the cassandra pages

Sheep's Eyes

Stone carving and colored pastework from an historic house in Damascus, Syria, from Damascus: Hidden Treasures of the Old City, by Brigid Keenan (Thames & Hudson)

A little while ago, Language Hat posted a question about a phrase identified as Persian, basa basa:

The Arabic phrase “basa basa” means to ogle, cast amorous glances or make sheeps' eyes at someone [is it Persian? Arabic? Arabo-Persian?]

I'm always looking for good conversation topics with my father-in-law, so when we had lunch with him a few days later, I asked him. "In Persian - and we borrow this from them - bas means "enough" - you know, that's what you'd say when your host is coming around with the pastries and tea for the third time." (That was exactly what my Persian friend, Shirin, had told me.) "But basa basa...well, let's get the dictionary."

He sent me to the lower section of one of the bookshelves, behind the teetering tray-table with its precariously balanced arrangement of dried flowers, books, papers, and the perpetual-motion clock he picked up last year from the bargain room at the retirement home ("It's amazing! You never need to wind it and it doesn't even have a battery!") "There." He pointed at two large volumes bound in old red leather. I handed the first one to him. He smiled happily as he took it into his hands. "This is a treasure," he said. "The best Arabic dictionary there is." He began scanning, turning the pages with his long fingers and saying words out loud. He wasn't finding anything that satisfied him. I went into the kitchen and drew some water, and went out onto the balcony to water his plants. "Making sheep's eyes, you said?" he asked. "I'm just trying to see if there's anything here that could serve as a root word for that...but it's not anything familiar to me."

"OK," I said, after a while, "let's give up," and we talked of other things. In another half hour, my husband and I thanked him for a good visit, and went home.

As I was making dinner that evening, the phone rang, and my father-in-law's excited voice was on the other end. "You didn't say it was bas bas!" he said, repeating the phrase in a way that, to my ears, sounded identical but obviously wasn't. "I was sitting at dinner and thinking about it and saying it over and over to myself, and then it came to me all of a sudden - you see, in Arabic we have two "s"s. There's the English-kind of S, like "Sam"and then there is the other "s". This is the other one. It's called "sah" and when you say it the tongue comes up to the roof of the mouth." He demonstrated. I tried to repeat after him, and failed, as usual. But I was happy that the mystery seemed to be solved.

"Oh!" I said. "That's fantastic! Good for you! Now, what does it mean?"

"It means to look at someone....illegally," he said, drawing the word out to its full length and clearly enjoying himself. "In a way designed to cause trouble, to make people talk." In a society where young unrelated men and women weren't even supposed to look at each other in the eyes, I could well imagine what he meant. He laughed, thinking back. "We used to say it all the time."

Quiet Happiness

Today I went over to the local big bookstore, in search of Orhan Pamuk's "Istanbul", but instead I found myself with his novel "Snow" - which I've also wanted to read - in my hand. I was ready to leave, and then I turned back to the in-store computer which had helped me locate "Istanbul" (shelved in the Middle East History section.)

"Maybe I'll just look my book up and see if by any chance it's come in," I thought to myself. I typed and clicked, and to my surprise, it said, "In store. Church History and Theology." Somewhat mechanically, I followed the aisles down to the religion section, and started scanning for Church History. There was the section, yes, alphabetical by author, OK, up on the wall to the left, there are the "A's" -- and there it was. My heart did a little flip, and then I stood there and stared, very quietly, without moving.

It was a happy moment when my publisher handed me the first copy of my book, in Columbus, Ohio, this spring at General Convention. But it wasn't the thrilled-to-the tips of-my-toes sort of feeling I've heard other authors talk about, nor did I expect it to be. J. and I had designed the cover, and I had already looked at a lot of page proofs, so the visual appearance was no surprise - plus, I've spent my professional life designing things for print, and holding the final copies isn't a new experience for me - in fact it's often accompanied by a huge sigh of relief that the whole production process is finally sucessfully over. I was also in the throes of recent grief. When the box of books arrived on my doorstep a few weeks ago, that was a little anticlimatic, because I had already seen them in Columbus and then again in Montreal. I didn't really have any feeling of unfulfilled anticipation and excitement today...but I guess I was meant to feel something extra-special sometime, and this was when it happened.

