In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Vienna was the best evidence that the most accommodating and fruitful ground for the life of the mind can be something more broad than a university campus. More broad, and in many ways more fun. In Vienna there were no exams to pass, learning was a voluntary passion, and wit was a form of currency.
Cultural Amnesia, Clive James
I read the opening to Clive James overture over a decade ago now, toward the end of my undergraduate degree. In retrospect it is clear that the aspiration it conveyed, and indeed the whole book conveyed, lodged itself deep in my mind. I did not read the entire book, following the practice of most readers, but jumped around the essays, ultimately moving on before the book’s depths were exhausted. It was the overture to the book that gave me a deep impression of what Vienna and specifically its cafe culture once was. It is probably the reason I first arrived in Vienna with greater expectations than when I visited Paris, even knowing what James informed me of: the abrupt end of it all with the finis Autriae.
Walking around Vienna it is hard not to think of how Twitter is collapsing — in corporate farce rather than facist horror (although, not coincidentally, there are plenty of nazis now on Twitter). For those who were lurking in the right corners and following the right people, the cultural significance of Twitter was easily comparable to Vienna’s cafes. James writes that for “generations of writers, artists, musicians, journalists and mind workers of every type, the Vienna cafe was a way of life”, and it is too good not to suggest that today they those very people have all become terminally online. He writes of Peter Altenberg who “hardly achieved anything at all” by the standards of his more famous cafe contemporaries, “But his very existence was a reminder to more prosperous practitioners that what they did was done from love“, and you think of all the legions of writers who hustled for work, readers, or even just likes on Twitter. Or you might read Stefan Zweig describing the cafe as “actually a sort of democratic club, open to everyone for the price of a cheap cup of coffee, where every guest can sit for hours with this little offering, to talk, write, play cards, receive post, and above all consume an unlimited number of newspapers and journals.” The unlimited number of newspapers and journals is so much on the nose, that the rising paywalls suggest another reason why the great age of Twitter discourse is at an end.
The fact that certain habitues received their mail in the cafes seemed amazing when I read it back in (maybe) 2011/12. But now I can check my email and my Whatsapps while in line at a Dunking Donuts.
Early in October I made my long awaited trip across the Atlantic. After a year and a half of an international travel ban, international uncertainty, and international levels of mooching about the house, things moved very quickly. The gears of the US immigration system had finally started turning again and I entered the US under a National Interest Exemption (which was far less glamorous than it sounds). A month later and the floodgates were open to all the suitably vaccinated from the UK/Europe.
Now I’m married and in the process of settling down and making this place my home. It came as something of a relief to discover that while the waiting times have grown on processing paperwork in every other state institution, I was able to get hold of both a library card and marriage license in under a week. It was in the library that I recently discovered the local newspaper, which did not disappoint.
I will miss walking along the bit of the river Thames that passed us by in Oxford. I certainly was not getting the full Magdalen college experience I thought I was signing up for when I took the position. The bicycling between the department and college for lunch, an occasional boozy high table dinner, and department seminars felt like a very brief and distant chapter in my life. I still get chapel updates in my email inbox (and you can watch recordings of Evensong on their Youtube channel).
A regatta on the Thames.
I’ve taken up the role of a rather callow would-be Tocqueville trying my best to make my observations about this America we’ve all heard so very much about. There is plenty to go at here in New England; there are so many little details that seem to separate the place from anything you might expect to encounter in Europe. There is the huge main road that cuts right through the middle of town that rivals the Champs-Élysées in breadth, but not in French-i-ness. There is the habit of sidewalks to be pulled away, out from beneath your feet, in certain neighborhoods; a feature of what I understand to be a sacred part of each American’s autonomy to decide things for themselves. I stared at one gas-station for a while trying to work out why it seemed so singularly a New England gas-station, and I finally settled on the Doric columns that framed the windows.
While the fall colours blossom in their red, yellows, and gold, the commercial store-fronts and advertisements struck me as strangely washed out. I only half believed my senses until we drove past an Aldi, and its colours leaped out at me as if they had imported high saturation colour along with their own German brand of discount supermarket experience.
I really did feel stuck in Oxford for the past year and a half. There was plenty of mathematics that I managed to get done that I was very pleased with (this paper with Sam, and this more recent article), but it really wasn’t where I wanted to be when the music stopped.
