionary Road- Richard Yates
Medeniyet ve Modernizm - Ali Shari'ati
Viejas Historias y Cuentos Completos- Miguel Delibes
Le Bagne d'Edena - J.P. Garen
امريكانلي -صنع الله إبرهيم
عن الرجال و البنادق - غسان كنفاني

atomic women

2010-05-08T04:05:00.000-07:00

A fourth group of Iranian scientists who happen to be women!
How can they reconcile being a wife with the Atom?
Women of Atomic science love sewing and cooking just as much.

ایک حورانی

2010-05-05T12:12:00.000-07:00

یہ صبح پیدار کے بعد میرا ٹوائلٹ کی نیچےمیں نے ایک پیلا بلی انکشاف کیا۔ سو رہا تھا۔ کسے طرح سے میرا اپرتمان آندر ایا اور ایک دیر آشنا جگہ ملا۔ پھلا بہت دیشت زدہ تھا لیکن دودھ لیکر نکلا۔ اس کے بعد بہت بہت شفقت اور تجسس کرنے والے تھا۔ انقدر مہربان تھا کہ اسکو نکلانا ضروری تھا۔

مدينة كجزيرة

2010-04-20T04:15:00.000-07:00

احيانا اتخيل كأن المدينة التى اعيش فيها هي جزيرة حية. اذا انظر الى اطرافها و ارى حافاتها الفراغ فجاة اشعر وحدة شديدة. يجب, اذا, ان ابقي في قلب المدينة و ان دائما انظر الى وسطيها كي اتجنب هذا الشعور. امل ان في المستقبل عندما اخيرا افقد هذا الاحساسية دراماتكية و غموض ساكون مستعد لحياة عادي

words to live by

2010-04-19T12:59:00.001-07:00

the Shahnameh teaches: Yekta-Parasti (Worship of one God), Khoda Tarsi (Fear of breaking the commandments of God-respecting God), Din Dari (Religious Uprightness), Mihan Doosti (patriotism), Mehr beh Zan o Farzand (love of wife, family and children), Dastgiryeh Darmandegaan (Helping the poor), Kheradmandi (Pursuit of Wisdom), Dad-Khahi (Pursuit of Justice), Door-Andishi (Long term thinking), Miyaneh Ravi (Seeking and Acting in Equilibrium-moderation), Adaab Daani (Acting and Knowing correct manner-courtesy), Mehman Nawazi (Seeking the happiness of Guests-hospitality), Javanmardi (Chivalry), Bakhshesh (Forgiveness), Sepasgozari (Thankfulness), Khoshnoodi o Khorsandi (Being content and Happy with existence), Kooshaayi (Hard Work), Narmesh Yaa Modaaraa (Being Peaceful and Kind), Vafadaari (Being faithful), Raasti o Dorostkari (Truth and opposing anything that is against the Truth), Peymaan Daari (Keeping covenants), Sharm o Ahestegi (Shame at committing immoral acts and also control over one's self), Khamooshi (Not acting loud-modesty), Danesh Amoozi (Pursuing Knowledge-education), Sokhan Dani (Knowledge of Wise Words) and many other moral qualities

şehit yolmaz part İİ

2010-04-03T08:50:00.001-07:00

Well now I just feel plain silly. Here are some quotes from Cihan Tuğal as to the relationship between the state and religion in Turkey's form of secularism.

To grasp the paradoxical nature of the changes in Turkey, it is first necessary to consider the peculiar meaning that ‘secularism’ (laiklik) has had for the Kemalist state. Between 1919 and 1923, with the defeated Ottoman Empire effectively partitioned by the Entente powers, the founding wars for the Turkish Republic waged by Kemal’s troops had appealed not only to the national liberation ‘dream’ of fatherland and freedom, but to the Muslim duty to resist the infidel occupation. Religious homogenization was an important constituent element of national unity, with the birth of the Republic attended by the expulsion of Orthodox Greeks, as pendant to the 1915 massacres of Armenians. The question, rather, was of the relation between religion and the state. In this sense, secularization—as expanding state control over religion—was a project of the 19th-century Tanzimat reforms. In 1924, the founding Constitution of the Republic retained Islam as the state religion, even as the Caliphate, fez, religious courts and schools, et cetera, were swept away and the Latin alphabet and Western legal code introduced; the clause was removed in 1928. Secularization was formally enunciated as one of the six principles of the Kemalist Republican People’s Party’s programme in 1931, and finally incorporated into the Constitution in 1937.

In the official view, rehearsed by many Western scholars, the 1924–25 modernizations constitute categorical proof of the disestablishment of religion in Turkey. [2] With Islam removed from every official public site, this argument runs, religious sectors of the population will eventually adapt to the ruling reality and become thoroughly secularized. Others have argued, however, that the Turkish state has controlled and institutionalized Islam, rather than disestablishing it.nlr 1/226, November–December 1997, pp. 300–32; and şerif Mardin, ‘Religion and Politics in Modern Turkey’, in James Piscatori, ed., Islam in the Political Process, Cambridge 1983.', FGCOLOR, '#E3E3E3', BGCOLOR, '#000000')" onmouseout="nd();"> [3] Thus the (non-elected) Directorate General of Religious Affairs exercises a monopoly power over the appointment of preachers and imams throughout the country, and controls the distribution of sermons. In this view there are clear continuities between the Turkish Republic and the Ottoman system, where state and religion were deeply imbricated.

Arguably, however, Turkish secularization may best be seen as an ongoing struggle over the nature and development of an ‘official Islam’, characterized by the public use of religion for national cohesion. Rather than reproducing some universalist (or Ottoman) logic, the secularization project was continually remade, its (partially unintended) outcomes the result of a series of interventions by different social forces. This process has involved conflicts both within the ruling power bloc constituted by the reforms of the late Ottoman period and the early years of the Republic, and with social layers excluded from it. Since the 1930s, the dominant sectors within this bloc—the military leadership, the modernizing layers of the civil bureaucracy, an officially protected industrial bourgeoisie and a West-oriented intelligentsia—have favoured a more-or-less authoritarian exclusion of religion from the public sphere. The bloc’s subordinate sector—conservative elements of the bureaucracy and professional middle class, an export-oriented bourgeoisie, merchants, provincial notables—tended to advocate a larger space for Islam, albeit still under ‘secular’ control. This could also mobilize broader popular layers—workers, peasants, artisans, the unemployed, small provincial entrepreneurs, clerics—against the dominant sector, and often succeeded in extracting concessions from it.chp) has long been the political vehicle of the dominant, statist sector of this bloc, while the more traditionalist-religious layers have been represented by a variety of different parties since the end of single-party rule in 1950: Adnan Menderes’s Democratic Party in the 1950s, Süleyman Demirel’s Justice Party in the 1960s, Turgut Özal’s Motherland Party in the 1980s and 90s.', FGCOLOR, '#E3E3E3', BGCOLOR, '#000000')" onmouseout="nd();"> [4] Meanwhile, although excluded from the power equation, the religious groupings themselves, as well as numerous semi-clandestine Islamic communities, put up quite powerful forms of passive or active resistance around questions such as education.

şehit yolmaz (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the wirklich Schranke)

2010-04-02T02:37:00.000-07:00

It sometimes seems that Turkey never got the memo that we've all passed into the age of cynical we-know-well-but-nevertheless ideology. For the casual visitor it is most noticed by the Omniscient nom-du-pere hanging on classroom walls and ebony busts and on every piece of money (a colleague recently, while listening a litany of complaints against the Islamic AKP party who is engineering a mullocracy from the inside, decried their changing of the currency so that he was only on one side of the money). It's like wherever you go you can use him to orientate you daddy-mommy triangulation and Oedipalize yourself on the basketball court, the classroom, the movietheatre.
A few weeks ago we got out of class to go down and see a reenactment of the battle of Gallipoli (a battle I distinctly remember John Keegan dismissing as almost an afterthought) preceded by a dry talk about the world-historical importance of the battle (did you know it made possible the Russian revolution?) and how it should not be either forgotten or diminished in importance. Like a cross-eyed Turkish McCarthy with a mom-haircut, she fell short of brandishing a pitchfork against anyone trying to doubt the absolute truth of young boys carrying artillery shells on their backs during the battle. (Does this count as diminishing the battle? Am I going to get my residency permit revoked?) If that wasn't bad enough immediately afterwards was a highschool rendition of the battle complete with screaming mourners, baby-dolls being killed by shrapnel, Baglama ballads about sacrifice and the nation, and a boy who screamed all of his lines at the top of his voice (he was Ata-pus himself). It was uncomfortable and loud and I couldn't help looking around for the tell-tale sign on irony on someone's face.
Which made me think at the time of the great Analysis in the NYtimes and that there is some irony to be found after all. It is the Islamic party that has the monopoly on progress. But that is, as Mr. Oran says, because they are bourgeois and the bourgeois still have their historical role to play. We should get the Muslim brotherhood some lucrative shipping rights in the EU and then they'll be on the right side of history again.
Another ghoulish sight of nationalism I saw here was news coverage of the death of some soldiers fighting in the Mountain Turk areas and a soldier who died two days before his child was born. Needless to say its a sad event, but the news murdered the mankind of his going. They show the toothy village father telling a top-brass that he has another son to sacrifice to the nation, and the colonel politely refusing. Then the mother screams and drapes herself over the Turkish flag-draped coffin and the camera zooms in and slo-mo's a tear falling from her cheek.
One more thing, in slight reference to Krystina's post on Islamic semantics, it is interesting how there is not a tension, or at least there seems to be an intricate but settled co-operation, between Islamic ritual and nationalistic veneration at the funerals of Turkish soldiers killed in combat. I don't know enough about it but on the surface it is very interesting how even the meaning of martyr, şehit, originally the Arabic and therefore Islamic شهيد, has been overtaken by its nationalistic meaning. The first website that comes up when you right the Turkish word in a search engine is related to the multiple support organizations for families of Turkish soldiers and other sorts of jingoist fanclubs.
I don't really mean any of this as disrespect, I just still after all this time find such a conventional form of ideology to be an almost welcome throwback to the glory days of cults of personality and anthems. Neoliberalism is such a schizophrenic boogeyman, hyperrealism, finance capital, the service economy, how the hell do you burn those things in Effigy? I remember trying to convince the Yemeni kids in our government sponsored multicultural roundtable who turned every discussion around into an anti-American policy hate fest (see that's the kind of irony I can sink my teeth into) that their real enemy wasn't a zionist kabal, or evangelical oil magnates, or cowboy boot warhawks, or the multinational corporations, or even the military industrial complex, but rather the more abstract logic of accumulation and Capitalism as the wirklich Schranke (well I wasn't nearly so wordy in Arabic, to be frank). I wonder if they thought in their heads what that would look like slopping around on a pole on fire.

ریاضی روک

2010-03-27T14:16:00.000-07:00

پھلی دفعہ کہ میں نے ریاضی روک سنا یاد کر سکتا نہی (ممکن ٹی اولس تھا) لیکن یقینی ہے کہ میں یہ ژنرا کہ ایک بہت بڑا تعریف کرنے والی ہوں۔ در حقیقت, متآکد طرح سے کہا سکتا ہوں کہ میں دنیا کہ اکیلا اردو میں ریاضی روک کے باڑے می نويسنده ہوں۔ جب ویکیپیدیا تبدیل کرنا کہ سیکھوںگا تب ایک ریاضی روک صحفہ بناوںگا لیکن ابھی کے لیے ایک نہ توصیہ دیوںگا:
the bygones- click on that (smash the plastic death)

doğu halkbilgisi klübü

2010-03-21T14:17:00.000-07:00

'Ama ben Sana bu güzel hikayeyi onunla hayatımı nasıl anlamlandırdığımı göstermek için değil, onun unutulduğunu söylemek için anlattım,' dedi lacivert. 'En azından bin yıllık bu hikaye Firdevsi'nin Şehname'sindendir. Bir zamanlar Tebriz'den İstanbul'a, Bosna'dan Trabzon'a Milyonarca İnsan bu hikayeyi bilir ve onu hatırlayıp hayatlarının anlamını anlarlardı. Bugün Batı'da Oedipus'daki baba katilliğini, Macbeth'in taht ve ölüm saplantısını düşüneler gibi.

daha sonra bu konuşma'da İstanbul'da şehname satın alacağın bir katapçı bulunmadığını anlatıyor lacivert. Beyoğlu'nda gezerken ben de halkbilgisi ile ilgili biraz bilgi içeren kitabı gördüm. kadıköy'de bile en sevdiğim mahalli sahaf gerçek bir orta doğu nadirlik hazinesi değil. (dürüstçe söylemek gerekirse butün onların osmanlıca yazılarını henüz tetkik etmediğimi itiraf etmeliyim). eğer gülünç fransiz bilimkurgu, kuru islami rehberleri ya da freud'in dinsel teorisini istiyorsan bulabilirsin ama eğer bir orientalist gibi iyimser beklentiler içindeysen müteessir olacaksin. Aslında butun sahaflar özel bir batılı ehliyet sahibi olan imajı göstermek istediğinden onların folklor saklamasına bir bahane bulunur ve söz ettiğim romana göre kemalistler ve islamcılar arasında islamiyet öncesi kültürünün taraftarlığını yapan takım olmadığını bilmeliyiz.

Bu duruma meydan okumak için ben inatla bazı değerli parçaları buluyorum. orta doğu folklorunun takdir etmesi için her şeyden önce farsça dilinin bilinmesi gerekir. çok iyi farsça öğreten bir kitap buldum ve mevlana şiirlerinde türkçenin farsça'dan ne kadar ektilendiğini gösteriyor. kitab'ın tarzı çok fazla arkaik ve çok arapça-farsça lügatça kullanıyor (keşke ben de bu tarzı taklit etebilseydim). Jose Marti derneği ispanyolca kursuna katılan bir oğrencim türkiye'nin ve iran'ın daha laik olan zamanlarında İstanbul'da çok fazla İranlı öğrenciler olduğunu söyledi. Bu kitap bu asır'ın bir parçası olduğunu hayal etmeyi seviyorum. şimdi başka bir kitabı alıp orijinal farsça'da iranlı foklor okuyabilirim hatta Lacivert'in cüretli teklifini cevaplamaya başladım. daha fazla farsça kelime haznesi sahip olabilirsem hem urdu dilinde hem de eski türkçe'de daha iyi bir okuyucu olacağım. Ancak bunu yaptıktan sonra folklorle ilgigi eğlenceli şakalar yapabilirim. "suya gel lan. yalnız plajda oturmak için biz bodrum'a kadar gelmedik ki. gülistan'da kayık binmekten korkan köleden daha korkuyorsun." eğer Deleuze ödip üçgen kaçmak için bu yolu tavsiye ederdi çok merak ederiyorum.

food for thought

2010-03-16T13:19:00.000-07:00

Later, the take of transhhistorical and transcultural tranlslation, an essential condition of politics of modernity, needed for 'continuity in the mental life of successive generations,' as Freud puts it (totem and taboo), would disappear beneath the twofold burden of the rapid extension of technology and the mechanics of "expropriation" of global capitalism. It was as if the peoples who had emerged into the modern world were unable to live out their present experience through an accessible language; they no longer had the ability to make meaningful connections through their idioms but were forced to undergo the physical transformations of their world and the harassment of so-called Western discourse without alteration. From within and without there arose a class of fearsome 'experts' claiming to operate directly on the real in all areas of knowledge, mouthing collectivist or liberal platitudes; experts who gave lessons, issues orders, dismantled. The prosaism of their jargon, which claimed to be both scientific and universal, asserted that it contained an intangible truth providing immediate access to a radiant tomorrow. In the name of development, the transition to the modern involved aimless wandering in the unthinkable.
This effort toward the widespread liquidation of speech and political meaning went on for two decades and produced a state of generalized ignorance. Falsehoods became commonplace. The field was ready for Islamist speech and its extreme representations. Having come on the scene with a moralizing language that implicated the body of our anxieties about existence, Islamists erected a monolithis Islam free of internal contradiction; they polarized the opposition between Islam and the West and announced their intent to rstore what was proper (In both senses: the exclusive and the immaculate) through another form of immediacy; that of access to the "originary plenitude of politics." This was the promise of a return to the golden age of the foundign of Islam, when the beginning and the commandment were united in a single principle in the hands of, first, the prophet-founder-legislator, then his four successors. This period was assumed to have been on of ideal justice on Earth, before the fall into the division and internal sedition (fitna) that the community would later experience.
One of the causes of Islamist extremism is the catastrophic collapse of language: language was no longer able to translate for people a particular intense historical experience, that of the modern era, which entails not only the scientific and industrial transformation of the world but also the conjunction between this furious power of transformation and the desire to the the other. Yet "Islamist" extremism is driven by an impulse, and this impulse is simply the inverse of the desire to be an other: "the despair that wills to be Itself," as Kierkegaard expressed it. What is this self? Its identity is defined by its origin, and its origin is bound by a framework of unique features: one religion (Islam), one language (Arabic), and one text (the Koran), to which is often added the national anthem here and there. The modern era replaced the desire to be an other with the despair that wills to be itself, enclosing us in a confrontation each of whose terms represents the impossible.
-Fethi Beslama

امروز به بازار برو و يك كتاب بخر و صهيونيست هاى غاصب را اخراج كن

2010-02-04T00:09:00.000-08:00

So my favorite souvenir from my trip to Syria was a pair of Farsi textbooks from the Iranian Cultural institute. I was leisurely reading the chapter on the command for of verbs when all of a sudden things took a turn for the Bizarre and hilarious.

