Thessaly's Tooth

A couple of days ago I was lying in my room semi-napping when I heard the assistant director of the excavation come in and say “In five minutes, we learn about the stones. Tell everyone.” A few minutes later, one of the women staying in the other room came in and repeated to my roommates and I, “In five minutes, we learn about the stones.” I had no idea what this meant, but I dragged myself groggily from my bed and five minutes later went outside, where a truck was driving away and people were walking towards the building. It was too late, the stones had already gone.
I was completely unsure whether or not I had dreamed the whole sequence, but apparently it was real: were were to learn about the concrete markers were are going to use to more permanently mark the spaces were were marking with our bodies yesterday.
Today, I spent the morning watching other people dig holes. A good part of this I spent sitting on a chair in the shade in the village, where some very nice ladies gave me Turkish coffee, and children taught me some Turkish. “Sonliarda oturiyorum”: “I am sitting in the chair.” Hopefully I’ll get a picture of this on Flickr soon. The holes were for the concrete markers, the mysterious “stones” of the other day, and I did do about 15 minutes or so of work on that process.

Today was the first full day at the site of Zincirli, and as I noted on the pic on Flickr, my job was to stand in one place (two different, actually, for two different points) so we could check if it could be seen from two other points for the purposes of mapping the sites. I also built small piles of stones in each point! I am an archaeologist!
The people in the village of Zincirli were extremely nice and hospitable, and the children in particular where quite curious about what we were up to. One nice lady brought us some cold water and some type of food the name of which I forgot, but it was yummy.
We eat lunch at a restaurant in the town of Islahiye, and they wrap up our dinners that we heat back at home base–two apartments in the small town of Favzipasha. One thing I need to check into getting while here is a Turkish cookbook in English.
More later, hopefully!

I’m in Turkey to work at the site of Zincirli. We awesomely have wireless internet, so I’ll try to post once in a while.
Yesterday we went to Gaziantep to get residency permits. There we met the Chief of Police and had tea, then we met the mayor of Favzipasha, the small town wher we are staying, and met the governor of the province of Gaziantep, where we got Coke instead of tea. We also visted the museum in Gaziantep and looked at mosaics from the Roman town of Zeugma, which were pretty awesome. Then we went to a restaurant higher up in the mountains and ate freshly caught fish, which was delicious.
Today we hiked around the site looking for the location of the city gates–the site was excavated in the late 1800s and we were looking for the areas of the former excavation.

The time of year when only the only things I can think of are fluff like the following.
What does your favorite flavor of Life Savers say about you? And how can you use these associations to make impressions on others?

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Today is Andy’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Andy!
I will be spending my birthday next month in Turkey, for purposes of archaeology (and I’m afraid our cat Teti is just going to have to look to herself during this time, see post below). Thus, Andy has been asking me whether I want to celebrate my birthday before or after the Turkey trip, and I keep answering “both” but I guess he doesn’t think I’m serious because he just keeps asking me.
The question of birthdays and especially of ages in the Trixie Belden series is a difficult one, in that the characters age (or rather, don’t age) at different and quixotic rates. Hence, the best choice for Trixie Belden on Birthdays may be this fanfic. One oasis of sanity in this sea of nonlinear timelines can be found in the fact that the three girls, Honey, Di, and Trixie, all age from 13 to 14 during the series; and the birthdays of two (Di and Trixie) feature in two of the books.
Perhaps the best birthday-related Trixie is The Mystery of the Emeralds. It features one of the hallmarks of the Trixie series, the Improbable Gift, here in the shape of Di’s father taking the entire Bob-White crew down to some tiny town in the indeterminate South as a birthday gift for Di–because he just happens to be attending a conference near the tiny indeterminate town in which Trixie has unearthed a mystery.
The requisite Educational Digressions in this book feature the Underground Railroad and Williamsburg, Virginia. The book also features a birthday cake shaped like a hat.
Trixie’s one and only birthday in the entire series, which would, in our world, cover several years, takes place during the events of The Marshland Mystery. This book includes another Improbable Gift, the nature of which I cannot reveal since it forms part of the mystery–okay, there isn’t an actual mystery in this one, but it’s still fun to read. Educational bits about natural remedies found in marshland plants are brief and easily skipped.
Andy’s birthday cake is shaped like a cake, his birthday presents are not implausible in the least, and there will be no educational digressions during the day; but I hope he has a very Happy Birthday anyway.

I have invented a new game, called “Better than Teti.” Teti is our cat. To play, I ask the other player (Andy, let’s say) which he likes better, Teti or some other entity, such as “toothbrushes” for example. He says “toothbrushes,” then I ask about something else, say “Grand Rapids, MI,” and he likes GR better than Teti but not as well as toothbrushes, and gradually I make up a list of his preferences.
Here is the outcome of yesterday’s game, listed in order of most to least preferred:
1. Used bookstores
2. Ice cream
3. French horns
4. Corn on the cob
5. Walking on the beach
6. 24
7. The moon
8. Office Depot
9. a Macintosh computer
10. Sand castles
11. Mountain Dew
12. San Diego
13. Eels
14. Lost
15. “Better than Teti”
16. the drawbridge in Grand Haven
17. Burger King
18. the Grand River
19. Sand in your shoes
20. the CRC
21. Teti
22. bananas
23. the Michigan left
24. $3.12 per gallon gas
25. Club Kordro (adjacent to the Best Western Park Plaza in Muskegon, MI)

