One of Istanbul's Good Sides

.Tonight, in the warm lights of the Limon Cafe as the rain comes down outside. Outside, raindrops make rings in puddles. I'm playing backgammon with Padraic and losing, but the salep is warm, thick, and cinammony, and the sounds--the murmuring of voices, the click of the tiles, the dolloping rain, is hypnotic.

On the way home, the rain is sluicing over brick and tile. Cats dash out of my way. A dog is looking for a dry place to sleep, and the only non-libatory place open is the old Antique book store, Osmanli Esyalar, where I buy an old picture of the city after rummaging through a mound of antique maps and pictures. Two cats slept on a pile of books on either side of the cash register. Outside again. Rivulets glittering with the lights of bars and cafes and restaurants. On the corner, where the narrow road suddenly turns steeply down to emerge at the mosque is a corner bar, all windows, filled with lone men facing forward and nursing beers. Most of them are young, black hair and black eyes, the rain drops blurring their figures a little, the neon lights extra bright in the rain.

A Sunday Painting, yani.

Sunday. A warm wind and the sun bright in the morning. I went down to the seaside to sketch the sailboats pouring out of the marina docks. Hundreds of them on the horizon, turned every which way. The Marmara looked like a page from a trigonometry book, triangle sails facing me, turned away, curved in the wind, slightly angled to the right and left, turning left and right, fluttering. Acute, obtuse, isosceles, equilateral, jigs and mainsails. White on dark sea blue. The sky was milky with haze. You could see the mountains near Izmit floating as vague gray shapes above the water. Even the freighters far out to sea looked like they were drifting on white cloud.

The park filled with flowers, pink cherry blossoms, bright yellow dandelions, blue clover blossoms.

At night, Delal and I went to Moda Teras, a fancy restaurant on a bluff with a sweeping view over the Marmara and her islands. A black storm was rolling off the European shores. We watched the shadow creep across sunset pink clouds, over the old Sultan's palace and Hagia Sophia before starting over the water. Lightning flashes. It looked like summer. And on the way home it rained furiously, big-drop warmish rain, not that winter drizzle that has depressed me for the past month. We took shelter under a bus stop and talked about the storms back home--me Florida storms and she Bingol storms, about how frightening the thunder is, like bombs. The football match between rivals Galatasaray and Fenerbahce had just finished and cars were blaring their horns. Fener had won. Rain on the plastic roof. A huddle of men smoking and talking furiously about the game.

The Next Sunday

Sun. Fire. Flame. Heat. Scorch. Glare. White. Light.

Summer. May.

The tourists are here. A group of Germans took over a fish restaurant last night. There were Brits wandering the bars. Tourist sites make everything seem unreal, like a set. They take pictures by the old Ottoman wharf. "Old Ottoman". "Ancient Byzantine". Those words fly around here as thick as the gulls and crows.

Everyone's ready with a history lesson. There are ancient Byzanine walls, ancient Byzantine cemeteries, ancient Byzantine churches and towers, Old Ottoman fountains, Old Ottoman mosques, and graves, but the only thing real is me, longing for my imagined home, for my Florida swamps and fireflies. The air is still. The sky is white. The rooftops wrinkle with escaping heat. The junk peddler is calling up from the street. "Eskiiiiiiiiici." He's got a cartload of plastic toys, a vacuum cleaner and some books.

A hammer. Clank. A gull squawk. A dull traffic roar. The rumble of a truck going by. A neighbor beating her rug. Thump. The toddler next door squawling.

This is a moment, a frame, a piece of my mind--gone already.

I cut my fingernails out on the balcony. It seems like a did it yesterday, but here they are back again. Is this how time is marked off? Hair cuts and beard shaves and season after season. Tick tock tick tock, routine cycles rolling us toward the end of the show?

Aziz Nesin's "How Do I Write, You Ask?"

This story may mainly be of interest to writer friends, but I think it's funny for everyone, of course. I translated it for my roommate's birthday present. This is for you, The Michael!

How Do I Write, You Ask?

by Aziz Nesin

Translated by Jeff Gibbs

I got a letter; it wasn't only to me. It had been sent to several writers. It began something like this. "As you know, readers are curious about writers, about what lies beyond their works and words..."

The writer of the letter says "As you know" but to tell the truth, I don't know. Do readers really wonder about "what lies beyond the writings and works?"

Let's read the rest of the letter.