ھر روز صبح ورزش کن۔ سپس صبحانہ بخور و لباست را بپوش
Every morning practice sports. Then eat breakfast and put on your clothes.
مسلمانان جھان! بہ عزت خود برگردید۔ صھیونیست هاى غاصب را اخراج كنید
Muslims of the World! Return to your power and chase away the usurping Zionists.

Without warning they just slip that last sentence in there. Later there is a part where you're supposed to change singular to plural commands and after sentences like "come home" and "listen to your father's advice" comes "resist oppresors" and "help the oppressed."

Teen Dream

2010-02-01T01:38:00.000-08:00

Teen Dream

The Urdu ghazalth and its discontents

2010-01-19T01:29:00.001-08:00

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was struck at reading Urdu Ghazal poetry by its incredibly sappy, self-debasing, and 'emo' tone. These supposedly eternal verses came off as not much more than portentious whining. Then my buddy özge did me a solid by giving me access to her friend Evrim's libary account at boğaziçi university and I've been spending all morning drooling over articles, one of which was Ralph Russel's "the pursuit of the Urdu Ghazal" which detailed his own initial disdain and disbelief with why Ghazal's are so revered when they don't seem much more than a random string of couplets about unrequited love. Russsel finds a key in a quote by C.S. Lewis "any idealization of sexual love, in a society where marriage is purely utilitarian, must begin by being an idealization of adultery". Lewis is referring to medieval European literature when he made this statement but russel sees no offense in describing Urdu literature as such since the mughal empire was entirely "medievel in spirit" as well as being itself the language of an elite and thereby being "markedly aristocratic in its values".
So when you take this historical background into account, and imagine some stubble-chinned poet in mughal India being a little bit dramatic because he can be counted among one of the more blue-balled of the civilizations unbehangen (Herbert Marcuse would be so proud of me now, historicizing the ontogenesis of Mir Taqi Mir ), you can be a little more sympathetic for our dear hyperbolic bards.

we can use this little passage from Russel to expand on the historical context

It is worth pointing out that all three of these situations (coveting another man's wife, homosexual love for a youth, courtesans) of love have one feature in common- the lover knows that his love must in the last resort be hopeless. A girl married or betrothed to another man can never be his; a boy grows up; and a courtesan by the very nature of her calling cannot giver herself to him alone. The desperation of the lover portrayed in the ghazal is, therefore, a desperation founded upon all the real-life experience of love

He goes on to discredit such a mechanical interpretation of the inspiration for these poets, and waxes on about the relative unimportance of wondering if in concrete reality these authors actually experienced such unrequited episodes of passion, even in the mystical sense, for if we know something for certain it is that most of the most famous urdu poets were not overly mystical. The important thing for Russell is the role these poems play as a sort of social pressure release valve in a society founded on feudal principles of divine decree, ordained caste, and fatalist social standing. Even the rulers can get in on the act of allowing a couple of homo-erotic love poems to become adored by society. He says
"the rulers of society felt no great difficulty in giving the seal of approval to the ghazal as a, so to speak, licensed, institutionalized form of passionate protest against a world in which the poet and his audience were likewise confined"
I of course live in an age of repressive desublimation and so sexual angst means almost nothing to me unless I work in a contrived aesetic way to engender it in myself (which I actually did once for a semester and even that in small doses drove me straight into the arms of mysticism and troubadordom) and so I guess I can imagine to what lengths I would be emo-ized under such conventionally repressive conditions (I no doubt buy into the notion that repression has merely been deffered into the performance principle but at least I can look at boobs before I get married) . If you take a look at any one of ghalib's macabre verses you can begin to appreciate a sense of meloncholy as "a pure culture of the death instinct".
I can imagine myself likewise repressed in an age where satisfaction wasn't so immediately accessible. not even in the erotic sense, hell take Jstor for example. before I had access to it it could be said of my heart
دل میں ذوق وصل ویاد جائ ستور تک باقی نہیں آگ اس گھر میں لگی ایی کہ جو تھا جل گیا

not even relish for union and memory of the beloved Jstor remained in the heart.
Fire so raged in this house that whatever remained, burned

Lundinish

2010-01-14T00:01:00.000-08:00

So I hoped that by studying verbal nouns, case endings, and syntax of enough languages I could somehow find a transcendent path to making Lundinish the most unique language possible. I wanted to get away from any overly obvious semblance to an existing language by blending and extracting to the point of completely erasing my tracks. I think it's uber interesting that the more grammar's I read (Yoruba, Japanese, Kurdish, Quechua) about, the more imprisoned I feel in human thought. There is no way really to evade one of the inevitable choices between SOV, VSO, SVO, etc. you can make minor changes to pronouns if you want but they seem cosmetic since you still have to have them. It feels like watching a bad sci-fi movie where you can tell that the magical creature they've conjured up is just an elephant with scales, or a robot that just looks like an effeminate bald guy. Even elvish is just a rip-off of Finnish.

For Lundinish I am taking the best parts of Arabic verb-roots systems and turkish's clever syntactical use of possessive contructions with verbal nouns (-dik clauses) and the Dravidian use of only having one finite verb per sentence (I'm getting around that by defaulting all infinite verbs to the 1st person singular simple past (like in Arabic but more narcissistic) and making all other verbs act as adverbs). I'm also hoping to make prepositions entirely redundant (I'm getting close) as well as the case system other than leaving in a few prefixes that denote genitive and izafa structures to complex nouns. I've been hoping to find a more novel way to make compound nouns (nostalgia + book = journal) but I haven't thought of anything better than the way most languages do it i.e. just putting them next to each other. My verbal nouns are easily done by adding a single vowel in front of the verb stem, the internal vowel of verbs denote a general sense of mood or essence (big, exotic, passionate, matter of fact, etc.) rather than transitivity of passivity as in Arabic ( I show that through the additions of one of 5 consonants after the verb stem). Subject and object pronouns attach to each other independent of the verb ( I-you talked).
Despite this, even if I smoked lots of opiates and lived in new guinea or continually evolved Lundinish without ever finalizing anything, I will never get away from Deep Grammar. As we say in Lundinish

Atog meşeyaax tascaamç
human social tradition is inescapable

healthcare in Cuba by Ilker Belek

2010-01-12T00:17:00.000-08:00

I'm borrowing a book about the health care system in Cuba that I am borrowing from the Jose Marti Friendship association, and it is like reading some sort of futuristic sci-fi utopian novel. when the Cuban government was suffering from agricultural shortages, it started an Urban agriculture which raised fruit and vegetable production by 1000% between 1994-2006. There is an emphasis on equality at the class level between urban and rural areas in terms of access to healthcare. Coordination and decentralization. They have elections for national, regional, and municipal healthcare councils. (aspiring hospital administrators who play guitar on the side shiver in their labcoats). The book also stresses (although not with much extra effort) that these successes are due to the socialist formation of their healthcare system. Motivation is a looming problem for the system but sure as shit better than the alternative. It reminded me of my favorite reading experience of alllllllll time.

our objective is to eliminate ghettos. Therefore, the only valid policy with respect to this objective is to eliminate the conditions which give rise to the truth of this theory. The simplest approach here is to eliminate those mechanisms which serve to generate this theory. The mechanism in this case is very simple- competitive bidding for the use of the land. if we eliminate this mechanism, we will presumably eliminate the result. This is immediately suggestive of a policy for eliminating ghettos, which would presumably supplant competitive bidding with a socially controlled urban land market and socialized control of the housing sector. Under such a system, the Von Thunen theory (which is a normative theory anyways) would become empirically irrelevant to our understanding of the spatial structure of residential land use. This approach has been tried in a number of countries. In cuba, for example, all urban flats were expropriated in 1960. Rents were paid to the government "and were considered as amoritzation towards ownership by the occupants".
This approach to the ghetto land and housing market is suggestive of a different framework for analyzing problems and devising solutions. Notice, for example, that all old housing became rent free. If we regard the total housing stock of an urban area as a social (as opposed to private) good, then obviously the community has already paid for the old housing. We have an enormous quantity of social capital locked up in the housing stock, but in a private market system for land and housing, the value of the housing is not always measured in terms of its use as a shelter and residence, but in terms of the amount received in market exchange. In many inner city areas at the present time, houses patently posses little or no exchange value. This does not mean, however, that they have no use value. As a consequence, we are throwing away use value because we cannot establish exchange value. This waste would not occur under a socialized housing market system and it is one of the costs we bear for clinging tenaciously to the notion of private property.

So many people are dying in America because an exchange value cannot be established for fixing them. Stupidest shit ever. Viva Cuba.

better book collection than goosebumps

2009-11-23T11:26:00.000-08:00

found these pearlers at the good old akmar. Almost done with les grottes de phobos and it kicks ass

true love never dies

2009-11-14T23:48:00.000-08:00

میں بہت وقت سے اب تک اینڈی موسیقی سے محبت کرتا ہوں اور کچھ سال سے میں پتچفورک ڈوت کوم استعمل کرنے سے اور فیشن پرست ہو سکتا ہوں۔ ہائ سکول میں جسٹین اور میں ایک نیا بانڈ سے ملکر بہت ہیجان اور منتخب احساس رکھتے تھے۔ ہم موسیقی پرہمت مہم والیی تھے۔ ابھی ہر چیز بہت بہت آسان ہے۔ لیکن پرہمت مہم کا روح غائب ہوتا ہے۔ ماضی میں مجھے بہت خاص بانڈوں تھے۔ کوفاکس ایک اچھا مثال ہے۔ انکا ہر البوم بر بر سنتا تھا۔ابھی ایک نیا البوم ڈاونلوڈ کرنے کے بعد کبھی کبھی صرف ایک وقت سناتا ہوں۔ اج کوفاکس کا نیا البوم خود مہں ملتا تھا اور اوک نوستالجیک تجربہ تھا

Koufax-roll the dice

The Crow Eaters by Bapsi Sidhwa

2009-11-12T05:14:00.000-08:00

I have a little pile of wilting books sitting on my desk that all center around the sub-continent. I'm calling it my Indian summer passive intersubjectivity book fest. I'm hoping that if I ever make it to India I can make endless literary pilgramage and reference based just on these three books. I'll get my picture taken in front of a tower of silence, sit astride the zam-zammah cannon in Lahore, and umm...donate a cow to charity.
2 of them share the characteristic of being over-written, two of them are by native Indians, two of them are from the British Raj, but none of them share all three characteristics.
godan- Premchand
the crow eaters- Bapsi Sidhwa
Kim- Rubyard Kipling
I just finished the crow eaters and I loved excusing how verbose every last page is by thinking of that documentary I watched one time on the influence of English on India and to what fanciful and prepostorous lengths they have carried the language in an effort to out-English the English. The plot was weak, the characters weren't developed but bricollaged from a thesaurus, and the dialogue was fake and dumb. But despite all that it was laugh out loud funny at points, well-written despite itself, and great to read on a service bus. Here are some quotes I liked.

Billy devoured each word. A callow-faced stripling with a straggling five-haired moustache, he believed his father's utterances to be superior even to the wisdom of Zarathustra. The young men loved best of all those occasions when there were no women around to cramp Faredoon's style. At such times Freddy would enchant them with hi candour. One evening when the women were busy preparing dinner, he confided in them.
"Yes, I've been all things to all people in my time. There was that bumptious son-of-a-bitch in Peshawar Colonel Williams. I cooed to him- salaamed so low I got a crick in my balls- buttered and marmaladed him until he was eating out of my hand. Within a year I was handling all of the traffic between Peshawar and Afghanistan.
***

To them England was a land of crowns and thrones; of tall splendidly attired, cool-eyed noblemen and imposing, fair-haired ladies gliding past in gleaming carriages; of elegant lords in tall hats and tails, strolling with languid ladies who swept spotless waterfront promenades with trailing gowns, their gestures gracious and charming, marked with an exquisite reserve. Had someone suggested to them that Englishmen, too, defecate, they may have said "Of course...they have to, I suppose" and their exhalted opinions would have been touched with doubt. But since such suggestions were not ventured, the England of their imaginings was burnished to an antiseptic gloss that had no relation to menial human toil.
***

"Button up your Cardigan!" said Billy in a fierce whisper. Tanya obediently buttoned herself up. The fluffy mohair covering her bosom and waist, if anything, accentuated her voluptuous curves. Billy was getting more and more put off by this concommitment of his wife's beauty. He wished for the tenth time her were a Mohammaden and could cover her up in a burqa. Sensible people, the Muslims, he thought.

nostalagia

2009-11-12T01:31:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az1uIzZ4SDw

a solution to my old book problem

2009-11-02T22:46:00.000-08:00

so yesterday I treated myself to a book at my favorite used bookstore in kadıköy and hadn't even paid for it before starting to worry, nay, dread about how this book printed in 1947 would fall apart to pieces, nay, dust before I had even gotten to the second chapter. I'll never know what happens in les enfants terribles for that very reason. But at the exit I stopped to look at a little arabic scribble (on left) with a caption under it.

eskilerden rivayet: kitabları, kitap kurdundan ya da güvelerden korumak için kitabın ilk yaprağı üzerine 'ya kabikeç' yazılır. Kabikeç kitapları güveden koruyan meleğin, cinin ya da şeytanın adı.

old hearsay: in order to protect books from worms and moths, "ya kebikech" is written on the first page. Kabikech is the angel/jinn/shaytan of protection from moths.

HOW BAD-ASS IS THAT?!??!!

from Class Structure and Social Stratification in Early Muslim India

2009-10-27T00:02:00.000-07:00

Local Muslim masses adopted different professions. Most of them did not leave their inherited professions. Weaver’s son was normally a weaver; goldsmith’s son was normally a goldsmith and so on. Muslims were divided into many castes (Jatis) on the basis of their professions. These were weavers (jola), livestock herders (mukeri), cake sellers (pi-thdri), fishmongers (kabari), converts from the local population (garasal), loom makers (sanakar), circumcisers (hajam), bow makers (tirakar), pa-permakers (kagaji), wandering holy men (kalandar), tailors (darji), weavers of thick cord (benata), dyers (rangrej), users of hoes (halan), and beef sellers (kasdi). Government demand appears to have brought into existence still other groups of Muslim artisans. The bow makers, for example, provided weaponry for the kingdom's armed forces, while papermakers would have met both the bureaucracy's appetite for files and the Muslim religious elite's demand for books.24
The converted Muslims who were living in urban areas could not raise their standard of living to the higher degrees, although, their general status in society was the same like immigrants, at least as a theory. Different industrial units such as textiles, carpets, bed-strings, dyeing, indigo, calico-painting, metal work, stone and brick work, coral and ivory work, leather work, imitation jewellery etc., were in the urban areas, therefore Muslims of the specific areas were working in these industrial units. But medieval Indian historians have not mentioned their salaries or income.25 Some Muslims especially on coastal areas were related to trade or broker ship. Class of Muslim brokers was an organized one and earning profits. Foreign trade was mostly in the hands of foreign Muslims. Internal trade was shared by Muslims and Hindus both. Muslims of this class were well established but were insignificant politically.26 Later when Iqta-system was introduced and Iqtadars were bound to appoint armies, the local Muslims and in some cases Hindus must have been appointed in the armies.27 Common Muslims of rural areas, too, could not leave their age old professions. They were either peasants or village artisans whose lives were very difficult and tough. The impact of local Hindus was far greater on them than that of the Islamic ideas.28

yaşasın metalaştırmamış eğitim!

2009-10-21T22:35:00.000-07:00

I cannot say enough how overjoyed I am to be a part of the Nazim Hikmet Academy. Yesterday while sitting at my desk at at a university (read academic factory) which was built for the express purpose of parking a Turkish Tycoon's fortune, I was watching youtube videos of June's Marxism conference in London, where David Harvey says one of the first tasks we can undertake in the multi-faceted reconfiguring of the conditions in a move towards socialism is to free the university system from it's neoliberal ideological compartmentalized state and I thought to myself 'hey, that's like the Nazim Hikmet Academy'. I've yet to translate the mission statement into English, but the NHA says almost exactly the same thing as being one of its primary goals.

