Eminent Kababish

One catches a vision of strange characters, moved by mysterious impulses, interacting in queer complication, and hurrying at last- so it almost seems- like creatures in a puppet show to a predestined catastrophe.

-The End of General Gordon, by Lytton Strachey, from Eminent Victorians

No, the preceding is not a synopsis of Voice of the Whip, although it could be, except for the sentence’s last word, which you should replace with “success”. For KhairAllah got us to Binban without losing any camels, without catastrophe, without drama, all arriving sound and relatively fat and ready for market. We had taken it easy, easier than Yousef who pushed his dabouka to the breaking point just so he could arrive a few days before us.

But I did in fact have a brush with General Gordon in Khartoum before heading out to Kordofan when I visited the National Palace and its famous outside staircase, on which it is said that he lost his life- and as repeated in the various painted and cinematic versions- and which post-independence has been opened for any Sudanese citizen to walk past and gawk at from the riverside. When I passed by, I was not thinking about spear wounds of the past but rather saddle sores to be. Forty days of friction sliding to and fro. No stirrups, so no posting up and down.

Along the trail, yes there had been plenty of “queer complication”- short on water, short on dhoora (millet flour, for making the Sudanese staple meal of aseeda cake), short on sugar, short on tea. You can hear the tension in the dialogue. “Why don’t you hurry up and saddle?” “Why don’t you fall in a hole?” Those subtitles were made by a BBC Arabic Unit translator, so I have no idea with what salty words the insubordinate drover Idris had in fact answered his impatient trail boss Yousef.

All I know is that General Gordon’s very last journal entry- December 14, 1884, “Arabs fired two shells at the Palace this morning; 546 ardebs [a Sudanese dry measure] dhoora ! in store…Now mark this, if the Expeditionary Force, and I ask for no more than two hundred men, does not come in ten days, the town may fall; and I have done my best for the honour of our country. Good bye.”- speaks to the same complication that we often faced on the trail. No dhoora, no dinner.

A cultural anthropologist's best informant is under ten

I sat by myself in the street until a boy of about eight years old passed by. I called him and said, “Who is your father?” “Abdallah al-Haj Ali.” “What’s your name?” “So and so.” “And your brothers and sisters?” “So and so, and so and so, and so and so.” And so we went on until the number in his household amounted to twenty three people, whereas his father had admitted only to eight.

-The Memoirs of Babikir Bedri, An Autobiography

It is hard to get names and relationships straight in some Arab extended families. Brothers can be full or from a different mother or unrelated but off the same wet nurse. Forget about daughters, aunts, and mothers. I was once introduced to the older sister of a man I’ve known for many years and she said, I met you and we talked a long time ago. I said, I don’t remember and she said, you came to my father’s house and sat in the men’s quarters and we talked through a crack in the door.

That’s why I liked to befriend the family’s youngsters. They didn’t look at you like you’d dropped in from the planet Mars and they talked to you like the simple-mind whose broken spoken Arabic you sounded like. But you could get a free vocabulary lesson from them, like playing a game of you point-and-they speak pictionary. As long as you could see it, they could say it. Donkey. Ear. Donkey ear. And most children had all their teeth, so that solved the problem caused by using the old and toothless as your word informants.

Babikir Bedri, an original companion of the Sudanese Mahdi and later an educator who founded what was to become Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman, had similar troubles in getting all the names in the household straight. His grandson Gasim is now Ahfad’s president and presides over his campus- quite a household it is- like a benevolent father figure.

And he is proud of his girls and knows most of their names. When I wanted some student interviews for an article I was writing, he waded into a crowd of them during their class change-over and pulled two aside. Tell me if you want others, he said to me. I’ll make them talk all you want. And he smiled.

Hanan, Visit Me Sometime

My name is Hanan Abdalla Abdel-Karim, aka Hanan Bulu-Bulu. My beginning was in 1983…[when I] recorded my first album Alamy wu Shagaya (My Pain and Misery)…During those years in the eighties, the Sharia law was in effect and because of it I ran into many problems with the authorities and had to answer for summons in different parts of the country and was subject to several arrests. I was fed up and had to leave the country.

-from the liner notes interview with Vik Sohonie in Two Niles: The Violins and Synths of Sudan, Ostinato Records

It was February 1984, the next to last year of Ja’afar al-Nimery’s dictatorship and his last gasp attempt to survive by imposing Sharia law on the whole country. The western provinces did not take kindly to this, being a place where merissa (millet beer) and aragi (date wine) drinking are commonplace. David and I were on the trail with KhairAllah at the head of the herd, and the other trail boss accompanying our camels once got so drunk that he fell off his mount. A long way down, but unhurt.