"One of the peculiarities readers are most curious about is what kind of surroundings writers work in."

Ah, now I think I'm starting to get what these readers are on about. To be frank, readers are curious because they expect the abnormal, the bizarre, the surprising, and the shocking. Or, to be more frank, that's how they desperately want it to be.

Now let's skip to the letter's list of questions and give our answers.

Question: "What sort of atmosphere do you write in?"

Answer: This atmosphere...well, it changes according to the genre I'm writing. Say if I'm writing something serious, I close tight all the doors and windows in my room. There's a skull on my desk, and I scoot my lamp over so that it lights up the eye sockets. In order to focus on the topic, I need the house to be as silent as death. And in this death-silence, I must have music continuously playing. Brahms. Bach. Beethoven. You know--I'll listen to any of the works by the big three with Bs at the beginning of their names. And to keep alert, I must not let the room's temperature rise above sixty degrees Fahrenheit. Because of this, I can't write anything serious in the summer. Nothing. As soon as I start to write, the subject matter turns funny.

If I am writing something nationalistic, I write in the same sort of surroundings. Only, since I'm writing about the Turkish Republic, you will find a bottle of raki with ice and a bowl of roasted chickpeas--Turkey's quintessential combo. And if the writing hits a difficult spot, I just drink some raki and catch a buzz. To make whatever I'm writing more universal, I'll mix up some whiskey and vodka and drink a little brew I've dubbed "Kogistans."

If I write something lyrical and romantic, I seclude myself in a hotel on a mountain top or on the shore of some lake or sea. It's not for the quiet. I choose these places so I can peek through the key holes of the hotel rooms. This way, I can both research social life up close and personal, and get a rise out of what I see. Because writers are people who need a rise now and then.

For funny stories, I prefer a hamam or near an animal market, anywhere where there's lots of noise. To work up the urge to write, I go out and get mixed up in Istanbul's seediest places. At one time, I'd wander around the bars and betting joints, and with the inspiration I got there, head to one of the early morning cafes, or if the season was summer, down under the bridge to one of the barges and scribble away in my notebook. And sometimes, without telling a soul, I'd live the life of a vagrant for weeks at a time.

If I said this or some similar nonsense, it would really peak a reader's interest. If, on the other hand, I said I could not write if I didn't have some hot little blond on my lap while I sat at my writing table, well then, they would understand this to be a lie and not believe me. But if someone else secretly wrote it about me, they'd believe it and find it fascinating. It's not just writers. There's a tendency to see all artists as half mad or completely nuts. And some artists, in the most affected manner, scratch their readers' itches by becoming wannabe madmen.

I know a poet, who has rented himself a space in an office building that calls to mind the mildly luxurious digs of a real estate broker. You can always find a half empty bottle of booze on his desk as he wants to give the impression to visitors that he's a nonstop drinker. And though he never touches alcohol, as soon as he sees the door crack open, he immediately snatches up a glass.

Take the most beautiful poem of a poet. If she claimed that she had written it while standing on top of Beyazit tower about to hurl herself to her death below, her readers, would take much more interest in this mad desire than in her work. I think there are no more well-known painters on the face of the earth than Van Gogh, Gaugin, and Toulouse Lautrec. And its not solely for their work, this fame. Their insanity and crippled lives have taken precedence.

There are forty or fifty famous names in the history of world philosophy, art, and literature, and many people, though they have read not one of their works, know that so and so is homosexual and are more eager to find out whether they are a top or a bottom than to know anything about what they create.

And there are also those writers who try to tickle their readers' curiosity with shocking behaviors. Now if they have true value and artistic power, then purposely engaging in this sort of baloney merely helps get their works known. But if they have no value, they become a public laughing stock and the topic of ridicule. Orhan Veli got rid of his beard for this very reason. (At that time, people in Turkey were not accustomed to young men shaving their beards.) In a way, if nothing else, you could say this was his idea of rebelling against society's rules. One night, Veli, while staying at the house of a famous painter in Pendik (1), thought until morning about how in the world to ensure that his poems would be widely read. He decided to shower them down over Istanbul from a plane. But how would he find the money to rent a plane?