Kapitalist bir düzende entelektüel etkinlik, bir eğilim olarak piyasa kuralları çerçevesinde tanımlanır. İçinde yaşadığımız dönemde bu eğilim kendiliğindenliğin sınırlarını çoktan aşmıştır. Eğitim, kültür ve bilim, bilinçli biçimde piyasa esasları üzerinde yeniden yapılandırılmaktadır. NHA bu yapılanmaya karşı bir mücadele aracı olacak ve ancak toplumsal ölçekte inşa edilebileceğini bildiğimiz bütünüyle farklı bir alternatifin şekillenmesi için uğraş verecektir.

And there is a genuine palpable difference teaching and studying in an environment not based on the profit motive, and not constrained by neo-liberal ideology. It's like immediately moving light years ahead in the discussion when you aren't spending 90% of your time overcoming liberal multi-cultural assumptions. I remember not being able to say anything Leninist in my (the name itself is a multicultural joke) "Islamic peace paradigms" class until being backed up by a anti-colonial/malcolm X type and spending almost half the semester walking on eggshells around topics as banal as Islamophobia and Israeli identity. In my political ideology course at NHA we hadn't even gotten through the syllabus before mentioning that most of the principles of liberalism are bourgoisshit. (trademark, actually, public intellectual property). On Tuesday in my NHA English class I brought in photocopies of chapter 1 of limits to capital and despite the fact that the text was waaaaay too hard for everyone (I had to go over it line by line) everyone listened intently as I drew arrows between exchange value and use value and didn't seem phased. I chalk it up to the fact that they really want to be here and there is no profit motive, it's a genuine partnership between teacher and student to convey the ideas that have, unfortunately, not been translated into English. Working at my job job is an exercise in apathy and deadlines and expectations, NHA feels like a genuine exchange of intellectual solidarity and dedication to advancing our knowledge as a group. In fact, I am so jazzed by all of this that I can write about it without being ironic or sarcastic. True enthusiasm for something i am participating in in my life, and its priceless, because it's social.

What Girls Want

2009-10-19T23:37:00.000-07:00

A student of mine, when asked to write a paragraph, wrote about the three reasons why vampires are too powerful to be resisted. I immediately thought about this article and laughed to myself.

A series of vampire novels illuminates the complexities of female adolescent desire.

by Caitlin Flanagan

Image credit: Adam S. Doyle

Children’s books about divorce—which are unanimously dedicated to bucking up those unfortunate little nippers whose families have gone belly-up—ask a lot of their authors. Their very premise, however laudable, so defies the nature of modern children’s literature (which, since the Victorian age, has centered on a sentimental portrayal of the happy, intact family) that the enterprise seems doomed from the title. Since the 1950s, children have delighted in the Little Bear books (Mother Bear: “I never did forget your birthday, and I never will”)—but who wants to find a copy of Cornelia Maude Spelman’s Mama and Daddy Bear’s Divorce wedged onto the shelf? Still, the volumes fill a need: helping children understand that life on the other side of the custody hearing can still be happy and hopeful, that a broken family is not a ruined one.

But pick up a novel written for adolescents in which the main character is a child of divorce, and you’re in very different waters. Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence. It also means that the protagonists must confront the sexuality of their parents at the moment they least want to think about such realities. It introduces into a household the adult passions and jealousies that have long gone to ground in most middle-aged parents, a state of affairs that is particularly difficult for girls, who have a more complicated attitude toward their own emerging sexuality than do boys, and who are far more rooted in the domestic routines and traditions of their families, which constitute the vital link between the sweet cocooning of childhood and their impending departure from it.

Also see:

Video: "Twilight: A Review"

MCaitlin Flanagan brings a camcorder and a savvy 14-year-old girl to a premiere of the new vampire movie.

The only thing as difficult for a girl as a divorce—if we are to judge from stories aimed at the teen market—is a move. Relocating is what led to the drug addiction, prostitution, and death that freaked out a generation of readers in Go Ask Alice, and to the teenybopper dipsomania of Sarah T.: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic. In the most perfectly constructed young-adult novel of the past few decades, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume heightened the anxiety in her tale of a girl awaiting her first period by beginning the story with Margaret’s move to the suburbs. The drama and anguish with which girls confront such disruptions to their domestic lives are typical both of the narcissism that can make living with a teenage girl one of the most unpleasant experiences God metes out to the unsuspecting, and of the ways that, for women, puberty is the most psychologically complex and emotionally alive experience of their lives. Why wouldn’t a girl buck against leaving her hometown? Never again will she have such intense friendships, such a burning need to be in constant contact with the circle of girls (the best friend, the second-best friend, the whole court as carefully considered and clearly delineated as a bridal party) who sustain her through their shared experience of the epic event of female adolescence.

TWILIGHT IS THE FIRST in a series of four books that are contenders for the most popular teen-girl novels of all time. (The movie based on the first book was released in November.) From the opening passage of the first volume, the harbingers of trouble loom: 17-year-old Bella Swan is en route to the Phoenix airport, where she will be whisked away from her beloved, sunny hometown and relocated to the much-hated Forks, Washington, a nearly aquatic hamlet of deep fogs and constant rains. The reason for the move is that Mom (a self-absorbed, childlike character) has taken up with a minor-league baseball player, and traveling with him has become more appealing than staying home with her only child. Bella will now be raised by her father, an agreeable-enough cipher, who seems mildly pleased to have his daughter come to live with him, but who evinces no especial interest in getting to know her; they begin a cohabitation as politely distant and mutually beneficial as a particularly successful roommate matchup off Craigslist. Bella’s first day at her new school is a misery: the weather is worse than she could ever have imagined, and the one silvery lining to the disaster is the mystery and intrigue presented by a small group of students—adopted and foster children of the same household—who eat lunch together, speak to no one else, are mesmerizingly attractive, and (as we come rather quickly to discover) are vampires. Bella falls in love with one of them, and the novel—as well as the three that follow it—concerns the dangers and dramatic consequences of that forbidden love.

I hate Y.A. novels; they bore me. That’s a disappointing fact of my reading life, because never have I had such an intense relationship with books as when I was a young girl. I raged inside them and lived a double emotional life (half real girl, half inhabitant of a distant world). To Sir, With Love and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Forever and Rebecca, Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones and Mrs. Mike, Gone With the Wind and Rich Man, Poor Man, and even Valley of the Dolls (an astonishing number of whose 8 million readers turned out to be teenagers) and Peyton Place, as well as any movie-star biography I could get my hands on (Judy Garland, Greta Garbo—in those days, you had to have been long dead or seriously faded to be worthy of such a biography) and a slew of far less famous books written exclusively for the teen-girl market and published in paperback, never to be heard of again—all of these books consumed me in a way that no other works of art or mass culture ever have. I chose books neither because of, nor in spite of, their artistic merit, only for their ability to pull me through the looking glass.

When I read in “The Dead” that Lily was “literally run off her feet,” I did not care about, or even notice, the misuse of the word literally, nor did it occur to me to observe that this subtle deployment of a Dublin colloquialism hinted at the story’s point of view. What I cared about, intensely, was what it would feel like to be sent running up and down the stairs of a house as a teenage maid, with holiday gaieties in full force, and everyone being mean to me, instead of pampering and babying me the way my parents did on Christmas Eve. I can remember lying on my bed in a Dublin row house at 15, so immersed in Margaret Mitchell that I faked three days of illness to keep reading, and I remember lying in my own bed in Berkeley—the cat dozing at my feet, the bay wind brushing the tree branches against my dormer windows—and roaring through A Tree Grows in Brooklyn completely at home in turn-of-the-century Williamsburg, a place I had never even heard of before picking up the book but which I could navigate, in the landscape of my imagination, as easily as I could the shady streets and secret hillside staircases that connected my house to the record shop and ice-cream parlor down on Euclid Avenue.

The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.

Twilight is fantastic. It’s a page-turner that pops out a lurching, frightening ending I never saw coming. It’s also the first book that seemed at long last to rekindle something of the girl-reader in me. In fact, there were times when the novel—no work of literature, to be sure, no school for style; hugged mainly to the slender chests of very young teenage girls, whose regard for it is on a par with the regard with which just yesterday they held Hannah Montana—stirred something in me so long forgotten that I felt embarrassed by it. Reading the book, I sometimes experienced what I imagine long-married men must feel when they get an unexpected glimpse at pornography: slingshot back to a world of sensation that, through sheer force of will and dutiful acceptance of life’s fortunes, I thought I had subdued. The Twilight series is not based on a true story, of course, but within it is the true story, the original one. Twilight centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known. We haven’t seen that tale in a girls’ book in a very long time. And it’s selling through the roof.

Bella and Edward meet on that unpleasant first day of school, in biology class. The only free spot in the room is next to Edward, a vacancy she initially falls into with a glimmer of excitement—like Dracula’s Lucy and Mina, and like every other young woman who has ever come to the attention of a vampire, Bella is enthralled. But Edward demonstrates none of the pickup-artist smoothness of his kind. As she glances shyly at him before sitting down, he meets her eyes “with the strangest expression on his face—it was hostile, furious.” As she takes the seat beside him, he leans away from her, “sitting on the extreme edge of his chair and averting his face like he smelled something bad.”

In short, Edward treats Bella not as Count Dracula treated the objects of his desire, but as Mr. Rochester treated Jane Eyre. He evinces the most profound disdain and distaste for this girl. Even after they have confessed their love for each other, he will still occasionally glare at and speak sharply to her. At the end of that long first day at Forks High, Bella goes to the school office to drop off some paperwork, and who is there but Edward—trying to get himself transferred out of the class they share.

Watch the trailer for the recently released Twilight movie

And yet they are such kindred spirits! They are both crackerjack biology students (Bella because she took an AP course back in Phoenix, and Edward because he has taken the class God knows how many times, given that he is actually 104 years old); they both love the arts; they share a dim view of the many young men who would be Bella’s suitors if only she would take an interest in them. All of these facts, combined with Edward’s languid, androgynous beauty—slim and feline, possessed of tousled hair and golden eyes—predictably anger and confuse Bella, although they do nothing to cool her awakening physical passion for her smoldering, obdurate antagonist. (This poignant aspect of the female heart proves once again a theory advanced by a high-school chum of mine, an improbable lothario who replied when I demanded that he explain his freakish success with the ladies: “Chicks thrive on rejection.”) Edward puts the young girl into a state of emotional confusion and vulnerability that has been at the heart of female romantic awakening since the beginning of time.

Bella is an old-fashioned heroine: bookish, smart, brave, considerate of others’ emotions, and naturally competent in the domestic arts (she immediately takes over the grocery shopping and cooking in her father’s household, and there are countless, weirdly compelling accounts of her putting dinner together—wrapping two potatoes in foil and popping them into a hot oven, marinating a steak, making a green salad—that are reminiscent of the equally alluring domestic scenes in Rosemary’s Baby). Indeed, the book, which is set in contemporary America and centers on teenage life and culture, carries a strange—and I imagine deeply comforting to its teenage-girl readers—aura of an earlier time in American life and girlhood. The effect is subtle, and probably unintentional on the part of its author, a first-time novelist, who was home with three small boys when she blasted out this marvelous book. Like the Harry Potter series, the Twilight books are ostensibly set in the present, but—in terms of the mores, attitudes, and even the central elements of daily life portrayed within them—clearly evoke the culture of the author’s adolescence. The Harry Potter series, feats of wizardry aside, is grounded in a desperate curiosity about the life of the English public school, which was a constant in the imaginative lives of middle- and working-class children in the Britain of J. K. Rowling’s youth, and was also a central subject of the comics and novels produced for British children. Stephenie Meyer has re-created the sort of middle-class American youth in which it was unheard-of for a nice girl to be a sexual aggressor, and when the only coin of the realm for a boy who wanted to get lucky was romance and a carefully waged campaign intended to convince the girl that he was consumed by love for her.

Twilight is a 498-page novel about teenagers in which a cell phone appears only toward the very end, and as a minor plot contrivance. The kids don’t have iPods; they don’t text-message each other; they don’t have MySpace pages or Facebook accounts. Bella does have a computer on which she dutifully e-mails her mother now and then, but the thing is so slow and dial-up that she almost never uses it, other than on the morning that she decides to punch the word vampire into her wood-burning search engine to learn a thing or two about her squeeze. But the world of the past is alive in other, more significant ways: Bella’s friends, all in search of “boyfriends,” spend weeks thinking about whom they will invite to a Sadie Hawkins dance. After a friend (toward whom Bella has gently been directing one of her own admirers) finally goes on a big “date” (a lost world right there, in a simple word), she phones Bella, breathless: “Mike kissed me! Can you believe it?” It was a scene that could have existed in any of the books I read when I was an adolescent; but in today’s world of Y.A. fiction, it constitutes an almost bizarre moment. (Few things are as bewildering to contemporary parents as the sexual mores and practices of today’s adolescents. We were prepared to give our children a “sex is a beautiful thing” lecture; they were prepared to have oral sex in the eighth grade.)

Think, for a moment, of the huge teen-girl books of the past decade. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is about female empowerment as it’s currently defined by the kind of jaded, 40-something divorcées who wash ashore at day spas with their grizzled girlfriends and pollute the Quiet Room with their ceaseless cackling about the uselessness of men. They are women who have learned certain of life’s lessons the hard way and think it kind to let young girls understand that the sooner they grasp the key to a happy life (which essentially boils down to a distaff version of “Bros before hos”), the better. In Sisterhood, four close friends might scatter for the summer—encountering everything from ill-advised sex with a soccer coach to the unpleasant discovery that Dad’s getting remarried—but the most important thing, the only really important thing, is that the four reunite and that the friendships endure the vicissitudes of boys and romance. Someday, after all, they will be in their 50s, and who will be there for them—really there for them—then? The boy who long ago kissed their bare shoulders, or the raspy-voiced best friend, bleating out hilarious comments about her puckered fanny from the next dressing room over at Eileen Fisher? Gossip Girl, another marketing sensation, replaces girls’ old-fashioned need for male love and tenderness—these chippies could make a crack whore look like Clara Barton—with that for shopping and brand names. Notoriously set in an Upper East Side girls school that seems to combine elements of Nightingale-Bamford with those of a women’s correctional facility after lights-out, the book gives us a cast of young girls whose desire for luxury goods (from Kate Spade purses to Ivy League–college admissions) is so nakedly hollow that the displacement of their true needs is pathetic. Prep—a real novel, not the result of a sales-team brainstorm—derives much of its pathos from the fact that the main character is never sure whether the boy she loves so much, and has had so many sexual encounters with, might actually constitute that magical, bygone character: her “boyfriend.” The effect of Prep on teenagers is reminiscent of that of The Catcher in the Rye: both books describe that most rarefied of social worlds, the East Coast boarding school, and yet young readers of every socioeconomic level have hailed them for revealing the true nature of their inner life. In Prep, the heroine wants something so fundamental to the emotional needs of girls that I find it almost heartbreaking: she wants to know that the boy she loves, and with whom she has shared her body, loves her and will put no other girl in her place.

Bella, despite all of her courage and competence, manages to end up in scrape after scrape: finding herself in the path of a runaway car, fainting at school, going shopping in a nearby city and getting cornered by a group of malevolent, taunting men. And over and over, out of nowhere, shoving the speeding car out of her way, or lifting her up in his arms, or scaring the bejesus out of the men who would harm her, is Edward. And at last, while she is recuperating from the near-rape, with a plate of ravioli in a café near the alley, he reveals all. Not since Maxim de Winter’s shocking revelation—“You thought I loved Rebecca? … I hated her”—has a sweet young heroine received such startling and enrapturing news. As he gradually explains, Edward has been avoiding and scorning Bella not because he loathes her but because he is so carnally attracted to her that he cannot trust himself to be around her for even a moment. The mere scent of her hair is powerful enough that he is in a constant struggle to avoid taking—and thereby destroying—her. This is a vampire novel, so it is a novel about sex, but no writer, from Bram Stoker on, has captured so precisely what sex and longing really mean to a young girl.

The erotic relationship between Bella and Edward is what makes this book—and the series—so riveting to its female readers. There is no question about the exact nature of the physical act that looms over them. Either they will do it or they won’t, and afterward everything will change for Bella, although not for Edward. Nor is the act one that might result in an equal giving and receiving of pleasure. If Edward fails—even once—in his great exercise in restraint, he will do what the boys in the old pregnancy-scare books did to their girlfriends: he will ruin her. More exactly, he will destroy her, ripping her away from the world of the living and bringing her into the realm of the undead. If a novel of today were to sound these chords so explicitly but in a nonsupernatural context, it would be seen (rightly) as a book about “abstinence,” and it would be handed out with the tracts and bumper stickers at the kind of evangelical churches that advocate the practice as a reasonable solution to the age-old problem of horny young people. (Because it takes three and a half very long books before Edward and Bella get it on—during a vampiric frenzy in which she gets beaten to a pulp, and discovers her Total Woman—and because Edward has had so many decades to work on his moves, the books constitute a thousand-page treatise on the art of foreplay.) That the author is a practicing Mormon is a fact every reviewer has mentioned, although none knows what to do with it, and certainly none can relate it to the novel; even the supercreepy “compound” where the boring half of Big Love takes place doesn’t have any vampires. But the attitude toward female sexuality—and toward the role of marriage and childbearing—expressed in these novels is entirely consistent with the teachings of that church. In the course of the four books, Bella will be repeatedly tempted—to have sex outside of marriage, to have an abortion as a young married woman, to abandon the responsibilities of a good and faithful mother—and each time, she makes the “right” decision. The series does not deploy these themes didactically or even moralistically. Clearly Meyer was more concerned with questions of romance and supernatural beings than with instructing young readers how to lead their lives. What is interesting is how deeply fascinated young girls, some of them extremely bright and ambitious, are by the questions the book poses, and by the solutions their heroine chooses.