I had a small cassette player and some tapes that I played mostly for myself. I remember playing Ella Fitzgerald for a Southern Sudanese man named John- unlike another Southerner I once met, Bau from Wau, John was from Kadugli- who was Bashir abu Jaib’s buying agent Abd al-Wahab’s driver, sitting on the hood of the jeep, me trying to explain about the blues and scat. And once I played the Talking Heads’ Take Me to the River (“Take me to the river, drop me in the water, Push me in the river, dip me in the water”) over and over through the night after we jumped into a passing lorry upon reaching the Nile at Khilewa and tried to get to Dongola asap. It didn’t work, because we broke down long before reaching town.

But mostly I remember playing Hanan Bulu-Bulu’s Zurni Marra, Visit Me Sometime, much to the delight of the drovers while sitting at the night fire, running down my batteries, and now, only much later, do I learn that Hanan faced the same Sharia troubles as did we when drinking our merissa and playing- in a reworking of the Christian gospel-infused Reverend Al Green version- the heathen Talking Heads. If we had known, no doubt the drovers Mas’ood and Muhammad would have convinced KhairAllah to take her with us up the trail to safety in Cairo, where she ended up on her own anyway.

Delight Turbaned around my Head

There I was, cutting through a strange market crowd- not just people shopping for their salad greens, but beggars and butchers and thieves, prancers and Prophet-praisers and soft-sided soldiers, the newly-arrived and the just-retired, the flabby and the flimsy, sellers roaming and street kids groaning, god-damners, bus-waiters and white robed traders, elegant and fumbling…The day was fresher than a normal summer day, and I could feel delight turbaned around my head, like a Bedouin on his second visit to the city.

-The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away, by Bushra al-Fadil, from the collection The Book of Khartoum: A City in Short Fiction

Strange market crowds, how many I have pushed and dodged and cut my way through in countries where men wear turbans and when a woman appears in public the scene becomes even stranger than before. Big city markets are much stranger than village souks. I’m not talking about Khan al-Khalili, Cairo’s tourist trap, but rather like the old Bab al-Louk not far from AUC where I could walk past the live poultry stalls and learn twenty new and essential vocabulary words in five minutes. Gizzard, wing, neck, feather.

Or Souk Libya in Umdurman, where you could buy a camel, board the high clearance desert bus for El Obeid, or change a $100 bill into hundreds of thousands of Sudanese pounds.

My first walk-through of such a market was in Arequipa, following a step behind Emma Nunez whom I trailed as if I were her prized pet on an invisible leash, she explaining to her usual Andean Homburg-hatted Saturday lady vegetable vendors that I was her house guest, living in her son’s room for the summer to learn Spanish. She bought huge slices of orange squash and big-kernel corn, choclo, and various greens- I knew the cilantro from arroz con pato, which we ate at the Hotel Bolivar in December 1981 when we missed our flight to Arequipa and had to overnight in Lima- whose names I never learned, all for the simple condensed milk-based chowders- chupes, or sucks, she called them- she would make for supper after we had returned still full from our Sunday dinner in a picantería in Sachaca or Tiabaya where we’d have eaten the real deal, chupe de camarrones, a crawdaddy suck for which you had to really suck on those tiny Río Chili crayfish legs to get the meat out.

But those Sudanese markets were the best. I remember walking through the Dongola souk with KhairAllah after twenty days on the trail. I was wearing a rugby shirt and bluejeans and he a short riding tunic and loose pants, the araagi and sirwal which marked him to the townsmen as a real camel man, and the stall merchants all wore ankle-length gallabiyas which dragged in the street crud.

I wanted to buy fresh mint, sold in bunches and piled on huge green stacks of it. He said, better buy dried mint, crumbly and scooped from a gunny sack. Fooey, I said. I want it fresh. Everything green in the desert rots and goes bad, he said. Baayis, miserable. Everything dry, lives. Lazeez, delightful. He proved right the next day when my mint in the plastic bag went bad that fast and his mint lasted as many more days as I could stop myself from using it all in one pot of tea.

The secret police nabbed us and wanted to know by whose permission I was in Dongola. I showed him my journalist permit and passport stamps and he said they meant nothing to him. I told him I knew the prime minister’s family and he asked, so what? I showed him a letter of introduction from my host Bashir abu Jaib and he said, why didn’t you tell me that in the first place, and he let me go. So we went back to the trail and left Dongola and its market whose fresh green mint I thought about for many days after.

Dongola

Verily I say to you, No Prophet is accepted in his own country

The Pontic region to which Darius was leading his army is inhabited by the most ignorant peoples of all. For we cannot cite the wisdom of any nation there…nor do we know of any man noted for wisdom in the Pontic region other than Anacharsis.

Anacharsis went abroad and saw a great deal of the world, demonstrating great wisdom along the way, and on his return home to Scythia…he retreated to a place called Hylaia and here he celebrated…with a drum…But one of the Scythians saw him doing this and told the king…and when he saw Anacharsis performing these rites, he shot him with an arrow and killed him. And because Anacharsis had gone abroad and practiced foreign customs, if anyone even now asks the Scythians about him, they deny knowing about him at all.