I won’t say that this was a coping mechanism for dealing with the circumstances, but there were times when I was very happy to fall down certain Youtube rabbit holes. Nothing political, extreme, or conspiratorial (although I understand these have been very popular), but certainly nerdy. My personal favorite was discovering the community of youtubers dedicated to the pursuit of constructing elaborately complicated model kits for giant Japanese Gundam battle suits. I’ve never watched the associated anime television series, nor tried constructing any of these kits myself, but giant robots need little explanation. I found something both soothing an compelling about watching these particular videos, on double playback speed (so I didn’t actually have to sit through the full twenty minutes).
There is an almost medical degree of precision committed to these builds, and plenty of nerdy tools and technique brought to bear. You’d think they were putting together a satellite in a clean room. Added to the constructions themselves is the video production itself, with all the camera’s, lenses, microphones, editing, and really every video is the product of two distinct headaches. Thinking about it harshes the mellow though, so I wouldn’t dwell on it.
With the level of unnecessary detail on these model robots, I was reminded of the lavishly illustrated Dorling Kindersley “look inside” books I would get as a Christmas present when I was growing up. These huge hard backed coffee-table-books-for-kids offered interior cross sections of Man-of-Wars, 747s, and the space shuttle. And in one notable series, the interiors of the vehicles from the Star Wars universe. That a fictional universe should be given the same attention as the real one didn’t bother the younger me in the least. For an eight year old the Star Wars universe was a far more immediately accessible and vivid world. To an adult the books look like and elaborate joke, but to a kid they were as serious as Star Wars itself.
I am telling myself that it must be a sign of deep maturity on my part that I look at the two above images and feel more of an urge to read some Patrick O’Brian rather than watch The Mandalorian.
The past month has been packed. In fact, my life has literally been packed up into boxes, as the first thing I did this month was leave Israel and move back to England, where I am starting a postdoc at Oxford. It has been seven years since I last lived in England, but I haven’t had much time to really take it all in because no sooner had I arrived, set up all my new passwords and bought a bike, I was flying off again to Montreal, Utah, and Chicago to give talks and finish a paper. Most of my life is still packed up in those boxes, but hopefully not for too much longer.
I was in Utah two weekends, so we managed to spend one of those weekends down in the south of the state, visiting the national parks and hiking around Bryce Canyon — a “natural amphitheater” carved into the valley by millions of years worth of rain and wind. These natural forces have sculpted a landscape of striking red rock formations featuring stone spires known as Hoodoos. The Paiute native Americans who lived and roamed these valleys, before the arrival of Europeans, were as taken by the Hoodoos as the camera-toting tourists pulling up in their cars today. The Paiute had a mythology that these formations were the magically petrified remains of “Legend People”, victims of a trickster Coyote god. Who exactly such Legend People might have been remains unclear, but European settlers managed to identify one rock formation as having an uncanny resemblance to Queen Victoria:
The almost central rock formation has an uncanny resemblance to the iconic full profile of the illustrious British monarch.
The Canyon today takes its name from the Mormon homesteaders who settled in the area in 1874. Ebenezer Bryce was a Scottish ship’s carpenter born in 1830, who converted into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and, after being disowned by his father, moved out across the Atlantic to Utah. At the age of 17. After marrying a Mary Park in Salt Lake City he did what many of the Church’s faithful were encouraged to do: homestead. And homestead they did — not only in multiple locations in Utah, but also then in Arizona as well. All while having a fantastic number of children.
Before we made the trip I found I had to supplement my limited supply of clothing (most of my clothes being boxed away at some unknown location) if I was going to survive the weekend. So off we went to the Deseret Industries (an LDS equivalent of the Salvation Army thrift store), where aside from picking up some suitable synthetic fabrics, I found a book that took me back to high-school.
Back in 2017 my AS English Literature teacher, Alan Currie, passed away. He had covered Hamlet and Keats — if only I had such lessons to guide me through all of the English canon. But perhaps more interesting and formative for me than the examined syllabus, was the month or so we had after the AS exams had been completed. In principal, we were supposed to use that time to start preparing for the second year — which I had dropped out of (unfortunately and completely unnecessarily). In practice it seemed like the teachers took the opportunity to expose us to the breadth and variety of all English literature offered. Although these classes were redundant in terms of my final grade, I was engrossed enough to go to every one of them.
I remember one class Mr Currie came in with large A3 photocopies from the Times Literary supplement. It contained the shortlist for the TLS/Foyles (2007) poetry competition. Held every year, and now called the Mick Imlah prize, this is was an open competition and all the poems were featured anonymously; readers were provided with a coupon they could cut out and submit a vote on the winner. We spent the class poring over the poems like they were the football pools, trying to work out which was the best, and which ones could possibly be the work of a celebrated poet. Not that I think any of us aside from Mr Currie could have named a contemporary poet outside of those featured in the GCSE anthology. I remember being excited by the sense that literature was a thing going on right now, and not only was I invited to judge, but it was clear that I could also have been submitting poems (were I so inclined).