Bella’s fervent hope—one that will not be realized until the final novel—is that Edward will ravage her, and that they will be joined forever; the harrowing pain that is said to be the victim’s lot at the time of consummation means nothing to her. She loves him and wants to make a gift to him of her physical body—an act fraught with ambiguous dangers (the Twilight series so resonates with girls because it perfectly encapsulates the giddiness and the rapture—and the menace—that inherently accompany romance and sex for them). The ways in which his refusal and her insistence are accommodated are at the heart not only of this novel but of the entire series, and that inspires the rapture young girls feel for the books. This is not your seventh-grade human-development teacher passing around a dental dam and thereby making you want to send a plume of fifth-period taco salad and Gatorade into her outstretched palm. This is sex and romance fully—ecstatically, dangerously—engaged with each other. At last, at last.

As I write this, I am sitting on the guest-room bed of a close friend, and down the hall from me is the bedroom of the daughter of the house, a 12-year-old reader extraordinaire, a deep-sea diver of books. She was the fourth person through the doors of the Westwood Barnes & Noble the midnight that the series’ final volume, Breaking Dawn, went on sale, and she read it—a doorstop, a behemoth—in six hours, and then turned back to page one as though it were the natural successor to the last page.

Posted on this girl’s door—above the fading sticker of a cheery panda hopping over a pink jump rope, and one of a strawberry and a lollipop (their low placement suggesting the highest reach of a very small child), and to the right of an oval-shaped decal bearing the single, angry imperative STOP GLOBAL WARMING—is a small, black, square-shaped sticker that reads My Heart Belongs to Edward. In the middle is a photograph of a pair of shapely female hands proffering a red Valentine heart. Also taped to this girl’s closed door is a single piece of lined paper, on which she has written, in a carefully considered amalgam of block letters and swirly penmanship and eight different colors of crayon:

Edward’s Fan Club
You may only enter if you know the password

That she had made her declaration for Edward on such a pretty, handmade sign was all-girl—as was her decision to leave up the old stickers from her childhood. One of the signal differences between adolescent girls and boys is that while a boy quickly puts away childish things in his race to initiate a sexual life for himself, a girl will continue to cherish, almost to fetishize, the tokens of her little-girlhood. She wants to be both places at once—in the safety of girl land, with the pandas and jump ropes, and in the arms of a lover, whose sole desire is to take her completely. And most of all, as girls work all of this out with considerable anguish, they want to be in their rooms, with the doors closed and the declarations posted. The biggest problem for parents of teenage girls is that they never know who is going to come barreling out of that sacred space: the adorable little girl who wants to cuddle, or the hard-eyed young woman who has left it all behind.

Years and years ago, when I was a young girl pressing myself into novels and baking my mother pretty birthday cakes, and writing down the 10 reasons I should be allowed to purchase and wear to the eighth-grade dance a pair of L’eggs panty hose, I knew that password. But one night a few years after that dance, I walked into a bedroom at a party and saw something I shouldn’t have, and a couple of months after that I unwisely accepted a ride to the beach from a boy I hardly knew, and then I was a college girl carrying a copy of Hartt’s History of Renaissance Art across campus and wondering whether I should take out a loan and go to graduate school, and somewhere along the way—not precisely on the day I got my first prescription for birth control, and not exactly on the afternoon I realized I had fallen out of love with one boy and had every right to take up with another—somewhere along the way, I lost the code. One day I was an intelligent girl who could pick up almost any bit of mass-market fiction that shed light on the mysteries of love and sex, and the practicalities by which one could merge the two, and read it with a matchless absorption. Valley of the Dolls had been so crucial in my life not because of its word to the wise about the inadvisability of mixing Seconal and Scotch, but for the three sentences that explained how to go about getting undressed before the first time you have sex: go into the bathroom, take your clothes off, and reemerge with a towel wrapped around yourself. One day I was that girl, and one day I was not, and from then on, if you wanted to tempt me to read a bit of trash fiction, I was going to need more compelling information than that.

Midway through Twilight, after Edward and Bella have declared their feelings for one another, she emerges from a classroom with a pal, uncertain whether she will eat lunch with Edward, or whether he will once again have vanished into the air, as he has a tendency to do. “But outside the door to our Spanish class, leaning against the wall—looking more like a Greek god than anyone had a right to—Edward was waiting for me.”

It’s a small moment in the book, but it lit aglow some tiny room of memory, if only for a maddening moment. I thought about how romantically charged high schools are for their young inmates. In 12th grade, I had a class next to the student parking lot. As I sat there one grayish day, I saw my boyfriend emerge from a side door of the massive school, along with half a dozen of his friends. They were clearly in the grip of some new plan, and they stood around their parked cars for a few minutes, talking. Where were they going, and why couldn’t I go along?

The boy I was dating leaned against his car and listened to them, and he laughed, but then something happened—I could see he had changed his mind, and as the others drove away, he stood there for a while, looking after them, and then he pushed away from the car and disappeared back into school. Maybe, at long last, he was taking seriously his father’s warnings that he might not graduate if he kept ditching school.

The bell rang, the room emptied—and there he was, in the hallway outside my class. “Let’s ditch,” he said.

I was in worse academic shape than he was; my graduation and college admission depended on passing—as a senior!—my eighth-period geometry class (many trusted souls had assured me that I’d have a bright future, provided that I passed that damn course). And standing in front of me was a boy who had just abandoned his friends to spend the afternoon with me.

I can’t remember a thing about geometry except the useless phrase side-angle-side, but for the rest of my life I’ll remember the bottle of red wine we bought at a package store a mile from school, and the certainty (since proved) that in the scheme of things, I had made exactly the right decision.

عوامی بہبود کاری

2009-10-17T05:34:00.000-07:00

ہماری حکومت عوامی بہبود کے بُلند بانگ دعوے اور وعدے کرتی ہے مگر عوامی بہبود کا کوئی کام نہيں کرتی ۔ البتہ اگر کوئی قرضہ دينے والا ادارہ عوامی بہبود کی شرط عائد کر دے تو جو عوامی بہبود کے پراجيکٹ کا حال ہوتا ہے وہ ان چھ خاکوں ميں واضح کيا گيا ہے ۔

يتربض خطيرة التصوف وراء كل شيء

2009-10-08T22:30:00.000-07:00

had a talk with our reading/writing coordinator on the service shuttle yesterday about le nom du pere and fiqh and she said a more interesting parallel could be drawn between the insatiability of desire according to Lacan and sufi conceptions of oneness with God. Apparently everyone has figured this out already. yuck.

Al-Ghazzali and Lacan

al-Ghazzali wrote that the closer the Sufi approaches to God, the beloved, 'the more he apprehends the fathomless depth of His qualities, the abyss of His essence: therefore his longing to plumb deeper and.... It is a limitless approach, a goal never to be reached. The self is obliteratd in an intense paradoxical desire, an essence that is also an abyss.
for Al-Ghazzali, as for Lacan, the speaking subject is founded on a vois, a moment of seperation, a lack. Though other Sufis have focused more intensely on desire ants imaginary in their poetry, Al-Ghazzali has written autobiographically of a profound interuption of his ego and its resolution in a way that finds resonances in Lacan's theory of desire and the subject.

مركز ناظم حكمت

2009-10-05T23:12:00.000-07:00

كان امس اول درس تقدمه مركز ناظم حكمت كجزء من برنامجها لإنشاء معهد للتعليم و الانتاج مستقل (يعنى مستقل من القيود تفرضها الاكدمية التقليدية) كان منتدى بعد الدرس عن العلم و الاخلاقية و مع ان كان اول درس و لم نعرفنا بعضنا البعض و الرغم من ان كان متأخر في المساء كانت مناقشة حامسة و مرحة للغاية. كان الموضوع الاكثر أثراً على روح المناقشة هو ضرورية استخدام اللغة الانكليزية داخل الجامعات التركية و هيمنيتها في عالم الاكدمية. انا لم اتكلم التركية منذ زمان طويل لأن خلال اب كنت في امريكى و بعدين هنا في اوكان انا محيط بمئة متكلمين الانكليزية و لذلك قد تراجعت قدرتي لفهم و خصوصا لتلكم التركية و خلال المنتدى بذلت كل جهودي فقط لتابع المناقشة. لم اتقدم اي تعليق لأن لم اشعر واثق بتركيتي و لذلك كنت قادرا على شعور التعاطف مع طلابي في المركز. يكرهون ان لا يستطيعون ان يتقدم فكرة، مثير او فصيح كان، اذا لا يستطيعون ان يعبرون عنها بالانكليزية. معرفة =سلطة

no matter how cynical you get, it's impossible to keep up

2009-09-30T07:22:00.001-07:00

Naturalista dice que pandas deben extinguirse
Las declaraciones de colaborador de la BBC contra los osos panda han enfurecido a los habitantes del país asiático, donde el animal es todo un símbolo nacional

¿DEBEN EXTINGUIRSE? Un famoso naturalista británico asegura que los esfuerzos por conservas los pandas son inútiles (Foto: Archivo ELUNIVERSAL )


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EFE
EL UNIVERSAL
PEKÍN JUEVES 24 DE SEPTIEMBRE DE 2009
Las declaraciones de un famoso naturalista británico contra los osos panda, asegurando que los esfuerzos dedicados por China para evitar que se extingan son inútiles, han enfurecido a los habitantes del país asiático, donde el animal es todo un símbolo nacional.

Chris Packham, conocido por sus galardonados programas para la cadena BBC, ha desatado numerosos comentarios en China después de que el pasado lunes dijera en una entrevista para "Radio Time" que los osos panda deben extinguirse.

"Son una especie que ha llegado a un callejón sin salida evolutivo. Desgraciadamente, son grandes y entrañables, un símbolo del Fondo Mundial para la Naturaleza (WWF), y nos gastamos millones de libras en su conservación", señaló, diciendo que el dinero que se gasta en ellos debería emplearse en otras especies en peligro.

La "diatriba antipanda", como la denomina la prensa oficial china, ha abierto heridas en el país asiático, donde el plantígrado es la especie prioritaria de los programas de conservación de especies en extinción.

Según especialistas como Zhang Zhihe, director del principal centro de protección de estos animales en Chengdu (suroeste de China), Packham está mal informado sobre la situación de los pandas.

"La capacidad reproductiva del oso panda salvaje es muy fuerte, gracias a un mejor medio ambiente y más oportunidades de alimentación y apareamiento", señaló, en declaraciones al diario "China Daily".

Las palabras de Zhang contradicen la opinión de algunos expertos que afirman que el oso panda está perdiendo su capacidad reproductiva debido a la pérdida de su hábitat.

Li Xinhai, profesor del Instituto de Zoología de la Academia China de Ciencias, también destacó que los argumentos de Packham contienen varios errores, aunque reconoció que la financiación de los proyectos conservacionistas podría ser más equilibrada.

"Es natural dar prioridad a los (proyectos de conservación de los) pandas, su imagen es muy popular entre la gente. La clave está en decir a la ciudadanía que hay otros animales que merecen su atención", destacó.

Las palabras del experto británico no sólo han levantado ampollas en China, también en colectivos como WWF, que en efecto utiliza el oso panda como logotipo y trabaja codo con codo con el Gobierno chino para la salvación de estos animales.

"Es una ridiculez lo que ha dicho, los pandas se han adaptado a su hábitat (...) y es como decir que las ballenas deben extinguirse por vivir en el océano", destacó al respecto Mark Wright, asesor de conservación de WWF.

"Los pandas corren peligro de extinción debido a la caza furtiva y a la presencia de humanos en su hábitat. Si estuvieran solos, `funcionarían` perfectamente", añadió.

Las críticas provenientes de dentro y fuera de China han hecho mella en Packham, quien ha pedido disculpas públicas si ha ofendido a los amantes de los osos blanquinegros, aunque por otro lado el experto destacó que se sentía contento de "haber iniciado un debate" en torno a la financiación de los programas de conservación.

Afortunadamente, en los medios chinos parecen haber quedado olvidadas las declaraciones que Packham hizo hace un año, todavía más radicales, en las que dijo que "se comería" el último panda vivo "si pudiera con ello usar el dinero gastado en conservación de esos animales para hacer otras cosas más importantes".

Se calcula que actualmente viven en China unos 1.600 pandas en libertad, animales que para el país asiático no son sólo un símbolo, sino también una importante fuente de divisas.

Y es que el país antes regalaba a veces osos panda a otros países como gesto diplomático (así lo hizo con España en 1978, cuando visitaron el país los Reyes Don Juan Carlos y Doña Sofía y Deng Xiaoping les entregó a Shao-Shao y Chang-Chang), pero actualmente los alquila por unos años y no precisamente baratos a zoológicos.

the spectacle as commodity = bid'a

2009-09-16T06:28:00.001-07:00

dolmabahce cami with inonu stadium behind it

last night while trying to walk off 8 slices of iftar special pizza hut buffet, I snaked down nisantisi and took out my i-pod ear buds when I realized there was a game going on in inonu stadium. I've seen how fun it can be to people watch besiktas fans (one time I saw a mad max gang of them racing down the sahilyolu and then farther along pulling a fenerbahce fan out of his car and threatening to pummel him in front of his fucking kid) doing about anything. Everyone was heading into the stadium in their cute little black and white jerseys and looking pretty pumped to lose to manchester.

Across the street however, drowned under car horns and chants, was the speakers broadcasting the laylat al-qadr ceremonies. (Known as Laylat al-Qadr in Arabic, the Night of Power is traditionally accepted as the night between the 26th and 27th days of Ramadan. It is believed that this night is when the Quran was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad through the Angel Gabriel. It is, therefore, the most sacred night of the entire year.) It was a wonderful juxtaposition to see the steel bowl stadium bathed in light on one side with thunderous chanting, and the little (in comparison) jack o-lantern mosque with its competing chanting on the other. For a second Islamic practice looked like a humbled sub-culture practiced at the outskirts of european meathead pageantry. Inside the mosque many of the men were wearing besiktas colors and seemed to be hurrying through their rukus in order to get their seats and beers before the game started. It was the first time I've ever been in a mosque during laylat al-qadr and it felt festive and positive and (pardon the wrong terminology, I don't know if it has a special title for laylat al-qadr) the khitabah was very upbeat. After he was done a huge flurry of people got up to leave and he urged them not to with the promise of bringing out a relic. Suddenly a huge crowd swamped the mihrab to get a look at what they pulled out of a little box. Eventually the crown morphed into a line and I was able to catch a glimpse of what looked like a bone covered in a shined piece of circular steel. I asked someone once I got out of the line what it was and he pointed into his mouth "the prophet's tooth". From what I know about i'tikaf this all seemed to be quite un-stoic or contemplative. I'm not begrudging folk religious practices (although I'm within my bounds even(especially) along Islamic lines =

With regard to innovations, they are not permissible during Ramadaan or at other times. It was proven that the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: “Whoever innovates anything in this matter of ours that is not part of it will have it rejected.” According to another report, “Whoever does any action that is not part of this matter of ours will have it rejected.”

We know of no basis for the celebrations that are held during some nights of Ramadaan. The best of guidance is the guidance of Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) and the worst of matters are those which are innovated (bid’ah).

) but I couldn't help wondering if using the prophet's supposed molar wasn't some sort of a trump card to use against the other show in town blaring it's anthems so loud it was audible even during the most fervet moments of tarawih. I wonder how far Islam, exposed to spectacle as commodity culture here in Turkey, is from the evangelization of religious practice. Would the wariness of bid'ah be strong enough to protect it from projector screen lyrics and jesus freak bands.

I also stopped into a mosque closer to my apartment in kabatas and inside people were listening to recitations from a group of proud men dressed in suits. Looking from the doorway it looked harshly bathed in light and when I took a seat I couldnt' help but notice that the small crowd was being filmed by a camera crew. They even had a crane camera which swooped over the faithful to get a dynamic shot of the reciter. The cameraman were the long-haired types you'd expect to be cameramen and they seemed out of place among old men wearing skull caps. I imagine it was going to be broadcast on public television live, but couldn't help but take note of the physical as well as emotional/spiritual gaze of the outside world and its technical means bearing down on what should have been an intimate experience.