-Herodotus, The Histories

When you go abroad and see a great deal of the world and return home and practice foreign customs there, beware if returning to a backward, ignorant, know-nothing place. Speaking a language spoken elsewhere, or seasoning your food with za’atar or pico de gallo or duck sauce, or climbing minarets and burning copal and ringing temple bells and flying prayer flags used to get you into a heap of trouble back home. Not anymore. In any small town America even more than in any big city USA you might hear Q’eqchi’ or Hmong or Somali spoken, buy goat necks or chicken feet or smoked eels at the butcher, or worship Krishna in a converted church or Allah in a basement room. If you are from Panajachel or the Plain of Jars or Puntland, that’s okay. If you are Norwegian-American from Duluth or Russian-Jewish from Teaneck or native Angelino from Long Beach, that’s okay too. And if you are Hmong-Norwegian-American or Somali-Russian-Jewish or Guatemalan-Maya-Californian, that’s even better. Yes, be a prophet in your own country. Any country. And don’t forget the hyphenated Gold’s, even its Rib Sauce certified Kosher for Passover.

sahel sounds

I ran across a music publisher called Sahel Sounds which remasters and re-releases music from West Africa like Mauritanian wedding songs and Polisario freedom anthems and helped to define now super popular Tuareg guitar music for western audiences. Their website’s sales page offers a one-off collection of field recordings on a pay what you wish basis.

Its track list includes sounds of Wolof grief, Niafunke clapping games, pinasse stevedores’ shouts from Mopti, murmurs while getting off a night bus at a rest stop in Douentza, karate practice and shortwave radio emissions from Gao, women’s mortar and pestle beats from Timbouctou, well singing from Chinguetti, and the chatter of phone card sellers in Nouakchott’s Cinquieme slum district. You can stream them all for free.

One buyer recommends it…”Alright, this is epic. If you want to drift over the edges of space and time, to hear voices from the liminal zone, to feel connected with the elemental, then this bizarre piece of work is the place to be. It's hypnotic and transcendent, and it's the perfect antidote to modern life. Dig deep. Enjoy.” I bet this guy never stepped foot in West Africa, for him to call street vendors’ cries and video game chimes “liminal”, “elemental”, “bizarre”, and “hypnotic”.

But even so, I know what he means. I came back from a camel drive from Sudan to Egypt with cassette recordings of the drovers’ tea time banter, the sounds (recorded with much difficulty and patience) of two different kinds of dromedary flatulence- “afeet”, a sharp report, and “fuswaa”, a slow hiss- and snatches of conversation and complaint around the camp fire. I thought they were gold and I played the well working songs for Alan Lomax. He said they sounded like Inuit throat singing. Boy was he wrong.

what is rare is not what everyone likes but rather what everyone ignores- Nicolas Landau, art collector

Naples’ Capodimonte Museum has 126 galleries with a few masterworks- by Masaccio, Bellini, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith and Holofernes- and 10 rooms on the way out dedicated temporarily to the exhibition “Deposito”- salon-hung paintings and vitrine-piled objects from its storerooms- a peek, a “cone of shadow” as the brochure puts it, at some of the 6,000 leftover pieces that are never on view, what everyone usually ignores.

Caravaggio’s Flagellation is the museum’s biggest draw and it hangs at the end of a long hall of connected dimly lit galleries with a spotlight on it so that when you turn the corner you see it from several rooms away telescoped into view. If a person wearing red walks in front of it, Jesus’ white flesh appears from a distance to bleed.

The Deposito exhibit’s brochure- calling the storerooms “closed universes, dusty undergrounds, impenetrable guardians…the cave of Ali Baba, the tomb of Tutankhamun”, in other words, the fine art equivalent of the city’s many many catacombs- goes on to challenge the visitor to make sense of these 1,200 pieces that have made it upstairs from the basement vaults.

The last panel reads “Some of you, already along the exhibition route, will have tried to weave a story, to draw a conclusion; others will have hypothesized new attributions for the works; still others, discouraged, indifferent or lazy, will have decided to abandon the thread of the story in disorder and without plot. Will it not be that history does not exist if not written, organized by historians, philosophers, professors, or museums?”

After walking my dogs off in the museum’s 15,000 square meters, more than the Uffizi which has many more masterpieces than here, I did not need the Capodimonte’s self-important curators to call me lazy if I chose to abandon the thread of their story. I could always refer later, when home, to the the Museum’s joint collection digitization project with Federico II University of Napoli, a school that had been on my mind whenever I drank acqua minerale naturale frizzante in that country.

Every bottle’s label must contain an independent laboratory’s chemical analysis of its contents and Federico II University seems to have that business cornered. Carbs, Protein, Fat, Sodium, Calories…that was the thread of the story I most wanted to follow. I would have loved to knock on the Chemistry Department’s door and ask for a tour of the many bottles- San Benedetto, Sveva, Potenza, Ferrarelle, Benedicta Prestige, etc- that had been sampled, shaken, titrated and tested there.

