A friend asked me to correct a sentence for her today. The original sentence was something like “Unrelated, I am the bestest evar.” She asked whether it should be “unrelatedly.” I told her that it should be, but that I couldn’t really explain why.
Can anyone provide a good explanation?
My Treo 650 arrived promptly in the mail today or yesterday, so I’ve been trying to figure out how to get it working with Linux. It’s more of a hassle than it should be, which is a common refrain. I don’t really blame Linux, though: as the third-most-popular OS (I think), it gets almost no support from any company. If Palm made Treo-syncing software for Linux, I’m sure there’d be no problem with it. As it is, amateurs have to hack their way to a solution, which is something that Windows developers and users don’t need to do. Alas.
The big thing I’ve learned so far, I think, is that when you HotSync your Treo (details presently), you get a new device node called /dev/pilot; once the sync is done, the node goes away. Now apps will sit and monitor that file’s presence; if it shows up, they do various things. Maybe they only HotSync? Not clear to me.
I guess when that node is created, only root can do anything with it. If you want it to be world-readable, you need to make a udev rule in /etc/udev/rules.d that looks like so:
BUS=="usb", SYSFS{product}=="Palm Handheld*", KERNEL=="ttyUSB[13579]", SYMLINK+="pilot"
I don’t know either; I just know what the Internet tells me.
The next thing to do is to load the visor module, by calling
sudo modprobe visor
then adding the visor module to the list of modules that loads when Linux boots. To do so, edit /etc/modules and add a line at the end containing only the word visor. Or just do
sudo sh -c "echo visor >> /etc/modules"
I believe visor is responsible for the /dev/pilot device node.
Now you need an app that does what the Windows HotSync app does. The canonical solutions seem to be jpilot and kpilot. The latter is a KDE app.
I’ve had troubles with kpilot so far. It doesn’t sync my address books (at least) properly. Add a contact on the desktop and try to sync it to the Treo: no love. Various bits of googling suggest that compiling kpilot from source would help here, but I’ve not been able to make that work. Besides, I shouldn’t have to do that; that is lame.
Also, at various times the HotSync button on the USB connector will not trigger as much love from Linux as it should. Push that button, and you get badness like this in /var/log/syslog:
May 27 21:30:52 slaniel-laptop kernel: [ 2329.855096] usb 2-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 37
May 27 21:30:52 slaniel-laptop kernel: [ 2329.975071] usb 2-2: device descriptor read/64, error -71
May 27 21:30:52 slaniel-laptop kernel: [ 2330.199041] usb 2-2: device descriptor read/64, error -71
May 27 21:30:52 slaniel-laptop kernel: [ 2330.415011] usb 2-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 38
May 27 21:30:52 slaniel-laptop kernel: [ 2330.534984] usb 2-2: device descriptor read/64, error -71
May 27 21:30:53 slaniel-laptop kernel: [ 2330.758462] usb 2-2: device descriptor read/64, error -71
May 27 21:30:53 slaniel-laptop kernel: [ 2330.974437] usb 2-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 39
May 27 21:30:53 slaniel-laptop kernel: [ 2331.382124] usb 2-2: device not accepting address 39, error -71
The hell if I know what that’s about.
Once I get it syncing properly from address books and all other data sources, I’m going to
Those are the biggies for now. I’ll report progress whenever I experience some.
Charlatans love to make us think that there’s doubt where there is none. The reason is straightforward: they have nothing else with which to win us over. The truth, for one, is not on their side. This is where creationists come from: “Evolution by natural selection is just a theory; there is doubt among scientists about whether this is actually how organisms evolve.” It’s where global-warming denialists come from.
If we believe David Michaels, these folks all learned from the tobacco industry 50 years ago. The industries that rely on doubt have been blossoming ever since: beryllium (did you know that there was a beryllium industry? I did not), asbestos, and popcorn, among others.
