A Dance to the Music of Time

This is the discovery I have made for my pains for watching a series (the first Staffel anyway) in which they make the same actor play a character both when he's 15 and 25! maybe it is a subversive comment on the passage of time...

Don't talk to me about Matisse

talk to me instead

of dinner parties

of monsters with champagne breath

and reclining on the sofa

how names and learned and forgotten

Germany will tear us apart, again

I watched the delectable Sam Riley play Ian Curtis in Control- and brushed up on my Brit Punk. They started off as Warsaw and then renamed themselves after the prostitution section of concentration camps, it appears. The film ties in nicely with the German film Requiem which I've watched recently with equally interesting dance scenes and where the young hero/ine goes into fits. In Control Ian Curtis's doctor was also played by an actor with a German accent, and then he goes and falls in love with a Belgian girl- played by an actress again with a German accent- a German citizen of Romanian origin. Alexandra Maria Lara (Plătăreanu- the surname that dares not speak its name) also happens to be Sam Riley's girl friend and they live in Berlin, if you please.

Ah, this is what I so much love Europe for. Do take a seat dear, just mind you leave your name outside.

On another note, it was so touching (dare I say refreshing?) to actually see a man break (and a pop-star at that) into pieces because he cannot handle his relationships- rather than leave the usual wife- girlfriend- wife- mistress trail.

Inter Milan as Aumerle (of Richard II fame)

Many a time hath banished Norfolk fought
For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field,
Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross
Against black pagans, Turks, Saracens (IV.1)

this must no doubt have been going on in the mind of the lawyer who filed a suit against Inter.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/12/wfootball112.xml

It is not for nothing that Turks are the most symbol obssessed Volk and have been talking about yet another 'symbol' for the last few months.

Cairo Reading

I have been trying to finish my Cairo reading and have at last gotten somewhere, although not quite the end. I finished reading The Yacoubian Building today by Alaa Al Aswany. The style was so much like Mahfouz, I even thought Aswany must be his pen name. I had actually started reading Midaq Alley to see whether there was a particular thread in Egyptian literature that I could follow--- and lo and behold, I had chosen the very two books that seemed to be part of a trilogy.

Aswany's more risqué, of course, written as it is in the new millenium, however the themes of honest girl sells her body for money, the young man's hopes are thwarted, the greedy merchant who considers getting a second wife and who gets into politics gets his comeuppance, political 'stands', the cunning crippled and the unrepentant sexual deviant... And for Mahfouz's World War II, there is Aswany's even sexier terrorism. Whereas Mahfouz's novel takes place around Halili, Aswany's takes place downtown on Talat Harb.

However, one more novel wants to get into this discussion here, and that is Shafak's Flea Palace. Yacoubian Building and Flea Palace both hark back to La Belle Epoque, levantine cosmopolitanism, whatever you may want to call it. And they do this also through the fact that both apartments' original owners are Armenian. Exiled Armenians and their apartments in ruin has become an Eastern Mediterrenean topos of lost multiculturality. I think there's a paper in there somewhere.

Eastern Promises- II

Today, having made my way through the blizzard, and seeing many interesting sights on the way, like the opened iron gate of a Greek church that is always closed up, and the path that looked so enticing but...
I was on my way to discover Kurdish sufis, however, when I entered the apartment I was met with smiles and one particular one I couldn't quite place and which bugged me during the whole conversation. Like the smile of the vanishing cat in Alice in Wonderland (thank you Zizek), the lamella, the undead, the excess that bugs you until you have attached a body unto it.

Forty days
After forty days of having to see the faces you have to see
shaking the hands you have to shake

Forty days,
in a man-forgotten land
surrounded by man-forgotten tombs
man-forgotten tombstones on which
are inscribed the lives of the undead
in a man-forgotten language
as you go looking for
errors committed
in a man-forgotten alphabet

and yet how that smile
opens a thousand gates
pulls you to a thousand shades
of eastern promises
kept
and unkempt
till you put a name to it
in that man-gotten, man-forgotten
alef-be.

The Conversation That Did Not Take Place at the Cecil Hotel

Her heart skipped a beat when he
told her this one story about the man she loved.

***
Many, many moons ago
on a beautiful winter evening
as wintry as it could be in Alexandria
we had stopped to take
the usual ablutions
the usual salutations

entering the white washed mosque
there were children waiting
holding hands
holding shoes
and when we had taken enough photographs
taken in as much as we could
I stepped out alone

to be hailed
by his friend who took me to one side
and offered me coffee
as we sat on
rickety chairs and placed our cups
on a rickety table
he told me how he knew him,
how everyone knew him
how two men stranded on a desert island knew not each other
but knew him

thus chid
I went back to the bus
back to those known constellations
back to the hotel with the pyramid view.

Islamic Law: Everyone's Talking About It

After the 'Friday sermon' delivered by the staunchly secular opposition party leader in Turkey on Wednesday on the correct way to wear Islamic dress, quoting from the Koran and speaking of "Big Sins" and "Smaller Sins" (I think he was trying to say that not wearing a headscarf was a smaller sin that should easily be committed if one wanted to go to university) with the know-how of an Islamic televangelist, today the Archbishop of Canterbury says that implementation of Islamic law is unavoidable in Britain. I quietly refer him to Nadeem Aslam's apocalyptic "Maps for Lost Lovers" if he wants a depiction of what that could lead to. Britain has been forewarned.

Here the archbishop:
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/pressass/20080207/tuk-sharia-law-unavoidable-archbishop-6323e80_1.html

Here Nadeem, the oracle:
http://www.culturewars.org.uk/2004-02/aslam.htm

Joseph's Inmate's Dream in Saqqara Tomb

"12.36": And two youths entered the prison with him. One of them said: I saw myself pressing wine. And the other said: I saw myself carrying bread on my head, of which birds ate. Inform us of its interpretation; surely we see you to be of the doers of good.