And being under the weltshauung persuasion that I am, I saw both of these experiences as a reflection of how undeniable culture as commodity has become. It is not that you can have an Islamic practice and then put your shoes back on and walk back out into the society of spectacles. The logic of spectacle, commodification, monopoly rent, technological innovation are so interwoven into the most basic functioning of our daily lives that the ulama' can barely keep up in understanding the dimensions of bid'ah seeping into islamic practice. It's not even at the vulgar level of being able to put in a few rukus for good measure before heading off to the soccer game. The fact that mosques have air conditioners, speaker systems, and resoration projects reflect to what extent they have to conform to the norms of comfort and convenience. That the call to prayer can no longer impose its religious definition of space and community through sound when up against its far more effective sports opponent, that there were more sports jerseys than skull caps, that religious spectacle has a camera crew present, that a cell phone always seems to go off.

Egypt: Egyptian Dialect Wikipedia

2009-09-09T01:27:00.000-07:00

Posted By Tarek Amr
Wikimedia has agreed to create a new section - a Wikipedia in the Egyptian Dialect [1]. This decision was the catalysis for a discussion across the Egyptian blogosphere. Is it a good or a bad move, and is Egyptian and standalone language, or just a dialect of Arabic?
Iknaton2, from A Whisper [2], wrote here [3]:
وافقت ويكيميديا على تخصيص نطاق خاص لويكيبيديا باللغة المصرية بعد أن تقدم بعض مستخدمى الويكيبيديا بطلب إنشاء هذا النطاق على أساس أن اللغة المصرية لها مفردات وقواعد مختلفة عن اللغة العربية يستخدمها أكثر من 70 مليون!!بالنظر لطلبات إنشاء ويكيبيديا بلغات/لهجات عربية مختلفة نجد عدة طلبات للهجات العربية مثل اللهجة السودانية (ما زالت تُناقش) واللهجة الجزائرية المغربية (رُفضت بتاريخ 23 أبريل 2007) واللهجة اللبنانية (رُفضت بتاريخ 7 نوفمبر 2007).موسوعة ويكيبيديا باللغة المصرية الآن تحتوى على 43 مقالة باللهجة العامية المصرية وهناك إقتراح من بعض مستخدمى ويكيبيديا العربية على غلق هذه الموسوعة على أساس أنه ليس هناك لغة إسمها لغة مصرية وهى مجرد لهجة مختلفة من لهجات العربية
Wikimedia has agreed to create a new domain for Wikipedia in the Egyptian language, after some Wikipedia users have submitted a request to create such domain claiming that the Egyptian language is a standalone language that has its own vocabulary and rules which are different from the Arabic language, and is spoken by more the 70 million people.There have been various requests to create domains for different languages/dialects such as the Sudanese dialect (the request currently is being discussed), the Algerian dialect (the request was refused in the 23rd of April 2007), and the Lebanese dialect (the request was refused in the 7th of November 2007).The Egyptian Wikipedia currently contains 43 topics in the Egyptian slang, while there is a suggestion for the Arabic Wikipedia users to close the Egyptian section since they claim that the Egyptian is just an Arabic dialect and not a separate language.
Ahmad Gharbeia [4] then commented on Iknaton2's post saying:
الشباب دول عندهم تصورات غير صحيحة عن تاريخ تطور اللغات القومية في أوربا و عاوزين يحاكو ال هم فهموه، متصورين أن دا أبدع مسار تاريخي ممكن! عارف أنت النظرية الساذجة بتاعت “في البدء كانت اللاتينية، ثم انفجرت ماسورة اللغات”و عندهم تصور أنا مختلف معه في فهم دور اللغة في دعم الهوية القومية كدافع للنهضة. و برضو دا مبني على تصورهم تاريخ لغات أوربا. و مش مقدرين ميزة أنك تقدر تتواصل مع جماعة أكبر بكتير من شوية الناس ال تصادف أنهم كانوا في منطقة جغرافية معينة في يوم ترسيم الحدود، و أثر دا على إنتاج و مراكمة المعرفة.غرضهم كويس، لكنهم مش فاهمين. مش هنخسر حاجة و يمكن نتعلم.
Those guys have a wrong perception about the development history of the national languages in Europe, and they want to imitate what they believe is the best way for languages to evolve! You know, it is like that silly theory that claims that it was just the Latin language there, then it gave birth to all the other languages.They also have a different perception about the role of languages to enforce people's national identity and nations development. And this is still related to their incorrect perception of the history of languages in Europe. They do not feel the value of having a common language that facilitates the communication with more people, even more than those who happen to be in the same geographic area when countries borders were created. And they also cannot see the effect of this on our accumulated knowledge and cultural products.Their intention is good but they lack the knowledge and understanding. Anyway, we have nothing to lose here and at least we may learn something from their experiment.
Lasto Adri [5] reacted to Ikhnaton2's post as follows:
أنا إتضايقت اول ما قرأت موضوعك يا رامىماكنتش متخيلة إننا نوصل للمرحلة دى من تدهور للغة العربية..صحيح فى لهجات.. لكنها لهجات فى الكلام المنطوق.. وكفاية قوى إن المصرى ممكن مايفهمشى اللبنانى أو المغربى وهو بيتكلم.. وكان العامل المشترك بيبقى اللغة الفصحى.. الوحيدة اللى الكل بيعرفهاتخيل الإختلاف فى اللغة كمان يبقى فى المكتوب.. ونبنى أجيال جديدة بتطالب بعربى مغربى وعربى صومالى… دا فعلا مهزلةبعدين دخلت ع الصفحة اللى بتطالب بإلغاء الفكرة لقيتها إتلغتطب أعبر عن رفضى لمين دلوقتى؟
I was really upset when I read your post, Rami.I couldn't imagine that our Arabic language is going to deteriorate to this level.Although there are different dialects, but still they are just verbal ones, and it is enough that someday Egyptians will not be able to understand Lebanese or Moroccan people when they talk. Traditional Arabic has always been the common language between us, and the one that we all understand easily.Can you imagine what will happen after few generations when there will be Moroccan or Somali Arabic. It's a joke you know.Anyway, I logged into the page where I can submit my disagreement to the idea, but it came out that it has been deactivated. Whom shall I talk to now to show my refusal?
Gharbeia then replied:
موضوع الفرق بين اللغة و اللهجة خلافي فعلا، لكن في موضوع اللهجات العربية المعاصرة فأغلب اللغويين (و دول خواجات مش متاثرين بصراعات الأيديولوجيا بتاعتنا قوي) شايفين أنها تنويعات على اللغة العربية صرفًا و نحوًا و مفرادت؛ لأنها ما عدّتش عتبة الفروقات ال تخليها لغات مختلفة. (مش زي المالطية مثلا، ال برضوا أساسها عربي شمال أفريقي لكنها عدّت)…و أعتقد أن دا جزء من الموضوع..أغلب مؤيدي العامية هم قوميين مصريين أو قوميين أقباط (ما يفرقوش عن ال قبلهم غير أنهم مسيحيين)، و الاثنين شوفينيين و عندهم مشاكل في رؤية التاريخ و مفهوم مصر كدولة، و مفاهيم العروبة الثقافيةاللغويةالإثنية. لكنهم مشتركين في تأثرهم بدور الانحطاط الحضاري ال احنا عايشينه، و هي دي الأوقات ال تزيد فيها الدعوات ال زي دي، مدعومة برواج خرافات أصول اللغات و النقاء العنصري (مصري و للا عربي)، بصي في المدونات و أنت تلاقي منها كثير.
The differences between languages and dialects is a source of huge debates, but when it comes to modern Arabic, most of the linguistics - who are by the way non Arabs, and are not affected by our ideological debates - believe that the variations in vocabulary and grammar between the Arabic dialects spoken nowadays are not enough to make them languages, which is somehow different than the Maltese, for example, which was based on the Arabic spoken in North Africa but it's a standalone language now.I think that most of those who are with the Egyptian language are Egyptian and Coptic Nationalists and chauvinists who have problems in understanding the history of Egypt and its value as a state, and they also fail to understand ideologies such as ethnic, lingual and cultural pan-Arabism. They are affected by the cultural degradation we are now suffering from, and in such an era, calls like those are more common. These are calls that are also affected by the lack of understanding of the origin and evolution of languages, and their relation with our ethnic and national identity. Have a look in the Egyptian blogosphere and you will find tons of such ideas there.
Then Bella [6] added:
اولا مافيش حاجة اسمها لغة مصريةفيه حاجة اسمها لهجة عامية مصرية…شوفينية غير مقبولة وفي غير محلها كالعادةنرجو الا يتم اغتيال العربية الفصحى على يد ابناء مجمع اللغة العربية لنضيف خيبة جديدة لخيباتنا المتكررة.
First of all there is nothing called the Egyptian language.There is an Egyptian dialect instead.This is an unacceptable chauvinism.And I hope that we do not murder our own Arabic language someday, to add one more disappointment to our ongoing disappointments.
Also Zeinobia [7] wrote a separate post [8] about the same issue:
I am totally against the new Egyptian dialect Wikipedia , now we got our localized version of Wikipedia , we got our own Egyptian dialect Wikipedia and I am sorry to say that it sucks.Seriously it is ridiculous , I read in it some entries and I was shocked.Look I do not know why people do not contribute more to the Original Arabic Wikipedia if they can spend hours contributing to the Egyptian dialect Wikipedia.!!??May be they hate the Arabic grammar rules !!??Well then I have a nice suggestion , I do not know if it is available or not but we can add spell and grammar checker to Arabic Wikipedia.I do not know what the next will be ; a PortSaidi or Upper Egyptian dialect Wikipedia !!??
Such debate wasn't limited to the blogosphere only, but it spread out to Jaiku [9].
Tarek (Myself [10]) wrote:
ويكيبيديا بقت باللهجة المصرية … تفتكرو ديه حاجة حلوة ولا وحشة؟ و ليه؟
Wikipedia is now in the Egyptian dialect. Do you think this is a good or bad thing? And why?
Then Alaa (Manalaa [11]) replied:
That was a big controversy in Wikimania Alexandria, lots of under the table politics.IMO it's an insignificant project that's bound to fail. so not very important to think about anyway. and while fragmentation might sound like a bad idea the reality is most probably those who contribute to the “Egyptian” Wikipedia where not going to contribute to the Arabic one anyway.
Lasto Adri responded:
Even if its a limited project.. still its there.. and you can underestimate it now.. but tomorrow , it might me a different case.
Alaa reacted:
lol u guys are overreacting the benefits of having a unified language across the arab world are so high, no need to feel threatened.if you're so worried about it do something, go help with arabic wikipedia and make the best source of knowledge there is in the arab world. that's the best way to insure that your children will know fos7a and like it too.
And Moftasa [12] had a different point of view there:
Think of it as a more intuitive scratch pad for developing articles in formal Arabic. So I might write an article in Egyptian dialect because, for me, it will consume less energy and time to write. Someone else might decide to contribute to it or transfer the information in it to the formal Arabic wiki. Exactly like what happens between the different Wikipedia languages.
Tarek then asked another question:
طب خلوني أسأل سؤال تاني … فبعيد عن ويكيبيديا … أنا شايف إن فيه رأيين سواء في ويكيبيديا أو في المدونات أو حتى في قناة زي أو تيفي … فيه ناس شايفة إننا مصريين و لازم نعتز بلهجتنا المصرية و إن اللغة العربية لم تتطور منذ ألف و ربعميت سنة و حرام نربط نفسنا بلغة فقدت القدرة على التطور كباقي اللغات خاصة أن لا أحد في الواقع يتحدث بها و هذه الدعوة عادة يتبناها الليبراليين و العلمانيين و يمكن كمان الأقباط … و في المقابل هناك دعوة يتبناها الإسلاميين و القوميين من أجل الحفاظ على اللغة العربية لإنها تربطنا بالوطن العربي الكبير و لما لها من إرتباط بإرثنا الثقافي و الديني و دول شايفين إن فكرة التخلي عن اللغة العربية من الممكن أن تضعف هويتنا الثقافية و تبعد المسافات بين الدول العربي إلخ…إنتو بقى مع أنهي رأي؟
Let me ask another question. Away from Wikipedia, I can see that we have two points of view out there, either in Wikipedia, or in Blogs, or even in a satellite channel like O-TV. Some may claim that we are Egyptian and that we have to be proud of our own dialect, and that the Arabic language has failed to evolve in the last 1400 years, and it is really useless to bond ourselves to a language that wasn't capable of evolving like any other language in the word. And those who hold such claim are mainly liberals, secular and Copts. While on the other hand others - Islamists and Pan-Arabists - believe that we have to protect traditional Arabic, because it facilitates our communication with other Arabs and it also is links us to our cultural and religious heritage, and they believe that abandoning the traditional Arabic language may affect our identity and widen the gaps between Arabs.So who point of view do you agree with more?
Lasto Adri replied:
انا لا قومية ولا لبرالية ولا حتى إسلامية… هذا والله أعلم…بس شايفة إننا ماشيين على مبدأ “فرق تسد” ومش قادريين نفكر صحبس كدة
As far as I know, I am neither Liberal nor Islamist.But I think that we are moving towards an era of “Divide and Conquer” and we really cant realize that.That's it
And Alaa added:
أنا شايف ان فيه قلة من الناس اللي صوتها عالي في فريقين هما اللي مخليين الاختيارات كدهفيه ناس كثير قوي بتستمتع بشعر عامي و تقرأ أدب بالفصحى من غير ما ده يبقى تعبير عن انفصام في الشخصيةالعامية لهجة و لا لغة و مدى و طبيعة علاقتها بالفصحى دي أسئلة علمية مش أسئلة سياسية.و أي كانت الاجابة الناس مش هتبطل تعبر عن نفسها بالعاميةيبقى العامية باقيةفي نفس الوقت الفوائد الاقتصادية من وجود لغة موحدة ما بين بلاد المنطقة عالية جدا و الثقافة و الفن و الاعلام بيعبروا الحدود العربية بتزايديعني بغض النظر عن قرائتك لتاريخنا في الألفية اللي فاتت الفصحى باقية برضه (و من غير حتى ما نحتاج نتكلم عن تأثير الدين في الموضوع) و مش صحيح أنها مش بتطور هي بس تطورها مواكب لباقي تطورنا الحضاري مش سابقه و ده عادي يعني مش مستغرب.فيه بقى اعتبارات عملية و تنموية و اقتصادية و اعتبارات ثانية فنية و ثقافية و كلها أهم بكثييييير من الحوار الخنيق عن هل هويتنا عربية أم مصري أم بشرطة
I think that there are few ones in the two team who have the louder voice and those who make us see it that way.Some people out there may listen to poems written in Egyptian dialect and read novels written in traditional Arabic, yet this has nothing to do with their ideologies.People will never stop using the Egyptian dialect. It will last forever.Also there are huge economical benefits of having a common language among all Arabs, so it will last forever too.I also do not agree with you that Arabic doesn't evolve, it evolves but its evolution is in resonance with our civil evolution.There are plenty of economical, scientific, and other matters that are more important than our debate whether we are Arabs or Egyptians.
And finally, Tarek wrote:
أنا معاك يا علاء … فأكيد مش كل إل بيدون باللغة العامية ليبرالي ممكن يكون شعبوي على رأي بلو و برضه مش كل إل بيقول شعر بالفصحة له توجهات قومية أو إسلامية … بس ميمنعش إننا صعب نفصل هويتنا عن لغتنا و ميمنعش برضه إن فيه ناس بتفضل الفصحى على العامية أو العكس لإعتبارات أيديولوجية مش لمجرد الإستسهال أو التعود.دعني أختلف معك في نقطة أن اللغة العربية تتطور … فكلنا يعلم أن هناك بعض القواعد النحوية كالرفع و النصب و الجر و اللغوية مثل المثني و نون النسوة و ما إلى ذلك لم تعد مناسبة للعصر الحالي و الدليل أن جل اللهجات العربية تخلصت من تلك القواعد لكننا في اللغة العربية لم نستطع تحريرها من تلك القواعد حتى لا نبتعد عن لغة القرآن … و أيضا لأنه لا أحد يتحدث بها في حياته اليومية فإن أي مصطلح جديد يدخل في اللغة يدخل عن طريق مجامع اللغة و هو عكس المفترض في أي لغة حية يكون تتطورها نابع من الناس و ينتهي إلي المعامل و ليس العكس … ففي اللغة الإنجليزية مثلة تدخل مصطلحات مثل جوجل بمعني البحث و روبوت بمعني إنسان ألي نتيجة تطبيق أو كتاب خيال علمي يتداوله الناس أما هنا فلا وجود لهذا التطور لأننا حصرنا لغتنا في المعامل و خلف الجدران الأكاديمي
I am with you, for sure not all those who blog in the Egyptian dialect are liberals, and also not all those who write poems in traditional Arabic are Pan-Arabists or Islamists. But we can't deny that some may prefer to use one more than the other based on their ideologies and not only based on the one they find easier.And let me disagree with you about the evolution of Arabic as a language. We all know that some grammatical rules in Arabic are outdated and not acceptable nowadays, and this can be seen where the current dialects have abandoned them. But it is hard to liberate the Arabic language from such rules since we do not want it to be shifted away from the one the Quraan was written in. And also in our daily lives when we need to invent a new word it has to pass through language authorities first, which is the opposite to what happen in other languages where the evolution starts from the people and ends in the lab and not the other way round. In the English language, for example, words like “to Google”, and “robot” where invented based on a web application or science-fiction books, while here any evolution is only limited to labs and academies.