Yes, popcorn. Were you aware that there is a condition called “popcorn lung” (officially bronchiolitis obliterans)? I was not. It’s called that because one of the main ways to contract it is by working in a factory that manufactures one of the ingredients — namely diacetyl — for the butter flavoring in popcorn. Every time you open a steaming bag of butter-flavored microwave popcorn, you are inhaling a bit of this chemical. The more of it you eat, the more likely you are to contract a devastating lung ailment. (And this isn’t the sort of disease that you’d only get by eating an implausibly large quantity of popcorn. Real popcorn consumers have actually acquired it.)
The agency responsible for protecting workers from this sort of hazard is OSHA. The one responsible for protecting food consumers is the FDA. This division of labor comes in for some well-deserved scorn in Doubt Is Their Product; it has left the government fairly impotent to respond to threats against the public health. This book could be read alongside Marion Nestle’s Food Politics and What To Eat as a single thread about the assault on helpful government regulation. It might fit into an even larger story about public goods and compact interest groups: the people harmed by diacetyl are comparatively rare, spread out, and disconnected, whereas the companies that would suffer from diacetyl regulation know exactly how much they’ll lose.
In their nonstop fight against that sort of regulation, companies have pulled out all the stops to inject systematic doubt into the public discussion. The most pernicious of these, it seems to me, is the creation of sham peer-reviewed journals. Peer review is a negative process: if you can’t pass peer review, your ideas are unlikely to have merit (though there are cases, says Michaels, where brilliant scientists — future Nobelists — have been denied peer approval). Passing peer review doesn’t mean that your ideas are any good. Something similar applies to the references you give a potential employer: if you can’t find anyone in the world to say something nice about you, that is a warning sign. If three people will say good things about you, that doesn’t mean that you’re going to be a good employee. The public doesn’t understand this distinction, and doesn’t know which journals have any respect within the field. So regulated industries have dutifully gone and created journals that will say whatever they’re paid to say — just as the creationists have done. The news reports then compile, say, a “list of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming” as though scientific consensus were decided by majority vote among equals.
If there’s the slightest bit of doubt about, say, the cause of a disease, industry pounces and insists that more research is necessary. More research will always be necessary: science never attains the truth, only better and better approximations to the truth. The situation is complicated in public health by scientists’ inability to conduct controlled experiments: it is immoral to subject patients to a potentially crippling disease. So scientists are forced to make educated guesses: this population — of popcorn-factory workers, say — has probably been subjected to thus-and-such a daily dosage of diacetyl for thus-and-so many years, whereas this other group of workers in the same factory has had less exposure. Meanwhile, people living near the factory but not working in it almost never experience popcorn lung. Hence we make the educated guess that the additional cases of bronchiolitis obliterans are due to diacetyl exposure within the factory.
Having reached a tentative conclusion about what’s making people sick, we have some options. We can mandate that factories use a different chemical. Does industry have other, safer alternatives? Presumably it does, but those alternatives are more expensive; otherwise it would already be using them. If industry were forced to use safer alternatives, would economies of scale drive the price down to the point that consumers wouldn’t notice?
That approach seems ethically sterile to me. It seems better to start with the assumption that no one should get sick at work. Being ethical about this means, in many cases, taking Paul Farmer’s “preferential option for the poor” seriously. You’d probably find that most people getting sick at work are not wealthy; hedge-fund managers and computer scientists aren’t coming into daily contact with beryllium; even if they are, wealthier folks can insist on workplace-safety measures in a way that the poor cannot. I’d wager that workplace safety is another front in the fight for distributive justice.
Michaels is a former Department of Energy official whose work centered on the safety of nuclear plants. As such, he has a somewhat reflexive faith in the power of regulation. To me it rang hollow: one regulation will limit diacetyl, another will limit beryllium, another will prevent factory workers from acquiring repetitive-strain disorders — but will any real problems be solved? Companies’ desire and ability to game the system is virtually limitless. When they lose the regulatory war, they invent a public-relations campaign to convince Americans that tort reform is necessary. They demonize “trial lawyers” (lawyers who write briefs and stay out of the courtroom are off the hook, as are lawyers who resolve cases before they reach the court). They challenge the very epistemology of the scientific revolution. If worse comes to worst, they move production of noxious chemicals to countries with lower environmental and health standards.