Eine Stadt Sucht Einen Mörder

Returning from Old Cairo where the Coptic community still live, we were accosted by a group of taxi drivers who all wanted to take us to our next destination- The Citadel. The brouhaha was caused because the first one we stopped did not speak English and hence revealed our origins- we were looking quite Egyptian a minute ago. A rather complex and intriguing bargaining happened between the drivers and we were led to a rather dingy looking car- that was it, we were going to reclaim our freedom, and so on we walked, with three taxis driving behind us in our walking pace. We walked, we crossed the streets- and yes, ended up taking a taxi that was involved in the very first argument. There was no escaping the net. We could've tried a bit harder, but we had to make it to the bus that was to take us to the airport quite fast.

This made me think of the various networks of the city and reminded me of Fritz Lang's Eine Stadt Sucht Einen Mörder, where the networks of beggars and burglars join the police to search for a child killer, as all these groups have men covering certain parts of the city. The Cairene incident made me think that one should add the Taxidriverbund to the list.

Because evil will find you

this
is a colonial disease

whether in Damascus
or two hour's drive from Vienna,
evil will find you

how'ever you may try to skirt it.

Eastern Promises

I checked my breast pocket
for eastern promises today
and found one
polished to perfection
hard to improvise
hard to utter
without premeditation.

The Leuven Tune

The following is a free (read faulty) translation of a song I'd listened to managed to record two summers ago in Leuven. It has fascinated me since. I have to find a Belgian music enthusiast to tell me who the singer is.

The blue in your eyes
Wilderness
The allure of princesses in your soul

The hair that cries in deserted carosses
The sparrows that singe themselves as they fly
The air circulates and turns
Each time I hear your name

I want you to give me reassurance
You can lift my chin up, let me sleep like a nightingale
That no one should embrace you

Because each time it is like the pain of death
Pain of faith
Pain of being childlike again
An anxiety

Come here
And put me in order

The red colour of your skin
And fingertips on fire

it was impossible that you should sleep naked
in the night, when the ache awaits
And afterwards the divan, the sofa
Without rules or explanations

Without expense, without laying bare
To believe that your everything was dead
The soul, the core, to infinity

Merry Christmas

Had this been a time to celebrate
in my own calender
I would've wanted nothing more
or less
than the red flowers I found this evening
on my desk, waiting
for a name to be put on them.

it is I,
Mrs. Dalloway
who's arranged them
to be put there
by simply being a very good
daughter and cousin.

Çoban Çalılığı Anıları

babamdan kaldı bir geyik,
zaten onun çoğunu da yedik

The Turkish March According to Zizek

This comes very timely, after I have purchased a book on Opera by Zizek (and in German to boot!)- I guess he doesn't treat them any more or less discerningly than he does film, so I should be alright, I think :-)

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/opinion/24zizek.html?ex=1199163600&en=47c5664276e90d20&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Maps for Lost Blitcons

I have just finished reading the very very sinister Maps for Lost Lovers, and turning to the internet for help have found unequivocal praise for it. TLS and London Review of Books do not report, but the Guardian does, in laudatory terms.
Every single ill that you can imagine that is attributed to Islam can be found in this book, it's almost like a check-list.
However one thing I find very hard to stomach is that the book implies that blind Islamic adherence is also at the heart of the fact that abortion is condoned in Pakistani communities if the baby is female--- subhanallah- so far as I know Koran is the only holy book that speaks of the plight of just such babies when speaking of judgement day: "And when the female infant buried alive is asked for what sin she was killed (so she may testify against those who killed her)" (81:8-9)
Blind adherence to Islam would stop anyone from messing with female foetuses, methinks.

Conversation Starter/Stopper

Overheard at a dinner party

the rah-rah-rah son of landed gentry: (addressing the crowd) ... I can never get my father to read that rag
the racial/social debu/dilittante: What does you father do?
rah-rah-rah: He's the Minister of Defence
debu/dilittante: Oh

Zauberberg

She came to me with the tell-tale signs of her distress
An urgency to the step
A shortness to the skirt,
And the kohl reluctantly smeared over the eye-lid

It took her some time to name it

Here they had dined together
And here, they had had coffee
This mountain was the mountain from where
They had observed the villages beyond

And it took a giant’s reserve
To keep my mouth shut or exempt
From asking questions as I
Gorged chocolate covered pineapples and bananas
under the cacaphony of the Europe’s biggests christmas tree,
Thinking, everyone to their own devils
(oh, that sofa, the sofa, the hands, the shoes, the receding hair
and whispered questions below the decibels of the general conversation
the hand shake, the promise unkept)

The day wore on, and another
And then the goblin confronted us
With an outstretched hand and a smile
And she fed her with fruits and conversation
And when it was time to go to bed
She made one last offering

“Take him!” she said to me
but I had heard these cries before
I had heeded such words before
And knew them to be the false maps they were
For the uninitiated
For the disinterested,
for the little hopeful girl I once was.

But now I sail through life
With not a care in the world
And these goblins,
these magic mountains,
these false friends,
the ghosts of Europe
can’t touch me anymore
for in my breast pocket I keep
enough eastern promises
to last me a life-time.
***
darling, darjeeling
dear, deer, darjeeling.

Past the Mission

behind the prison tower/present hour
looking for a way to catch up
with the music of time
getting ready for the next mission
to conquer Jerusalem

The Maiden of Istanbul's Tale

Not once had she been to Jerusalem
and yet she had such stories to tell