Now thanks to the Oxford libraries online archive access I’ve been able to go back and find out who actually won (The Mauve Tam-o’-Shanter by Paul Groves).
It was around this time that I set myself the challenge of reading the 1001 Book to Read Before You Die. I can’t remember exactly when I gave up on this. I think it was the moment I decided it was OK to read at a book that was not on the list. At that point the challenge took a far less definite form.
Possibly picking up on my sudden inclination to read as much of the canon as quickly as possible, Mr Currie began suggesting books to me. Usually these books were taken from the dog-eared copies of former set texts that had been retired to a supply cupboard. I remember Mr Currie showing me one classic of American literature, told from multiple viewpoints. It stuck in my mind because Mr Currie was amused to show me one unusual chapter in the middle of the text:
Mr Currie was amused.
I was unable to recall which book this had been. Until I found myself lying in a tent within Dixie national forest, flipping through the copy of As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner I’d bought the day before from Deseret Industries, and discovered that this was in fact the book Mr Currie had suggested to me. Two chapters into the book I discovered that I remembered reading it — or at least those initial chapters. I hadn’t read any further than those first chapters, but had set it aside for some unknown reason — possibly I simply hadn’t known what to make of it.
It is strange to try and imagine what you might have made of a book when you were a decade younger. It would be nice to imagine my capacity as a reader has improved — although there is a thriving industry of commentators reporting that our attention spans have been dramatically reduced. I found myself having to reread the first sixty pages to get my head around what was going on. I’m not sure I would have been up for that in high school. Mr Currie would certainly have approved of my perseverence. I imagine he would have laughed and admitted he had done likewise. And trouble understanding half of the characters were saying.
I will be leaving Haifa in August this year and returning to the UK. After three years living in Israel, and being in no particular rush to do and see everything, we suddenly realized that if there was anything we still wanted to see or do, then we had better get on with it. There remain a bunch of museums in Jerusalem I’d still like to visit, but there was one major thing we had conspicuously failed to do: visit the ancient city of Petra in neighboring Jordan.
Due to its appearance at the climax of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the treasury building is Petra’s most iconic sight . The entire ediface is cut out of the rock face and is as impressive in reality as it appears on film. Despite the name, the building is not a treasury — in fact it is believed to have been a mausoleum for the Nabatean King Aretas IV. The name derives from the Arabic name Al Khazneh which is rooted in folk tales of treasures hidden inside.
But before we could admire the Treasury Building, we actually had to get to Petra. Due to relatively healthy relations between the Kingdom of Jordan and Israel, it is possible to cross the border between the two countries, albeit at one of a handful of crossing points. Most tourists book with a tour group, but it is entirely possible to go solo, so we opted to plan our own adventure. This meant an early start in Haifa to catch one of the sporadically scheduled buses that run from Nazareth into Amman, the capital of Jordan.
Amman is far less tourism oriented than Petra (or Aqaba where we would exit Jordan after visiting Petra), but it was worth visiting just to see the huge Roman amphitheater which dominates the downtown area.
Although I do not have any similar photographs to document the experience, eating the local kanafeh in Amman was a similarly worthwhile experience. In case you don’t know what kanafeh is, allow me to explain. Imagine a cheese cake. Now make that cheesecake thinner and serve it hot and upside down. And instead of shortcrust pastry you have a base (now a lid since you turned it upside down) of shredded filo pastry with pistachio nuts sprinkled over it. And the cheese is a local Palestinian variety — a cross between something like mozzarella and ricotta. It is served with hot, sweet, sugary rosewater is poured over it. Kanafeh is a killer desert. Even as I type this I’m grieving the fact that I haven’t eaten more of it. I may have to try making some after I have left. I won’t be the first person to have tried, as this youtube video I stumbled over bears witness:
From Amman it was another early start and long bus journey to arrive at Petra where we were disgorged from our bus into the throng of tourists. Tourism is a major part of the Jordanian economy and Petra is a central to that. But until 1812 the capital of the Nabataean Kingdom, once a major regional trade center, was essentially lost to the world, the location a secret known only to Bedouin tribesmen intent on preventing the remains of the city from being plundered.
Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, was born in 1817 to a Swiss family of merchants. After studying Arabic at Cambridge, and was tasked by the African Association with finding the source of the Niger River, but instead decided to improve his Arabic first by traveling around the Middle East. Soon he was adopting the persona of Sheikh Ibrahim ibn Abdallah an Indian Muslim whose strange accent could easily be explained away so long as he wasn’t actually in India. After hearing talk of what he realized must be the ruins of a city known to classicists only through passages of ancient text, he convinced a Bedouin to guide him there on the pretense of completing a pilgrimage.