I had taken to using Tomas Nunez’s way of asking for the bathroom- i servizi idraulici, per favore- when in Italy. That would have been embarrassing, visiting Federico II and waiting to explode like a bottle of frizzante, asking for the toilet and being shown to the laboratorio. A deposito for leftovers, to be sure.

Andy Warhol’s Vesuvius, in the Capodimonte Museum, the same view as from its Belvedere

Screening Boccaccio '70 in Palazzo Margherita, Just Me

Francis Ford Coppola bought the run down Palazzo Margherita in Bernalda, one of Basilicata’s neglected hill towns, where his grandfather was born and turned it into a swank boutique hotel, the kind of place he wanted his children to return to again and again long after he was gone.

He is not yet gone but he was right. Sofia got married there and even better for a family of cinephiles he created a great movie room in the piano nobile’s reception hall, with black-out curtains, retractable chandeliers, and drop down screen. Coppola personally selected 200 films for screening, mostly classic Italian neorealist and post-neorealist, some on their way to being forgotten, some never released in the USA in their Italian versions. To see any one of them, all you have to do is ask. So I did.

I like Rossellini and De Sica, Visconti and Pasolini, and wanted to see Monicelli for the first time. So I saw two old favorites first, Francesco giullare di Dio and Il Decameron, I wanted to see La ciociara, from 1961, which we call Two Women and was Sophia Loren’s Oscar break through- she was the first to win Best Actress in a foreign language film- but Coppola only had an un-subtitled version.

So I saw it when I got home and was shocked by the last scenes of expressionist violence and sadness- so unexpected and raw in a work of gentle neorealism- and I read about the marocchinate, “the deeds of the Moroccans”, the mass rape and killing of civilian women and men in the Ciociaria countryside following the fall of Monte Cassino. The Italian government estimated 2,000-3,000 female victims aged 11 to 86 years old had been raped in a few days of mayhem by Goumiers (from the Arabic word “qawm”, meaning “people or tribe”), irregular troops from North Africa under loose and out-of-control French command.

Instead I saw the 1962 anthology film Boccaccio ‘70 with the short La riffa, like La ciociara, starring Loren, directed by De Sica, produced by Carlo Ponti, and with a milquetoast supporting actor playing against Loren’s busty broad- Jean-Paul Belmondo (a year after Breathless !) in Two Women and Alfio Vita in La riffa.

The Italian release had the Monicelli short- Renzo e Luciana, co-written by Italo Calvino- that the US version did not which I liked too, with modern office-as-rat’s maze scenes like what Jacques Tati played for laughs in Parade ten years later but that Monicelli played for poignancy- with the Italian gioia di vivere completely snuffed out of a young secretary newly married to a janitor in the same company, which they must keep secret because for a woman to marry in that company is a firing offense.

But to compare Two Women to La riffa is to compare cantaloupe to honeydew- Sophia Loren fills out her shirt so well that it seems impossible she can find any extra room to stuff and unstuff fat wads of lire in there, which she does in both films with gusto. Her weak counterfoils are not quite equals- Belmondo is an intellectual with his head in the clouds, Vita is a Mama’s Boy- but neither can stand up to her high-heeled sashaying self.

I must have spent ten hours in that screening room over two days, not a minute of them wasted, and the lights came up with a renewed taste for neorealism, for untrained actors and extras picked off the mean streets like Pasolini did, or picked out of the monasteries like Rossellini did, or picked up from random town carnivals where De Sica found his.

I like the story that Rossellini once shot a scene with Ingrid Bergman talking to a group of fishermen in Stromboli, using real fishermen, but he couldn’t get them to mouth nonsense words at the right times where the dialogue would later be dubbed in, so he tied strings to their toes and told them to say something whenever they felt a tug, and his assistant director pulled on the strings one by one, and it worked, sometimes with the fishermen swearing, but Rossellini got his shot.

Stromboli wasn’t on Coppola’s list but Viaggio in Italia was, which I also saw. Its scenes from Naples and Pompeii are great, made just ten years before I was there the first time when I saw the famous plaster dog. Was he awkwardly scratching fleas or writhing in pain from Vesuvio’s suffocating gas? And the car George Sanders and Miss Bergman drove? In the Colette story it was a Jag, in the film it was a Rolls. This time ours was a Fiat Panda. Theirs was a comfortable convertible. Ours, under-powered but good on curves.

The St. Martyrs of Otranto, or un'altra Campari Soda per favore

The fortified town of Otranto sits low on the back of the Italian heel like a blister you get from wearing new Florentine leather boots, as close as you can get across the Adriatic to Albania and the start of the Via Egnatia to Istanbul. English speakers may know it best from Horace Walpole’s gothic novel in which a father wants to marry his son’s fiancee, but its fame stems more from the year 1480 when 800 of its townsmen were beheaded by an invading Ottoman army. Their bones are still encased under glass in the cathedral and their still uncorrupted flesh is held in locked wood-fronted cabinets, so their degree of uncorruption must be believed unseen.

