Booker-prize winner Michael Ondaatje’s preferred medium is 8½-by-11-inch Muji brand lined notebooks. He completes the first three or four drafts by hand, sometimes literally cutting and pasting passages and whole chapters with scissors and tape. Some of his notebooks have pages with four layers underneath.

When he’s in the middle of a novel, Colum McCann sometimes prints out a chapter or two in large font, staples it together like a book, and takes it to Central Park. He finds a quiet bench and pretends he’s reading a book by someone else.

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“There ain’t no voting no more–just protest voting.” – some dude who walked into my friend N’s polling place this morning.

[UPDATE: THT offers a handy NYC Mayoral Voting Guide, with supplementary photos.  I'd like to echo his admiration for the musically-enhanced website of the Rent Is Too Damn High party candidate, Jimmy McMillan.]

For my fellow New Yorkers, I can only repeat Gawker (!?)–Don’t Vote for Bloomberg.  Read the whole anti-endorsement, but here are some highlights:

For all the talk of Bloomberg the power-player who at least gets things done without worrying about the unions and special interests, he’s been unable to win any political battle with anyone he couldn’t literally buy off.

[...]

His record on housing, like his record on nearly everything having to do with the outer boroughs and poverty and human beings who make less than $100,000 a year, has been a ridiculous disgrace. His entire philosophy of development solving everything turned out to be precisely, 100% wrong.

[...]

Bloomberg deserves to be run out of town on an inadequately funded public rail line for the 2004 GOP convention alone. Remember that ridiculous farce? No, of course not, no one does, besides the thousands of people improperly spied on, arrested, harassed, and detained by the NYPD. All of this was completely illegal. No heads rolled.

One more special bonus factoid: New York leads the world in marijuana arrests! Specifically, marijuana arrests of black people!

And he is personally a jerk. He is a thin-skinned, unpleasant, sanctimonious asshole. His company is being sued for a culture of sexual discrimination that plaintiffs say Bloomberg himself contributed to. He is a tremendous dick to reporters whenever he gets cranky. He is fucking race-baiting with Rudy Giuliani again, because why not?

Don’t vote for him.  I’m not sure who to vote for, because I’m not exactly a fan of the Democratic candidate.  But if you’re going to protest vote, protest against the plutocrat with the city press in his pocket who flies away to play golf in Bermuda each weekend while the rest of us deal with weekend subway service disruptions.  And I haven’t even mentioned the most personal (all politics is local) reason for my antipathy to the mayor: his shady attempts to bully the EPA over the potential Gowanus Superfund designation.

Also, for my people back in WA: vote YES on Referendum 71 (to stop right-wing assholes from taking away domestic partnership rights recently granted to queer families, and NO on state idiot Tim Eyman’s latest initiative (1033).

Happy Election Day.  Fingers crossed for Maine.

While we are on the subject of mosques, here’s one closer to (this) home: one day the other week, after breakfast with friends in Sunset Park, and I set out on a circuit through the neighborhood’s groceries (Chinese, Vietnamese, Turkish, Mexican, Gujarati….)  I lingered a long time in Birlik Market, at Eighth Avenue and 60th Street, over jars of sour-cherry jam and packaged mantı, but more to listen than to shop:  the woman working the counter that day was Chinese, but the old men in the back aisles were bickering in Turkish, and I hovered nearby, letting the sound wash over my ears.

A few steps up the block, women pushing strollers were spilling out of the Fatih mosque after Friday prayers.  The mosque constitutes the center of a half-block Turkish knot in the center of Brooklyn’s Chinatown, with a shop selling nazar boncukları and Kütahya tiles and clothing on one side, and the market plus a restaurant on the other, with one of those all-purpose travel agency/tax accountancy/translation service businesses that sprout up in immigrant neighborhoods all over New York.  I’d wondered about the provenance of this Turkish outpost, and googling, found a quasi-answer on Google Books: the mosque, it turns out, used to be a cinema.  According to Barbara Daly Metcalf,

The Turkish mosque was originally a movie theater, designed, as many American movie houses have been, as a Hollywood amalgam of Orientalist-Moorish-Arabesque fantasies. The conversion of the movie house into a mosque reclaims the Orientalist style, invests it with new meaning, and literally reorients the building.

(Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe, p. 210-11.)

Perhaps one of these days, I’ll ask if I can go take photos inside this one, too.  In the meantime, if you missed Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq’s 30 Mosques in 3o Days project this past Ramadan, it’s a fascinating exploration of faith (and food) in New York City mosques, although the pair didn’t make it to any of the Turkish ones this time.  Maybe next year.

The late-afternoon light was complicit in the act of calligraphy, but the shadows threatened to rewrite the holy book.

The good people at qarrtsiluni have published a series of photographs I took this summer (of Arabic calligraphy on the walls of the Eski Cami in Edirne) in their “Words of Power” issue.  Their virtual pages have hosted a number of artists and writers I greatly admire, and it’s an honor to get to play in their sandbox.

This is not the post I wanted to return to this space with. A week ago, I heard the wonderful news that Maziar Bahari had been released from Evin Prison and was en route to London (where his partner is about to give birth to their first child). His release gave us great hope that Kian’s might follow.

Instead, on Tuesday, I found out that Kian has been sentenced to a prison term of 15 years, on the patently ridiculous trumped-up charges that he was involved in orchestrating the post-election protests (which he did not take part in) as part of some sort of international NGO/CIA conspiracy (which does not exist).  The NYT’s Lede blog linked to extensive material on the case, including an excerpt from Negar Azimi’s 2007 piece on the Bush administration’s disastrous “democracy promotion” fund for Iran (which was the provided the original pretext for Iran’s persecution of scholars and NGO staff like Kian and Haleh Esfandiari, both vocal critics of the Bush administration and its policies toward Iran).  Haleh–who was imprisoned with Kian in 2007, and returned to the US after their release–has written a post for the New York Review of Books about his sentence.  Kian’s friend Karim Sadjadpour has just published a story in Foreign Policy magazine.

This news is devastating, even more so because Kian was only a few weeks away from leaving Iran to take up the offer of a visiting professorship at Columbia University. He was supposed to be here, in New York, by now.  (Here is a video from the dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, calling for Kian’s release, and speaking about his place in our academic community.)  I am thinking of the last time we met–over coffee and lemon cake at Columbus Circle, during one of his quiet trips abroad after his release–and of how he talked about all the books he was planning to write.  I am thinking about the pictures he showed me of his baby daughter, born just weeks after his release from Evin in 2007, who turned two this month.

There are petitions to sign (the new Free Kian site has links).  But his case is now tangled up in international politics–some suggest the sentence may be intended to make him a bargaining chip in US-Iran negotiations–and I am not sure what else we can do, save make noise, make it clear that he is not forgotten, that we will keep watching and waiting until he is back home with his family again, and they are free to go as they wish.

The other night, at a gathering of friends who come together from time to time to read aloud to one another, I shared a short piece he wrote for an Amnesty India publication about his first imprisonment, in 2007: “May I Take a Book With Me?” In it, he writes,

Books also helped open my cell to the world outside.  I must have seemed mad to request deliveries from Amazon, shipped to Paris, couriered to Bahar, then relayed to me through the prison system. But imagining a worldwide network of booksellers, all in motion to bring a book to me, was exhilarating and reassuring. I ordered a book by a French writer I had met at the New School years before, and felt in touch with my former colleagues there. In a footnote, I saw the name of a Polish intellectual I knew, and again felt less anonymous. The penciled margin notes in a book given to me by a friend took me to a cool hill station in Pakistan. If I was thinking of all of them, maybe they were thinking of me.

We are thinking of him still.

Everything on the Bosphorus was a reflection. Light was reflection, sound was reflection; sporadically, here, one might become the echo of an array of things unbeknownst to oneself.

-Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, A Mind at Peace (Huzur), translated from the Turkish by Erdağ Göknar.

The indomitable Frederick Seidel came to İstanbul, and wrote a poem about it.  It’s my last day among the stray dogs of Galata; I’m flying to Heathrow this evening, and back to the States on Monday.  So the poem seems particularly appropriate for this week–ranging back and forth across this city, dwelling for a brief moment on London, and then coming to rest, at the end, in New York City, with İstanbul still echoing in its ears.

Istanbul
Frederick Seidel

Stray dogs with a red plastic tag in one ear
Have been licensed
By the city to be safe and allowed to live in the street,
So they wander around, or more likely just lie there,
Healthy, checked by a city vet, without a care.
They’re red-tagged Turks and they’re an elite.
You walk past them in the street.
They’re bums, they’re the homeless, not educated.
It’s complicated, but they’re regulated.
It isn’t complicated.
The red tag is their fez.
That’s what the republic Atatürk founded says.

The Four Seasons Hotel Istanbul
Has toothsomely been called the best hotel in the world.
The luxury takes place in what was once a prison.
To be a prisoner of luxury
In the old centre of the city
Is such a Turkish incarceration
To luxuriate in.
The Turkish hot chocolate the Four Seasons serves perspires
Oriental desires.
Think swarthy sweetness.
Think secular Atatürk.
But Sultanahmet has turned more than a bit Islamic.

From Claridge’s and London I have come
To the holy city of Byzantium
To see Ayasofya.
I see the Blue Mosque and I see a
Fanta-zi-a projected on the air
Whose six minarets make it Disney beyond compare,
A fat domed flying saucer with sticking-up spikes of hair.
I am awakened to the opposite of despair
By the Blue Mosque’s muezzin’s dawn call to prayer.
Another nearby mosque’s muezzin immediately starts to call.
Come one, come all!
Antiphonally back and forth, and I go back to sleep.

I dream I’m dead in the trunk of a car. I’m the survivor.
I’ve hired for the morning a car and driver.
It’s my Disney Fantasia
To drive to Asia.
Let’s cross the Bosphorus.
It won’t be hard for us.
Each day I take my pills from the day’s section of the tray
Lest the Lord disappear me and throw me away.
I find myself across the bridge in Asia thinking of Aldo Moro.
Who on the Golden Horn thinks of Aldo Moro any more, though?
I’m back at the Four Seasons.
The Red Brigades had their reasons.

Be so kind as to cover yourself please with the blanket, presidente.
We’re going to drive you to another location for your safety.
So he covered himself.
Moretti immediately pumped
Eleven rounds into the blanket point-blank.
The car was left on a street pointedly
Equidistant from the Christian Democratic headquarters
And the Communist Party headquarters.
I’ll stay in bed under the red bedspread.
A Turkish flag of red soaks the bed.
I’m better red and dead.
I’m full of bull in Istanbul.

Awake!
Listen to the Voice! Climb out of the trunk! Rise and shine!
The bullet-riddled Moro is divine.
Each bullet hole is a portal to the immortal.
I’ve breathed so many million tears my legs ache.
My fellow Armenians, my brain is about to break.
I walk up the hill to Topkapi Palace past the red-tagged dogs.
I’ve heisted so much bullion.
I’ve lived a life of luxury.
I’ve lived my own Topkapi of poetry.
I’ve lived through four seasons. The muezzin calls.
The duelling muezzins call. It’s dawn. It’s dark. I SEE.

There’s the Statue of Liberty,
And there’s the United States of America,
And America’s holding the Statue of Liberty up in the air
Just exactly the way a grinning actor holds up his Oscar.
We’re in a holding pattern over land and water
On a rotating stage, circling New York Harbor.
We turn past the torch.
We’re on final approach.
It’s the end of my flight and Istanbul’s almost over.
The tugboats towing Ellis Island are the size of ants.
They trumpet like elephants.
The Blue Mosque broadcasts one of its beautiful chants.

