Editors notoriously complain about how much bad fiction and poetry
they’re forced to read, poor dears, but I think the case can be made that a large amount of surprisingly good stories and poems are submitted to publishers. Poor work is readily assignable to the round file, but good work raises the question of how good?

When I first encountered Daniel Pendergrass’s 23 Istanbul Karabitsi I fell into a strange reverie in which I was walking in the streets of Alexandria, not as myself, but as C.P. Cafavy, looking at the city’s street scenes in much the same way Pendergrass has observed the streets of Istanbul, the city Cavafy loved second only to Alexandria.Several times I snapped my head back and forth to get out of Cavafy’s head and into Pendergrass’s. I studied Karabitsi’s prosody, looking for a way out of this unjust reverie, unjust to Pendergrass. The prosody is suave and at times daring. The poet was obviously well read, although I was to learn he hadn’t read Cavafy.

As the poem—its separate poems in the end constitute a whole—drew me into Istanbul’s streets, making me at home in a city I had never seen, I realized that, while Karabitsi deserves comparison to Cavafy, its author is more an observer and less a conversationalist. Cavafy has a lot to say about history and his own pain. Pendergrass has something of the extraterrestrial in him. He’s a visitor, not a resident. He has reports to make, things to do, other than lounging in favorite cafes and taking his own and history’s pulse.

I recognized by the time I had read a third of the work that this poetry wasn’t just good, it was superior, and when the poet asked me to say something for the jacket of the published work I felt no hesitation bringing up Cavafy, a modernist whom I admire inordinately. I had commended the manuscript to Amari Hamadene, the founder and publisher of Arabesques Press, and I had no doubt it would find its way into the hands of the most sophisticated readers, as it deserves.

The karabitsi is a street drama which the Ottomans inherited from their Byzantine predecessors. It embraces the kind of scenes I’m fond of describing in my own poems about New York City and New York’s Hudson Valley. You have to have a sharper eye than if you were sitting in a theater, and you have to care, which is what poets do for us.

I commend 23 Istanbul Karabitsi to you as enthusiastically as I had the privilege of commending it to Arabesques. It’s not just another good book of poems, it’s an important book of poems.

The actress Natalie Portman takes a memorable walk at the end of the 2004 Mike Nichols’ movie Closer. She’s mowing them down on the streets of New York. Men are twisting themselves into pretzels to take a gander, and she’s giving them zilch, except that breathtaking walk.It reminded me that there’s a moment when a boy walking with his mother suddenly understands why she’s able to cut a swath like a John Deere. That moment came for me when I was eleven on Union Square in Manhattan. My mother was wearing a white dress and a jaunty broad-rimmed straw hat with a blue ribbon. I was determined to fathom how she plowed through waves of frothing humanity like a J-Boat when humanity wouldn’t budge for me.

I noticed that some men’s faces screwed up as if hit by a taser when they studied her. I noticed men eyeballing her furtively, as if they were swiping apples from a vendor. They pretended they didn’t notice her, only to turn after she’d passed to appreciate her more. I saw bold men smile, old men bow, troubled men flinch and blanch, happy men doff their boaters, and crude men pant like Border Collies.

It’s not the dress, Djelloul, I reasoned with myself. Or the high heels or the hat. What did I know about high heels, except they looked precarious? Hah, it’s how she wears this stuff! Mmm… close, but no cigar. There they were, these big guys, parting like weeds, making strange. Oh, I know what it is, it’s that cryogenic stare!

But nothing felt quite right until Arshile Gorky came along. He and my mother had had studios in the same building. She was crazy about his paintings. He was, as I eventually learned, crazy about her. We were crossing an intersection—well, I was crossing it, my mother was sailing—when Gorky appeared looking both gallant and melancholy. He was ill and only three years away from his suicide. The critics were still unwilling to crown him with the laurels artists knew he deserved. My dear Nita, he cried, and bowed with a long sweeping gesture, like a Spanish courtier.

I got it. That’s the moment I got it. Beauty is a great sculptor: you never know what it’s going to do with the clay of men. My mother was beautiful. She made men stutter, wince, shiver, fall every which way and generally corrupt their habitual demeanors. Talk about power.

I was standing in the middle of traffic contemplating this eternal and menacing truth. Horns were blowing and lights were changing, but people looked less distracted than they do now with their cellphones and text messengers. My mother looked at one of the very few men she truly admired and laughed. Then she noticed me in harm’s way and snatched me by the collar. Men are such jerks, she told me gaily, don’t be a jerk, dear, okay? But, I said, won’t I have to be one if I grow up?