What I’m getting at is that we have a much more systemic problem on our hands. I applaud regulation where it helps, but I do wonder if it’s tinkering at the edges of a massive problem that lies at the heart of our society. We need regulation; we also need education to explain to Americans what science is. We need Americans to believe that we owe much to the least fortunate among us. Until that message gets through, we’ll have to content ourselves with putting out little brushfires while the forest burns.
Pre-George Bush Paul Krugman is a different beast from post-George Bush Paul Krugman, though you can see a different side of The Conscience of a Liberal in The Return of Depression Economics. Conscience of a Liberal is, among many other things, admirable for the concision and sweep of its narrative: in not very many pages, it runs through a century of U.S. history, and to my eye didn’t leave out very much. Krugman delivers the story almost breezily; we could be forgiven if we didn’t notice that we’re learning a lot.
So it is with The Return of Depression Economics, which could be the leitmotif for a course in macroeconomics. Why did Japan, whose economy made the U.S. tremble throughout the early Nineties, falter into a recession for the better part of a decade? How did Mexico, Indonesia, Thailand and Brazil all require IMF bailouts? Why did central banking, which seemed to have mastered the control of business cycles, suddenly lose its bearings?
The remarkable thing about this book is that I feel like I’d be doing it an injustice if I summarized it with fewer words than the book itself contains. There are a lot of stories wrapped up in here. There’s a story about properly devaluing your nation’s currency, for instance: if you’re going to do it, do it only once; this tells the market that you’re going to maintain as stable a currency as you can. At the same time, don’t devalue just a little bit: the market will think that you have future devaluations on hand and that you’re not serious about fixing your country’s fiscal problems.
There’s a story about hedge funds — a story that’s especially valuable now, a decade after Krugman wrote this book. The hedge funds were all so interconnected that a collapse in the one entailed a collapse in the others. And they’re so heavily leveraged that a tiny drop in the market causes an enormous drop in the fund. Combine this with how interconnected they are, and you have a recipe for disaster.
There’s another story about the difficulty of measuring a nation’s productivity. Krugman spent a good bit of Pop Internationalism addressing this in the context of “Asian tigers” and the Soviet Union. To most outsiders, the USSR looked like an economic miracle, achieving remarkable growth in GDP. To those who looked carefully at the numbers, though, the story was much different: the Soviets achieved those rates of growth by wasteful use of capital. Carefully measuring the productivity of labor and capital — a metric economists call Total Factor Productivity — showed that the Soviets were making inefficient use of their resources, and that they’d have to run out of steam eventually. And so they did.
The overarching story, if I’m reading Krugman right, is that we need more Keynes now, not less. If people expect a recession in the future, they consume less now. This leads to a contraction in the economy, which leads to layoffs, which leaves people even less economically secure, which makes them hoard more. The Keynesian response is demand-side stimulus: dump money into public works to get people spending again, print more money to pay for it, and put up with the temporary inflation that results.
I know almost no macroeconomics, but I’m dying to learn. If Krugman’s book has any major faults, it’s the absence of any footnotes that could help someone like me. I ended this book wishing to dive more deeply into any of the various stories; Krugman gave me nowhere to go. (For the record, it looks like Lectures on Macroeconomics, by Krugman’s erstwhile MIT colleagues Blanchard and Fischer, is one classic direction to go from here.)
I think you have two choices when reading this book: either be utterly horrified, or take it as a succinct bit of honesty about sex. Which of these you choose will depend, in all likelihood, on whether you’re a woman or a man. Many women will see it as rank misogyny. I don’t begrudge them that belief. I happen to think, on the contrary, that it is an absolute masterpiece. It does for the sexual revolution what Roth’s American trilogy — American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain — did for the rest of mid-to-late-twentieth-century American history: condense it down and focus its agonies on one man.