I hired a guide at Eldjy, to conduct me to Harouns tomb, and paid him with a pair of old horse-shoes. He carried the goat, and gave me a skin of water to carry, as he knew that there was no water in the Wady below.
In following the rivulet of Eldjy westwards the valley soon narrows again; and it is here that the antiquities of Wady Mousa begin. Of these I regret that I am not able to give a very complete account: but I knew well the character of the people around me; I was without protection in the midst of a desert where no traveller had ever before been seen; and a close examination of these works of the infidels, as they are called, would have excited suspicions that I was a magician in search of treasures; I should at least have been detained and prevented from prosecuting my journey to Egypt, and in all probability should have been stripped of the little money which I possessed, and what was infinitely more valuable to me, of my journal book. Future travellers may visit the spot under the protection of an armed force; the inhabitants will become more accustomed to the researches of strangers; and the antiquities of Wady Mousa will then be found to rank amongst the most curious remains of ancient art.
At the time you could easily imagine Burckhardt fancying himself a brave and impetuous explorer. I think most of us today would, at the very least, would consider betraying the trust of your guide a major ethical lapse. Not that Burckhardt had long to reflect on the choices he made. He died five years later of dysentery.
Visiting Petra today is hazard free, to an extent Burckhardt himself could have imagined. There is still some legwork involved, however. Walking through the entire site is a good 8K hike. But it is an amazing 8K. You start by wandering through the outer limits of the city where you can still see graves cut into the rock face of the sounding valley. Then you hike through the Siq — a norrow passage between two rockfaces that legend tells was originally formed by the water that gushed from the stone that Moses struck with his staff. Eventually you arrive at the Treasury building, and then into the valley where you find the rest of the city.
The length of the hike combined with the heat seemed to take plenty of visitors by surprise. There is a brisk trade in camel, horse, and donkey rides to take the overwhelmed back and forth. You can be forgiven for not anticipating how much there is to see (there is an entire city) if all you were expecting was the Treasury Building. There is a huge amphitheater, temple, and — if you are ready to go to the site’s furthest extent — the impressive Monastery which easily matches the Treasury for grandeur:
We also made a friend on the way up to the Monastery.
Finally, after spending 24 hours in Petra we took a taxi down to Aqaba where we were able to enjoy more kanafe before leaving Jordan and crossing into Eilat the next morning.
In December we took a trip to the Hula valley, a wetland reserve located in northern Israel and a few hours out from Haifa by bus. The site is a major destination for ornithologists as it lies in the intersection of two major migration flyways. An estimated 500 million birds of over 400 different species pass through the valley each year, although I imagine that current environmental situation may mean those figures are out of date. Climate change notwithstanding we were able to see an awful lot of birds — mostly Cranes — taking a break from the long a perilous journey between breeding and wintering.
If we had visited the valley a hundred years earlier, it would have been a very different experience. We would have run the serious risk of catching Malaria for one thing, because the entire valley was swampland. Only in the 1950s was the process of draining these swamps undertaken. Canals were dug out canals and the river Jordan was deepened. The project was ostensibly a successful; the swamp was gone and the land could be used for agricultural purposes. As is often the case with such human enterprises, however, there were some unintended consequences. These swamps were full of peat — semi-decomposed vegetable matter — that when dried out tends to be seriously combustible. Sure enough the drained Hula valley was struck disastrous underground peat fires.
In the Hula valley the damage caused by the peat fires was extensive. In some places the damaged caused to the soil caused depressions as deep as 6-7 meters. This would go on to cause environmental damage to the Sea of Galilee and deterred migrating birds from stopping in the valley. In the 90s the decision was made to flood the Hula valley again. The idea was to develop a nature reserve by controlling the underground water levels. While the valley would remain drained during the winter, it wouldn’t dry out during the summer. And as they restored the valley, the birds began return.
The summer in Israel, for me at least, are months of enduring the ordeal of endless mosquito bites. I am however grateful that I’m not running the risk of malaria, a disease that thrives in the swamps such as the one that existed in the Hula valley. So I can’t say I disapprove of the original desire to transform the land. The individual who we can really credit of the elimination of the disease from Israel however is Gideon Mer. Visiting Rosh Pina a number of years ago during Passover I was taken to his old house and told that this was the man who had cured Malaria. Given that most diseases aren’t eradicated by the miracle drug or vaccine, but rather through public health policy, I think it is fair to say this is close enough to the truth, in Israel at least. Here is his obit in the British Medical Journal:
On the bus back to the Technion, we could see the fields still used for agriculture, less than a kilometer away from the wetland reserve. It seems amazing that you could maintain a bird sanctuary while growing crops next door. If birds like to do anything, or so I’ve been led to believe, it is to fly into a farmers field and gobble up all the seeds. Indeed, we could see guards on patrol, circling the fields in what looked like little golf carts, ready to scare off any hungry cranes.
