7th September 2006, 10:13
Uli is doing his military service now. He is in Urfa and this is the last week of training. After this week, he will go to his place for next five months. I have got several e-mails from him in recent weeks. He keeps warning me about the military service. He says “do not come to military service if you have a chance to do it in other way”. He means ‘one month military service for the Turkish citizens who work abroad and can pay 5000+ Euro for being exempted from 6 months service. He warns me about the irrational activities during the military service. “One doctor is picking grass all day” he says with some humour in his words. They don’t care how many schools you have finished, how many languages you can speak or how many years of experience you have in international institutions. Everybody is equally worthless! (From Kubrick’s movie ‘Full Metal Jacket’) However, I still want to do my military service fully, without paying the money. I don’t know why but anything except teaching seems attractive to me. I did not do any other job in my life. Since I have known myself, I have been teaching Math/Physics etc... I am not bored of teaching. I definitely still enjoy teaching because it is always rewarding. One can learn a lot from students while teaching to them. But still, I want to do something different, something I have never done before! It is like being attracted by other colours. If they force me to pick the grass or dig a hole at the middle of nowhere, I will do it. I will try to enjoy although it sounds difficult. Somehow, physical jobs seem attractive to me. I want to be away from academic people for a while. I want to do things for which I don’t need to use my brain. I might get bored within a month but I am ready for that. It is another way of learning about simple people and simple lives. After 7 years of professional teaching, anything different seems enjoyable. I will go to military service and do it like many other Turkish citizens. Then, I will have right to live in Turkey without any problem. I still did not get an answer from Uli for my last e-mail which says the similar things I have written above. He has permission only Sundays and he can use internet only on that days.
I read Mc Ewan’s second book last week. The Daydreamer is actually a “meta-story” about a child story writer. With its narration method, it reminded me Mark Haddon’s novel ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time’. Here there is a child and he daydreams amazing things which grown-ups can not even imagine. His world does not have limits unless someone wakes him up from his voluntarily-set-up dreams! The reason I call it a meta-story because it has the roots of future stories same as it introduces us a child writer who will definitely be a great writer. The relationship between child and grown-ups is similar to his stories and grown-ups’ stories in the sense of root-tree relationship. It is definitely not a child book and it has deep understanding of children’s world. I am amazed with his conceptualization of time for the children. We were all children and it is impossible to remember all the details of our childhood. It is because we were happy when we were children and time was not something we measure; it was something invisible and immeasurable. We did not care about time; neither had we cared for food or money! Peter (the boy in the story) tries to understand the world of grown-ups. One day, he imagines he himself becomes a grown-up and see how difficult to have sense of time, food and work! At the end, I really enjoyed reading Mcewan and I will definitely read more from his books in the near future. After ‘Enduring Love’, this little book proved that he is really talented.
I started another book yesterday. ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’ by Tracy Chevalier is the second book from the same writer. I have read ‘The Girl with the Pearl Earring” several months ago in Thailand. This is another historical novel on an artist (a miniaturist) who lived 17th century. Actually, the story reminds me Pamuk’s ‘My Name is Red’ and it seems their plots are very parallel. An authoritative person in the society orders some magnificent tapestries to celebrate a certain event for their family. Then, story develops around love, hate, betrayal etc… In Pamuk’s novel, the sultan was the one who orders a miniature book cover from the best miniaturists of Ottoman Empire. Pamuk worked on this novel for 3-4 years to complete since there are so many technical details in the novel about the art of miniature. I will write about Chevalier’s novel later. Here is a link for The "Lady and the Unicorn" tapestry at the Cluny Museum in Paris.
Two weeks ago, we went to Mekong Delta. It was very smooth trip if we don’t count our tour guide. He was amazingly talkative. It was ok if he only enjoys talking but he also forced us to listen to him. There was a South Korean girl in the bus. She was sleeping during his speech and he walked toward her and woke her up because she had to listen to him. The things he mentioned were usually the things almost everyone knows by general knowledge. He asked people many times ‘do you know honey? , do you know banana?, do you know bee? etc.. Actually I was laughing since there was nothing else to do. He just wanted us to take him granted as tour leader and respect him. If he kept quiet, we would have done it definitely. Here there is a link for some of the pictures from that trip:
I will write about the movie “Contact” tomorrow. I watched it yesterday on TV. It made me think about Math, Science and God again…
Merhaba Ali,
YanıtlaSilService in the army strikes different people in different ways. I had a friend who went into the service and on leave he told me, "Al, if you can avoid it, don't go. They will have you sweeping down a driveway with a toothbrush, and you will go nuts." He new me well, and he was probably right. I was lucky. It was during the Vietnam war when people were inducted by lottery, and my number did not get drawn. My friend Sedat, here at the pansiyon, followed my advice and said he knew something about computers and could type -- and he got a good office job, in which he trained his superior officer in the job each time there was a change of command. Emin got to work as a kind of protocol officer and interpreter, which he enjoyed. If you make your talents and abilities known, they will probably be used. The army is short of competent, intelligent, educated people.
The Daydreamer sounds like an interesting book, told from a child's perspective. Jesus said, "Only as children can you enter the kingdom of Heaven." Innocence coming in collision or contact with the adult world can produce strong insights.
Your Mekong Delta guide sounds like a real pain in the ass. Too bad.
I think your impulse to junk the accounting information was sound. Streamline and simplify your life. The MBA program, while cheap, is a trap for you, taking you away from writing and teaching. If you want to be a functionary in a corporation, then go for it. But again, I think you are wise if you skip it.
The "d"s that your keyboard won't type, and the stream of them that it puts out unsolicited, are fascinating. Maybe the universe is trying to tell you something, and the first letter of the word is a "d". D for desist, d for drop it, d for "dana", giving, the first of the Buddhist virtues. I think it is all of those. You have dropped or stopped some things, and as a teacher and a writer you give from your heart and mind.
Best wishes,
--Allan