Here the representative for 20th-century America is David Kapesh. Others will have met him in Roth’s earlier novels, The Professor of Desire and The Breast ; I’ve not read those, so I can’t comment. In The Dying Animal, we meet Kapesh in his early seventies, a famous cultural critic who appears on public television every week, book in hand, white mane flowing and (one presumes) turtleneck up to his chin. He is also an enthusiastic hedonist. It seems as though every semester he picks one new student to seduce after classes are over — for sex, nothing more. This is just a meeting of flesh and flesh: everyone is aware of the game that everyone else is playing.
This contract alone leads into the book’s heart, which is a lecture on and a demonstration of what sex used to mean for someone of Kapesh’s generation, what it means now, what changed, and how much we’ve forgotten. In Kapesh’s youth, “heavy petting” was a stage one got to after endless courtship; anything more would have horrified his parents, had they known. Without going into detail (this is a family publication, after all), we take substantially more contact for granted. As Kapesh notes, today’s youth (I count myself in there, though maybe my youth ended on May 9) believe that absolute sexual freedom arrived along with the Declaration of Independence; we think it’s a fundamental human right, as natural as the water we drink. Kapesh reminds us that in order to move from the era of heavy petting to this sexual anarchy, sexual anarchists had to set fire to a lot of taboos: like anything else that we take for granted, today’s casual lifestyle was yesterday’s struggle.
During that struggle, Kapesh was an awestruck participant. He wasn’t young enough to take the struggle in stride and accept it as part of his being; he was a mature man, already a married college professor, who saw the revolution for what it was and decided to dive right in. He lost a wife and child during the battle, but he knew what he was getting into and knew what he’d be giving up.
When he gave it up, a lot of what passed for sexual certainty in the society was revealed to be hollow convention. Get married so that he could have unsatisfying but officially sanctioned sex with his wife, meanwhile yearning for the acres of supple flesh that attended his classes every semester; pretend that an omnivorous male could be locked away inside a socially respectable façade.
His son never forgives him. To prove that he’s so much more decent and moral than his father, he gets his girlfriend pregnant and promptly marries her. Tell her to get an abortion, Kapesh tells him. If she refuses, that’s not your problem — the sexual revolution made her a freestanding sexual being and it did the same to you. The son marries her anyway. When he goes on to have an affair a few children later, he has to endow that affair with social respectability: the girl is sweet and loving and intelligent and has wonderful parents. Kapesh can only stare with scorn: you’re trying to camouflage a transaction involving meat. Why pretend that you are anything other than you are? Why lacquer sex with the social respectability that my generation so feverishly cast off?
The son is devastated, but keeps returning to his father, whom he loathes. He needs to parade his respectability before his enemy, but at some level he probably also respects the choice that his father made. In this conflict between father and son, we have three generations of American sexual understanding: the father as a youth (sexual expectation: years of courtship followed by wedding followed by sex), father as grown man (the sexual revolution presents a world of limitless, dangerous possibility), and son as a grown man (trying to reassemble some sexual order after a generation of anarchy).
Into Kapesh’s life comes Consuela, a Cuban student born into the anarchy but standing outside of it. She is beautiful and (it’s important to the story) buxom, but she has kept aloof from the many men who desired her. She can take or leave Kapesh, and this fact drives him crazy. For once he needs control — needs to regain the order that he enthusiastically disposed of; to know that he can’t control her, and that some other man can take her away, sends him into spasms of jealousy. In one rather graphic scene, he throws away all his self-control and lets the anarchy destroy him. Consuela is the agent of his destruction, but stands hautily by while it happens.
All this in not much more than 100 large-print pages. It is the most brutally honest book about sex you will probably ever read. It is an unqualified masterpiece.
The next time most of you see me, I will have braces on my lower teeth and Invisalign on my upper. Sweet: I am 30 years old, with braces, acne, and grey hair. I am smirking at whoever made this happen.
It gets better: in order to fix the problems on the bottom teeth, one of them will have to be removed. The other teeth will move in to fill in the space eventually, but for at least a few months I will have a prominent gap down there. And braces. Don’t forget the braces.