It was enough to make me wonder: do scarecrows actually work? I’m more familiar with scarecrows as a trope in popular culture. And bizarrely scarecrows are usually depicted as being almost entirely ineffective in repelling birds, while being a very scary staple of the horror genre. If you visit the Wikipedia page for scarecrows, you’ll find there is far more page space devoted to scarecrows in fiction than to their alleged real world function.
I’m certainly not the first person to wonder this, or indeed to take to the internet to find an answer. Steve Coll in his New Yorker Diary back in 2009 describes being struck by the same question, but finds nothing helpful in his search results. It is a good example of an area of knowledge where the internet feels incredibly non-definitive. Since Coll’s own inter-quest for an answer something closer to a definitive answer appears close to the top of googles listings: a Mental Floss article linking to scientific studies, government webpages, and the Daily Mail. If you are also beginning to wonder if the ostensible legitimacy of areas of the web are giving way to a wave of jankiness then this article — the most informative survey of they literature on scarecrow efficacy I could find — is only going to stoke your fears.
Whatever Christmas spirit I may have lacked for being in Israel, I was able to suitably redress by spending the first week of December in Vienna. The whole city feels like it was built to be decorated with gaudy winter lights.
I arrived on a Sunday afternoon, and after finding my hotel and getting dinner I decided I needed to go off on a bloody long walk. Walking is my principal source of exercise when I am taking these short trips, and I certainly wasn’t going to let the inclement weather get the better of me.
Rain will eventually threaten to get the best of you if your waterproof jacket doesn’t live up to it’s name so finding hot chocolate became a pressing concern. Vienna is world renowned for its cafe culture, but this led google maps to send me towards fancy coffee houses with startlingly long queues for admission. Whatever chain outlets existed weren’t open on a cold and wet Sunday evening. Fortunately, while most of the Christmas market had packed up and left, there was still one stall left open offering hot punch (spiced wine and rum) that was able to fortify me until I got back to the hotel.
Vienna is renowned for it’s cultural history and visitors can behold the incredible architecture, visit one of the many museums, or experience the live music the city’s many music conservatories cultivate. I was only around for a week and most of the day time I was busy hallucinating about line patterns inside the free group. I did manage to spend one morning walking across the city. Given my limited window of opportunity I had to prioritize. So that meant the Museum of Art Fakes, and then the Republic of Kugelmugel.
In 1971 the Austrian artist Edwin Lipburger, with help from his son, built a spherical house for himself out of wood. As you can see from the picture above, the house isn’t just vaguely spherical. It is literally a sphere. Lipburger was apparently obsessed with the “cosmic harmony” of spheres. He christened his new home the Kugelmugel. The municipality of Vienna was less enamored with ball shaped houses, and as it turned out they had some kind of rule or regulation forbidding the construction of such a dwelling. This was the beginning of an ongoing dispute between Lipburger and the city that led to him declaring the Kugelmugel an independent state and would escalate to Lipburger going to jail for ten weeks — specifically for erecting unauthorized street signs.
Eventually, some kind of arrangement was reached when in 1982 the Kugelmugel was moved to Prater park, where it can today be found by the fun fair. Lipburger was apparently induced with the promise of electricity and running water, neither of which were ultimately provided. He was the Republic of Kugelmugel’s only citizen, and after his death in 2015, the Kugelmugel remains in Prader park as a strange tourist attraction.
Today the Kugelmugel stands among the growing ranks of the worlds micronations — the outsider artists in the world of statecraft. There have been many motivations for claiming your own independent ministate. In the UK the Principality of Sealand existed as a platform for pirate radio in the 60s and 70s. Lipburger’s own declaration of independence was made partly in protest but also as some kind of artistic statement. Although stamps and passports were issued, it is hard not to read his endeavor as a means of challenging the idea of a modern state, rather than a credible attempt to create one.
Whatever Lipburger’s intention, the impression it gave to this curious visitor was perhaps far from what he would have wanted. It is surrounded by an eight foot fence with barbed wire running across the top, and a sign above the gate give the impression of a former Soviet bloc country that doesn’t care for visitors. The sign marking the street Antifaschismus-Platz rings with an irony similar to the likes of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Last month we decided to take advantage of the off-season and spent a long weekend in Cyprus; one night in Nicosia and then two in the Troodos mountains. The flight is an hour, so if you forget about the hassle of getting to and from the airport it is the perfect short getaway from Israel.
