My Life and Thoughts

I am really happy and honored to report that Vampire Weekend and I are featured in a joint profile in today’s issue of Sabah (Morning): the Istanbul publication recently determined by a Nielsen survey to be Turkey’s “most recognized newspaper brand.” (The most recognized brands overall were Arçelik, manufacturer of “wardrobe-style refrigerators” and other appliances; and Ülker, manufacturer of Cola Turka, and also of something called Badem Kraker (Almond Crackers), which as a child I used to feed to the swans in Ankara’s Swan Park. The thing that made a big impression on me at the time is that the almond crackers didn’t actually contain any almonds at all—rather, they were shaped like almonds. This was my first introduction to metaphor versus metonymy.

The article in Sabah was written by Kaya Genç, a grad student at Istanbul University. My favorite part is the first sub-head: “PAMUK’U BİTİREMEDİM” (“I WAS UNABLE TO FINISH [ORHAN] PAMUK”). This section contains my kind of unsophisticated comments on Turkish literature, e.g. that I was unable to finish Pamuk’s Snow, and that the last book I read and liked in Turkish was Güntekin’s Çalıkuşu (The Wren). Çalıkuşu, one of the first modern Turkish novels, set in the early days of the republic, is about a young girl who has an unhappy love experience and then decides to become a schoolteacher, and is sent off into the backwaters of Central Anatolia where she has adventures and adopts a baby goat.

Kaya was tactful enough to leave out my even more ignorant remarks about Turkish pop music, where I think I said my favorite song was “Koy Koy Koy” (“Pour Pour Pour”), by Tanju Okan, who was at some point married to one of my mother’s high-school classmates. In this song, which features a gypsy violin solo, Okan is all singing about how he traveled to every country and learned the secret of human existence, but he doesn’t know why they won’t let him drink anymore—it’s like they think he’s drunk or something.

Most of Tanju Okan’s greatest hits involve drinking. One thinks of “Öyle Sarhoş Olsam ki” (“If Only I Could Get So Drunk [that I could forget you]”), or “Benim En İyi Dostum İçkim Sigaram” (“My Best Friends Are My Drinks and Cigarettes”). This isn’t actually funny because he really was an alcoholic, to the extent that he got some kind of gangrene and then died of cirrhosis in 1996 (so you can appreciate just how cutting-edge is my knowledge of Turkish musical culture).

Moving to more cheerful subjects…

The interview itself was really fun. Kaya emailed the questions in Turkish, and I answered them in English (because I don’t write very well in Turkish). This led to some small factual mistakes about my family members, a semantic field in which Turkish tends to be more specific than English: e.g. I mentioned that “my brother lives in New Orleans,” but in Turkish there are different words for older and younger siblings and he somehow came out as my older brother, even though in fact my heroic brother is still in high school.

Anyway… thanks again, Sabah!

In the next installment of My Life and Thoughts: I am actually contacted by the Muskogee Daily Phoenix in my capacity as one of the foremost web resources on Keith Gessen! Stay tuned…

Tags: birds, d-list, Keith Gessen, music, reviews, translation, Turkey, Vampire Weekend

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.