So, an article I wrote about the big dam projects in Turkish Kurdistan was published last week on China Dialogue, a bilingual web magazine dealing with environmental issues: “The Ilısu Dam’s Uncertain Future“:

Since a group of European backers withdraw funding in July, the fate of the controversial Ilisu dam – and that of the surrounding, mostly Kurdish communities in southeastern Turkey – has been in limbo. The dam, located on the Tigris River, 65 kilometres from the Syrian and Iraqi borders, would power a 1,200-megawatt hydroelectric plant, while displacing tens of thousands of local residents and submerging the ancient city of Hasankeyf beneath a vast reservoir. The project has drawn widespread criticism from environmental groups in Turkey and abroad, who are concerned that it will threaten endangered species, reduce downstream water flows and cause irreparable ecological damage to the Tigris River basin.

Ilısu is part of the “Southeastern Anatolian Project” (Güneyanadolu Projesi, or GAP), a massive multi-dam hydroelectricity, irrigation and development project dating back to the late 1970’s that encompasses nine provinces in Southeastern Turkey, in the Kurdish-majority region that abuts the Syrian, Iraqi, and Iranian borders.  The controversies surrounding GAP will be familiar to anyone acquainted with contested mega-dams elsewhere, like China’s Three Gorges or India’s Sardar Sarovar on the Narmada–they involve consequences like population displacement, environmental damage, the flooding of settlements, and the destruction of archaeological sites and historical built heritage.  GAP has also sparked tension with Syria and Iraq due to the dams’ impact on downstream water levels of the Euphrates and Tigris (here’s a recent NYT article on the devastating drought plaguing the Euphrates in Iraq).  The Turkish government maintains the the dams are absolutely necessary to increase energy independence and develop the economy of the impoverished southeast.

Mega-dams (and massive infrastructural projects) were, and are, irresistible to a sort of twentieth-century nationalist understanding of development: dams are symbols of modernity and progress, technical prowess, and mastery over nature, and often seem to be claimed as specifically “national” achievements.  The centerpiece of GAP is the Atatürk Dam on the Euphrates,  and GAP’s website credits Atatürk with the original inspiration for the hydroelectric exploitation of the region’s water resources (much as Nehru’s vision is inevitably invoked in support of the Sardar Sarovar dam, and the poem Mao wrote championing Three Gorges is now chiseled on monuments near the reservoir.  Think, too, of the Hoover Dam).   An engraving of the Atatürk Dam decorated the back of Turkish banknotes for nearly fifteen years.  But the people whose lives are drastically altered by such massive infrastructural projects may not so easily view themselves as part of the national community whose standing is raised by the infrastructural achievement in question: as I write in the piece, GAP has been met with considerable resistance in many of the communities it is supposed to help, for reasons inseparable from the political context of the Kurdish issue in Turkey.

Resistance to the Ilısu Dam and other GAP projects–in a region scarred by almost two decades of intermittent civil war–stems from a deep suspicion of the Turkish state’s motives and priorities.  Some residents fear that the energy produced by the dams will merely be transferred to Western Turkey, and many Kurds see GAP as an attempt to consolidate, in concrete and steel form, the dominion of the Turkish state (and the Turkish army) over the southeast.  (There is indeed a security rationale for GAP: the construction of dams, roads, and massive reservoirs reshapes the landscape to better suit techniques of oversight and control, such as checkpoints and patrols.)  But the greatest concern source of opposition is the flooding that will create the massive Ilısu reservoir–both because of the number of people the flooding will displace, and because of the places that will be lost beneath the water.

The campaign against Ilısu–both abroad and in Turkey–has focused on the threat to Hasankeyf and the “cultural heritage” it embodies–the material traces of perhaps ten thousand years of human inhabitation: bridges, tombs, hammams, mosques and churches, a kaleidoscope of remnants from successive waves of empire and influence.  The Turkish government and the Ilısu Consortium have devised an expensive plan to move some of Hasankeyf’s “most valuable” monuments to an archaeological park on higher ground (unsurprisingly, most archaeologists are hardly mollified by this proposal).   And just as there are resettlement plans for the ruins, there are resettlement proposals for the people who live around (and sometimes inside) them.  But despite the fact that living conditions in Hasankeyf are difficult, the town’s mayor and the majority of the residents are opposed to the dam.   Distrust of the government and its resettlement action plan are no doubt part of the reason–assistance to the tens of thousands displaced by previous dam projects (and the hundreds of thousands made refugees, often at gunpoint, by the conflict) has been dismal.  Because so many residents of the region lack formal land rights, securing compensation for lost homes and fishing income is difficult even when the plans are implemented.

And the relationship Hasankeyf’s people have with the landscape and material world around them is something that can’t be resettled, or compensated.   This Kurdish Human Rights Project report quotes a resident who tells the interviewer, “‘Hasankeyf is not just artefacts, caves and bones, it is our inheritance and we should have access to it.”  In reading and writing about Ilısu, I’ve been reminded of a presentation that Vyjayanthi Rao (an anthropologist at the New School) made at a conference on ruins at Columbia last spring.  She spoke about a dam in Andhra Pradesh that had flooded a number of inhabited settlements in an area rich with ruins; the Archaeological Survey of India conducted a massive salvage project that removed several temples from the flood zone and placed them in an archaeological park of sorts (not unlike the one planned for Hasankeyf)–a jumble of orphaned ruins, decontextualized and struck dumb.   The inhabitants of one village that was flooded refused to cooperate with the resettlement plan; instead, they built a new village on the banks of the reservoir, reusing some of the bricks and stones from the old.  The water level in the reservoir is seasonally variable, and in the dry months, water goes down far enough that the old site of the village is exposed.  Every year, she told us, the people migrate back to their old village when the receding waters leave it dry, and stay there until the waters rise again.

UNTIL the very recent days of the Turkish Republic, when every effort is being made to adopt the ways of Western civilization, it has been the picturesque and wellnigh universal custom for shops to carry on their walls small placards, usually framed, and these placards have contained in beautiful Arabic writing verses from the Quran, traditions of Muhammed, rhymed and unrhymed sayings which have for generations been passed down from father to son. Coffee-houses, barber shops, booksellers, grocery stores, pharmacies, candy stores, fruit-stands, private houses even, all have decorated their walls with more or less artistically copied bits of wisdom from the past. In general there is no record of the authors or sources from which the sayings have come. They reflect in some measure also the thought of Turkish society as that thought has been passed on through the centuries.

So begins Prof. Dr. Hilmi Ömer’s article “Everyday Philosophy of the Turkish People in Stambul“, from the April 1933 issue of the journal Philosophy.   I came across it while searching for some entirely unrelated information the other week, and it is possibly the most charming thing I have ever found on JSTOR.   I devoted my twitter feed to a selection of the aphorisms for a day or two, and reproduce some of my favorite lines here, arranged as a found poem (or several)–though I’m not sure it’s fair to call it found poetry, when much of the source material is already a form of verse. Maybe “remixed poetry.”

I.
The patient dervish receives his desires.
Through patience sour grapes become sugar (helva).
The one who believes in Fate is free from sorrow.

II.
The World is a field sown for the next World.
It is an Inn with two doors.
This world is a Mill, it is ceaselessly turning.
The eye of man is a lantern, in the end it will go out.
There is no rest in the World.

III.
Wear not yourself out by losing your heart in vain.
If you fly into the air like Solomon,
some day the earth will of necessity consume you.
Cross not over the coward’s bridge; let the water carry you off.
Wealth and power, silver and gold are never anyone’s forever.
Real merit is in healing a broken heart.

IV.
Be of the people of Love; the World was established by Love.
O Lord, may everything end well.