Cyprus and Israel share a number of striking similarities: while Cyrpus is an island, Israel certainly seems like one metaphorically; both are stuck on protracted disputes over sovereignty and the status of certain minorities. But a more immediate similarity was finding ourselves surrounded by large numbers of feral cats. We had only to go as far as the airport bus stop before we encountered a cluster of skittish felines just off the grassy verge. It would be the first of many we’d encounter.
Cyprus now has around 1.5 million stray cats — that exceeds the human population of Cyprus of just under 1.2 million. For perspective, the UK has a population of 66 million, and the latest cat census puts the total stray and feral population at 10 million. (Israel has roughly 2 million cats out there and a population of 8 million.) Both Israel and Cyprus have half-hearted spay and neuter programs that attempt to curb the population growth. According to one article I found Cyprus and Israel share a public perception problem:
She added that the most important thing to do to reduce cat numbers is to educate owners on the benefits of spaying and neutering.
“Unfortunately, a lot of animal owners don’t use this service,” Foote said. Some even cite religious beliefs, that animals should be left “as God intended them to be”.
More cats than humans: population out of control – Cyprus mail.
The cats of Cyprus, however, have a claim to a special place in history. All the cat-themed relics that archeologists had been digging up in Egypt, had many to assume that cats were first domesticated under the dynastic rule of the pharaohs. But a cat grave has been found in Cyprus, dated to be roughly 9500 years old, predating the Egyptian claim. Since cats are not native to the island, it can be presumed they were first brought over to Cyprus by Turkish farmers along with all their other domesticated animals when they settled on the island.
There is also the later story of Saint Helena of Constantine (mother of the Emperor Constantine) sending over a boat load of cats from Egypt or Palestine to deal with a snake problem at Saint Nicolas’ monastery. We actually took a minor detour to check out the monastery of the cats, knowing nothing about the history, but vaguely hoping, based on the name in the guidebook, that we could find a feline-themed monastic order. Maybe little cats dressed up as monks. Or a painting somewhere of Saint Nicholas being led to the site by the Holy Spirit in the form of a cat. I was to be disappointed: aside from the presence of a fair number of strays, there was nothing evident in the monastery itself to earn the title. Cyprus is covered with a great many Greek orthodox churches, but even during our brief stop I noticed this particular monastery was picking up an unusual amount of traffic — presumably curious cat lovers enticed by the name.
A Greek orthodox church in the Troodos mountains.
Cyprus is a divided island. It was divided by a British army officer in 1964 who drew a line in a map with a green chinagraph pencil. While the situation in Israel/Palestine sits atop of the list of contentious, intractable ethno-national impasses, the situation in Cyprus is not so far behind. While the island sits just off the coast of Turkey, it is demographically dominated by Greek-Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots remain a minority. Historically, the island passed through many hands: the Venetians, Ottomans, and then the British being the most recent. It was during the British rule that the cause of Enosis — unification with Greece — came to the fore, with the Greek orthodox church being a major agitator for the cause.
In 1950, in the face of British refusal to hold a referendum, the church organized their own. It is hard to take the 95.71% approval on face value as only Greek Cypriots could vote, and those votes had to be publicly registered with signatures in books provided by the Greek orthodox church. Dissenters would effectively mark themselves out for later reprisals. I’ve been looking through the internet to see if I could find an image of one of these ledgers from the referendum. The following image appears to be attached in some way to the associated Wikipedia page, but I cannot vouch for its authenticity:
I’ve just finished reading Lawrence Durrell’s memoir Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, which recounts three years he spent on the island in the 50s when the situation boiled over into protests, riots, and terrorism. He arrived as a sometime civil servant hoping to be able to live cheaply while starting a full-time writing career. He acquired a cottage in the north of Cyprus after a comic/alarming/farcical property deal with a local family, and settled down into village life. His ability to speak Greek allowed him to befriend the locals and enjoy their goodwill, but he soon becomes increasingly aware that the British administration is blind to the building desire for independence and the potential for unrest.