This all happens on May 30. On June 1 I go to a friend’s wedding. Sweet.
I have to remind myself that my teeth will look straight again within 15 months or so. This is positive. What’s also positive is that when 2008 ends, my flexible spending will stop deducting money from each paycheck. So: nicer teeth and more money within a year and a half. I can deal.
My cell phone — an LG, the cheapest I could find when I bought it from the Verizon store [1] — is on its last legs. Actually, it’s been on its last legs for a while. I think it’s on its last toe by now. So now I’m searching for a new cell phone. My ideal cell phone is like so:
That will do for now. This is a pipe dream, though: as far as I can tell, no phone approaches this.
Of course the iPhone appears to be the best mobile device out there. People seem to love their BlackBerries. I’ve heard good things about Treos.
The Nokia 810 is intriguing to me. The trouble is that it does WiFi but not cell. To use it as a cell, you have to have another cell running Bluetooth nearby. If my experience with friends who have Bluetooth headphones is any indication, the sound quality will be wretched.
My only hope is that the Googlephone will save us. Essentially what I want is a small Linux box that’s specialized for voice. If it runs Skype at cell quality, I’m all for it.
But in the meantime, I really do need a phone. So I went on eBay and bought a Treo 650 for $64 including shipping. It’s one or two generations back, but it should do as a stopgap.
Verizon charges $45 per month for unlimited data. That would be on top of the $10 per month I pay for unlimited texts, and $60 for 900 anytime minutes. I may drop texts altogether if I get unlimited data; I’m not sure.
I’ve started looking around at other service providers as well. It may be time to switch to T-Mobile and get a BlackBerry. Or maybe the Treo will work as a nice stopgap and hold me over until Verizon opens up their network or the Googlephone comes out.
Isn’t it odd that cell providers suck so very badly?
[1] — After endless pestering from the Verizon salesman, who obviously works on commission. No, I don’t need anything more expensive. After it became clear that I was going to spend the very smallest amount that I could, his interest in me visibly died. For this reason alone, I would like to end this silliness within American cell-phone providers, whereby one is corraled into a store run by the phone provider to do routine things like buy a new phone, carry phone numbers from an old phone to a new, etc. When cell service becomes just a special kind of Internet service, and cell phones just a very small sort of computer, we’ll have arrived.
I don’t know what I did to deserve it, but I am now in possession of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, courtesy of my amazing friends for my 30th birthday.
On Saturday night we all went out to ZuZu in Central Square for drinks and (eventually, though by that point most everyone was gone) dancing. Midway through, my man Seth announced that everyone had pitched in for a gift for me. What they presented was a representation of the OED (pictured at right; click for larger), brilliantly assembled by Chris Rugen. Inside a box were 17 birthday cards, each of which looked like the cover of a single volume of the OED (“Birthday Edition”). Each of my friends chose two words over which their “volume” would range. Liz Miller chose “Coffee – Lapidary” (“lapidary” being Liz’s and my word and coffee our beverage), Seth chose “Strigil – Unguent” (two words that always occur in conversation with him), etc. I was told that back at my apartment were waiting all 20 volumes. And so they were.
I am still positively dumbfounded by this gift. I am more lucky than I could ever hope to deserve. Thus far for my 30th birthday I’ve received a monumental two-week trip to Turkey and a 20-volume dictionary that I’ve dreamt of owning for at least 15 years, not to mention a bottle of wine from my coworker Eric and his wife Meghan, a book of meals for small gatherings from the ever-lovely Sharon Wretzel and her fiancé Dan Mason, a copy of The Victorians from my coworker Dan, a card from my coworker Simon … what am I missing? I must be missing something. I’m just taken aback by all the generosity, so please forgive me if I’ve neglected to mention you.
Of course I can’t go without thanking all my wonderful friends, a good many of whom showed up to drink and dance with us on Saturday. You guys are the best. I hope I will eventually deserve you.