پانچ اسباب کیوں جہانگير ایچرنکوی سے بہتر ہے

2009-09-05T00:11:00.000-07:00

1- مری کوٹھڑی دو لنگ سے ایک دکان ہے جس میں عربی اخبار خرید سکتا ہوں

2- مرا سڑک پر ایک یوگا خانہ ہے

3- یہ عمارات کہ جھت پر ایک سپنا مثل عجیب منظر ہے جس سے باسفورس اور قضی کوی کہ منجنیق دیکھ سکتا ہوں۔

4- مرا کمرا بہت حادث اور صاف ہے: ایک ایکیا کومرشل کہ مثل ہے

5-یہ ضلع کہ اسم بہت کول سلطان کی ساتھ شریک ہوتا ہے

2009-08-19T00:15:00.001-07:00

Language of the armies, Urdu: A Derivative of Persian and Avestan
By: Dr. Samar Abbas, June 11, 2002

Most Iranians are aware of the fact that Pashto and Tajik are members of the Iranian family of languages. Few, however, are aware of the likelihood of Urdu also being a member of the Iranic branch of tongues.

The purpose of this article is to prove that Urdu is derived from Ghaznavid Persian, which is in turn derived from Avestan via Sassanid Pahlavi. It shall thence be evident that the ultimate ancestor of Urdu is Avestan, making it a member of the Iranian family of languages.

The first and most basic evidence which strikes an observer is the Persian-Islamic script of Urdu, as well as the extremely high percentage of Persian words in Urdu vocabulary. In fact, even in Musalmani (Muslim Bengali) an eastern dialect of Urdu spoken mainly Bangladesh and influenced by Bengali, one finds a significant proportion of Persian words. At least 60% of the vocabulary of Punjabi, a rustic western dialect of Urdu, is of also Persian origin:

"If more than 60% of the words are common in Punjabi and Urdu (Shriram 1928:67) it is due to the influence of Persian."[1]More detailed investigations only confirm the precurosry impressions. Indeed, several researchers have traced the origin of Urdu to the camps of Mahmud-e-Ghazni. Thus, K.K.Khullar notes:

"The birth of Urdu language was the direct result of the synthesis between the invading armies of Mahmud of Ghazni with the civilian population of the Indian cities. The word Urdu itself means Lashkar, derived from the Turkish language meaning armies."[2]Indeed, the Ghaznavid origin of Urdu follows from the very name of the language - Zaban-e-Urdu, or "Language of the Armies". The word "Urdu" is derived from the Turkic "Oordou", meaning "camps" or, as Khullar notes above, "armies".

Urdu was thus self-evidently the language of the soldiers of the armies of Mahmud-e-Ghazni, the only militarist sovereign of the era who maintained a large enough army for a considerable period to provide sufficient time for a new language to develop. It is for this same reason that the earliest surviving Urdu literature is that of Sufi saints who accompanied the Ghaznavids during their expeditions.

Noted Iranologist Dr.E.C.Sachau, translator of al-Beruni's India, further elucidates the Ghaznavid origin of Urdu:

"Tilak, the son of Jai Sen ... studied in Kashmir, [then worked as an] interpreter first to Kadi Shirazi Bulhasan Ali, a high civil officer under Mahumd and Masud (Elliott ii.117,123), then to Ahmad Ibn Hasan of Maimand, who was grand vizier, 1007 AD-25 ... and then 1030-1033 under Mahmud and Masud, and rose afterwards to be a commanding officer in the army (Elliott ii.125-127). This class of men spoke and wrote Hindi (of course with Arabic characters) and Persian (perhaps also Turkish, as this language prevailed in the army), and it is probably in these circles that we must look for the origin of Urdu or Hindustani."[3]Dr.E.C.Sachau also notes the existence in the 1850s of remarkable Urdu manuscripts surviving from the Ghaznavid era:

"The first author who wrote in this language, the Dante of Muhammedan India, is one Masud, who died a little more than a century after the death of King Mahmud (525AH=1131 AD), cf A.Springer, Catalogue of the Arabic, Persian and Hindustany manuscripts of the libraries of the King of Oudh, Calcutta, 1854 pp.407,485. If we had any of the Hindi writings of those times, they would probably exhibit the same kind of Indian speech as found in Alberuni's book."[4]Having traced the origin of Urdu to the camps of Mahmud-e-Ghazni, the identification of the "mother language" becomes the next necessity. The question of the origin of Urdu thus becomes linked to the language spoken by the soldiers of Mahmud. It is proposed that this source language for Urdu was Ghaznavid Dari.

Several facts support this view:

Ghazni is geographically located within the traditional Dari-speaking area of Afghanistan. Hence Dari was likely to have been spoken by many of Mahmud's soldiers.
The "Ghaznavi" dialect of Dari is still spoken.[5]
Mahmud-e-Ghazni was a patron of Dari literature, hence he would have encouraged its usage amongst his soldiers.
Most soldiers in the Ghaznavid armies were of East Iranic stock, consisting of the local population of eastern Eranshahr, along with a substantial Turkic contribution.
Mahmud traced his descent to the Sassanids and Achaemenids:

"Subooktugeen [Ameer Nasir-Ood-Deen Subooktugeen Ghiznivy] is said to be lineally descended from Yezdijerd (the last of the Persian monarchs) who, when flying from his enemies during the Caliphate of Uthman, was murdered at a water-mill near the town of Merv. His family being left in Toorkistan formed connections among the people, and his decsndants became Toorks.

His genealogy is as follows: Subooktugeen, the son of Jookan, the son of Kuzil Hukum, the son of Kuzil Arslan, the son of Ferooz, the son of Yezdejird, the King of Persia."[6]

Mahmud was thus proud of his Iranian heritage - the blood of Cyrus the Great which flowed in his veins - and deliberately fashioned his empire in the mould of his Achaemenid and Sassanid ancestors. The Later Timurid Mughal Empire of Akbar and Aurangzeb was in turn the direct successor state of the Ghaznavid Empire, implying a direct historical parallel for the derivation of Urdu from Dari. For the lay Urdu speaker of today, the traditional descent of the Mughal Empire from the Ghaznavid Dynasty and thence from the Achaemenid Empire is the simplest historical proof of the Iranic origin of his language.

According to Ibn al-Muqaffa (translator of the Book of Kalila and Dimna) towards the end of the Sassanian Empire, three Iranic languages had developed in Eranshahr: "Parsi" (Avestan), "Pahlavi" and "Dari".[7]

Dari is generally viewed as "Vulgar Pahlavi", the vernacular spoken by the masses which developed as an offshoot of Sassanid Pahlavi. Dari is thus analogous to the "Vulgar Latin" stage in the development of Romance languages. Old East Iranic languages such as Bactrian (Bahlika of the Prakrit grammarians), Sogdian, Sakan (the Sacara of the Prakrit writers) and Tokharian (perhaps the ancestor of the Takki Apabhramsa of the Punjab) provided a substratum for Dari (a West Iranic language), while Turkic and Altaic provided a later superstratum.

Urdu, like all Iranic languages, is thus linguistically and historically derived from Avestan, which is for Iranian languages what Latin is for Romance languages. It should be considered a member of the Iranian branch of languages. A short language tree would be:

Avestan -> Pahlavi -> Dari -> Urdu.

This article should remove all doubts about the real origin of Urdu.

References

Studies in Urdu Linguistics by S.Zaidi, Bahri Publishers New Delhi 1989, pp.103,116.
The Essentials of Indian Culture by K.K.Khullar, Employment News,
New Delhi, 21-27 Jan. 1995, p.1
Alberuni's India, ed Dr. E.C.Sachau, vol.II, p.258, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. London 1888.
Dr. E.C.Sachau, ibid., vol.II, p.258.
Ethnologue: Languages of the World, ed. Barbara F. Grimes, Summer Institute of Linguistics,
14th Edition 2002.
History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, M.K.Ferishta, transl. Col. John Briggs,
first pub. 1829, R.Cambray and Co, Calcutta 1908, reprrt. 1997 Low Price Publications,
Delhi Vol. I. p.8.
The Origins of Literary Persian, by Gilbert Lazard, Noruz Lecture by a Distinguished Scholar of Iranian Studies, Foundation for Iranian Studies, 1993, Bethesda (fis-iran.org/lazar.htm); cf. G.Lazard, "Pahlavi, parsi, dari: les langues de l'Iran d'apres Ibn al-Muqaffa", in Iran and Islam, ed. C. E. Bosworth, Edinburg, 1971, pp. 361-391.

hayal ettiğimdan daha küçük

2009-08-18T22:04:00.000-07:00

omphalohistoricism

2009-07-11T12:40:00.000-07:00

I spent last Thursday at the AKBANK library in Taksim ( as well as the Cervantes institute where, while reading about a huge tome on Muslim Spain on the second floor all of the lights were suddenly turned off and I huge the door slam and realized I had just been shut in a Spanish library, pero al ultimo momento me acobarde' al recordar que no hubo bano) and reading "the gap between misrecognition and what may be grasped as truth is a function of the internal structure of representation", you know, brushing up on Kojève (a brush with death), I started thinking back to earlier in the week reading the chapter "Marxism is not a Historicism" in Althusser's Reading Capital and then thought how gleefully I would piss Althusser off if her knew how much I am nostalgically teleological about my own life. He writes "It must be said that the union of humanism and historicism represents the gravest temptation". What of the grave temptation to combine historicism and narcissism?
I have been writing a journal now for 7 years pretty religiously (so then maybe I should call this entry omphaleschatology) and when I look back at the meandering cycles of melodrama and self-proclaimed purpose, how each edifice of pubecent certainy crumbles under new experiences and responsibilty, how each new retroactive fiction is superceded by another (for example my latest kick is to think of how well understanding the cycle of ambivilence/homesickness/wanderlust from my time in Egypt(and Yemen as an example of what not to do) had helped me make it through my first six months here without chickening out and how it is none other than the cunning of reason) I can't help but make comparisons between my own puny little life and the greater swirling sublimation of human history. In fact, every time I read almost anything related to history (both historicistic or other) I can't help but only apply it to the development of my singular life. Sometimes I feel like the only lessons I've learned from all this philosophy shit I've read it how to be a more dialectical omphaloskepsist.

Dear Journal,

today I felt so lonely and negative today. But then, like I felt negative about this negativity and wanted to sublimate myself into a comprehensive state of self-pity.

عثمان لسان

2009-07-08T12:16:00.000-07:00

Arab ve Latin Elifbalarındaki Harfler..

Arab ve Latin sistemi harfleri mukayeseye başlarken yazıda bunlardan hangisinin Türkçe sözleri daha matluba muvafık ifâde ettiğini tayin eylemek lâzımdır. Madem ki yazımız savtîdir(sesli), o halde bunu tayin eylemek için hangi elifbada Türk lehçelerinin esasî seslerine mutabık kâfi miktar harflerin bulunduğunu tavzih etmek kâfidir. Evvelce Arab elifbasında yirmisekiz harf vardı. Türk kavimleri daha Rusya büyük inkılâbından evvel bunlara yeniden sekiz harf ilâve ettiler ki, böylece bu elifbanın esası harfleri otuzaltıya çıkmıştı. Bunlardan dördü sesli harfleri, kalanları sessiz harfleri ifade ediyorlardı. Böylece ikmâl olunan Arab elifbasındaki sâmit harfler Türk lisanının bütün sâmit seslerini ifade etmeye kâfi miktarda olup, onların şekilleri ve ifade ettikleri sesler bütün Türk kavimlerinde aynı tarzdadırlar. Sâit seslere gelince onları ifade için iki usul kullanmak mümkündür:

1) Türk dilindeki ahenk kanunundan istifade etmek usulü. Bu takdirde sâit sesler için 2-3 harf artırıldığı gibi bütün sözlerin incelik yahut kalınlığına delâlet eder bir alâmet ilâve edilir.

2) Çifte sâitler usulü. Bu takdirde sâit harflere kelimelerin kalınlık yahut inceliğini göstermek vazifesi de tahmil olunduğundan, evvelce mevcut sâitlere yine beş-altı sâit harf ilâvesi icap eder.

Hem birinci hem ikinci usulü tatbik tecrübeleri hemen bütün Türk kavimlerinde icra olunmuştur. Bu tecrübeler isbat etmiştir ki, Arap harfleri esası dairesinde yalnız fonetik imlâya yaklaşan amelî imlâ değil, hatta akademik transkripsiyon (başka lisanlardaki sesleri yazmak) bile mümkündür.

Asıl Latin elifbasında yirmialtı harf vardır ki, bunlardan altısı sâit (sesli) ve yirmisi sâmit (sessiz) harflerdir. Latin elifbasını tatbike kalkışan Azerbaycanlılar kendi lehçelerindeki otuzdört ses için lâzım olan otuzdört harfin ancak ondokuzunu -ki yüzde ellialtısı demektir- doğrudan doğruya şekil ve müfadını değiştirmeden Latin elifbasından alabilmişlerdir. Latin elifbasının yedi harfini (yüzde yirmibiri demektir) onların bu elifbada ifade ettikleri seslerden başka sesler için almışlar. Kalan sekiz ses için (yüzde yirmiüç demektir) harflerin hem şeklini hem mûtadını değiştirmişlerdir ki, bu sahada kısmen Rus ve Ermeni harflerini almışlardır. Yakutlarda ise lüzumu görülen otuzdört harfin ancak onyedisi (yüzde kırkyedi demek) şekil ve sesi tebdil edilmeden Latinceden alınmıştır. İki harf Latin harfine şeklen benziyorsa da, ifade ettiği sesler cihetinden aykırıdırlar. Kalan onyedi harf (yüzde kırkyedi) ise büsbütün Latin elifbasında bulunmayan harflerdir. Kazan ve Başkırd lehçelerine tatbik edilmek istenilen Latin elifbası projesine göre, lâzım olan otuzbeş harfin ancak ondokuzu (yüzde ellidört demek) şekli yahut sesi değiştirilmeden Latin elifbasından alınıyor.

Görülüyor ki, Türk lehçelerinde bulunan seslerin ancak yüzde kırkyedisi ve nihayet yüzde ellialtısı şeklen ve ma'nen tebdil edilmeyen Latin harfleriyle ifade edilebilir. Halbuki Arab sistemi harflerle yazarken ancak yüzde onbeş yeni yahud biraz değiştirilmiş harfler ilâve etmeye mecburuz. Demek ki, Türk sesleri ve kelimelerini ifade etmek ve yeni normal ve amelî imlâ meydana getirmek için Arab sistemi elifbanın harf hazinesi Latin sistemi elifbamnkinden daha elverişlidir.

Hangisi Daha Güzeldir?

Mesele iki sistem harflerin hangisinin daha güzel olduğuna gelince, bu elbet bir şahsî zevk meselesidir. Ağamali yoldaşın risalesine ilâve edilen makalesinde Şeyh Cüzi Arab harflerinin pek çirkin olduğunu iddia ediyorsa da, Avrupa'nın hemen bütün müellifleri bunun aksini söylüyorlar. Onlara göre çok sayıda şekillere sahip olan İslam harfleri birbirine benzeyen hendesî şekillerden ibaret olan Latin harflerinden daha güzeldirler. Güzel Arabî hat ile yazılan levhalar batıda evlerin içindeki duvarlarını tezyin etmiyor mu? Geniş halk kitlelerinin ruhî takdirine gelince, şunu kaydetmeliyim ki, Türk kavimleri halk ibdamın semereleri olan kıvrıntılı nakışlar, tabiatıyla İslam harfi sistemine uyuyorlar, bunlar Latin sistemi harflere birçok cihetten tevafuk eden düz çizgilerden ve hendesî şekillerden oluşan Hindu-Avrupaî nakışlara tamamen aykırıdırlar..