Two or three days later, in every magazine and newspaper, reporters were making fun of a line from one his poems that read, "If I were a fish in a bottle of raki." Now thanks to these jokes, there was no need for the plane. The media wisecracks had had the effect of not one, but a whole squadron of planes raining his poems over Istanbul. If Veli had not been a worthy poet, he would have simply become an object of ridicule for this crap, a buffoon. But later, once his status as a master poet was established, it was the ones who mocked him who were regarded as buffoons.(2)

When I explained this to a few Romanian writers in Bucharest, one of them told the following story. There was a young writer whose name I can't remember right now. He put out lots of books, but no one took an interest. In fact, not one review had been written about him. One day, the newspapers claimed that the young poet had killed himself. All the critics rolled up their sleeves and set to work, heaping praise on him in the media. His books were published one after the other. Two or three months later, one of the authors of all this praise saw the writer famed for his suicide in a pub and threw a fit. "You low, vile..." Okay, why were the writers so silent before his death? This Romanian poet, like Veli, was also quite talented and did not become a laughing stock at all.

I don't think readers really want to know the actual environment in which I write. But you asked, so I'll tell you. I don't really have an "environment". What does that mean anyway? No Turkish writer has been in a position to look for the ideal "writing environment" in order to work. Wherever and however we find ourselves, that's where we write. Only in recent years have they begun taking our screenplay writers and film producers to write in quiet hotels. They close themselves up in these luxury resorts and for fifteen or twenty days do nothing but eat, sleep, and work. Now these writers know that they aren't going to be able to write any better scripts in these comfy surroundings. But since filmmaking is rather costly, don't these writers deserve at least five or ten days rest in this mortal world. Not one of the screenplays written in these places have been seen as having any artistic value. If they had been written in Dolmabahçe Palace, would that somehow have made them better films?

I generally write most of my stuff at home in a room packed floor to ceiling with books. And my wife constantly berates me about it. "What Turkish writer has ever had a 'special writing room' like you, and still you complain!" When I start writing, the doorbell will ring. I'll wait for someone to open it, but no one will, and to save myself from the headache of a bell, I'll get up and go do it myself. The doorman will come sometimes, or the grocer's assistant, or the kid from the vegetable market, or the water guy, or the milkman, or the maid, or a beggar, or a shoe salesman, or some guy going from door to door collecting money with a voucher from a charitable foundation. And between all this ringing of doorbells and the opening of doors, I'll try to gather my thoughts and return to where I left off. Then I'll have breakfast. And again, I'll have to leave the writing room.

If it's a school day, my two boys will start raising a ruckus fighting each other, and I'll try all different ways to calm them down and make peace between them. Then the paperboy will come, and I'll get all worked up over the stories filled with murder, scandal and poverty. Then I'll try to write again. Then an acquaintance or two will come over. And because they are just like those people who either always need help or to borrow money that they will never pay back, they begin to spill all their problems and come to consult me about things I've never even given the first thought to. And though I'm having trouble publishing my own stuff, there are readers of novels and plays and poems and stories who'll leave things for me to read and find publishers for. And between all of these visits, you'd better believe my creditors come calling.

Now because everyone at my house tends to come and go at their own whim, I usually prepare my own lunch and eat alone. After lunch, people I barely know or can't even remember arrive. And they always say (as if I could have been doing anything else) "I bet you were working!" And then add, "And here we are keeping you from your job!" before babbling away for at least an hour. Then again the bell. People coming and going. And then the evening comes, and dinner, and more noise and chaos, and more people coming and going. After midnight, everything calms down. Since there's no one else to do it, I make my own tea. And then I retreat to the room that, as my wife is continuously driving into my head, no other Turkish writer has. And then, goddamnit, I get sleepy. This is how it is. If I can find time in between all this, I write.

Question: "How do you write?"

Answer: So readers are curious about this as well. Well, I write just like that, you know, just like I came out of my mother--stark naked. Curious, isn't it?

Unlike some famous writers, I don't write by pacing the room furiously, thrusting my feet in warm water, and lying down. I do hand stands instead, and once I pass my legs over the nape of my neck, I start working. Blood is something that really gets my heart pumping. And since I can't drink human blood, I've gotten into the habit of going to the refrigerator, pulling out a pitcher of chilled rabbit blood, and pouring myself a glass before I write. Until I've had that rabbit blood, of course, I just can't get into the right frame of mind.

Now' If it were really like this, readers would love it, I'm sure, but I write like any other normal person writes. And it's never entered my head to write in any other way. There's a paper in front of me, a pen in hand, and I start.

For the past seventeen years, I've gotten a disease called "writer's cramp" in my right hand from writing so much. And that hand, which can do any other job with ease, rebels against me when I work. Because of this, I prefer to type everything these days rather than write by hand.