Part of being a liberal, I think, is the fight for memory. The nation we have now is the way it is in every particular — 40-hour workweeks, a couple days off at the end of the week, Medicare, unemployment insurance, rather clean water, not terribly many people smoking — because a great many people fought against a great many bastards who wanted to make money at our expense. Business is too important to be left to the businessmen; this is what our ancestors realized and fought for. When you put a seatbelt on in the car, it’s because someone fought the auto industry to put it there. And when you put unleaded gasoline in your car … here we turn the mic over to David Michaels’s book Doubt Is Their Product :
In the early 1920s DuPont and General Motors, which at the time DuPont partly owned, had agreed to manufacture and distribute leaded gasoline, a product designed to reduce automobile engine knock. DuPont chose the Chambers Works for its production facility. The neurological effects of exposure to the organic lead were so severe and widespread — hallucinations were a common symptom — that workers labeled the plant the “House of Butterflies.” The New York Times reported that more than three hundred workers had been poisoned, eight of them fatally, during the first two years of production.
Industry fights and fights and fights to do things in the cheapest way possible, fights to cover up any evidence that might force them to use a more-expensive but safer process, and mounts PR campaigns to sow doubt about the evidence that does manage to get out. We, as liberals, are on the side that won’t let companies do what comes naturally to them when it conflicts with the greater good. I can’t think of a simpler way to explain why I’m a liberal.
…is just not especially impressive, I’m afraid. We ate at any number of excellent restaurants in Istanbul, İzmir and Selçuk, and the best of them couldn’t match up to, say, Zaytinya (Turkish for “olive,” I learned). The fish at Deniz was tasty and fresh, certainly, and the environment — on the Bay of İzmir, feeding into the Aegean — couldn’t be more pleasant. When the sun went down, the waiters came around with blankets for the ladies, which was a nice touch. But this is not food that you should travel to another continent to eat. Whereas Real Greek in London, say, may well be. (I would kill, and kill again, for their taramosalata.)
In Istanbul, Asitane was without doubt the best meal we had. It only seemed like slight updates on the classic meyhane meal, though: the omnipresent Yeni rakı, mezze that included sea beans, yogurt with dill, butter beans, and a few others, updated somewhat but never enough to blow your mind. I suspect that I’ll eat better Turkish at Sultan’s Kitchen in Boston.
Turkish cheese is also rather unfortunate. It’s more or less all in the feta realm. There wasn’t really even a vein of blue to be found anywhere. As for Turkish wine, a few Turks warned us off of it, so we didn’t even bother.
The coffee, though, is everywhere identical and everywhere top-notch. Turkish coffee is a delight. For some reason when I asked for coffee, all the waiters asked me if I wanted Turkish coffee or Nescafé. I can’t imagine why you’d pick the latter over the former.
This book is unfortunately a specimen of what Joan Didion called (when describing Bob Woodward) “political pornography.” Schlesinger is in love with the New Deal — which, for all I know, he has every right to be — and wants us to be in love with it too. So he deploys the standard political-pornographic arsenal. Hard-charging politicians don’t just politely smoke cigars; they “chomp” them. People don’t write each other letters; they “dash them off.” There are lots of people sleeping on couches, the better to wake at the crack of dawn, slam down limitless quantities of black coffee, hastily knot ties and return to the service of the people.
For all I know this is exactly how the Roosevelt campaign worked. Maybe it was filled with brilliant political operators who only had the nation’s best interests in mind on their way to crafting the New Deal. Schlesinger hasn’t convinced me that he’s the man to tell me this story dispassionately, however. He has interviewed all the participants in the Roosevelt campaign, and like Bob Woodward he seems to take all their statements at face value. Either the 1950′s were a simpler time, when people really did act virtuously and never misrepresented themselves to interviewers, or Schlesinger was misled. I’m inclined to guess the latter.