At one time I thought that everything the human mind could conceive is already on the Internet. But then I realized I was wrong, because it didn’t yet have this–“this” being a reading suggestion from the Trixie Belden canon suitable for every possible occasion.
Today’s occasion is Summer. Hot, humid summer, when after five minutes outside your skin no longer feels like it belongs on your body but instead feels like you are covered head to toe with a heavy plastic tarp.
There are several potential Trixie choices for this type of weather, but I’ve chosen two. The first is The Red Trailer Mystery. Even if you don’t have air conditioning and are doing your reading two inches away from an electric fan while putting ice cubes down the back of your own neck, you can say to yourself: “At least I’m not living in a tiny, metal, un-air-conditioned 1940s era trailer home with two other humans and two dogs right now.” The Red Trailer conveys the dripping humidity and toaster-oven-like feel of August as well as or better than any other book I’ve read. And, of course, there’s lots of exciting mystery and adventure; and, since it’s only #2 in the series, we’re still just getting to know the three central characters, which is a lot of fun, and might take your mind off things for a minute or two.
If you’re not of the mindset that misery loves literary company, however, here’s the opposite approach: Mystery at Mead’s Mountain. This is probably the coldest of the Trixie books. T he opening scenes take place during a blizzard, the Bob-Whites spend all their time cross-country skiing, and somebody even gets buried in an avalanche. That ought to make you feel cooler if any book could. It’s also about my favorite of the post-1970 books, and should be a walk down memory lane for those of us born during that colorful decade (“‘Mead’s Mountain is a private, personal kind of place,’ Linda said emotionally”–see what I mean?).
The Internet is now complete.

Just when you thought it was safe to check my blog. Here are a few more books I’ve finished this year, this time 100% tangent-free! It’s possible spoilers are involved, I’m not really sure.
Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden: I have certainly never been a geisha but I have been female for quite some time now, and from this perspective this book written by an American male seems to be amazingly authentic as far as how a female, and possibly a geisha, might feel and act under the circumstances described. It is also quite interesting from a historical point of view. I understand there is some debate over how authentic it is: I read that a geisha upon whose life this book is partially based was quite offended by the suggestion that a highly-refined type of prostitution played any part in the geisha’s life. According to her, a geisha was an artist, carrying on ancient art forms, and nothing more. On the other hand, a geisha from a different type of town, a sort of resort place, argued that she was pretty much a prostitute, and it was quite a miserable life.
Either way, as the main character’s mentor, a highly successful and wealthy geisha says, “We are not geisha because we want to be. We are geisha because we have no choice.” This was the key point that seemed to bother a lot of reviewers of the movie (which I also recently watched), although oddly not of the book. Ebert argues that the geisha’s life is essentially one of sexual slavery, even if it’s more elegant than what we usually think of as a prostitute’s life.
This is true; but in this time and place few people had any choice in the course their lives will take. Placed in this circumstance, Sayuri (the main character) has three choices: collaborate with her circumstances and submit to being miserable; somehow freeing herself from the life into which she’s thrown (a historically implausible occurrence, even if it’s the one we as Americans want to root for); or somehow find a happy life within the circumstances she can’t escape. She goes for the third, and while feminists (including myself) might quibble with the way in which she finds happiness, her taking control of her life in the only way she can is impressive and makes for a compelling story.
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov: Reading Lolita in Tehran inspired me to read a few more books/authors cited by it. I had no desire to read Lolita, so I asked Andy for another Nabokov recommendation and he suggested Pale Fire. I was rather hesitant about reading this book, worried that I would find it either horrifyingly upsetting or completely incomprehensible. Happily, neither of those eventualities materialized. I enjoyed it very much.
What seems to be Nabokov’s trademark of the unreliable narrator was interesting–the whole story was the narrator’s unreliability rather than any of the actual events which occur in the book, which was quite fascinating.
A Short History of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich: Yes, really! I’ll go ahead and spoil the ending of this one for you: Byzantium falls and some schmo named Charlemagne takes over, naming his upstart little polity “The Holy Roman Empire” in a monumental display of hubris. But, in A Short History, it’s getting there that’s all the fun.

Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi: Andy’s mom recommended this and Andy got it for me, so I figured those were two good reasons to read it.
It was quite an amazing book. The author returned to Iran after graduate school in the U.S., just before the revolution which put the Ayatollah and religious law in power. Life under this regime seems at worst terrifying: as under all totalitarian regimes, no one’s life or property is assured, either can be taken under any or no pretext. At best, things are so surreal as to be almost comical: one could either laugh or cry, and it’s not just because I’m American and western that things seem this way to me. Nafisi, the “girls” in her literature class who provide the frame for Nafisi’s memoir, and many other people feel the same way. As Nafisi puts it, the generation prior to the Ayatollah’s power experienced the most progressive policies in the world regarding women, now suddenly women are forced into veils, robes, and the limited roles deemed acceptable for them by the reigning power.
The book is structured first through the framework of a class Nafisi started after having left her University post, and the lives of the women who participated in the class. Within this, the book is divided into four chapters, each based on the works of different authors: Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen.

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I’m good at beginnings, not so good at middles and ends. I’m very enthusiastic about starting things, but not as much about the follow-through. The three projects which I’ve kept at longest in my life are, in order from greatest to least longevity, 1. graduate school, 2. this blog, 3. my marriage. Most everything else has been abandoned before being properly begun.
As in life, so in reading: as I’ve noted before, I’m better at starting than at finishing books. As one of my Old Year’s resolutions this year, however, I decided to start finishing at least some of the books I begin. In keeping with the Old Year’s ethos, finishing books was not some sort of requirement I set up for myself; rather I simply thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be nice to find out what happens at the ends of books, sometimes?” and then I did. Sometimes.
Here are some of the books I’ve finished so far this year:

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