Maybe it will be of interest to readers to know that I sit cross-legged on the chair when I write. It's a habit left over from when I was a child. In our destitute house, I always sat this way. I think this might be one reason I'm so short. When I sit in a chair, I can't find a good spot to rest my leg against, so I sit with my right leg under me. Maybe that could be considered rather weird.

Question: "How do you get yourself ready to write?"

Answer: Now look, this is important. Before I start writing, I launch into a furious tantrum. I scream at everyone in the house and call them over to make demands. Get me this! Get me that! I kick and stamp my feet in rage. I don't just gnaw on my fingernails, but on my pens, and I throw fragile things around the room just to see them shatter. And when I get into this state, they say, "My God, inspiration has come! He's going to write! Quiet everyone! Quiet!" And not a peep will be heard anywhere in the house.

Come on. I mean, where do you come up with this stuff? WHERE? That artists have these breakdowns before or while giving some great work to the world. Please!

Do you have any idea what one of my biggest fantasies in life is? I want play the part of the needy spoiled brat a little, and I mean just a little bit. I want to at least act like I'm throwing a tantrum and whine a little so that everyone waits on me, even if it's all just for show. In that moment before creation, I'll fall into my role, and as a favor to me, I want everyone around me to put up with this for a measly five minutes. But right, like this will ever happen! It's always them that throw the tantrums. And whenever I finally start to sit down to write something I consider important, they start making demands of me a hundred times anything I could come up with.

Question: "Do you find your topics, or do they find you?"

Answer: I wonder what sort of answers my curious readers are expecting? That my topic rings the doorbells and says, "Hi! Here I am!" Would they like that? Or if I said that, like those stupid whirling dervishes in the dark ages, I went wandering the mountains and steppes searching my topics out?

It's true, either of these methods would do. If I took all the notes collected on various topics that I have right now and added not one new one, I could never finish writing about them even if I worked nonstop for the next one hundred years. A writer's worst tragedy are the topics he leaves behind after his death, half of which no one else but he will be able to write.

I don't write about topics that I search out nor about topics that "come to me" for the simple reason that in both cases, you need time and money. Here's what I do, I sit down at my table and write about whatever will earn me the most money to pay for whichever of my expenses is in the most dire need of being paid.

Question: "Do writer's prepare their own suitable writing environment or do they wait for one to be born?"

Answer: What does "suitable writing environment" mean? I've never seen any such place in all my life and don't even know what it would look like. A lot of our writers work in prisons, and I myself have written in a prison cell.(3) I wonder if this is what you mean by "suitable writing space"? If so, then no, indeed I do not prepare my own writing environment. And if I waited for one to be born....come on, forget about our generation, the generation after us would also have to wait a long long time.

Question: "In order to write, which part of the day (evenings or daytime) or hours do you usually choose?"

Answer: Nights, towards morning. I especially prefer nights when the moon is out because in the dead hours of dark, the monsters awake. According to people who have seen it happen, the shape of my face begins to change, my hands turn into claws. In other words, man by day, beast by night!

What Turkish writer has the write to choose his own writing time? Night, day, whenever, if I get an opportunity, I write.

Question: "If you qualify the emergence of a work of art as a "birth", then how do you go about this "birth?"

Answer: There is no one specific way. Some of them, I birth by Caesarian, and sometimes I get very frantic and pop them out the old birth canal one after the other. Look, I've been well "fixed" and can't birth a thing. Oh, I really can't stand this whole idea of birthing, this business of calling writing a story "giving birth". What can we do? I'm considered a prolific writer, but it's not because I'm actually prolific. I'm not pushing myself to produce. I write as soon as someone asks me too, because my financial conditions are frightful enough that they help me make these babies; help me to lay eggs, even.

ENDNOTES

1 Pendik: A bedroom community on the outskirts of the Asian side of Istanbul

2 In 1947, writer Sait Faik asked Veli about his raki fish line, all the talk in the papers. Veli's answer was this, "This poem is explaining the life of an old junk collector, a man in poverty. A man like this wants a great many things, food, water, and of course, raki. This line can be understood as a way to exaggerate that desire." But his friend wrote this in 1950 (and this could be apocryphal, "One day I asked Orhan if he had written that line believing it to be a poetic. He said, 'Of course not." The bizarre lines simply got people to read him. He went on to say that if he had known it would work so well, he would have stuck such bullshit in other poems, too.