As literature, this is a splendid book. All those pots of black coffee and shining beacons of virtue really do add up to a great story; this was a brisk book to tear through on a 10-hour plane ride. I don’t feel like I learned much, though. If you’re an American liberal steeped in the mythos of the New Deal — that time when progressives accomplished much for the less fortunate — then this book won’t add especially much to your store of knowledge. You’ll observe Roosevelt heroically overcoming polio to win the presidency. You’ll watch the nation bow before the altar of commerce, the stock market soar to new heights, a succession of presidents do nothing about it, and the inevitable crash. Herbert Hoover will withdraw further and further from reality before your eyes, and the eventual hollow shell of a man leave the presidency in disgrace.
You know all this already; you can’t not know it as an American in the early 21st century. From Schlesinger’s introduction, it sounds like maybe the world wasn’t aware of Roosevelt’s greatness when he wrote the book in the mid-1950′s; the forces of reaction (including Senator Joseph McCarthy) were still doing their best to tear down what Roosevelt had put up. Schlesinger’s book may be a victim of its own success: what looks obvious now was anything but obvious then.
The second volume in this three-volume series is The Coming of the New Deal, which came highly recommended in Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal. The third volume, The Politics of Upheaval, may or may not touch on McCarthyism and allied reaction. I’m hopeful that the first volume is just prologue to the real meat of the story in the final two. I expect as much from a man with Schlesinger’s sterling reputation.
I finished this on a flight from Izmir to Istanbul. It’s a good thing I did: it provides an excellent preface to visiting that amazing city.
Pamuk has three guiding ideas in this book. First is that all Istanbullus share a sort of melancholy which Turks call huzun. The idea is that they all lament the decline of their city since it was the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and that they lament their servitude to the Western world. Secondly, Pamuk wants to harness this huzun and create an artwork that is distinctively Turkish — not Western, not Muslim, but a harmonious blend of the two. Thirdly, Pamuk believes that the city inhabits the man just as much as the man inhabits the city: Pamuk feels Istanbul’s moods and it feels his. Huzun is thus a strictly collective emotion. One cannot feel this sort of melancholy on one’s own; one can only experience it in a collective way along with one’s fellow-Istanbullus. (Indeed, it’s not clear to me that residents of any other city — Vienna, maybe? Pittsburgh? — can feel huzun; it may be a nostalgic melancholy that only Istanbullus are logically entitled to feel.)
I didn’t feel the huzun in Istanbul, but then I was only there for a few days; Pamuk doesn’t believe that anyone can understand his city without living there for ten years or more. It may also be impossible for a new generation of lifelong Istanbullus to feel the huzun : those born into today’s Istanbul may not realize that there’s anything other than the Western model to follow.
This is all his perspective as an insider to the culture. As an outsider to it, my perspective says something altogether different. When I visited Istanbul, there was at least one mosque, minaret, and muezzin per quarter square mile. One block off the main drag in Beyoğlu (Istiklal Caddesi), our cab had to stop to let a flock of sheep and their shepherd pass. One block off on the other side was a warren of little streets filled with conservative Muslims. I felt distinctly foreign there, both in nationality and in culture. If this is “the West,” Istanbul-style, then Pamuk has nothing to worry about.
At times — certainly over the last fifth of the book — Pamuk’s melodrama about huzun gets to be a bit much. He haunts the miserable streets of a lost empire, collar upturned against the snow, trying to shake off his own desperation at a lost love and make an art form that doesn’t just ape the West. On and on he goes, trying to beat us over the head with the idea that the city inhabits the man and the man the city: we cut back and forth between his furious wanderings in the streets and his fight with his mother over what he’ll do with his life. Pamuk thinks he is terribly clever. He wants us very much to know how clever it is; earlier in the book he drops hints about its “hidden symmetry.” This symmetry, so far as I can tell, is just the symmetry between the man and the city. So now you know. If you were paying attention during the first half of the book, you already knew. I’d rather not be bludgeoned with the Cleverness Stick.
Still, it’s a fun read. It’s peppered with (deliberately) black-and-white photos of old Stamboul, from an era when people flocked to the shores of the Bosphorous to watch the Ottoman pashas’ wooden “yalıs” (waterfront mansions) burn to the ground one by one. There’s great romance in this book, great love for the Bosphorous, and delicious history. Worth reading, but not worth owning.