The martyrs were canonized en mass(e) by Pope Francis in 2013, a decision not without controversy, besides the fact that their individual names are mostly unknown so one must pray to the Martyrs- called “the victims of Islam” in one Italian newspaper- collectively. The move was forced upon Francis by the last minute decision of Benedict XVI, aka Benedict the Islamophobe, made the same day he dethroned himself from St. Peter’s chair.

One of the stated miracles required for their being named saints, in this case the return to health of a cancerous nun whose fellow sisters had prayed to the Martyrs, was challenged by her oncologist claiming she was cured the old fashion way with chemotherapy and radiation. Another basis for saintliness is that they be defenders of the faith, but documents from the time indicate they were war hostages killed because their overlord the cash-strapped King of Naples would not pay their ransom.

On a clear day they say you can see the Albanian mountains from Otranto’s harbor. It was cloudy during my visit, but very hot My legs were sore from walking. In the cathedral I was most impressed by the mosaic floor showing the Tree of Life growing from the backs of two African elephants, less by the four carved marble columns standing outside the Martyrs’ Chapel that recount their story, and least of all by the bones in the glass cabinets. I am facing hip replacement surgery next month and came to Italy to get away from all that.

I was happy to leave the chapel and head to a cafe table on the harbor side under an Aperol umbrella- Cinzano seems out of favor this summer- where I ordered a Campari soda. This one came mixed by the barman with a slice of orange in a tall glass. I prefer the ones I had in Naples that came pre-mixed in a volcano-shaped bottle for two euros, albeit a half size but still a nice visual companion to seeing Vesuvio across the Bay. I couldn’t see Albania from my table in Otranto but I did see the last of the tourist season’s bathers and sun seekers stripped for action on the town beach. Their flesh looked uncorrupted. My legs still hurt. But mirabile dictu, the Campari hit the spot.

Can you count all 800 skeletons?

can you see the beheaded martyrs?

Mamma Roma eats at Da Meo Patacca, the Earthman Boy at Tre Scalini

I remember Rome in 1965, five years after the two bit ham actor from California Remington Olmsted who had washed up in Cinecittà with sword and sandal roles in Ben-Hur and Barabbas opened a restaurant in Trastevere appealing to American tourists who wanted their waiters to sing and crack dirty jokes in Roman dialect. I ate there with my mother and brother and aunt and cousin. I remember we ate outside on straw woven chairs and had big helium balloons tied to their ladder backs. They looked good in the black and white pictures the restaurant photographer took.

A few years ago I told a Roman about my memory of the place and he laughed and said it was a tourist trap even back then. Owner “Sor Remy” as he was called when not getting credited billing as a Roman soldier on the big screen single-handedly invented the concept of the singing Italian waiter, in Rome! A bit like Mamma Leone’s in the Theater District and Adolph’s Asti in Greenwich Village, now both closed.

Mamma Leone’s brings to mind Pasolini’s film Mamma Roma, made about the same time as our dinner at Da Meo Patacca, about a former prostitute with a difficult son. We had rented a Checker cab in Paris and driven all the way to Rome, “two ladies and three children” as the night clerk at the Berkeley Hotel kept repeating to himself at 4 am in the funniest accent I had until then ever heard (“But the reservation says three ladies and two children, and you are two ladies and three children”) when we got to London on a late BOAC flight from New York.

My mother and aunt did not want to navigate Roman streets on their own in a Checker, so they picked up a hitch hiker on the city’s outskirts and asked him to drive us to our hotel. In broken Italian the two ladies and three children were taken to meet the hitch hiker’s wife in their apartment in a Fascist era building with a later conversation between hen-pecked husband and hell-to-pay wife no doubt like something out of the Mamma Roma script.

And something even stranger…My mother and aunt bumped into a lady they seemed to know from Texas travelling with her son who was a bit younger then me, maybe 6 years old, and when we all sat in the Tre Scalini in Piazza Navona he threw a fit because they didn’t have a hamburger- “hambuuguh” he pronounced it and we all laughed at him. The boy’s name was Earthman and he ran around the fountain of the Quattro Fiumi which contrary to what our mothers told us did not represent the Missouri River where we lived, just the Nile, the Ganges, the Danube, and the Rio de la Plata. I later saw them all.

Pasolini would have been amused by the Earthman boy’s Ugly American act. He could have cast him in one of his Trilogy of Life tales- say in the Decameron, as Masetto of Lamporecchio the pretend deaf mute who is forced to have sex with every nun in the convent because they know he will not tell anyone and finally when exhausted cries out, Enough!, is proclaimed God’s miracle- or even better in Salò, the 120 Days of Sodom. But then he would have had to stuff his face with that hambuuguh as carpaccio, raw and by the kilo, and laugh like an idiot, while the rest of us ate the Tre Scalini’s famous tartufo- “una storica golosità”- as if we were all civilized American gluttons.