3 Aziz Nesin has been and out of prison many times as a political dissident. In the 40's, he created a magazine with another comic writer, Sabahattin Ali, called Marko Pasha that published political satires. They were arrested after the third issue, and Parliament specifically mentioned Marko Pasha as proof that martial law was necessary

When fish drink raki...

A RARE SHOT OF ORHAN VELI WITH HIS BEARD

Orhan Veli is one of Turkey's most loved poets, and a damn fine one in my own opinion, too. His poems are brisk and simple. He is a genius at creating startlingly fresh images out of ordinary things. Take this poem for example:

I buy old junk

And make it into stars

Music is food for the soul

I'm crazy for music.

I write poems.

I write poems and buy old junk

I sell the old junk and buy music

If I were a fish, swimming in a bottle of whiskey

Eskiler aliyorum

Alip yildiz yapiyorum

Musiki ruhun gidasidir

Musikiye bayiliyorum

Siir yaziyorum

Siir yazip eskiler aliyorum

Eskiler verip Musikiler aliyorum.

Bir de raki sisesinde balik olsam

I love that bit about "I buy old junk." Four short words (2 in Turkish), a very simple line about garbage turned magic with "And make it into stars." But take a gander at that last line, one of the most famous in Turkey. "If I were a fish in a bottle of whiskey." Veli, before he became well-known, was obsessed with getting read. And he gave all sorts of interviews in which he explained, for example, that this line was an exaggeration of the narrator's poverty, that a poor man, wanting food and shelter would naturally crave whiskey (Turkish raki) as well, fantasizing in this desperate manner about swimming inside the bottle. A friend asked him after he was established and stopped writing such obscure lines, "Is that really what you meant by the fish thing? That stuff about the guy and poverty?" "Of course not," Veli answered. "But it made people read me, didn't it?" He had put in this line merely to attract attention. (And it did. Every magazine and newspaper had a field day making fun of the fish in a bottle and gave Veli more publicity than he had ever dreamed of.) "I would have put this nonsense in other poems, too, if I had known how much noise it would make," he said. He even shaved his beard for publicity--this, at a time in Turkish history when no young man in his right mind shaved.

TECHNICAL STUFF TECHNICAL STUFF TECHNICAL STUFF!!!!!!!!

A bit about the translation. (This might fall into my Dad's favorite category: absolutely unimportant but nice to know) Translation is a funny thing. You're always making decisions...include this even though it doesn't make sense in English? Add a word or two to make it read more smoothly? Change the sentence structure so it doesn't sound so awkward? Blah blah blah. One of the English translations I found said this for the first two lines of Veli's poem, "I find old clothes and cut them into stars." I think this is even better than the original in terms of a solid, yet magical image. In fact, I like it better than mine, but that's the thing. It's not very accurate. And I think I owe Veli some accuracy even if this is only my private blog that no one else sees but me. Eskiler means "old stuff", junk in other words, not just clothes. The narrator of the poem is an "eskici", one of the poor men who wheel around an old cart through the streets and collect junk to fix and sell...a bit like a garage sale on wheels. You might see their cart loaded with broken dolls, radios, paintings, old textbooks, rabbit cages, pipes, and/or laundry baskets. They call out into the streets "eskiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiici!" so that folks know they're coming. And if they guy has a nice voice, it can be a very musical sound and as eerie as the ezan when that long "i" echoes. Supposedly these guys have been at it for centuries. And this brings up a last point. The verb almak means, "take, get, buy." The eskici doesn't buy anything. He just collects crap free off the street. In the poem, he almak's the junk and then almak's the music. In one case taking and in the other buying. But I think a repetition of the word "buy" sounds better in English rather than making that distinction clear--even though it deemphasizes his poverty, which is part of the poem's theme (he's at least able to buy junk in the poem, though that's not the case in real life.)

I am trying (ozenmek or yeltenmek) to learn Turkish

A GLIMPSE OF THE BONEYARD................

I can be a big jackass sometimes, so stubborn about random principles that I drive everyone around me to scratching their eyes out in frustration.

Last night, I had a beer with some friends on a street in Kadıköy known as "The Boneyard." The Boneyard is a street chock full of cheap bars and pubs that cater to foreigners. (They also cater to Turks of course, but its a bit "spicy" here--a mafia style shooting happened last year, for example.) Most of the bars have been ruined. A friend of mine likens it to locusts. A group of us expats will discover one of these bars and occupy a table for the night. The next night, there are a million of us, screaming and belching and drunkenly shouting until we have devoured all the courtesy and patience the servers have, at which point the swarm moves on to another place. It's biblical.

