letteral approach II

the letters slanting to the left, no not like my writing at all. This is what happens when I don't want to write, really, but something forces me, to keep myself occupied, and I try out different orthographies, usually, what I imagine to be 'European' orthography. I have some image in my head of what it should look like, who knows whose hand writing it is I am trying to emulate, something I have seen on television? something I observed in a friend? or could it possibly be Dyson's?

at all events, he looks at my 'European' letters scrawled on the paper as sorry excuses for a note and asks me whether it is my handwriting. I smile, happy to see I have disoriented him as well. I tell him yes. He says it doesn't look like my handwriting at all. I scream inside and say "When are you going to recognize the other in me?"

summer rain- postcolonial creatures

The cool weather and the dark skies brings back memories which have been pushed into a corner in the crowd, which I have not had time to contemplate...

I sit at a crowded table in a Thai restaurant and the smiling (but nice) waiter brings me my diluted ginger tea-- it is in fact just ginger and hot water. The Southafrican by my side is inspired and orders one herself, I tell her to ask them to dilute it from the start. I put some lemon into it, and try to chat up the Anglo-Irish guy on my left, but he's not forthcoming. I see that his attention is fixed on the slanted eye Austrian beauty (surely she has some Oriental ancestry), but she's too far away to speak, it's a very noisy joint. Then the Southafrican and the English guy diagonal from me start talking about a conference in Joberg, and I listen as if all the names should be known to me. I know Joseph Conrad alright, but that's about it. Then the Southafrican lady turns to me once again and asks me if I find it difficult to find halal food in Germany. I whine. The slanted eye Austrian beauty eyes me, I don't know whether to play the good neighbour or the nasty exile. I turn the topic unto the Nünnings, it never fails in a German speaking context. Then the Austrian beauty and I exchange compliments concerning our accents, and with her lovely accent the Southafrican lady joins in. The Austrian beauty blushes a little, it will be sometime yet before she gets used to it, it seems. The Southafrican lady is a professor and wears what looks like a hautecouture skirt. I love. She tries to lift my bag and is appalled at the weight. It's my old laptop inside.

It is infernally cold outside and the hot ginger has opened my sinuses. I imagine what it will be like if I breath that in, and decide to take a taxi rather than find a busstop.

I am a stranger in Cambridge. And I have come so ill-prepared, I don't even have a map of the town. Unheard of in my travelling history. And in the dark it will be triply difficult- finding the salmon-coloured English faculty in the morning was quite an adventure in broad day-light. I missed the talk of the professor from Leeds, is that why he spurns every attempt at conversation I make and turns his head towards the Southafrican professor? I do my Southafrican trick. I tell her I have never met a black Southafrican. I tell her that I have even met someone from Swaziland and he was the blondest guy ever.

Anyway, I am pleased with the company of the Austrian beauty and the Southafrican prof who listens to my old tricks with Ottoman composure. I like her.

All those present, it turns out, will be staying in Cambridge that night. So I pack bags and make a move. First the train into London, and then to what seems to be a longer journey into Bromley.

The Bromley library, or rather the librarian, that's still another story...

Manifesto

After all the news, and an impending incident of me being thrown out of an airplane you look at me with patriarchal benevolence and say, for the nth time, hoping I shall see the light this time, that this won’t work, that if I really love Europe (for you have read right through me) I will have to work on my phenology.
But they’ve been there darling, they’ve been there
You are no traveller in unchartered waters.
But this time, this time I shall rise to the occassion and say that I have heard that all before, that I have spent the last thirty years hearing just that, and from tongues who spoke my tongue, not in conversations through some mutually adopted language.
And there was you, naively, thinking, there might be a flicker of hope
Nought darling, nought
Not for all the rivers and mountains of Europe

Yo se

last night as I went to bed, this one scene from the past resurfaced in my brain, very vividly:

I sit with my larger posse in the MCR and in comes she into the kitchen, looking at me coyly, pointing with her finger for me to come and join her in the privacy of the sink, and that infernal detergent smell. All I want to do at that moment is blow her a well placed fist on the nose (repeatedly). But there are guests to be considered, there is a reputation to be a maintained. So I call out to her from where I am sitting with a theatricality I know I can well possess. "Yo se". And I make the Y sound like a J, to let her know I am in the know about many things, that I am not one to remain in the dark for long (but I was, I was, I am, I am). Glen, the eternal American looks at me congratulatingly and then raises his eyebrows "You sounded like a primadonna right then N." I answer with a theatrical bow. And at that moment I feel, yes, this is the most dramatic moment of my life, the self-possession, the Sophia Loren-like, seen it all, done it all, can't hurt me now pose.
I am on top of the world and am prepared for the worst now, the worst. She comes and sits on the edge of Gerald's seat, somone she never even makes conversation with usually. I can see she is sorry for what has happened, but her happiness, her joy overflows all that, and I can see she can endure all in her happiness, even if she should lose me, she said, the only one who she could really talk to.

I look at Tarik, my German friend, who smiles back at me, and at that moment, I decide to defect.