Scheherazade was a grifter

But when the king took her to his bed and began toying with her, and was about to ———— her, she wept, and he asked, “What is the matter with you?” “Your Majesty,” Scheherazade replied, “I have a younger sister, and I would like very much to take leave of her tonight before dawn comes.” So he sent at once for Dunyazade and she came…Then the king arose and did away with his bride’s maidenhead, and the three fell asleep. But when midnight arrived, Scheherazade awoke and signaled to her sister who sat up and said “…please tell me some delightful story to while away the waking hours before dawn.”

-The Story of King Shahryar and His Brother

Much has been written about Scheherazade as the teller of these 1001 tales, about her masterful control over the Nights’ narratives and her command of embedding stories within stories, by either telescoping or cutting them short as if playing a strong fish on a weak line. But less is said about how she and her sister play with other things.

Dunyazade is both eye witness to her sister’s wedding night and ear witness to her plea bargaining for her life. Why is she intruding in the marriage chamber and why interrupting the king’s first night plan? Did he never feel there were three in his marriage, that he was an eavesdropper on his harem, not a husband to his wife?

Dunyazade asked her sister to change the subject from what the king intended to do, if not say, and their ruse lasted 1001 nights, long enough for her to bear two sons and save 1000 other maidens from their death beds. Fast talking, stalling for time, playing the long- 2 and 3/4 year!- con. In this Orientalist threesome, if Scheherazade was the grifter with a gun pointed at her head in her own bed, and her husband King Shahryar was the mark holding the gun, does that make Dunyazade the shill or the voyeur, or both?

Scheherazade puts Dunyazade to sleep, Edouard Richter

Don Quixote in Baku

We were a very mixed lot, we forty schoolboys who were having a geography lesson one hot afternoon in the Imperial Russian Humanistic High School of Baku, Transcaucasia…Professor Sanin was telling us in his flat and uninspired way…”Some scholars look on the area south of the Caucasian mountains as belonging to Asia, while others, in view of Transcaucasia’s cultural evolution, part of Europe. It can there be said, my children, that it is partly your responsibility as to whether our town belong to progressive Europe or to reactionary Asia.” …Then Mehmed Haidar, who sat on the back bench, raised his hand and said, “Please sir, we should rather stay in Asia”.

-Ali and Nino, an East-West romantic novel by Kurban Said, aka Lev Nussimbaum. Its authorship is contested by other competing claims between a German, an Azeri, and a Georgian

When Lev was allowed to go out [of his house in Baku], his favorite walks took him to the Asian quarter of town, with its mosques, its minarets, its narrow streets, and low houses…His identification with Islam and the Orient began there, when he was not yet ten years old. “To this day I still do not know whence this feeling came…I do know that throughout my entire childhood, I dreamed of the Arabic edifices every night. And I do know that it was the most powerful, most formative feeling of my life”. (quoting from his memoirs)

“The ship was like an insane asylum,” Lev wrote in his memoirs. “We sailed starving, freezing, and semiconscious over the waves.” He tried to distract himself by reading the only book they had with them, a Russian edition of Don Quixote. (on returning to Baku after having fled as a child because of political unrest)

-The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, Tom Reiss, a biography of Lev Nussimbaum

Baku in 1999 was a bit like La Mancha- with bowing oil derricks instead of spinning windmills, Persian lamb hats instead of barber basins worn on the head, and Soviet-era clunkers crowding new Mercedes sedans instead of rocines (nags) jockeying by Rocinante. I stayed in the Old City, the Icheriseher, in a rented room belonging to a vintage carpet restorer, not far from the Shirvanshah Palace and Maiden’s Tower. The other rooms were occupied by refugee families of the Karabagh war. The bathroom was down two flights, across the courtyard, and behind a half door. No light bulb. Remember to knock.

It was coming up on the Miss Azerbaijan contest’s final rounds, and because my landlord moonlighted as a fashion stylist of historical costumes, the courtyard was jammed with aspiring Dulcineas dressed in traditional brocaded gowns, their heads covered with conical and pillbox hats tied with primary-colored silk scarves. There was also a swimsuit and talent contest, if I recall. In 1999, Fatima Abbasguliyeva was the winner. That I didn’t remember, because I only stayed for the first walk-around, when the contestants twirled out front before the judges in evening gowns and high heels.

I never did hear a call to prayer all the week I stayed there. Maybe it was heard across the border in Iran, but not here in Azerbaijan. The Ceyhan pipeline was almost finished, running from the Caspian to the Mediterranean via Georgia and Turkey. A million barrels a day. That’s plenty of Allah Akbars for any country, whether in Europe or Asia.