The perspective Durrell offers is an interesting one. While the Cypriots have no autonomy over their own affairs, he maintains that there was a great deal of goodwill, or “amity”, between the locals and the British. He notes that he never once heard accusations of corruption against any governing officials. At the same time he understands that the Greek Cypriots desire to be taken seriously and have their right to self determination respected. But the British are in a bind: declaring Cyprus an independent state is certainly a reasonable demand, but an immediate rush to unify with Greece, subsequent to independence, would alarm the Turkish Cypriots and possibly Turkey itself. Durrell also notes that a Cyprus unified with Greece might not actually be so great for Cypriots. A delicate situation, but the real problem, as Durrell recalls it, was that the British administration didn’t really believe that the Cypriots ever had it in them to fight, and thus ignored the issue.
Durrell meanwhile runs short of money and starts teaching in a Nicosia high school before taking a job as a British civil servant on the island. When the troubles begin he sees first hand how badly prepared the administration are to deal with rapid developments, both conceptually and practically. He also witnesses many of his former student enlist in EOKA and their guerilla campaign. In the following passage he confronts one of his former students, caught in the act of bomb-throwing:
He was not far from tears, but the face that he turned to me tried to be composed, impassive. He did not speak but stared at me with a look of furious anguish – as if indeed a wolf were gnawing at his vitals. ‘He had a bomb too,’ said Foster wearily. ‘Bloody little fools! What do they think they gain by it? He threw it in the churchyard by the cross-roads. I suppose he thought he’d scare us all out of our wits.’
‘Are you in EOKA?’ I asked.
‘We are all EOKA. All Cyprus,’ he said in a low controlled voice. ‘If he wants to know why I threw it in the churchyard tell him because I was a coward. I am unworthy. But the others are not like me. They are not afraid.’ I saw suddenly that what I had mistaken for hatred of my presence, my person, was really something else – shame. ‘Why are you a coward?’ He moved a whole step nearer to tears and swallowed quickly. ‘I was supposed to throw it in a house but there were small children playing in the garden. I could not. I threw it in the churchyard.’
Superb egotism of youth! He had been worried about his own inability to obey orders. It is, of course, not easy for youths raised in a Christian society, to turn themselves into terrorists overnight – and in a sense his problem was the problem of all the Cypriot Greeks. If Frangos had been given a pistol to shoot me I am convinced that he would not have been able to pull the trigger. ‘So you are sorry because you didn’t kill two children?’ I said. ‘What a twisted brain, what a twisted stick you must be as well as a fool!’ He winced and his eyes flashed. ‘War is war,’ he said. I left him without another word.”
“Bitter Lemons of Cyprus” by Lawrence Durrell
In 1960 Cyprus finally became an independent state. In 1974 after a coup backed by Greece’s military junta, Turkey intervened, invading northern Cyprus. The coup failed, but so did negotiations between Cyprus and Turkey and after the violent displacement of both Greek and Turkish Cypriots, the north of the island was captured.
We crossed the green line in Nicosia into the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (as of the moment, only recognized by Turkey). While the green line was once impassable after the Turkish invasion, today the most you have to worry about is the queues. We didn’t hang around for long, but if we had, we might have seen a whirling Dervishes performance.
My surprise highlight of the weekend was visiting one of the ten painted churches in the Troodos mountains. These are small Byzantine churches with vivid murals on the inside (and recognized UNESCO world heritage sites). I’ve been in a bunch of churches, and seen many cathedrals with impressive architecture, but something about the interior of the church Pedoulas was impressive in a different way. I recommend checking out the Wikipedia page.
I finally managed to capture the chalkboard on camera. The diagram is the central focus and remains up through the entire talk, with various additions and modifications made along the way.
I like to commit to the diagram.
Giving the same talk several times over the space of a month allows you to appreciate a few things. Minor adjustments can make a big difference, especially to pacing. Having already given a talk once really boosts your confidence. Having given a talk four times already doesn’t give you complete confidence. Responses can vary dramatically as audiences latch onto different aspects of what you are doing, and as you invariably emphasize specific things. At Boston College they wanted to hear more about special cube complexes, something many of them had heard about but had little exposure to, while at UIC I had audience members who had themselves considered the specific conjecture I am working on and were curious to hear about the obstructions I had encountered.
After roaming all over Manhattan I had a far more limited Chicago experience. I don’t think I strayed any further than a mile from the hotel and campus and most of my time was spent talking mathematics.
Now I’m back in Haifa, recovering from jet-lag. Despite the rain that marked my departure a month ago, I’ve returned to amazing weather.
After a week in Boston I’m now in New York. I was out there just over a week and gave seminar talks at Boston College and Tufts. I also saw a free performance of Hamlet at Wellesley College given by Actors From the London Stage. I studied Hamlet for AS-level English literature, so at least ten years ago I had more than a passing familiarity with the play. Although I watched multiple film adaptions at the time (including Hamlet 2000 which I believe was widely considered disappointing, but has a stellar cast and may be worth revisiting), I don’t believe I ever actually saw it on stage.