Not at all, said Gorky. Don’t grow up to be a man, he said, be an artist, it’s more fun. My mother looked doubtful, but Gorky was God, even if the smug critics hadn’t figured it out yet.

Poor Gorky. He didn’t have fun. His life was hard and embittering, and I’ve always been glad my mother spared him her Medusa stare. He was a great artist, and she knew it and forgave him for being a man. (I’m not sure she forgave me).

(Note: The painting in the inset is Gorky’s The Artist and His Mother, oil on canvas, 60 x 50″ National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, donated by the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund.)

Have you ever noticed how things disappear right under our noses, and it isn’t always executive function disorder or Alzheimer’s; sometimes we get stuck in a time warp. Like whatever happened to doffing one’s cap, or fedora, or beret?

Some of us still remember how men used three fingers to lift their fedoras up in salute as they greeted you. They didn’t even have to know you. Now that was a different world, wasn’t it? And do you notice that baseball players still do it, but only when the manager tells them to take a bow.

I try to pay secret homage to those times in our not too distant past by smiling at friendly faces in the street. Most often people nod or smile, but sometimes they flinch or blink or look annoyed. So I have to steel myself to keep on doing it, because there’s as much discouragement out there as reward.

I never had the kind of head for fedoras. They always looked like something melted all over my head. I looked okay in woolen caps; they had a way of making me look like I knew what I was doing, feckless hope that that was. Ballcaps are handy these days for covering up my bald spot, but I miss the sky and get claustrophobic when I wear them. I tried wearing a keffiyeh once (that’s Lawrence of Arabia wearing one, inset), but it made me look like a Victorian candlestand, which, come to think of it, was an improvement. I was smart enough not to try on any turbans, because I was accustomed to the fathead in the mirror.

Besides, keffiyehs and turbans don’t come from cultures that doff the cap. And I remember fondly such scenes as a man doffing his fedora or boater while arresting a revolving door for a lady or holding an elevator door open. I remember men on the Third Avenue trolley doffing their hats to lovely passersby. Who can imagine a city like that today?

Actually I can, because I see gestural successors. I see young men, and not so young men, giving the thumbs up to pretty girls in business suits on roller blades. I see cockeyed sailor salutes between men and women wishing to acknowledge something fond or humorous. I see open palms signalling exclamation and pumping fists signalling triumph.

A different world, yes, but not a more indifferent one.

North Korea is apparently making and floating some hair-raisingly good counterfeits of U.S. money, according to Stephen Mihm in the July 23 New York Times Magazine. Federal agents in October 2004 found $100 bills worth more than $300,000 in a container ship in the port of Newark.The story reminded me of something my mother told me about counterfeit money when I was a kid. She was an artist and never big on conversation, so people were always spilling beans of many colors and kinds to her.Just after World War II she was studying with the great Hans Hofmann, teaching classes and struggling to support both of us. She started working for a short hyperkinetic man of a certain age and East European origins. He set up a loft on Fourth Avenue in Manhattan where artists sat around a huge square table painting flowers on white china. They were paid by the dish or cup, so they had to be fast to make a decent wage. My mother was magically dexterous, so she made pretty good money. Every once in a while the boss would change the flower and the color, but mostly they painted roses. I remember once he said to my mother, Juanita, please, this is not a known rose. It’s a Martian rose, Roby, my mother said. It was silver.

Roby’s name—if I invented it you wouldn’t believe it, in light of what I’m going to tell you—was Robichek. I don’t know if he was a Czech and I can’t remember if I ever heard his first name, because everyone called him Roby. He was nice and quite funny. His artists loved him.

He especially liked my mother, as men were apt to do, and he used to take us to late-night dinners at the Horn & Hardart Automat. Everybody called it either The Automat or Horn & Hardart. The artists loved the name because they were doing hard art, which was akin to hard time. It was famous for its paper-thin sandwiches and was popular with people like Roby’s, starving artists who worked odd hours, because it was open 24/7. (Nobody used that expression then.) The food wasn’t bad, but you wouldn’t say more in its behalf. You needed a lot of change because all the dishes were on shelves in rotating glass cylinders, and when you popped the right amount of change in the slot the little glass door opened for you. It was a very Art Deco idea and they began to disappear in the 1960s. (The Chrysler Building, inset, is a classic Art Deco inspiration).

One night over see-through sandwiches in the Automat Roby told my mother what he’d done during the war. Quite a few guys had told her what they’d done during the war and she wasn’t particularly hospitable to another war story, but Roby was a raconteur. He’d worked for British intelligence. A confirmed anglophile, he assured my mother that the British had a lot of it, intelligence that is. His wartime service began, he said, when they arrested him on a street in London because his reputation as a counterfeiter had caught up with him. He could stay out of prison, they told him, if he would agree to make German bank notes for the British. The Germans make very good money, you know, he told his captors. Yes, they said, and we intend to make a lot of good money for them and flood them with it. You don’t like the Nazis, do you, old fellow? the British asked. Oh no, Roby assured them, they’re entirely too serious. They never appreciate a joke unless it makes someone uncomfortable, he told the British with some enthusiasm. Yes, quite, they said, and that’s exactly what we’re about, you see, making them uncomfortable.

So Roby went to work with complete access to the British Exchequer and its world-class resources. He made the money and RAF pilots dropped it over Nazi-occupied territories, where it was put into circulation with the help of partisans. Roby, from what he told my mother, had himself a lovely war. The Germans, for their part, counterfeited enemy money in great quantities, and Roby carefully examined it for his British bosses. On the whole, he concluded, it was quite good, but what tripped the Germans up was that they were unable to keep up with the microscopic changes the Allies were making in their money.

The British were delighted with his skills, but when the war was over they confided to him that he probably would like the United States better than England. After all, it hadn’t been bombed, and they were perfectly willing to pay his way and give him a little nest egg. This, of course, in addition to the nest eggs he’d been giving himself in the form of His Majesty’s currency.

Roby had always intended to wind up in New York, because he was an artist, as well as a counterfeiter, and New York was bidding fair to supplant Paris as the epicenter of art. Moreover, Roby liked the way Americans made money. He’d been studying it for some time, and he arrived in New York fully prepared to make his share of it.

My mother had noticed that Roby tended to pay for things with one-dollar bills. She mentioned it to him that evening and he told her that success as a counterfeiter, a private counterfeiter, depended on the abundant presence of skill and the conspicuous absence of greed. If you make phonies in big denominations, he said, they’ll catch you. Your greed will imprison you. But if you make one-dollar bills nobody’ll care. So you just supplement your income with them. You don’t try to get rich. You live modestly, do good deeds, and pass phony one-dollar bills. That’s how I buy the plates, he said brightly. And your name, Roby, my mother said, it really is Robichek, and it doesn’t stand for rubber check? I don’t do rubber checks, darling, he said, I do one-dollar bills, beautiful U.S. of A. one-dollar bills. I have no intention of spitting in Uncle Sam’s hand, darling.

Roby had many wartime anecdotes to tell. One I remember vividly was about the RAF pilot who had been through the Battle of Britain and told his superiors that he didn’t think he’d be able to fly over Germany and drop bombs on people. It wasn’t that he’d become a conscientious objector, it was just that war was so awful he didn’t think he’d be able to do it. The pilot was much-decorated and certainly no coward, so his superiors took him seriously and introduced him to Mr. Robichek at the Exchequer. Roby told the war-weary pilot what he was up to, and then he, the pilot and the pilot’s commanding officer went to a pub for a drink. You see, old chap, his commanding officer told the pilot, it wouldn’t be bombs, it would be money you’d be dropping, big bags of money. The pilot smiled thinly and said, How generous of me. Exactly, his drinking companions agreed.

Roby was like that. His stories were about surviving in a world that didn’t seem especially interested in the issue. That’s why he liked the British; they’d survived with a little bit of humor intact, and they’d had the good humor to ship him to America because the Americans savored a good joke.

My mother collected people like Roby. Anyone with a zany story to tell usually told her, but Roby’s story was one of the few rare ones she ever passed along.

The Israelis want our smart bombs (now there’s a contradiction for you), and the usual response to outrages against humanity is a combination of bullets and baloney, but at writersalliance.net the world’s creators of beauty are gathering to tell the story of Darfur where genocide disgraces the human race.

The editors of this website request poems, flash fiction, photographs, music and paintings to tell the Darfur story, to protest its neglect. For more information, contact Sankar Roy at editors@writersalliance.net.

Amari Hamadene is an Algerian poet and publisher whose soaring vision is that technological advance has put in our hands for the first time in human history a means to speak with each other over the din of ideology.

The splendid idea that gave birth to the United Nations has been resurrected in cyberspace, and instead of appointed representatives pouring a kind of bleached paranoia over each other, the ordinary peoples of the planet are speaking instantaneously for themselves in words and images.

Consumed by his grasp of this opportunity to nurture an intimacy between cultures, Amari founded Arabesques Literary and Cultural Review and Arabesques Press.

The latest issue of the review, Volume II, Issue 2, explores the subject of Identities. The ambitiousness of Amari’s concept is evident in every page. Here you will find writers of many nations speaking with an immediacy and authenticity that governments and institutions never dare.

Joining with Arabesques in publishing Identities online is the unfailingly engaging and thoughtful Istanbul Literature Review, the brainchild of Etkin Getir.

Nothing celebrates a benchmark in mankind’s evolution more than such a burst of literary and artistic energy in three languages: Arabic, English and French.

Our journey into cyberspace is comparable to the invention of the wheel, the caravel, the car, or the airplane, and the journey has just begun.

All our prior concepts of progress lag behind this human dialogue in cyberspace, because it has always been the purpose of dogma to regulate and restrict our communion with each other. Governments, conventional media and institutions may conduct a rearguard action against this festival of expression, but we have had a taste of our oneness, and in a flash everything has changed.

To read Arabesques is to inhabit that flash in its own instant and to savor that the march of civilization has come to a verge of immense and unknowable implication. It is in the grandeur of this recognition that Amari Hamadene labors mightily.

—DM

… where ignorant armies party by night. Well, that’s not exactly what the poet Matthew Arnold wrote, but it pretty well expresses how I’ve always viewed parties. Here’s what he really said:

“Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
—Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

I’ve always been afraid to give myself permission to dislike the object of everybody else’s affection. It may just prove I’m the churl I’ve always feared others suspect.

An even worse possibility lurks in the wings: the list of people I dislike may get quickly out of hand, like all the other important files I’ve craftily hidden from myself in my computer.

You know those word balloons in the comics? Well, my world’s riotous with them and they usually conflict with what I hear. I mean, we all hear selectively, more or less, but here’s how I hear things:

“Hello Del (my nickname), it’s so good to see you again.” (Balloon: You horrid jerk).

“They tell me you’re a writer.” (Balloon: What the hell do they know?)

“Del, how are you?” (Balloon: Oh God, there he is again).

For my part, as I read those balloons, my face screws up like an over-wound clock and stops. It always stops at time to go, to get the hell outta this place where people are always saying opposite things at once.

I’m sure some people go to parties in pursuit of one of those boing-g-g moments when you meet someone you knew when you were a Cathar in a besieged castle in southern France and you both swore you’d meet again. But you really need to try having one of those moments without alcohol.

Alcohol is like diamonds, it produces the illusion of rarity. True boingggs are emeralds or rubies; they don’t need De Beers to persuade you how precious they are. You can always tell them because your spine can’t stop buzzing and you have the sensation of falling over towards your Cathar friend. Maybe that’s where the expression “falling in love” comes from. Nice to think so, anyway.

Any group of more than six is just too many word balloons for me to handle. I sort of float up to the ceiling among those balloons and get tangled in the strings of people’s intent. It’s sort of the difference between a party line and the plain fact that you know which party’s eating your lunch. I feel like I’m talking to two people for every one person whose mouth is moving.

I wouldn’t have been caught dead admitting this till I hit 70. Then I figured, Like I’ve got a lot to lose? I’m paranoid, so sue me. But on your way to the lawyer’s ask yourself if it’s never occurred to you that we all know a lot more about what’s going on between people than we think it’s safe to admit.

What do Osama bin Laden, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, President Bush and their Neocon Oil Extortion Company have in common? A propensity for putting their feet in a quagmire, it would seem. Osama, lamenting the death of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the murderous Jordanian thug he fatuously calls an emir, has just extended his evil jihad to the Shi’ites.

So here we have the spectacle of one spoiled rich kid from Texas handing over Iraq to the Shi’ites, with whom we’ve had a quarrel for a quarter century, and a rich kid from Yemen calling on Sunni insurgents to kill Shi’ites if they get in their way. And all we wanted was a little democratic oil.

This is the kind of world you get from slicksters who never let a fact disrupt the marriage of bad ideas and greed. To have spent billions of taxpayer dollars supporting Saddam Hussein in his war against Shi’ite Iran only to turn his country over to the Shi’ites doesn’t seem to faze these smart-talking boobs. We listened for months to their measured cadences while our national shit-detector was in the shop. Only now, billions of dollars and thousands of deaths later, do we gag on their menu of mendacity and betrayal of our national interests in behalf of their corporate lords.