If Marco Polo had Met Baron Munchausen...

Or did Marco fake the whole thing? A whiff of suspicion has lingered about him ever since…Even now, it is argued that Marco ventured no farther than Constantinople or the Black Sea and cribbed tales from more venturesome Arabs and Persians.

-National Geographic Magazine, May 2001

Having heard for the first time that my adventures have been doubted and looked upon as jokes, I feel bound to come forward and vindicate my character for veracity. (from the Preface)

Some years before my beard announced approaching manhood, or in other words when I was neither man nor boy, but between both, I expressed in repeated conversations a strong desire of seeing the world…(from Chapter 1)

When I was in service of the Turks I frequently amused myself in a pleasure barge on the Marmora which commands a view of the whole city of Constantinople, including the Grand Seignior’s Seraglio. (from Chapter Nine)

We at length arrived on the confines of an immeasurable desert- an immense plain extending on every side of us like an ocean. Not a tree nor a shrub nor blade of grass was to be seen, but all appeared an extreme fine sand mixed with gold dust and little sparkling pearls. (from Chapter 25)

-Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, Rudolph Erich Raspe, 1785

Factitious disorder imposed on self, also known as Munchausen syndrome…for cases of feigned illness not driven by a psychiatric disorder, see Malingering

-Wikipedia

Like the famous Baron, the persons affected have always travelled widely and their stories are both dramatic and untruthful.

-Regis Olry, Literature, Neurology, and Neuroscience

Did Marco Polo really fake the whole thing, as did Raspe in his tall written tales about the Baron, especially about his battles against the Turks in the two Russo-Turkish Wars, and as did the Baron himself in his own tall tales that once back home he told to his fellow German aristocrats, in the words of one of them who frequented his story telling sessions, in order “to ridicule the disposition for the marvellous that he observed in some of his acquaintances”.

So too Marco found a Venetian readership with a ready disposition for marvellous things of the East, egged on perhaps too far by his cellmate and co-author Rustichello da Pisa. And so too did the Nazis, under whom a 1943 film about the Baron’s Adventures- aimed at rivaling Alexander Korda’s 1940 film The Thief of Bagdad for its special effects in color- was made starring the actress and Third Reich-propagandist Ilse Werner as a princess kidnapped into the Seraglio, rescued by the Baron wearing a magic invisibility ring, and carried in his unseen arms past shrieking eunuchs and bumbling harem guards in a madcap Orientalist semi-nude slave girl scene. (For a nudier version, see Terry Gilliam’s 1988 film of the same name with Uma Thurman.)

As Egyptian folktales always end, I know because I was there and I just got back. But if spoken by Marco Polo, the Baron, or someone named Werner, don’t believe a word they tell you. Either they weren’t there and made it all up, or they were there but dreamt it.

Fraulein Werner rescued by Baron Munchausen from the hurma (protected women) in the harem

lyrics recorded where electric lines don't reach

Tape 6 Track 1 Take 6. Cifte Telli, For years you have left me alone to myself, my heart burns in your absence. You burn my heart, you threw into fire my head full of pains. [Recorded 22 September 1955, my 1st birthday] Take 7. The southern hot wind is blowing…etc. Track 2 Take 1. The spring has come again…Your hair is beautiful. Take 2. Are you tired? You astonish me. Take 3. Let’s go to Adana and have some fun. Take 5. The fortress of Estargon has a moat before it. My sweet heart has left it, with the absence of my beloved one, I am sad. Tape 8 Track 1 Take 1. Ceplikli, dance rhythm, periodic handclapping, interrupted by a donkey’s cry.

…this was the first time since I had been in Turkey that I felt that away from the half-Westernized cities there were still some places left where people were not ashamed to strike a rhythm on a drum.

-Translated lyrics and Recording notes, Deben Bhattacharya, The Desert Road

I know what it’s like to come upon a wayside bard singing in an incomprehensible language, knowing nonetheless that what he says is true but soon to be forgotten, and must be heard by others urgently. Out comes the tape recorder and he sings the song again. Her waist is not flabby but her hips are wide/Yet still just one hand can gird her buttocks riding high/By the life of the Prophet on a feast day!/Her gown shines brighter than the glow of dawn.

Back in New York, UN Arabic translator Khidr abd al-Razik, a Sudanese familiar with Kordofani dialects, told me exactly what Saeed had sung, and I was floored. All those weeks and miles in the desert, carrying such lyrics with me. Gold. Then Khidr said that the song’s following lyrics indicated Saeed was singing about his camel. Even better I thought.

Maybe Deben had a translator standing by in the field with him, more likely he had to wait until he got to the next half-Westernized city where someone bilingual might live. So he was like me a bit, although with better equipment and better field notes. Carrying unknown love lyrics in a bag, waiting until later to fully understand what they said, but knowing they will make everyone either laugh or cry.