It was a pleasant suprise to discover that Hamlet is great. The initial palace intrigue really does work, once you have taken a ten-year-step-back from studying it on the page. It made me yearn for ghosts to return from their horror fiction exile and claim their rightful place in contemporary drama.
I also went for a walk in the woods and met this fellow:
Now I am in New York. The Big Apple, where everything is Big expensive, and I’ve been going on Big walks, and now my Big legs feel like they’re going to fall off. Oh. And everything is Big expensive. It’s like I never even left the airport.
It’s like London with a grid system, less rain, and museums that aren’t free.
I’ve been having a blast here.
On top of my list of things I was excited to do in NY was visit The Strand bookstore. I miss the joys of English language bookstores while living in Israel, and The Strand is the epitome of everything I wanted. Extensive and well curated stacks brimming with wonderful literature. The store’s reputation came to me partly through word of mouth, but also through youtube videos I subsequently stumbled upon. For example:
Infuriatingly, the video doesn’t seriously set out to answer the question posed. I still found it engrossing.
(The individual featured in this video, Michael Orthofer, is a fascinating figure. He is the editor-and-contributor-in-chief of The Complete Review, an internet passion project dedicated to reading, reviewing and documenting the most significant works of contemporary literature. And I don’t mean just English literature. I mean world literature. The guy is reading upwards of five books a week and reads in multiple languages. He writes on the blog how much of a relief it was that no Nobel prize for literature was awarded this year, leaving him free to dedicate more time to the actual business of reading and writing. The New Yorker ran a profile on him and his obsession. If you are bookishly inclined you may have already stumbled across his website in the past. It is old school, homegrown html at its finest. Take a look at it. It probably won’t surprise you that Orthofer wrote the website in the previous century. I ran into it while trying track down a translation of The Pornographers by Nozaka Akiyuki [I don’t even remember why]. It is hard not to already look on the website with a kind of nostalgia. It seems so far removed from what the internet has become. The whole concept is so insane, non-commercial, personal, and unscalable that it feels like a product of a bygone era. Even our academic webpages are now becoming slick, Web 2.0, bland, templated monstrosities. It is interesting to note, however, that The Complete Review outlasted many of its contemporaries that were more commercially inclined. Like Pets.com.)
Although I am determined to travel light on my north American excursion, I went a little nuts and bought a piles of books. As with all the most dreadfully insane acts, it was of a deeply premeditated nature, with it’s own internal logic and self justification. I bought a bunch of books, but only short books.
The Scarlet Letter I bought in Boston, the volumes above in Montreal, and everything below in New York.
I also spent a day in the Met, went to see an adaption of Vonnegut’s Mother Night at 59E59, dropped by New York Public Library to see Winnie the Pooh, walked across the Brooklyn bridge, and visited ground zero.
My seminar talk at Columbia went fantastically well. I’ve failed to take a picture of the chalkboard after any of the seminar talks I’ve given so far, but there is still UIC. And I’ll probably scan or photograph my notes as well.
Columbia’s campus is amazing.
As my trip progresses and my final return flight approaches, so Halloween also approaches.
I set off from Haifa just as the first rain since the start of the summer started to fall. On arrival in Montreal the shorts and T-shirt I had set off in became insufficient to the demands of the local climate, so I had to switch into warmer clothes and revive myself with Tim Horton’s hot chocolate.
Two years had passed since I was last in Montreal to defend my thesis — the morning after the 2016 election. It was interesting to see what had changed. Cannabis was about to be legalized. The building work on McGill/Sherbrooke had been completed. The math department was full of unfamiliar faces. Many restaurants had closed (no more SmartBurger). Murals commemorating the late Leonard Cohen had appeared across the city. Poutine was pretty much as I remember it, though.
Montreal is now also home to the world’s largest permanent barbie exhibit. Which is completely free to access.
One among many of the Barbies on display.
Canadian Thanksgiving took us all by surprise, so I gave my McGill seminar talk earlier than expected. It was the first outing of the talk I’m touring while I’m out here in North America, presenting my new proof (and generalization) of Leighton’s graph covering theorem. The seminar went well, but I feel like I’m going to be experimenting a little to find the best way to explicate the coset summation argument I use. Piotr appreciated the fact that I was able to give the entire proof within the hour.
I was also able to do quite a bit of math. A fair chunk of Thanksgiving was spent discussing math with Dani and scrawling our ideas all over my notebook.
Don’t read too much into anything going on here…
I also took pictures of new murals I spotted around this city:
