Yes, back. I am staying in Turkey on a Fulbright for a second year, as an extended grantee. I am so terribly lucky to have this, another year to root myself deeper in this place, improve my teaching and my Turkish and my comfort in this part of the world.

In many ways, by now I feel completely at home here. The culture shock didn’t hit me until April and March, seven or eight months into my life here, spurred perhaps by long, back-to-back visits from my parents and a friend. I agonized over whether to stay when the opportunity was offered to me, miserable over the decision whether to go home to my life in Portland. Suddenly, though, at the end of April, the mental clouds cleared and I remembered why I was here, how much I love this place and these people, the whole strange sea of new culture I am swimming through here, all the challenges I am glorying in.

Somehow, over the last month, I became comfortable. Perhaps because my Turkish is finally conversational (stumblingly, awkwardly, dictionary-dependently conversational, but conversational all the same, even for politics and religion). Perhaps because I finally reached a workable cultural equilibrium– knowing what to do in most situations I encounter regularly here, yet confident enough about knowing these rules that I can preserve the Americanisms that really matter to me. Things have fallen into place for next year– teaching, projects, living with Nazlı– and in any case, the path somehow cleared.

It seems natural now to be coming back, and leaving Antep this evening was almost as strange and heart-wrenching as leaving Portland nine months ago. I rode out through the pastel apartment building canyons in the Karataş suburbs, listening to the call to prayer drift in at slightly different places from each minaret we passed, seeing the golden light on the plains fade slowly to purple and down to dusk. Trying to find and see the strangeness that I remembered from when I arrived– tiny rickety buses! enormous apartment complexes! strange vacant lots like wastelands! tall buildings marching up to the edge of the plains and stopping like a wall!– felt so artificial and odd, even though I could still recognize the things that should feel foreign; it just fit wrong over my eyes.

On Tuesday evening, I sat on the balcony of the faculty restaurant with a group of medical professors I taught this semester, and looked out over the whole expanse of the city with my friends as the sun was setting, all bright on the tall walls of the clusters of buildings, with the warm breeze blowing and the sky darkening at the edges. All I could think was, “Why, why, why would I ever leave?”

I’m going home for two weeks. But I’ll come back home afterwards, too.

—–

And a note: This semester was, in many ways, both much more challenging and much more rewarding than the first term– and yet none of it is up on the internet. Hopefully, I’ll be able to correct some of that– and post some of the thousand-photo backlog– over the next two weeks, as I relive it for friends in Portland.

1: Anadolujet neglected to inform me they’d canceled my flight until after I arrived at the airport. Negotiated a switch to a THY flight in the airport, in Turkish. It all worked out somehow. I am in Istanbul. Hopefully that is my quotient of travel trouble for this trip.

On the other hand (δε), my evening class was remarkably successful. This was our first week spending five consecutive hours together, and I was afraid it was going to be a disaster– there are some chronically badly behaved students in the group, and even my best students get worn out and apathetic by the end of the fourth hour, understandably. Five hours feels like begging for trouble. For some reason, though, they seemed invested in the lesson– more so than usual, even. The group that usually leaves after the second hour to go eat actually came back for the end of class.¹ We got through all of the material we needed to get through tonight. The idea may even have made sense by the end. So for the last twenty minutes or so, we played Apples to Apples (not the best game in the world, but excellent for teaching, and even directly relevant to the work we were doing on descriptive paragraphs), and everybody left the room happy and chattering. It felt like a minor, merciful miracle.

I am not yet a good teacher, though I aspire to it. Sometimes my activities fall miserably flat, sometimes I forget what I’m doing in class despite the clearly-marked lesson plans in front of me, sometimes I fail terribly at classroom management, sometimes I worry that I’m not giving them anything more to learn from than me talking. I had a tiny bit of experience with this juggling act before coming here, but in very different contexts, and I’d originally expected to actually be doing the work of my title here (English Teaching Assistant). Instead of an assistant, though, I am an honest-to-god classroom teacher all on my own, struggling and winning and failing with maybe less preparation than normal. Day to day, I often have no idea what will work and what won’t, despite seeking out help and poring over resources. I know that’s to be expected, but I feel like I should have more to offer. Two months in, this is not so terrifying. Two months in, this is still so terrifying.

When this post was bouncing around in my (tired, tired) head, the old cliche of the “little things” came to mind at first. Yet even though class only took up a small part of the day, everything else revolved around it. Teaching is the Big Thing, the mass at the center of my life here, shaping the orbits of my social life, my travel, language learning, bureaucratic frustrations, cultural understandings and misunderstandings, and on and on. Whether it’s recognized or unseen at any given time, it’s exerting its pull on the nature and structure of whatever else I do. It has to– I owe it to the work. And besides, I don’t yet know enough about it to be able to climb out of the gravity well.

1: It is very common and totally acceptable in Turkey to just leave class during the ten-minute break between hours, so that you can go eat or hang out with friends or what-have-you. In the US– by my perception, at least– that would be considered incredibly rude. Here, there’s a certain number of state-mandated hours that you’re allowed to miss class, and most students use them to leave early on Fridays or go get dinner during evening classes. It’s been, surprisingly, one of the hardest things to adjust to in the classroom.

Found while grading writing quizzes. About the Taj Mahal, one student writes,

“It’s made of white barber. It has two towels.“

…

It’s a sound-based mistake, of course, though as a friend pointed out, “How can you mistake marble for barber when the cognate in your own language is marmer?” Alas. And the “towels” (towers) just makes it better.

Unfortunately, the assignment wasn’t to write about the Taj Mahal, but rather a building in one’s hometown. And the Taj Mahal was a pre-written example from a similar exercise in the textbook. Sorun var. We’ll talk on Monday.

Easy-Bake Envy:

When I was a kid, I really wanted an Easy-Bake Oven. Cooking’s pretty much the only gendered hobby I ever picked up– my doll and horse phases were brief, I don’t really like to shop, and I almost never wear makeup. (The fact that cooking’s my only gendered hobby actually seems a little ironic, given that my dad does all the cooking in my parents’ house.) In any case, though, I love to cook– it’s a stress-reliever, a way to share with friends, an easy access to sociable company.

Alas, my Turkish apartment lacks a built-in oven, as is standard here. Instead, there’s what my friends called “a cooker”– a stand-alone two-burner thing, one hooked to electric, one to a purchasable gas tank. This is all well and good, and since I haven’t bothered to buy a gas tank, I’m even managing fine with just one burner– but I missed baking (cookies, bread, pie, everything) terribly.

So last week I finally got around to buying a counter-top oven, the available alternative. It looks almost exactly like an American toaster oven, but on some kind of magical appliance steroids: it has bake and broil settings, and goes up to 250C. And, amazingly, it works. I made roast Thanksgiving chicken in it (my first roast chicken ever, no less) and apple pie (I bake a mean apple pie), and I couldn’t be happier. It’s quirky and has weird interface issues and is pretty small, but my silly Easy-Bake envy has finally been satisfied by this ridiculous yet effective little gadget.

This morning I finished the snickerdoodles (the power and water were out for three hours last night, so that didn’t work out so well), and handed them out to students and colleagues at work. Everybody seemed shocked that I would bake at home. I can’t wait to share more food.

Turkish Christmas Trees:

After proctoring exams this afternoon, I wound up going to the local mall with friends out of sheer desperation (my shoes were literally falling apart). It is The Place To Go for many people here– the two times I’ve been, I’ve run into big groups of my students– and whenever I ask classes what they did over the weekend, a good two thirds will say, “We went to Sanko.” It’s huge and– to me, at least– terrifying, though I don’t like malls to begin with.

Anyway. We walked in through the gates, and there, in the giant four-story-high atrium, was an enormous metal Christmas tree.

I think I laughed hysterically for a good several minutes. In retrospect, I’m not all that shocked– the idea of Christmas is understood pretty much anywhere American culture penetrates, and we certainly tend to promote a fun, gift-centered, food-centered holiday over the religious midnight-mass version. Without the religious tie-ins, there’s not really much reason not to celebrate Christmas for the fun of it. It was unexpected and shocking, though, and I was baffled and amused to see this wholesale adoption of what is– let’s face it– a bizarre holiday tradition to begin with.

It’s probably going to be a pretty surreal month.

Bayram begins tomorrow, and I’m excited for it. I pride myself on being at least somewhat better-informed than the average yabancı about Turkish customs and Islamic traditions, but I really have no idea what the experience of participating in the holiday (even in a limited way) is going to be like. Knowledge of history and practices and religious significance and whatnot doesn’t get me very far in anticipating the emotions of and reactions to the newness of a foreign custom, one entirely outside of my own context. I’ll be visiting with a friend’s family in Adana for the first two days, then traveling to some coastal Roman and Byzantine sites on the third, then stopping by northern Hatay on the fourth day on my way back to Antep. It’s exciting. And makes me a little nervous.

In an odd sort of way, Thanksgiving and Kurban Bayramı fit well in my mind. Both seem like celebrations, on some level, of having enough: enough to get through the winter, enough to give to friends and family, enough to indulge for a day or two in an extravagant feast and celebration of togetherness, enough that you don’t have to endure pain and hardship for a little while. Charity is central. Food and family are central. There’s more to it than that, of course, in both cases– but enough, and being grateful for it, is important.

So instead of one day to remind me to be thankful this year, I’m lucky enough to get five devoted to the idea. I’m thankful for my friends and my family, for the ability to live in this wonderful place, for my health and my happiness and my luck. I’m thankful for the warmth and generosity of my new friends here, for the challenge of my work, for the time that I have to see places and explore experiences so unusual for my peers. I’m thankful for everything I have, for my life, and for the reminder to think on it and appreciate it.

Happy Thanksgiving, and bayramınız kutlu olsun.

1: Roast chicken (turkeys are– ironically, I guess– difficult to find here) over a bed of potatoes and quartered onions, plus tiny onions cooked whole until sweet with slivered spinach and crushed garlic steamed over them as a side. Bread and butter. Apple pie (a lovely success, when I expected a pretty awful failure– I bake a mean apple pie, but the circumstances were not in my favor).

Which is how I came across this extraordinarily dismissive and condescending article on abstract public art: “Well-Behaved Street-Corner Sculpture.” The author’s point– which is more than a little incoherent, but we’ll get to that later– seems to be that abstract public art is inferior to “traditional” figurative and monumental public art, status courtesy of its lack of “values.”

Right. For some reason, I thought we’d all moved on already from that particular chestnut. Maybe back in the ’80s.

Granted, I feel like I should preface my reaction by saying I’ve got a weird relationship with abstract art. My father is an artist of the most decidedly not abstract sort (can you tell where the mural ends and the diorama starts in that last?), and that fact has colored all my experiences with visual art. My background is deeply rooted in an obsession with realism, and affection for abstract art took somewhat longer to arrive.

Those biases aside, though, I think I can objectively say this: This article is unbelievably condescending. Even by New York Times standards.¹

Outdoor art isn’t what it used to be. Once it honored heroic individuals and upheld values that whole populations could embrace. Today, excepting memorials like the Vietnam veterans wall, outdoor art serves rather to divert, amuse and comfort.

When you start off your review– editorial– whatever the hell function this article was supposed to fill– with an ostensibly objective statement (it’s not what it used to be!) slathered in that thick a layer of disdain, well, it sets a certain tone. The kind of tone that makes sentences like

Judging by the reactions of passers-by and their clambering children, this infectiously cheerful work [Franz West's "The Ego and the Id"] is a popular attraction.

sound like scathing dismissals of infectious cheerfulness and popular happiness.

This disdain is set against the backdrop of what the author, Ken Johnson, holds up as an ideal example of public art: the statue of William Tecumseh Sherman across the street from Franz West’s work. To be honest, I rather like the sculpture, as much as possible when you’ve only seen a picture; I’m a sucker for turn-of-the-century figure stuff. But Johnson’s paean to the piece and to the sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, makes my skin crawl a little. Apparently Saint-Gaudens “displays a kind of traditional skill and idealism that practically no one possesses anymore.”

Apparently it’s that traditionalism that’s really the problem, because he goes on to say:

The big problem for outdoor art is the absence of any consensus of values in our pluralistic, multicultural society. It’s hard to imagine a public sculpture of a hero today that would not be regarded by one faction or another as partisan. As an unscientific sampling of art in the public realm this summer confirms, contemporary outdoor art tends to offer unobjectionable, mildly decorative or entertaining and relatively empty experiences.

Let’s pause here for a second.

First, this guy’s holding up a statue of William Tecumseh Sherman as an example of a public sculpture blessed by a consensus of values, a piece regarded universally as non-partisan and worthy of honor. Sherman was certainly an excellent general, and very much admired. But he helped pioneer the involvement of civilians in modern warfare, championing the “scorched earth” idea. And after the war, when in charge of military affairs west of the Mississippi, Sherman pursued vicious anti-Indian policies, including mass buffalo killings to make the Plains lifestyle insupportable and calling for “vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.”

Maybe it’s just because I live in a, y’know, multicultural society, but I don’t find Sherman a wholly positive figure, whether or not the sculpture has artistic merit. The call for this to be an example of inspiring public art upholding American values is a little distressing.²

Second, I’m not convinced by the whole lack-of-public-heroes-in-modern-partisan-society line. Unless we’re looking for the easily acclaimed heroes who perform monumental services in everyday contexts (firefighters,³ teachers⁴), our public figures are no more controversial now than theirs were then. (I can think of about half of America that may have felt some controversy over that Sherman statue, after all.) Blaming differences of opinion on “pluralism” and “multiculturalism” is both argumentatively lazy and beside the point, and sets up an anti-multi-cultural (god, what a conglomeration) tone that’s fairly uncomfortable.

Ok, so we’ve established the bad taste in our mouths apparent by about halfway through the article. The rest of the piece is a lazy tour of scorn past several public art works in New York this summer, without much effort put into observation or criticism of any of them. Tara Donovan seems to escape relatively unscathed, which is good, given that she’s a wonderful artist (and a MacArthur genius award recipient). Her rolling, distorted landscapes of styrofoam cups, toothpicks, straws, pins, and plastic sheeting are fantastical and thoughtful; they actually achieve the “reminiscent of cells, organisms, natural world” -type praise that gets showered on so much abstract art these days. The article describes an installation of 2.5 tons of folded plastic sheeting, which Johnson concedes is “magical” (but also “more hallucinogenic than” the work of another artist dismissed in the piece as “psychedelic”).

“wall and door and roof,” part of a subgenre called “intervention” that I wasn’t previously familiar with and that Johnson brushes off as “one kind of public sculpture practiced by people who want to change the world … [that] subtly alters some existing structure to subvert perceived complacency,” doesn’t get off so lightly. The work apparently involves replacing actual aesthetic elements of City Hall with imitations (fake brick patterns, photocopied doors). Johnson calls it “feeble;” claiming that if the artist had gone further “it would have been something to see.” Wait, didn’t we just finish a big ideological statement about the “unobjectionable” nature of public art? I would have thought an attempt to “subvert perceived complacency” might go over well.

His parting shot, against a public social shelter and architectual/sculptural installation at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, claims that the piece “nicely exemplifies the inoffensive spirit of public art today” and calls it a “techno-primitive folly.”⁵ He seems to have been unable to find anything in particular to criticize about the piece, so he damned it with the faint praise (or anti-praise) of being “a treat for young, old, hip and square.”

All of which leaves the article (which ends on that limp note) feeling rather incoherent. In the opening paragraph, Johnson praises outdoor art in the old style, that “honored heroic individuals and upheld values that whole populations could embrace.” Yet he goes on to criticize contemporary public art for being “unobjectionable” and having an “inoffensive spirit.” Art that upholds values embraced by whole populations is, well, pretty inoffensive by definition– it’s praising exactly what everyone else is praising. If Johnson wants art of heroes and public values, he needs to stop complaining about “unobjectionable” so loudly.

Besides, if contemporary art were so unobjectionable, would Johnson be whining about it at length in the New York Times art section? I mean, he whines about Damien Hirst’s “Virgin Mother” in a parenthesis. His claim that “art lovers will be relieved” to hear the “hideous” statue has been removed leaves me wondering what flavor, exactly of “not inoffensive” he actually wants. Maybe most public art isn’t overtly challenging everyone’s sensibilities, but it’s bothering someone enough to engage with it publicly in the newspaper. In my book, that qualifies as getting over the “inoffensive” bar. Between the inconsistencies, the snide reactions, and the uncomfortable praise of “traditional” art, it’s completely unclear to me what Ken Johnson actually does want from his public art. Except, maybe, something less “those kids,” “these days,” and “on my lawn.”

1: Sorry, NYTimes, I love you, but it’s true.
2: And on top of that, there’s the uncomfortable dog-whistle-like feeling of this note:

On a recent sunny day there were lots of people on the plaza in front of the [sculpture of Sherman], but most were watching a group of athletic young men performing gymnastic dance feats to loud hip-hop music. It seemed a safe bet that no one there knew or cared who the man on the horse was or who made the sculpture that honors him.

Really? Really?
3: When they’re not involved in discrimination lawsuits.
4: When they’re not battling teachers’ unions.
5: And again with the awkward, uncomfortable stereotypes: “The whole thing resembles the roofing of a South Pacific king’s palatial hut.”