Isra

tonight on this night of the nightly journey
I ask forgiveness from my brethren
who shall yet teach me
how to celebrate what I love

taking sides

when they open
the borders
where will you be-ee-ee?

I'll climb the highest tree
to avoid the stampede

(as sung by Black)

facts and figures

The opposite side of this coin is that while Israel's hi-tech "surgical strikes" have killed hundreds more civilians than Hizbullah fighters, the Lebanese resistance's low-tech weapons have killed about three times as many Israeli soldiers as civilians.

Guardian, 10th August

a Moorish enigma

working on the Pamplona paper (Verraeumlichung der Zeit, yes) I remembered, once again, a piece of graffiti I saw in the Catalonian village of La Riba.

On the long-distance-cum-commuter train from Lleida to Barcelona, (after the miles I had crossed just the other night sleeping and the same stretch yesterday morning, this time watching a group of Spanish mountaineers, and a Spanish-cum-English documentary on falconry) the train went into a mountainous region where sudden turns on the route revealed beautiful valleys and small villages. I was working, despite all this, on my paper for Nijmegen, and at one point I lifted my head to read the following words, written in Arabic script, at the train station- which consisted, for all I could see, of white washed walls placed at all the right angles.
Shouf wa Usqut. Watch and Keep Silent.
how despairing of the human spirit this enigma sounds these days of watching children being pulled from under fallen buildings. But at the time, it had felt very patronizing in another way. "Watch this beauty and don't speak a word. Don't turn it into one of your lousy poems"

But maybe it is a warning for today as well. Shouf wa Usqut. Don't turn it into one of your lousy poems.

Heart of Europe?

Istanbul, obviously :-)
And now Zizek to prove my point:

"Even racism is now reflexive. Consider the Balkans. They are portrayed in the liberal Western media as a vortex of ethnic passion - a multiculturalist dream turned into a nightmare. The standard reaction of a Slovene (I am one myself) is to say: 'yes, this is how it is in the Balkans, but Slovenia is not part of the Balkans; it is part of Mitteleuropa; the Balkans begin in Croatia or in Bosnia; we Slovenes are the last bulwark of European civilisation against the Balkan madness.' If you ask, 'Where do the Balkans begin?' you will always be told that they begin down there, towards the south-east. For Serbs, they begin in Kosovo or in Bosnia where Serbia is trying to defend civilised Christian Europe against the encroachments of this Other. For the Croats, the Balkans begin in Orthodox, despotic and Byzantine Serbia, against which Croatia safeguards Western democratic values. For many Italians and Austrians, they begin in Slovenia, the Western outpost of the Slavic hordes. For many Germans, Austria is tainted with Balkan corruption and inefficiency; for many Northern Germans, Catholic Bavaria is not free of Balkan contamination. Many arrogant Frenchmen associate Germany with Eastern Balkan brutality - it lacks French finesse. Finally, to some British opponents of the European Union, Continental Europe is a new version of the Turkish Empire with Brussels as the new Istanbul - a voracious despotism threatening British freedom and sovereignty."

Failed Defection

I never wanted to go wandering by the Rhein in the first place,
never wanted to listen to Schubert at Schwetzingen

The fairy-tale hills of Heidelberg
never figured in my dreams

I never wanted to speak
to blond heads with round rimmed spectacles

Was never much interested in separating my trash,
nor in saving money or choosing the best health insurance

Respect for machines, I never had
nor for (political) correctness

All I ever wanted
was to loose myself in some dyke in Norfolk
and have friends about me
who would humour
my mimickry, falsity, my laughter

I never wanted to go wandering by the Rhein in the first place
never wanted to dip my toes in its cold cold waters
never wanted to face the facts
ever

letteral approach to structuralism I

In the document I am translating at the moment I have just read a sentence that still (dares?) speak of the alphabet revolution as if it were the best thing that could have happened to Turkey, as if it were a Notwendigkeit.
And to think that only a couple of weeks ago I was in the heart of Europe, ridiculing this very act and my co-Europeans finding it appaling that a nation had been turned illiterate overnight.

letters are stores of memory,
you can feel this best in Turkey where there is collective amnesia concerning who we were and what we wanted to be,
for we no longer see the letters that we used to see and with which we expressed our notions of who we are.

Europeans- that would've started with the letter "alif", which looks like an "I", and which is the first letter of Allah as well

letters have memories, and initials more so, initials are intertextual, initials make you think about other words, make you trace other words in the word

initials bind, or make the rift more apparent, so now our task is to consider the implications of "alif"

memory

Memory

The word
standing there, at the end of a sentence
with its plump, motherly m's
and the o that swallows

and were it devoid of all meaning
the letters are still a familiar sight
read and learnt from a by-gone lover:
the 'verbuchstabelichung der Zeit'

Zauberberg

In search for something 'classical' I started to read what my library offered, in English. Was it Rhys who said that she wanted to read a novel where there are big houses and servants and a family to reckon with. I got such a feeling, and here I am.

So here's Mann:
"Space, rolling and revolving between him and his native heath possessed and wielded the powers we generally ascribe to time."

then we wander how these people come up with terms like "Verzeitlichung des Raums"