Maybe it was because I was all alone, browsing in a bookstore - that most ordinary and familiar place, but one that still retains a kind of magic for me. There is always some sense of quest, or of finding something I don't expect at all; of appreciation for the works on the shelves; and of being in a place where, from a young age, I've always cherished a small hope of finding a work of my own on the shelf too. There, today, it was.

I stood, and looked, and thought. And then I reached up and took the book - one of two copies - off the shelf, and placed it facing out. I stepped back, and looked for the first time at the other books keeping it company, to the right. Only two other authors in all the rest of that short shelf: St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Augustine. I had to smile at that. Then I just looked a little bit longer, wrapping up the memory of something that has never happened before in my life, and will never happen to me in the same way again. And then I walked up to the counter and paid for "Snow."

Internal Combustion

We left the city at about 2:00 pm, driving through a local rainstorm, then stopping under blue skies at a farmstand outside Iberville for sweet corn, green beans, strawberries, a big cantaloupe. As we approached the border crossing at St. Armand/Highgate the traffic got heavier and we could see a long line piled up at the booths, so we turned around and headed for St. Armand and the little border crossing one road over to the east.

The land there is beautiful and gently rolling, as if the earth started shrugging after its long flat sleep in the glacial floodplain that stretches for 60 miles on both sides of the St. Lawrence. Cows and sheep grazed in the pastures dotted with round hay bales; tassled cow corn, still green, stood awaiting the frost six weeks from now that will signal cutting time; Jay Peak and the northern end of the Green Mountains stand tall and blue in the distance. We arrived at the small customs station, and went through quickly after answering the obligatory questions from a friendly agent - "Bringing anything back with you besides the corn? Any hamburger? Tropical fruits?" - and then rejoined the interstate above St.  Albans.

There was traffic everywhere. Why? It was a Thursday afternoon; not a holiday, nor a holiday weekend. We stopped and put $30 worth of gas in our car, a 10-year-old Saturn that gets about 36 miles to the gallon. Cars and trucks are, on average, shrinking a little bit, we think, but here were SUVs and campers, Winnebagos, big pickup truck - how do people afford it? And so many cars, so much road construction. J. drove through the mountains; I fell asleep and woke to see Camel's Hump, the iconic Vermont mountain, off to the right, its summit still unspoiled. I fell asleep again.

We got home around 5:45, having waited in construction for half an hour, all told. The lawn mower died the last time we were here; it was at least twenty years old. J. doesn't want to buy a new one, but he called around to see what was available. He called the Wal-Mart in a nearby town and asked if they'd be open this evening. "You betcha!" said the boistrously perky voice. "We're 24/7!!" J. seemed a little in shock: were coming from the place in North America that probably has the least number of business hours in a week, after all, to the one with the greatest number.

"So if I want to come down and buy a lawn mower at four in the morning I can do that," he remarked, dryly.

"Absolutely, sir!" the cheery voice continued. "They may be chained up outside, but we can unchain them for you! Glad to be of service, sir!"

We had a glass of wine and boiled some corn; somehow I just don't think he's going anywhere.

New Pleasures

Modal Minority is the new blog of Teju Cole, and it boldly continues the excellent writing of that author, so sorely missed by this reader and many others. This time around, Teju is talking particularly about the arts and culture of the Global South, very broadly defined, and he moves with seeming effortlessness through the realms of literature ("The Writer's Changing Position"); art ("Portrait of an African Man"; music ("World Music"), stopping off every now and then for a personal reflection, or a visit to one more soccer-watching venue in Manhattan. Welcome back, Teju -- and I hope your readers will delve deeply into your wonderful writing and beautiful new site, adding their comments which are always such an important part of your blogs.

And it was through Modal Minority that I found two other excellent blogs (oh, for more hours in the day!) First, the quirkily eclectic reportage of 3qarksdaily, where I've been reading lately about the recent Fields Medal winners and Grigory Perelman's work on the Poincaré conjecture (here and here). (I had a math-major boyfriend once, and have never been quite the same since.)