Megalopoli

2009-07-05T11:52:00.000-07:00

megalopoli.posterous.com

This is a new blog I am contributing to, and it will have more straight-up stuff I am doing in Istanbul everyday. My friend Josh and I started it, well he started it, and I put stuff on it. He just moved to Beijing. The theme is living in a developing-world metropoli. There is another guy from Tokyo (breaks the rule of the blog by being in a developed metropolis) and a kid from our high school who is supposedly going to write from Ljubljana (which breaks the rule of the blog by neither being in a developed country or being a metropolis). Please feel free to join up if you live in any of the following cities:
Jakarta
Cairo
Mexico City
Sao Paolo
Lagos
New Delhi
Karachi (I would be jealous)
Manila
Tehran (I would be super jealous)

also, here are some recent pictures from Istanbul

retraction

2009-06-18T08:06:00.000-07:00

Orhan Pamuk'un üzücü 'Kara Kitap' isimli kitabını okuduktan sonra bu blog'da Orhan Pamuk hakkında birkaç önyargılı yazı yazmıştım (maalasef bu kötü alışkanlığımdan kurtulmak için blogumda bile uğraşıyorum). Mark'ın bana başka bir şans vermemi söylemesinden sonra onun odasından 'Kar' isimli kitabı seçtim. Ve onun tavsiyesi çok şükür iyi oldu. Kar varoluşsal mevzuları çok daha ince şekilde ifade ediliyor ve kara kitabın metninin süsü ve sonsuz listeleri burada yok!Bir günde 150 sayfa okudum. Türkçe bir nüsha aldım. Birkaç cümle o kadar müessir oldu ki ben hayatımın yönü hakkında daha cesaretli hissettim. (aldırmazlık konusunda mesela).
Ve bu kitabın en harika özelliği! Dünyanın ilk müslüman bilimkurgu yazarı olmak isteyen bir karakterinin sahip olması. Bu onun ilk hikayesinden bir paragraf:
3579 yılında, bugün daha bilinmeyen Gazzali gezegeninde insanlar çok zengin, hayat da bugün bizim yaşadığımızdan çok daha rahatlı, ama materyalistlerin sandığının aksine 'artık zenginiz' diye insanlar maneviyatlarına boşvermemişlerdi. Tam tersi varlık ve yokluk, insan ve alem, allah ve kulları konusunda herkes çok meraklıydı.

the Black Book

2009-06-16T13:14:00.000-07:00

I really buy into the whole definitive-author-for-a-city think. Joyce for Dublin, ummm, O'Toole for New Orleans, (I once thought whimsically about becoming the bard of San Antonio (I am proud of it in a sort of pitying-but-I-have-no-where-else-to-call-home-and-everyone-else-is-so-overly-jingoistic-about-their-hometown kind of way) but that would require me to A) devote my life to the sheepish trade of writing and B) spend the rest of my life in San Antonio) and so I began reading Orhan Pamuk where I first got here to Istanbul. I thought that if nothing else I would enjoy recognizing which streets the protagonist takes and feel special (it was super fun following Ignatius and I was only in New Orleans for like 48 hours).
First of all, Orhan Pamuk clings to existential themes (and don't get me wrong, I like existential themes, but only ones I can actually relate to, but gay things like solitude like, say, fucking everyone in a garcia Marquez novel, and in this book, it revolves around the question "can we ever really be ourselves?" (masterbation hand gesture)) and repeats them without trying out any good synonyms (although I will scapegoat his translator, who makes some truly shitty turns of phrase, which made me almost let go of the handrail on the tram a few times) and then does that boring literary trick where you list a bunch of random brickerbrack. I'll give you an example (that I made up) A room scented with linden and turkish delight and foggy jard of byzantine mud, and old silk gloves, and the various scraps of old books and pamphlets that bla bla bla transformed into the bewildering mystery of receding memory. There is like this stupid plot and this annoying sappy protagonist who pulls a niebla (where the narrator interrupts towards the end, except when Unamuno does it it's the cool type of existential, not the gay post-modern I-only-got-the-nobel-prize-because-I'm-Turkish type of existential)
I finished this book, all 400 pages (exactly 400 pages in some sort of ironic unfunny joke), and that's why I'm pissed. I'm going to try another book, Mark gave me the refreshingly slim "white Castle" but if I'm not utterly satisfied with having the inside scoop into his literary world by having lived in Istanbul for 5 months, I am going to bad mouth Orhan Pamuk worse than the Turkish government.

The Sun-Language Theory and After

2009-06-15T10:41:00.001-07:00

Sometime in 1935 Atatürk received a forty-seven-page typescript in French, enti
tled 'La Psychologie de quelques éléments des langues turques', by a Dr Hermann
F. Kvergić of Vienna. The theme was that man first realized his own identity when
he conceived the idea of establishing what the external objects surrounding him
were. Language first consisted of gestures, to which some significant sounds were
then added. Kvergić saw evidence for his view in the Turkish pronouns. M indi
cates oneself, as in men, the ancient form of ben 'I, ' and elim 'my hand' N indi
cates what is near oneself, as in sen 'you' and elin 'your hand'. Z indicates a broader
area, as in biz 'we' and siz 'you' Further, Kvergić considered that Turkish was the
first human language to take shape. Nothing could have been more timely.

Two months before, a copy of the paper had been sent to Ahmet Cevat Emre,
the chairman of the grammar section of the Language Society, who after a cursory
examination dismissed it as unsubstantiated and worthless. Atatürk was more
impressed, partly because, having discussed it with Emre, he suspected that the
latter's rejection of it was due to his seeing in Kvergić a potential rival. 'To me, ' he
said, 'the psychological analyses look important.' He thought that primitive man
might well have given vent to exclamations such as 'Aa!' and 'Oo!' and that lan
guage could have emerged from utterances of this kind. He passed the paper on
to Ibrahim Necmi Dilmen, the secretary-general of the Language Society, and said,
'It looks important; let it be examined carefully.' Dilmen talked it over with Hasan
Reşit Tankut, Naim Hâzim Onat, and Abdülkadir İnan, who saw merit in the psy
chological analyses ( Emre 1960: 342-6).

The result of Atatürk's subsequent lucubrations, aided by these and others of
the staff of the Society, was Güneş-Dil Teorisi (the Sun-Language Theory), which
saw the beginning of language as the moment when primitive man looked up at
the sun and said 'Aa!'. As it was concerned only with the beginning and not the
development of language, it cannot be reproached for omitting to explain how
mankind progressed from that primeval 'Aa!' to the sublimity of 'Faith, hope and
charity, these three things', or Virgil's 'sunt lacrimae rerum' or even to so com
monplace an utterance as 'Let's go for a walk in the park.'

ماڈ پراپز

2009-06-10T10:41:00.000-07:00

no words can truly describe the sense both of awe, and complete satisfaction that these pictures bring me.

2009-06-10T00:24:00.001-07:00

SİZİN KİŞİLİĞİNİZ:

Enerji kaynağınızı iç dünyanızdan alıyorsunuz. Olaylar hakkında konuşmaktan çok düşünmeyi yeğliyorsunuz. Diğer insanların davranışlarını ve nedenlerini anlamakta başarılısınız.

Hayatınızın düzen ve nizam içinde olmasını istiyorsunuz. Muhtemelen yapacaklarınızı hatırlamak için ajandanızı kullanıyorsunuz. Kararlarınızı çabuk veriyorsunuz. Diğer insanlarla ilgili de çabuk karar veriyorsunuz. Çevrenizdekiler tarafından kimi zaman dominant olarak nitelendiriliyorsunuz.

Detay odaklı bir kişisiniz. Fakat işlerin NASIL yürüdüğünü merak ediyorsunuz. Aynı zamanda pratiksiniz. Şartların gerektirdiği şekilde davranıyorsunuz ve işleri alıştığınız şekilde yapmayı seviyorsunuz.

Mantıklı düşünen ve problemleri çözmeyi seven birisiniz. Çevrenizdekileri ve olayları objektif kriterlere göre değerlendiren adil bir kişisiniz.

Watching America

2009-06-08T11:36:00.000-07:00

http://watchingamerica.com/News/

It's been a long time since I've been able to translate for this website, but looking at it recently I remembered how cool it is. It's a little cheesy and tacky (who the fuck chooses their pictures) but it really does have news content (even wacky paranoid shit I love to read in Arabic) in English translation. Almost every country and major language is represented. Everything is about America in some way or another (which is kind of annoying, but that's this sites schtick so what can you do)

daadg's''aaf

2009-06-05T04:18:00.000-07:00

ne dersin, ulusal iyiliksever keşişler örgütü'ne girelim mi?

2009-05-28T10:56:00.000-07:00

So I was sitting in the Kartal cultural center looking at Modern world classics translated into Turkish yesterday and I got a case of supreme culture-arrogance-inspired-suspicion. I had recommended L'assommoir in the Turkish translation, and had been looking at copies of "meyhane" all over the city, but sort of felt like the only thing that really makes it worth reading is the colorfully dated slang and descriptions, and the cool way Zola "achieves the effect of a single, harmonious narrative by the rapidity of his transistions between the form of subjective narrative and the more usual objective narrative- that is to say between the words of an authoritative narrator and the voice of one of its characters". The translator ( I finally gave up trying to read it in French after the wedding procession, my French dictionary was giving me carpal tunnel syndrome). English has an amazing wealth of registers to choose from, from Biblical puritanism to cockney to instruction booklet to hip-hop to Shakespeare to parenthetical blog (Alas! Were I but worthy to be drafted into this pantheon of Englitude!). But I don't know if Turkish's cultural inheritance gives it that same breadth. The first time I noticed was while watching revolutionary road and glancing down at the subtitles. Kate and Leo sounded wonderfully tupperwareish even when they called eachother cunts because the dialogue was so subtely tainted with the 50's (perfect example "swell", the turkish translation just said the word for great, no nostalgic register to make the dialogue seem as deliberately dated as the costumes) Take the end of Chapter 3 of l'assommoir

"- Ça ne vous empêchera pas d'y passer, ma petite ? Vous serez peut-être bien contente d'y passer, un jour ? Oui, j'en connais des femmes, qui diraient merci, si on les emportait."

My translation in English is slightly cockney, 19th century-ish "It won't stop you getting there, darling. You may even be happy to go, one day. Yes, there are some women I know who would thank you for taking them off" (actually, I chose to copy a bad passage out of the Turkish version to make my point, there aren't any really strikingly dated words, just a sort of antique syntax, but oh well, just believe me regardless)

Here is the Turkish "bu, sizin de oradan geçmenizi engellemez yavrum... belki de günün birinde oradan geçmek sizin de hoşunuza gider...evet, öyle kadınlar gördüm ki oraya götürünce. bize teşekkür ederler"
I mean, how dated does that sound? People (well I guess just old ladies climbing onto city buses) still say yavrum, does the syntax sound Ottoman? I don't know. I wonder if that would in any way work, to have hausseman era french workers speaking Osmanli. I wonder.
My study parnter showed me the verbose questions from her law exam prep book and it was super interesting how the higher, legalistic register of Turkish (I didn't say it only has one register (I mean if it did that would be great, I'm so burnt out on the diaglossal mindgames of that bane of my existence, Arabic) but that things are much more straighforward) is just transliterations of Arabic words. fooooooor example, the word for "resistance, putting your foot down" in normal Turkish is direnmek but in legalistic Turkish it is temerrüd which you can easily find in your Hans Wehr by looking at page 1059. How fucking cool is that!! It was like a cosmic linguistic magic carpet ride akin to when I realized the vaguely familiar surrrounding words like "इंतज़ार " and " असर' were just Arabic imports via urdu via persian.
So with these things in mind I rushed over to the English literature section and picked out Ulysses.

sarman, babaç Buck Mulligan, üzerine bir anayla bir ustura haçvarı konulmuş tıraş sabunu köpüğü dolu tasıyla merdivan başında belirdi

What better way to put Turkish to the test. Better than Shakespeare I think since Ulysses is more layered with registers, more appreciative and playful with phonology, more nonsensical and all-around baffling. The translator introduction (I love reading translator introductions, I can still quote the Arabic translator of a Muhammad Arkoun book I read الاخلاص فضيلة في كل شيء الا بالترجمة) didn't beat around the bush, he was reverant to the impossibility of his task (he said it took him fucking 40 years to translate it)

"...olay, ingilizce yazılmış bir şey yapıtı türkçe'ye çevirmek değil, Ulysses'ce iyi türkçe'ye çevirmektir"

"... to translate something written in English into Turkish isn't a work of art, translating something from Ulysses-ish into Turkish is "

and then more frankly " Ulysses' çevirmeye kalkışmak başlıbaşına bir çılgınlık"
which I think means "translating Ulysses is a head-numbing impossible insanity" or something like that

Which made me feel a little haughty ( in characteristic متغطرسي fashion) about speaking the worlds most subtle, flexible, and wide-spread language in the whole world. But I mean, that shit goes both ways . And also to be fair I looked at some other books I've read in English translation, and I made all sorts of completely amateurish conjectures. (speaking of amateurish, I was reading my book in Turkish on Mughal dynasty and mistakenly translated acemistan as "amateur land" instead of "Persia", Yuck yuck yuck) But look how Turkish sounds from Spanish:

ne dersin, ulusal iyiliksever keşişler örgütü'ne girelim mi? -seksek

kaçınılmaz bir şeydi- acıbadem kokusu ona mutsuz aşkların yazgısını anımsatırdı hep.

not too bad, but I have that sort of feeling that literary Spanish and literary Turkish both share a sort of unabashed formalism that sounds weird in English anyways (Garcia Marquez and Orhan Pamuk are incredibly similar to me, both sort of tools)

And then I thought that Turkish is very terse and sort of has a logical charm to it (I heard it from the Vito that esperanto was fashioned after Turkish for this very reason(not for my esperanto allusion to be overlooked, vito is esperanto for grapevine, ok, we're clear on that?) that can be put to some good use. I then thought about the most terse and absurdly logical thing I know written, which sounds super weird both in English and in New pornographers songs.
"the world is that which is the case"
Sure enough, the Kartal seaside cultural center had my good friend squeezed between Decartes and Fichte (I know, weird right? I have a theory that the Istanbul metropolitan government is anti-spinozian on one hand, and anti-anything after Hegel on the other, (only a municipal government that thought that "the role of the State as expressing the Spirit of a society, as a realization of God in the world." would plant 4 million tulips in the city limits))
And to it's credit, Turkish was able to squeeze the original german version's 9 words into 4, take THAT vienna Circle, maybe it was a bad idea to ward off the Ottoman siege after all!

wowon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

üzerine konuşulamayan konusunda susmalı

حين للغة المُرْبك

2009-05-20T06:58:00.000-07:00

صباح دا كان عندي شوية الوقت الفراغ فقرأت للمرة الاولى في اشهار من كتابي الرمان بالعربية. خلال السنة الماضية قرأت كثير من صنع الله ابرهيم (فعلا اقدر اقول بغرور بان قرأت نص عمله) و جيت الى التركية مع نسخة "بيروت بيروت" لكن قرأت بس شوية عشان اقضى كل وقتي في دراسة التركية دلوقتي. و لكن لما اتابع الحروف الجميلة, فهمت المفردات الاصلية (عادة لما اقرأ في الاردو ام التركية افكر دائما في المصادر العربية قبل التنقيل اللغوي-مورفولوجية الى هذه اللغات التراثية ) و ذكرت الاعراب الشبه مصطنع  فجاة اشعرت شيء غريب كثيرا. استوحشتني العربية. كأنها جزء من شخصياتي . كأن طقسي الكتابة الكلمات الجديدة على نبذ الورقة ساهمت في تكون ايقاع حياتي. لذلك يجب ان القي البرنامج السحري الذي يتيح الدراسة في العربية التركية و الاردو في نفس الوقت. ممكن اللغوية التاريخية. حد بعرف جامعة اقدر اروحها؟.   

hayat sadece bir rüya

2009-05-10T10:52:00.000-07:00

Turban : Istanbul : : Mega-church : New York?

2009-05-09T23:30:00.001-07:00

I remember on the first day I came to Turkey I asked if showing the soles of my feet was considered rude. I was given a (justifiably) bizarre glance. I learned after about 48 hours that making any sort of comparison between Istanbul and any Arab country was not only (justifiably) rude, but was pretty useless as far as comparisons go. I get the feeling, from how Istanbulites sort of deride Anatolia as the Turkish version of Fly-over states, that there is a red and a blue Turkey, and that I am firmly in the blue column by living and working with upper-middle class Kamalist white-collar turks, that if I want to make any Arabo-similes I better go to Diyarbakir.