I wrote 3,000 words yesterday about our trip to Turkey. That’s pretty solidly over the line for admissible blog-post length, unless you’re Balkinization, so I decided to break things up a bit. Here I’ll describe the smaller places we went, and reserve Istanbul itself — the most remarkable place I’ve ever been — for later.
We started the trip in Selçuk, a sleepy little place of 25,000 people about an hour from İzmir. Selçuk had its charms, and our hotel — Hotel Kalehan — was marvelous: a beautiful flower garden, a hammock, a nice breakfast every morning, friendly staff, a cozy room. We stayed there too long, though: there’s not very much to do in Selçuk. I suspect that most people come to see Ephesus, the site of ancient Roman ruins that’s a 45-minute walk from the hotel. Once you’ve seen Ephesus and the Selçuk market on Saturday (Sunday? I forget. I’ll have to consult our journal.), you’ve more or less exhausted what the town has to offer.
It was really good that we went to Selçuk first, before Istanbul. It’s a conservative little town, where the men go out every night to a café to drink and smoke and play cards while the women … we have no idea where the women were, though we presume they were home putting the children to bed, cooking, etc. Istanbul is much more westernized, but it does have the occasional district that looks like Selçuk; it was good to understand what a conservative Muslim district looked like so that we could, for instance, stop holding hands when we walked through one. I’d advise two, three days max in Selçuk.
I’d also advise going to Turkey when we did, or perhaps just before. We were there from May 1 to May 12, and we didn’t have to wait for a table at a single restaurant. I assume the tourist season starts in earnest in June. Hence the tourists won’t get to see oil wrestling in Selçuk like we did. That was pretty excellent: 300 dudes getting oiled up and throwing each other down on the grass, while a few hundred or a thousand spectators — few of them tourists, as far as I could tell — cheered them on, and guys wandered through the stands selling tea (çay). Everyone in Turkey drinks tea from little cups that can hold maybe a shot and a half or two shots of espresso. They are lovely cups. I wish we had them in the U.S., but they’d have to be scaled up to Mega-Ultra-Grande size. (Here might be the place to note that if you see anyone in Europe or Turkey who’s disgustingly, morbidly obese, that person is almost surely American.)
After a few days in Selçcuk, we just had to move on, so we took off for İzmir. Stephanie had left a day or two in here during which we could do whatever we wanted; at various times we talked about going to Cappadocia or Fethiye, and I would mutter noncommittally. (More later on why Stephanie is my better half.) So by the time we had to leave Selçuk, we didn’t know where we were going. Anywhere we were going to go, though, required that we go to İzmir first and take a connecting bus. To have done so, though, would have meant arriving in a strange town probably after dark and trying to find a hotel, which we didn’t really want to do. So we looked at a few hotels in İzmir that Lonely Planet recommended, picked the least-ratty-looking one, and spent the night there.
Note: it was an extremely ratty hotel. Do not under any circumstances stay at the Grand Zeybek hotel if you have any taste. More generally, do not use the Lonely Planet guide to Turkey — especially not if you have a little bit of income. Lonely Planet is for backpackers in their twenties, and it strives for comprehensiveness: list every available attraction in the town, rather than filtering out the chaff.
I had been drawn to İzmir because it was formerly Smyrna, a several-thousand-year-old Greek city that was leveled during the Turkish War of Independence just after World War I. Stephanie raised the logical point: if it was leveled, then there won’t be any interesting history to see. And so it was. We left after a day. We ate at a nice restaurant (Deniz — Turkish for ‘sea’) on Atatürk Caddesi along the water, found a travel agent near the hotel to get a ticket to Istanbul a day early, took a cab to the airport, flew to Istanbul, and had our hotel — the lovely Hotel Troya — pick us up at Atatürk Airport. After our experience with the Grand Zeybek, we joked for the first couple days in Istanbul that Hotel Troya was “extremely non-disgusting” and “eminently un-foul” and so forth.
I’ll continue with more about Istanbul in another post.