The second blog is the prolific literary and political commentary of Elizabeth at verbal privilege, who often writes about Near East/Middle East topics that interest me a great deal. I'd especially like to recommend yesterday's "Jet Blue Can Kiss My Skinny White Teez", and, from August 13th, "Some Lebanon Readings" -- but there is much more here to explore and consider.

Temporarily Lost

The other night we decided to go to the movies - we wanted to see a new film called Bon Cop, Bad Cop, about a Toronto cop and his Montreal counterpart, that has become quite a hit in Québec. It was playing only at the AMC Forum, a movie theater complex built in the old forum where the Montreal Canadiens used to play. We both hate it - there's no ambience whatsoever; just plastic, escalators, bright colors, fast food, and the smell of popcorn. And when we fed our debit card into the automatic ticket machines, the price came up: a whopping $13.00 for each ticket. "I'm sorry," I said, looking at J. "That's just too much."

"I agree with you," he said. "Let's get out of here," and we left, taking a quick look at some large photos that showed the old forum being gutted, and then  a slow look at the brass plaques commemorating championships won by the Canadiens, embedded in the sidewalk at the front entrance.

We'd ridden our bikes over, past downtown and the Concordia buildings, stopping for dinner at the Iraqi-run cafe we like, which had been served by a shy, pretty young woman wearing a hijab who smiled at me, big dimples showing in her cheeks. It was only 7:15, on a beautiful clear evening, so we decided to take a slow ride back home along the waterfront, heading down Atwater to pick up the bike path along the Lachine Canal, and then riding through the Old City and back up to the Plateau. It was a fine plan but J. wanted to show me something that he thought was to the west of Atwater, so we turned right on St. Antoine and went west, and then west some more, and then south, thinking we'd hit the river soon, but we didn't, and then we rode some more, and finally went through a tunnel, which wasn't the Atwater tunnel but one to the west of it. Except we didn't know that. We could see where we were, basically, and we knew where we were, basically, but that didn't mean it was simple or quick to get back to the bike path. After a long, circuitous ride we did, much further west than we'd planned, and then we rode along the canal and through the old port, and then up the long hill back home, arriving around 9:30. We hauled out the maps and and studied them to see what we'd done wrong, and it was then that J. remembered he'd had his PDA in his pack all the while, and could have easily consulted the maps in it.

The thing is -- we hadn't been tired, or in any danger, and it had been sort of fun to be kind of lost, and to have to figure it out. We had cell phones if we'd needed them, but we didn't. What we needed were our brains, and good humor, and some nice weather, and some time - all of which we had. It had been an adventure, and we'd learned something new about the place we live in, seen some different neighborhoods, gotten some extra exercise. All good.

And tonight, in a few minutes, we're heading out again...

August

Where I grew up, classes weren't assigned "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" essays because very few of us went on summer vacations. For the townies, vacation maybe meant a trip to Cooperstown, or a drive through the Adirondacks, or a few days up in the Thousand Islands, but no one's family had enough money for a trip to Europe, let alone Disneyland. For the rest, there was the farm work to be done. Free time meant fishing in the creek or part of an afternoon lazing around in the upper fields, far away from the barn and the relentless pace of chores and haying and milking which would start up again before suppertime. My family had a camp on a lake, which was unusual enough that I shared it with my close friends and didn’t say much about it to others. The idea of being sent to Europe for the summer was so foreign to me that I’d never even met anyone like that until I was in college.

We still don’t take summer vacations, unlike the French, who close shop for – it seems – the entire month of August. Our neighbors seem shocked and concerned when they ask where we are going for our vacances and we say “nowhere.” We’ve gotten so used to that reaction now that we reassure them, saying we’re planning to do something in the fall or winter. Of course, they take a winter vacation too! It’s part of their approach to life: that there is a time for work and a place for rest and rejuvenation – without guilt. They’re right, but it is a hard lesson to learn, or perhaps we should say that past patterns are difficult to un-learn.

 

So in lieu of a formal vacation (our upstairs neighbor just left for Rome, for a month), this summer we’re trying to take days off here and there, and really take them off. Yesterday we went down to Isle la Motte, in Lake Champlain to visit some family and friends who were having a birthday celebration. On the island, which was warm and windy and beautifully blue, we explored the oldest fossilized coral reef in the world; hung out on a wide, time-slowing porch and in a veritable paradise of a vegetable garden; petted cats, dogs, goats and horses; paddled kayaks and went swimming in the cold lake; drank even colder vodka and local beer and ate steak and garden bounty and squishy chocolate cupcakes; and then drove home as the starry sky gradually gave way to city lights, feeling – yes, undeniably – rejuvenated.

But now I'm curious: what did YOU do in the summers, when you were, say ten?

Cutting off those Short Shorts

The summer edition of qarrtsiluni, "Short Shorts," which Dave Bonta and I have been editing, will be closing submissions on August 21 - so if you've been thinking of sending us 100 words or less of previously-unpublished prose or poetry (as we hope you have), you have slightly less than one week remaining. The journal is also looking for visual artists to respond to the theme or to the texts, either spontaneously or by invitation after a portfolio review.

This has been an extremely rewarding theme to edit, and we've been delighted to publish some absolutely wonderful contributions, many by people who have never appeared at qarrtsiluni before. It's been difficult to decline some good work as well, but the editors do try to engage and encourage contributors, even when their work is not published. The most recent posts - by Ernesto Priego, Mikey,  Bill, and Dick Jones - all illustrate the breadth and quality I'm talking about. So take a look, be inspired, and consider sending your best work before the deadline.

Idle Words from China

Maciej is in China. I haven't figured out how, or why, yet, but he's there and writing about it, and I recommend that you go over and read a few of his inimitable posts. Here is a map and a list of posts whcih doesn't appear to be complete or updated. A sample from the first one, "Inoculated:"

For my money and my pains I got the four shots and a thick sheaf of papers describing the dangers I will face in China. Assuming the painful traveller's diarrhea ever abates enough for me to leave my hotel, I am liable to have my pocket picked, my Bible confiscated, be sold fruit juice that has been diluted with infectious tap water, receive counterfeit change from my taxi driver, be enticed into following a young woman to a secluded location where her accomplices will beat me senseless (no doubt stealing the counterfeit change) and have parasitic larvae burrow into my skin as I lie unconscious in the mud.

I recommend the three most recent posts on the main page: "The Five Friendlies," about the cutsey Olympic mascots and the author's own nominations for the same titles; "Dirty Old Town," about Beijing pollution; and the amazing "I Spy", wherein our hero has a run-in with the authorities. No national culture is sufficiently inoculated against this observer's pen, with its Szymborska-esque combination of sarcastic wit, detached Eastern-European irony, and technical brilliance. I cringe at times, but can't stop reading.

Fromagerie

We are back in Montréal after yesterday's long rambling drive through the Quebec farmland. We went around the normal large crossing, and through a small border station, hoping to avoid weekend lines. It's never bad in this direction, but going into the U.S. can be. To our astonishment, the lines at U.S. customs stretched for half a mile; people were out of their cars, leaning on them, talking, pacing, looking annoyed and tired -- they told us they had already waited an hour. We breezed through the other way, feeling fortunate and outraged and ashamed all at the same time.

We found ourselves on a small road that wound through cornfields and past widely-spaced farms. Then we spotted a rough, handpainted sign, Fromagerie, with a painted cheese on it. A friend who lives on one of the islands in Lake Champlain had mentioned a cheese shop just over the border before, saying that the cheeses had won many awards. We pulled into the lane, went half a mile, turned left - and there, in the middle of nowhere, was a parking lot full of cars and a line of jovial people, each holding a number, and waitng their turn to enter the tiny shop. We listened to them chatter in French, and pretty soon I struck up a conversation with the woman in back of us, who seemed willing to tolerate my lack of fluency, and she told me a good deal about the cheese and other attractions of the immediate region.

The shop was unexpected and amazing. Tiny, it held a display of European chocolates and another of Héro jams and jellies, but the real attraction was a single refrigerated dairy case filled with wheels of beautiful cheese, some in wax and some with a natural rind, some in small rounds, others in large wheels designed to be cut into pieces -- and the whole presided over by three attractive young women in white coats and the straight-sided pillbox-style hats that fancier food-shop workers wear here. At least twenty different kinds of cheese were listed on the handwritten sign behind the counter.

The three young women barely had room to stand more than shoulder to shoulder, but they had a finely-tuned system in which two of them alternated giving tastes of the various products, answering questions in fluent English, French, and German, taking the orders and cutting the cheeses. The third girl wrapped the cheese in special waxy paper, added labels from the rolls hanging on the back wall, and completed the financial transaction. The middle girl - tall, blonde and Germanic - left the counter for a moment and came back through a side door bearing an armload of cheeses, as much as she could carry: each wheel was about a foot across.

Then it was our turn: we asked for tastes of five or six, and chose a strong semi-soft goat cheese called Noyan, for the nearest town; a milder semi-soft cow's milk cheese called Haut-Richelieu, for this region above Lake Champlain and near the Richelieu River; a slice of their famous Douanier, a morbier-style cheese with a thin line of blue mold running down the middle; a piece of raclette studded with green peppercorns; and a small round of their signature camembert, L'Émperateur. The bill came to $20.00 Canadian; I was expecting to pay twice as much. "You should see the line at Christmas," the woman whispered, and gestured to show me that it went all the way around the factory-building. "If you're interested, there is a place nearby that sells very good homemade saucisses..."

Outside, a family was passing a bar of chocolate around the interior of their car as it pulled out of the parking spot, and the line to get into the shop was getting longer. We determined that we would come back soon, and, foregoing the sausages and nearby vinyard, made our way back to the main road, past the cows that made the milk that made the cheese.

A Summer Evening

Last night we had dinner with New York friends, a sixty-ish couple, up for a month in her country house, off in the hills of Vermont; a beat-up two-hundred-year-old place with great charm. The wife's aged mother was there - a little bent bird, wearing flowered pants and a yellow fleece jacket, and silver Navaho combs in what was left of her wispy hair - and we lifted her into the front seat of the pickup truck, while the rest of us piled into the back, and drove nearly straight up, it felt, banging against each other, through the mown fields of the hill behind their house to the top of the pasture, where we set up chairs and had drinks and camembert, and spoke about the events of the year since we had seen each other. The mown hay was ringed by copses of thorn-apples from which deer no doubt watched, and taller maples and oaks; hawks cried overhead, and crows, and in teh far distance was the whirr of trucks on the interstate, but all you could see were hills solidly covered with green trees, and the far mountains, blue, and three houses in all of that expanse of green: their own and two others, white rectangles a long ways away.

The elderly woman had been an actress on Broadway in her youth, and then had a radio show of her own, before marrying and working with her husband, an architect and planner. They had been married more than sixty years, and he had been dead now for ten. She didn't speak much, but she listened to the conversation and followed as much as she could with her failing ears, and when she smiled you could see that who she was still strongly existed. The couple's son was there, too, a boy of 17. As the sun went down and the air became cool, we all realized we'd have to leave that place soon, and we fell silent. Then the old woman spoke, in a clear flutelike voice: "We are so fortunate to be together here in this beautiful place," she said, "with all the suffering in our world today."

Dinner was a milky fish chowder, with thick slices of homemade white bread and fresh corn. We ate at the solid, square farm table on the back porch, with candles and lanterns lighting our plates and an electric heater warming our feet. Just as W. brought out a warm blueberry pie, and ice cream, and a bowl of freshly-picked red raspberries, the moon suddenly appeared over the black hill above the pond: round and white as the old china dishes from which we ate. We sat back then, with the last of the wine, and talked about New York in the early part of the century, and the debates over the highways that now define the paths in and out of the city - concrete and steel stories written by strong personalities well known to the elderly mother - and we told stories about travel to other countries during gentler times.

It grew colder, and the heaters no longer seemed quite warm enough. "Is it time to go in, Mother?" W. asked, and her mother said she supposed it was. "Her birthday is soon," W. said, getting up. "September 7th. She'll be 99."

"It really doesn't seem possible that I have lived this long," her mother acknowledged, smiling slightly ruefully, slightly mischievously, as her daughter helped her rise to her feet. Her two bony, gnarled hands grasped the table. "It was a great pleasure to meet you," she said, looking first at my husband and then at me: this, I thought, was a lady.

"I will look forward to seeing you here next summer," I said, smiling back at her, and she graciously said she would look forward to that too, and, with her daughter's arms around her, disappeared lightly through the doorway.