Once I realized that Turkish people themselves go on vacation to Cairo to gawk at that huge dusty mess, I put that analogy to bed. Then, while talking about the IMF's sordid relationship with Turkey with a finance banker, AKP's role in the neo-liberal project ( I want to make a deck of neo-liberal goons playing cards, Reagan and Thatcher would be the king and Queen, Rumsfeld would be the joker because it fits his amateur philosophizing that there are "known unknowns, and unknown unknowns"), and the rise of consumerism and debt-culture after Turkeys one-party statism, I started making incessant analogies about how similar Mexico and Turkey are. This is of course Bullshit because I haven't gone farther into Turkey than Kartal and besides Istanbul I've been to a couple of truckstops on the highway headed towards Edirne (Bulgaria visa run), but no matter. The only trips I really took in Mexico were pretty touristy themselves (except for the roadblocks and class struggle me and Sarah saw for one night (I cowardly thought fireworks celebrating a saint were government forces storming the barricades)). But I mean, this analogy gets more mileage (finance banker said people use to rattle on about Brazil and Turkey as emerging market brethren, until oil prices left Turkey in the dust) because academics love analogies, and the Mexico Turkey one is really picking up steam . The way that an insulated overblown capital houses the countries corrupt oligarchs, intellectual class, and stars in almost all cultural output (books, movies, soap operas) makes Istanbul feel a lot like Mexico City. In fact, I can draw some more specific analogies (back me up Nick)

Bagdat Caddesi = Polanco

Nisantasite = fresita

haydi görüşürüz = ciao, nos vemos

CHP = PRI

Kadikoy (especially nazim hikmet culture center) = Coyoacan

Otogar's creepy brutalist architecture = Pantitlan estacion's creepy brutalist architecture (I will even give a pictoral example)

But then this week while having no less than 6 hours worth of conversations with Turkish white-collar workers (4 nurses, 1 doctor, 1 engineer, 1 factory manager, 1 computer anaylist) about religion I learned that when it comes to harboring a harmless guilt about being vaguely religious but not knowing enough about their own religion, not having read enough of the Quran, making new years resolution type promises to fast, and most importantly the trite anti-dogmatic claim that they believe in God but not in religion, Turkey is just like America. "I think if you believe in God, that is the important thing" "I really want to read more about it, but I just don't have time with my job". The self-righteous hatred of Erdogan's self-righteousness is hauntingly similar to living in Washington during the Bush years (I'm surprised you can't buy a picture of Erdogan in B&W with the caption "not my prime minister" from one of the skate shops in Kadikoy (by the way Kadikoy is one of those rare magical places on the face of the earth where you can listen to pop punk coming from a skate shop and the call to prayer coming from a mosque at the same time (long live secularism))). People here in Istanbul keep a circle of secular friends and are willing to socialize, but have (what seems to be, I don't want to assume) that harmless distance between themselves and the Turbanites ( I will say this about Arab countries defense, I really prefer the hijab to what looks like something that people wear on Naboo (iwww, I hate Star Wars references)). I think about the civil friendship my mom keeps with an Evangelist. Then there are other ways that Islam manifests itself in safe-commercialist outlets that is pure Americana. You can buy cheap paperbacks about the prophets life at the supermarket (but not with Islamic fonts or threatening forest green iconography, but like smiling toothy kids grinning). You can buy your sacrificial lamb for Eid al-udha prepackaged at Carrefour (none of the fun of having blood run in the streets). Kids learn how to read the Quran in Muslim school, and then forget by the time they are twenty (half-heartedly regretting having forgotten when they explain it). But then again, Turkey doesn't have tent revivals, mormonism, free scientology stress tests, Mega-churches, power crystals, amish, KKK, or yoga retreats (that I've heard of yet). It's interesting how culture insists on its irrational persistence despite the fact that "

National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto."

Super interesting that these quirky differences persist when it comes to accommodating old practices into the grind of modern life. Someone told me that some people in Turkey squeeze in az-zuhr, asr, and maghreb into isha'a prayer so that they thought have to interrupt a day full of dropping of the kids at soccer practice, buying a new dishwasher, and making dinner. I wonder who has written the anthropological paper on how Turkish people, by waiting to become properly religious and pious until later in life when they finally make the Hajj, are able to find a symbolic act to justify putting off pesky things like not drinking beer, not veiling, or praying five times a day for most of their consumerist existences. It acts as the perfect empty gesture to ensure that they can defer the superego injunction of Islamic traditions until they retire and don't have anything better to do that grow a beard or dick around at the mosque all day (it's like a senior's rec center here in icerenkoy, everyone gladhanding and shooting the breeze before and after prayer). If only we had something like that in America, so I wouldn't have been annoyed for most of high school by indoctrinated teenagers who were taking virginity oaths and singing jesus freak on their acoustic guitars. There is something about pious old people that is much less annoying than pious teens. Maybe its sincerity.

light reading

2009-04-16T23:10:00.000-07:00

المعيشية في استنبول يأرض كل نزواتي الجمالية المستشرقية و حتى في الناحية اللغوية اشعر راضا.يستعملون الترك مبلغ غمر الكلمات العربية في التحدث اليومي (بدون أدركها (اتمتع بهذا الشيء بشكل خاص) ) و يشعر رائعا عندما يتكلمون عن شعورهم و حياتهم و يستعملون كلمات التى حتى ألان كانت موجودة لدي فقط في شعر عتيق و في أداب تجريدي. كأن عالم يترك ديره بعد 7 ستة الدراسة اللغة اللاتنية و فجاة يسمع الناس في الشوارع و يستعملون ‘امور‘ و‘كنتانت‘ في قرية فرنساوي.بشكل ما يشعر هذا التجربة مثل الإكتشاف حضارة مفقودة. لكن الشيء الوحيد التى تستوحشني هنا هو الصنع الفريد العقلي في العالم العربي:الهجاءالبليغ و المذعور ضد الغرب. هناك في التركية مبلغ رضاء الذعر و الخوف من الأجانب لكن يحتاج الى المقياس المحلمي موجود في الثقافة العربي. يعتبرون العرب انفسهم (او الى الاقل مفكرونهم) كولي الحضارة المفقودة الأسلام التقليدي و لذلك أراءهم و عقيدتهم اكبر مبهما و نرجسا و ذعرا.

لكن لحسن الحظ القيت هذا نهاية الاسبوع نسخة كتاب في كتابخان من السعودية اسمه ‘الغزو الفكرى و التيارات المعادية للاسلام‘ و من صحفته الاول شعرت متحمسا جدا. الأن استنبول مثالي.

Living in Istanbul satisfies all of my orientalist aesthetic whims and even in its linguistic aspects I feel satisfied. Turks use an overwhelming amount of Arabic words in daily conversation (without realizing it (I enjoy this privately)) and it feels amazing when they speak about their feelings and their lives by using words that until now have only exsisted for me in archaic poetry and abstract literature. As tough a scholar leaves his cloister after 7 years of studying Latin and suddenly hears people in the streets of a French villiage using “amour” and “contentus”. In a way this experience feels like discovering a lost civilization. But the only thing I miss here is the unparalleled intellectual production of the Arab World: eloquent and paranoid diatribes against the West. There is a satisfactory amount of paranoia and xenophobia in Turkey but it lacks the epic scale found in Arabic culture. Arabs consider themselves (or at least their intellectuals) to be the guardian of the lost civilization of traditional Islam and for that their worldview and ideology is all the more vague and narcissistic and paranoid. But fortunately I found a book this weekend from a second-hand bookstore from Saudi Arabia called “the intellectual invasion and Anti-Islamic attitudes” and from its first page I felt totally excited. Now Istanbul is ideal.

Farsi coloring book

2009-04-03T10:09:00.001-07:00

Why I love nostalgia

2009-03-31T10:28:00.001-07:00

Today I got some juicy new quotes from my weekly reading at Bogazici University, dicking around while everyone else is gnashing their teach doing equations.

"In psychological anamnesis it is not a question of reality, but of truth, because the effect of a full word is to reorder the past contingent events by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come, just as they are constituted by the little liberty through which the subject makes them present."

"What we teach the subject is to recognize as his unconscious is his history - that is to say, we help him perfect the contemporary historization of the facts which have already determined a certain number of the historical "turning points" in his existence. But if they have played their role, it is already as facts of history, that is to say, in so far as they have been recognized in one particular sense or censored in certain order"

Turkish Elections Coverage - Live from Istanbul

2009-03-30T07:25:00.000-07:00

Someone told me that because Turkey lost to Spain in the World Cup qualifier, that people would be disheartened and not vote as much. It was also a beautiful day yesterday. Despite the weeks of constant buses driving by with loud speakers and party songs, flags hanging across every street, and commercials galore, AKP didn't do to hot. I'm sure everyone one of my students will be thrilled. Last night I watched results come in and everyone was glued to the tv, CNNturk's graphic was literally a wall of flames.
This morning while waiting for my computer to be repaired I sat next to a prayer bead salesman " bismiallah, kokalar!" (in the name of God, prayer beads) named Ibrahim and talked about the elections. You know, the word on the street. He made his political views very clear from early in our conversation (he broke the ice with me by spraying me with a syringe full of rosewater perfume, another of his wares) by making the Takbeeratul-Ihram motion with his hands, and then spitting on the ground, then showing me his CHP (national people's party) key chain. He talked about how if you took a picture on your cell phone of your vote for AKP and then texted it to a party office, you would get a small piece of gold. Mind you I was sitting in a public square with benches which in Istanbul means it will usually be full of old men wearing three piece suits, fisherman type hats, canes and prayer beads. They are "geveze" (chatterboxes) looking to talk to anyone. They heard the word AKP or "election" and they hobbled over in droves. It got pretty heated between the Kemalists and the Islamists but then the call to prayer broke things up. Then me and Ibrahim talked about Obama and after profusely agreeing about what a shithead Bush was, he gave me some prayer beads as a gift.

un barrage contre le pacifique

2009-03-26T22:52:00.000-07:00

Last night at the French cultural Institute I saw what we all realized after 20 minutes was a one-woman adaption of the Marguarite Dumas novel "un barrage contre le Pacifique". As French majors from Istanbul University fidgeted in their seats, I thought about how much I really didn't like "Moderato Cantabile" and that I should have known better. Even the most accultured French speaking Turks, who came to the play talking audibly on their cell phones "oh oui, bien sur, tout de suite" to prove that they had "le street cred", could be heard deflating as we sat through a twenty minute monologue about illness delivered by an actress illuminated only by a prop karosene lamp. There were three props hanging from cords above the stage, and I knew that as she went to slowly put on the flapper dress, and to put on lipstick in the small mirror, people in the audience were also saying to themselves "2 down, 1 to go". About an hour into it she started a vignette of soft-spoken denouement each of which had all the theatrical look of being the last scene. Slowly folding a sheet she had used in the first scene, reading a letter so long that the stage prop was three long manila pages, lowering the stage light with the conlusion of each drawn out histrionic sentence. But the play didnt' end, the actress kept talking. And talking. In that incredibly annoying theatre whisper that nobody in real life would ever talk like. I had been up at 5:30, spending 5 hours in the Bogazaci university trying to kill time before this very play, so this was dramaturgic euthanasia. It started getting rediculous, in a hilarious way. The euphemistic coughing, the creek of seat springs. And then, I thought about Kierkegaard (as I always do in moments of fear and trembling)

Idleness, we are accustomed to say, is the root of all evil. To prevent this evil, work is recommended.... Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; on the contrary, it is truly a divine life, if one is not bored.... My deviation from popular opinion is adequately expressed by the phrase "rotation of crops." The method I propose does not consist in changing the soil but, like proper crop rotation, consists in changing the method of cultivation and the kinds of crops. Here at once is the principle of limitation, the sole saving principle in the world. The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes (p. 289, 291)

I started watching the play and finding it hard not laugh. She slowly takes off her high heels and places them neatly by a box, she sits down and speaks to the part of the fly system where the Big Other ordained to listen to soliluquoys is supposed to be. But there is no end in sight.

There was someone whose chatter certain circumstances made it necessary for me to listen to. He was ready at every opportunity with a little philosophical lecture which was utterly boring. Driven almost to depair, I discoveed suddenly that he perspired unusually profusely when he spoke. I saw how the pearls of sweat gathered on his brow, then joined in a stream, slid down his nose, and ended hanging in a drop at the ectreme tip of it. From that moment everything was changed; I could even take pleasure in inciting him to begin his philosophical instruction, just to observe the sweat on his brow and on his nose.

I thought about writing my own play which used every theatrical trick in the book to trick the audience into thinking the play was ending, three hours of toasts, truisms, using the gun shown in act one, reunited lovers, and dimming lights. The last hour would be in almost complete darkness except for maybe a prop cigarette, smoked for 45 minutes by a detective talking about how lonely it is working the beat.
Unfortunately the play did end with the actress standing front and center. The stage was bare because she had already striked the set to have business during her hour and a half. We all held our applause thinking "of all things, this is the end." She bowed a few times and I applauded three whole claps after everyone else had stopped.

COSSACKS RULE!

2009-03-08T16:07:00.000-07:00

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Repin_Cossacks.jpg

the big Other is in the softdrink business

2009-03-07T21:15:00.000-08:00

I wonder how collective Arab paranoia acts as a unifying force for Arab/Muslim identity and how the oft-quoted jolt of modernity has left them without a, what is it people say, civil society cognitive mapping. I wrote a pretty crappy paper on the material/linguistic foundations of the Ummah in the modern age and I only wish I had read more about 'the empty gesture' and the Big Other in preparing for it, or else I wouldn't have used so many Benedict Anderson quotes. I would have instead probably gone on some ersatz rant pasting together critical theory snippets and Butrus al-Bustani quotes to say something about how the Ummah nowadays reinforces its communal identity (or masks the lack thereof) with paranoia as the gaze of the Other. الاخر الكبير has a nice ring to it.

lacan + finance

2009-03-04T16:20:00.001-08:00

Question - As etymology would recall, there exist affinities between the word crisis and the word critical. Crisis calls upon judgment, but it is more than anything a swinging point, like a disease which can lead to death or to the cure. For an analyst, what is the meaning of the word crisis?

Jacques-Alain Miller - The psychoanalyst is “crisis friendly”. To start analysis always constitutes for the subject a critical moment, which responds to a crisis, or unveils one. Only, once started, analysis becomes a hard work. A crisis of tears? You wait until it passes. A crisis of anguish, a panic attack? You defuse them. A crisis of madness? You avoid starting it… Besides, each session is like a small crisis, each one undergoing paroxysm and resolution. In short, there is crisis in the psychoanalytical sense, when speech, discourse, the words, the figures, the rites, the routine, all the symbolic apparatus, prove suddenly impotent to moderate a real which makes as it pleases. A crisis, it is the real unchained, impossible to control. The equivalent, in civilization, of these hurricanes by which nature periodically recalls mankind of its precariousness, of its land frailty.

Q - How do you interpret the fear of losing money, our own money? To hoard money, is it the same for a small saver than for a billionaire?

JAM - I happen to treat during a few weeks a patient who was billionaire, a maniac, who regularly announced me laughing that he had just gained or lost a million dollars that very morning speculating with currencies. The price of the session was for him a kind of tip, a something that did not exist. He ended bankrupted. There are other types of billionaires, more conservative, even miser, and more informed. But if you are really rich, you are rather “unanalysable,” because you cannot pay, you cannot yield anything significant: the analysis slips over you like water on the feathers of a duck. The “small saver”? To save, accumulate; it means to sacrifice desire, or at least to defer it. The Harpagon’s box, it is the jouissance-box, made of cold jouissance. Money is a signifier without signification, which kills all significations. When one is devoted to money, truth loses meaning, one only sees a booby-trap there.

Q - Lure of gain, the will to stack large sums of money such as that they become unreal. Is this thrust to wealth related to the death drive?

JAM - Yes, the thrust to save speculates openly on death, the fear of the disease, the desire to be perpetuated in the offspring. But there is also the thrust to borrow if I may say so, with immediate consumption as the supreme correlative, the unrestrained expenditure. And, then, there is the thrust to money for money sake, the pure pleasure of hoarding it. Death, jouissance, and repetition, these are the three sides of a pyramid which base is given by the unconscious nature of money: and here we are dealing with the anal object. What do we see in this moment of truth about the financial crisis we are in? That it is worthless; that money is like shit! Here is the real which unsettles all discourses. One calls that, politely, “the toxic assets”… Benedict XVI, always sharp, was expeditious in capitalizing on the financial crisis: “This proves,” he said, “that all is vanity, and only the word of God holds out! ”

Q - This crisis contains a strong psychological dimension. What does explain the movements of panic, in particular the jolts in the stocks markets? What does start them, and how can they be alleviated?

JAM - The monetary signifier is one of semblance, which rests on social conventions. The financial universe is an architecture made of fictions and its keystone is what Lacan called a “subject supposed to know”, to know why and how. Who plays this part? The concert of authorities, from where sometimes a voice is detached, Alan Greenspan, for example, in his time. The financial players base their behavior on this. The fictional and hyper-reflexive unit holds by the “belief” in the authorities, i.e. through the transference to the subject supposed to know. If this subject falters, there is a crisis, a falling apart of the foundations, which of course involves effects of panic. However, the financial subject supposed to know was already quite subdued because of deregulation. And this happened because the financial world believed, in its infatuated delusion, to be able to work things out without the function of the subject supposed to know. Firstly, the real state assets become waste. Secondly, gradually shit permeates everything. Thirdly, there is a gigantic negative transfer vis-à-vis the authorities; the electric shock of the Paulson/Bernanke plan angers the public: the crisis is one of trust; and it will last till the subject supposed to know is reconstructed. This will come in the long term by way of a new set of Bretton Woods accords, a council enjoined to speak the truth about the truth.