Livane--a bar also famed for it's Turkish folk music--has long been harvested, but the occasional bug will light on a server or two. Like I and two friends did last night. As soon as the waiter at Livane saw the table of three hapless Americans, he scurried in alarm to the bar and had the bartender come ingratiatingly over, slightly bowed, his hands folded. "May I help you?" he says in English. This is where my inner donkey comes out. You see, I have little stomach for this. Okay, I admit it. Part of it is pride. I am not a tourist fresh off the cruise ship with my tour book in one hand, and sunscreen in the other. I have been learning Turkish for over two years--I have, in fact, been translating a few of Turkey's literary authors--and goddamn it, I don't need this guy to translate, "One beer" as if I were some toothy-grinned newbie.

Part of it is a kind of class disgust. As advantageous as the world's need for English is, on this personal scale it smells slightly of colonialism, especially service in English. Why does he come scuttling over with the lowered head to give the Raj their own private translation service? In America the waiter would mutter, "Live in my country, better damn well speak the language." And to hear a lot of my fellow expats talk--"it's a good restaurant, because their English is good." No, that only makes it a convenient restaurant. And I've even heard friends say, "She's a very nice person. You know her English is good." As if English is some kind of moral virtue rather than a skill.

My final reason is this: I hate being used. There are a legion of obsessive people who simply see me, and all foreigners, as tools--things to be used to improve their English. Another friend has named this particular treatment, "the language rape". A person runs up to you in the street, or in a restaurant, and starts harassing you when you clearly want to be left alone just so they can practice their present perfect.

"I feel sorry for you," a Turk told me once. "Everyone wants to learn English, everyone in the world. And not because they love your language. They just see it as something that can buy advantages. It makes it difficult for you to learn a language yourselves, and then, well, you miss out on so much."

Yes.

One of the things I love about learning a different language is the way in which it changes your thinking--utterly--sometimes the way your very thoughts are structured. When the languages are different enough (like Turkish and English), certain words from one simply do not exist in the other. You end up needing a whole sentence to explain them. For example, in Japanese you have the famous noun aware (pronounced "a-wa-ray). Aware is the feeling of quiet sadness when you realize that nothing lasts forever. When you leave college, for example, and are driving out of the university campus for the last time and remembering all the friends you made there, feeling half-happy at the memory and half-grieved about its loss, this is aware.

Or take Turkish. There are umpteen words for "try". One is yeltenmek. The Turkish dictionary states the definition as follows: "To dare to embark upon something that you can't or shouldn't do. To have the intention of starting a task (you can't finish)." It's like the lovechild of "dare" and "hopelessly try". A good example is this: Fanatiklar Kadıköy'de Jimbomun bayrağını kaldırmaya yeltendiler "They had the balls to attempt raising our rival team's flag in our territory!" One dictionarily legit word in Turkish, and I had to use a vulgar slang expression and four extra words to explain it in English. Another word is for try is özenmek. It's a hybrid of the following two definitions: "To work hard at something, to want to bring any job to a good result," and "to imitate someone, be carried away with the desire to copy and look the same as another." So it comes out having, in English, two meanings at once--to both try very hard but at the same time to be imitative and fake because you're trying too hard. So you get this sentence from Aziz Nesim, "Kimi sanatçılar da yapmaçık yollarla deliliğe özenerek okurlarını ilgisini tırnaklarlar;" which means, "And some writers, in a totally affected manner, arouse their reader's interest by ozenmeking insanity." In other words, they try too hard to pose as crazy people and half-believe themselves.