We listened to Hanan Bulu Bulu’s song Zurni Marra til the tape wore out

What egyptian Dogs Do on Three Legs

We have ample testimony to her sense of humor; Cleopatra was a wit and a prankster. There is no cause to question how she read Herodotus’ further assertion that Egypt was a country in which ‘the women urinate standing up, the men sitting down.’

-Cleopatra: A Life, Stacy Schiff

So Herodotus made Cleopatra laugh. I wonder what he would have made of Elizabeth Taylor’s kohl-lined blue eye shadow shaped like bird wings and gold-beaded braids looking like cat-o’-nine tails. I bet he would have said something more about the wonders of Egypt, about eyes that fly and hair that hurts. That too would have made her laugh. And he would have taken one look at her sitting on that golden throne and said, Stand up and pee like a Queen!

I don’t think that most Egyptians I met in Cairo in 1978 had even heard the name Herodotus. A Greek?, they would have asked. You mean a Rumi- a word originating in Rome but broadened to mean anyone from the wider Greco-Roman Western world, such as a Ptolemy or an American.

Cairenes are known for their sense of humor because there is a survival imperative at work in that dog-eat-dog city- if you can’t beat ‘em, laugh at ‘em. I never got the hang of how to joke with Egyptians. I once called Ahmad, my building’s doorman, Abu Bawaaseer, Father of Hemorrhoids, when he went into the hospital for treatment, and he looked at me like I’d kicked him in the teeth. Not so funny after all.

I never got to ask him that riddle about what dogs do on three legs, so I can’t say if Cleopatra might have laughed at that one too. But I bet in any case she was a cat person, not a dog lover, so a peeing dog joke wouldn’t have rung her bell. But Egyptians all love Arabic language punning. So here is one for the post-hemorrhoidal Ahmad. If you eat ful (stewed beans, the Egyptian staple meal) like a fool, you’ll bul (pee) from your bowel. Sorry, Abu Bawaaseer.

Constantinople's panorama, dome by dome

The crystalline and prismatic forms of Sinan’s externally articulated domed mosques are often regarded as somewhat untypical regional offshoots of “truly Islamic” architecture…

-The Age of Sinan, Gulru Necipoglu

Melchior Lorck captured the sweep and swagger of Istanbul at its most imperious acme.

-Julian Raby, former Director of the Freer-Sackler Galleries, Washington D.C.

My first desire was to visit the Church of St. Sophia…it is indeed a magnificent mass of buildings…with its huge vault or dome in the middle…Almost all the Turkish mosques are modelled upon [it].

-The Turkish Letters, 1581, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Austrian Empire’s Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, in whose embassy the artist Melchior Lorck worked when in 1559 he produced a panoramic ink drawing, 11 1/2 meters wide on 21 contiguous paper sheets, of Constantinople’s skyline drafted in exquisite architectural detail, showing the domed articulations of the city’s mosques including the converted church Hagia Sophia, the Mehmet II aka Fatih (before it was destroyed and rebuilt in 1771), the Bayezid II, the Yavuz Selim, and Mimar Sinan’s masterpiece the Suleymaniye newly completed in 1557, drawn from a vantage point on the heights across the Golden Horn

The Ottoman-style domed mosque rules the world. Even many Saudi-financed mosques in the most remote places, especially in former Soviet Central Asian lands, are marked by the work of Hagia Sophia-inspired protractor and compass-wielding architects. That some art historians might have ever called this style an untypical regional offshoot of something truly Islamic seems hard to accept.

Tourists in Istanbul have many vantage points from which to see the city on either side of the Golden Horn or across the Bosporus. The Galata Tower is a good place and so is from the foredeck of any ferry crossing from Uskudar. But five centuries ago Melchior Lorck found the best place of all and it has been rediscovered in modern times by clever digital geometricians recreating his angles of perspective and lines of sight.

What they find is that in order to have seen the entire skyline, Lorck must have done what all tourists have to do in order to see it all- walk around a bit. By doing just that, you will find that domed mosques are everywhere. Non-domed mosques in Istanbul are rare, usually those that have been converted from Byzantine-era churches. Most converted churches in fact are domed as well, although perhaps nowhere as prismatic as those built intentionally as mosques with their half, quarter, and eighth fragmented domes adjoining a central dome.

Better than Istanbul’s Greek domed churches-turned-mosques are other Greek and Roman era structures. The Valens Aqueduct running almost one kilometer and spanning the city’s Third and Fourth Hills is to the right of the Bayezid II Mosque, over Lorck’s head in the drawing. It is a long walk between the Hills but worth the effort in order to see how the two mosques that dominate each Hill, the Fatih and the Bayezid II, can be so similar despite having been built 250 years apart. As Lorck knew, such pile-ups of dome upon dome are not regional offshoots of any other style, but rather a style all their own.

A middle page from the 21 page wide panoramic view of Istanbul’s skyline, showing the artist Melchior Lorck at work

Bayezid II Mosque