And, almost as cool, other languages use words that we almost never use in our own and thus make not just the words, but the ideas and emotions themselves take on a new importance. In Japanese, everyone says they are natsukashii at least five billion times a day. The best English translation is "nostalgiac"--a rather fancyish word that you simply don't toss around willy-nilly. An American, for example, me, when he sees a favorite cartoon from his childhood such as The Dungeons and Dragons Hour, will mostly likely say in a wistful voice, "Hey, I remember that show!" A Japanese person would say, "Natsukashii!" Or when I ate Japanese rice crackers for the first time in 8 years this past fall on a trip to Japan, I said "Natsukashii" at the first hint of this flavor long forgotten, but I can't imagine eating a cracker and saying "I feel nostalgic for these" in English--maybe simply "I've missed these!" When speaking Japanese, you start saying natsukashii so much, that the feeling itself becomes more noticeable and more valued. Suddenly, it's something you let register in your head instead of glossing over with words like "miss" or "remember". In Turkish there is the famous miş past tense when you are reporting things you have heard but haven't witnessed yourself. If your mom tells you that your sister bought a Harley, you'd say "Harley almış" instead of the regular past tense aldı. You could qualify this in English by saying, "Apparently my sister bought a Harley" or "It seems my sister bought a Harley" but most of the time we'd just say, "My sister bought a Harley." But with the miş tense in Turkish, I find myself much more aware, even in English, of when I've just heard something and when I have witnessed the event myself. My brain works at distinguishing them much more carefully. In other words, at almost 40, my thoughts are restructuring themselves in a way English doesn't need them to do. And that's cool. Every time my brain performs some new linguistic acrobatics, I get a little high. It's like that feeling little kids get when they learn something completely new "Eggs come out of a chickens butt?"

And finally of course, other languages give us words for ideas that are always on the tip of our tongues, but which have no equivalent in English. Take the Turkish kolay gelsin--literally, "May your work come easy." You can say this to anyone who is working at any time, and it means "Dude, your working like a dog, and I'm not going to help you, but I'd like to at least recognize the fact." It's a way to say something in appreciation of their labor. You enter a store with kolay gelsin, pass someone cleaning the stairs with kolay gelsin, ask the guy in the copy room for two hundred copies with kolay gelsin. I remember in Boston watching my boss scream in frustration over a new operating system on our school's computers. She had been wrestling with it for hours. I wanted to say something, I don't know, anything to let her know I had watched all this struggle and sympathized and so I said "Wow, that looks annoying." But I couldn't help feeling that there should have been a word for what I wanted to say, something more precise. Well there is, in Turkish. Kolay gelsin, Emily!

So no thank you Mr. English speaking Boneyard bartender, it's "bir tane ellilik bira lütfen" and you can shove your "one beer please" up your kıç.

Work Like a Dog

WORK LIKE A DOG (See endnote 1)

Every morning, I walk down the same highway to the service bus that will take me to the zoo where I work. (Zoo, school, whatever. They both have a double o, like two open mouths forever crying out in horror). In the afternoons, the road is so chock full of cars that they run up on the sidewalk in a desperate race to get around each other--everyone honking horns, and screaming, and revving their engines hysterically. (See endnote 2)

At 6:30 in the morning, there is hardly a car in sight. One will race by once every two minutes or so, but on the whole it is blessedly quiet. Every morning, on the median, a scruffy gray dog lies on the grass with his paws crossed delicately in front of him. He is by no means cute. He's missing several teeth, has ratty ears and a tail broken so many times it makes a perfect zig zag. I think he also has the mange. He waits just down from the traffic light. He may dig himself a little hole or gnaw on the blossoms, but for the most part he simply relaxes, regarding the highway with the look of a rich widow watching her servants doing something inexplicable out on the lawn. "How strange the amusements of peasants are!" A car will come up the hill and stop at the light. The dog might yawn or shift his paws.

Then the light turns green.

The transformation is sudden and profound. The little dog leaps to his feet, a snarling, hysterical ball of rage that tears off after the car as if he were a starving wolf and the car a plump, crippled buffalo. Halfway down the bridge, the car will be forced to the curb and the driver will crack the window and shout "shut up! shut up!" while of course honking his or her horn. But the dog is satisfied with having treed his prey, and trots back to his spot on the median--his long dog nails tap tap tapping over the pavement. He resumes his spot on the median and awaits the next hapless car or truck at which point the whole process starts all over again.

He comes at sunrise and stays until the number of cars become unmanageable, and is so dilligent and single minded that I find myself wishing I could trade him for one or all of my students. I could put twenty of my ninth graders in the middle of the road where they might chase cars and scratch fleas. Being a sports school full of athletes, I should think they'd be quite successful at it. Of course, they would probably be too lazy to do any of these things, and that's fine. They could simply relax and chew some flowers and lick their crotches clean, occasionally trotting across the road to poop on the sidewalk. And the dog! He could sit in my class, paws crossed, and yawn or regard me arrogantly like he does the cars, and probably end up learning a lot more than any of my students could. I could teach him to sit, stand on his hind legs, speak, and even shake hands (Most of the tenth graders have mastered shaking hands). I am not suggesting that a half-rabid street dog is smarter than the human beings I teach. Its more like I am saying it directly. But in any case, that little dog's antics are one thing that brightens my workdays before I descend into the darkness of a private Turkish high school.

Endnotes

1 Apparently the Turks say "work like a donkey" and don't get why we think dogs work so hard. I think the Japanese say "work like a horse". Nobody is saying "Work like a Turkish high school student

2 By the way, the solution to every Istanbulite's problem, no matter what it is, is a good horn honk. Someone stop in front of you and turn their flashers on? Don't go around them, honk your horn! Did you have a bad day at work? Honk your horn! Are you concerned about global warming? Honk your horn. Get cancer? Honk. Find out your five year old daughter started smoking, honk honk honk honk honk. Honk till your deaf. Honk till your hand breaks off from the strain--then honk in a rage about that. If you think I'm crazy, honk. If you know what I'm talking about, honk again

Don't breathe...it may kill you.

THE DEADLIEST OF KILLERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What is the deadliest thing in Turkey? Devastating earthquakes in the Northwest? Bombs in the Southeast? Landslides in the mountains? Minibus and taxi driver's freshly escaped from Istanbul's Mental Facility for the Deaf and Blind? No! The answer is something far more sinister, and even more sinister than that for its pervasiveness. It's on every street corner, in every restaurant, running freely from every tap. It is in the very air you breathe. It is the air you breathe! That's right, air and water are Turkey's greatest killers. And I am not talking about any climate related disasters, my child. No, no, no. Those are far too fey, too poofy. No, I'm talking about the everyday air and water we breathe, drink, and bathe with. The so-called "essentials" of life.

For millennia man has longed to destroy air in a tooth and nail struggle that has claimed billions of lives, and yet air (and its satanic sister "water") like the indomitable cock roach, still prevail. All this week, at my school in the Anatolian outskirts of Istanbul, one of my fellow teachers has been floored by severe chest pains. She can't sleep at night from the excruciating tightness in her throat. At times, her left arm goes numb. She's only twenty-eight, so the likelihood of a heart attack is slim, yet something is clearly amiss. I ventured a guess that it had something to do with the amount of coffee and tea she drinks. (By noon today, with five hours still to go, she's already pounded five cups of coffee, and one of tea). Or possibly stress. (She handles seventeen different classes of raving, wild, chimp-like creatures a week, for a grand total of thirty classroom hours--anyone who has every taught before knows that this is an insane amount of hours. She cries at the teacher's table on a daily basis from sheer frustration with some of these students.) Or, I said, it could be a combination of caffeine and stress.

I am so naive.

No, it turns out, it's simply the fact that some teachers leave the window open in the teacher's room. "You see," she says as her jittering hand brings her mug of Nescafe up to her lips, "There's a draft that runs from the window to the door and it brushes right over me." A breeze passing over three or four layers of cloth has the power to devastate the heart muscles and sever the nerves to the left arm. God only knows what other damage it causes unnoticed. Ebola? Leprosy? Look no further than sweet O2, friends.

A more famous and therefore more important person was victim to a different element. When in his late seventies, Aziz Nesin, Turkey's beloved (once he was dead at least) comic writer, was plagued by weeks and weeks of colds. Is this because his immune system had been ravaged by age and heart disease? Ha, only a simpleton "doctor" would suggest such bollocks. A wise friend had the answer. "Aziz," he said. "You wash your clothes too much." And so Mr. Nesin simply stopped doing so. Then one New Year's Night, while preparing gifts for the orphans in the orphanage he managed, he was floored by a deadly heart attack. He was sure that it was the big one, and lay clutching his heart preparing to die (undoubtedly there was an open window somewhere, ah the folly of man!) His only regret was that whoever found his body would discover him sitting in underwear that had not been washed for weeks. (But hey, he was blessedly free of colds.) Water, even the memory of water on cloth is nearly as fatal as a breeze, and thought by some to be deadlier than radiation poisoning. It's far healthier to roll around in hydrogen bomb fallout than to allow yourself or anything you touch to get wet. Much damage that has been attributed to radiation sickness may actually be due to open windows in hospitals.

One day our scientists will be able to destroy our age-old enemies, air and water. But until that golden morn, we must continue to spin in this macabre dance with death and pray for salvation.