Islam has had its Osama bin Ladens before. So has Christendom. Hasan-i-Sabah (shown in inset), an 11th Century Persian Shi’ite scholar and mystic, gave us the word assassin. He got his disciples high on hashish and sent them out to kill anybody he didn’t like. They were called hashasheen, which entered our language as assassins. The Mamluk Sultan Baybars, who finished off the Crusaders, attacked Hasan in his mountain redoubt in Iran, but it took Hulagu Khan, Ghengis Khan’s grandson, to finish him off. This all happened about the time Macbeth and his bloody spouse ruled Scotland. And speaking of religious fanatics who kill people, we shouldn’t forget Peter the Hermit, who whipped up the Crusades. Their first official act was to kill all the Jews in Mainz, and that was just for starters.

The Crusades had a lot in common with the Neocon Oil Extortion Company. The Crusaders sacked God knows how many Christian communities on their way to the Holy Land. They were masterful looters, and they didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good cover story either.

Osama is nowhere near as smart as Hasan-i-Sabah, who had to work a lot harder for his money. But they both holed up in mountains. Hasan had much more dangerous enemies, Baybars and Hulagu. Fortunately for Osama
(the CIA isn’t looking for him any more), President Bush is nowhere near as smart as Baybars. Baybars ruled and made war well and spoke his own language eloquently.

Hasan has always been popular in folklore. The writer William S. Burroughs, who knew good hash when he sniffed it, is but one of a number of fiction writers who incorporated him or his ideas in their work. Brion Gysin, a friend and contemporary of Burroughs, wrote about Hasan and the assassins in his novel The Process and also described his visit to the ruins of Hasan’s castle at Alamut in one of his short stories.

The serpent king Thulsa Doom in the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian is reminiscent of Hasan, notably in the scene where acolytes commit suicide to show that “flesh is stronger than steel.” To demonstrate their loyalty one follower slit his own throat and another leaped from the battlements of Alamut.

“Hæsæn-e Sæbba” and the assassins play a substantial role in Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum, as well as in his Baudolino.

Robert Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus! trilogy features Hasan and his boys and connects them to the Necronomicon.

Hasan X (the tenth in the line) appears as a Sufi named Franklin Delano Roosevelt Stuart in the Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson.

And there have been a number of rock musicians drawn to Hasan’s legend.

It doesn’t seem likely the ham-handed Washington freebooters will be treated as kindly in music and literature, and Osama is going to have a hard historical time shedding his rich brat stigma. Hasan wasn’t your average fulminator; he could actually think his way around ideas and wrote some memorable stuff.

One of the facts that never surfaced in the smarmy temporizations of the Feith-Perle-Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld jihadis as they hornswoggled us into Bushworld is that the Shia-Sunni crack in Islam, far from being an historical artifact, is a volatile chem lab. Even poets know this, but not those professorial turkeys who’ve planted our woe-weary feet in Iraq.

Listen to the Raj poet-translator Laurence Hope (1865-1904 ) in his poem, This Month the Almonds Bloom at Kandahar (which we might now well call Bloody Kandahar):

Aha! Friend Amir Ali! it is Duty
To rid the World from Shiah dogs like thee.
They are but ill-placed moles on Islam’s beauty,
such as the Faithful cannot calmly see!

Also thy bullet hurts me not a little,
Thy Shiah blood might serve to salve the ill,
Maybe some Afghan promises are brittle;
Never a Promise to oneself to kill!

The capitalization is Victorian, but the exclamation marks are typical of the hyperbole we’re accustomed to hearing today from the exclusionary nutcases who think they’ve got a lock on the truth. Nor are all the nutcases Sunni. Quite a few are Christian and Jewish, agnostic, atheistic and Randian.

But hey, if the neocons in bowties didn’t listen to all the scholarly Arabists in the State Department and the universities, why would they listen to a romantic poet who died a century ago?

Remember the funhouses where we used to laugh at ourselves? We’d look into those convex and concave mirrors and make faces to see how downright silly we are and then we’d go home to the serious business of being ourselves, forgetting how much of ourselves we’d left behind.

Well, what if we’re locked up in a funhouse and can’t go home anymore?

The telecommunications hogs are trying to shut down the Internet where just about the only job creation left in America is going on. The globalist khans (you know, the ones who stuff obscene paychecks and options in their own pockets while booting thousands of us) are unleashing an immigration avalanche on the open graves of the middle class. Retirees are being betrayed by companies they gave their lives to. Children of the poor and soon-to-be-poor are being slaughtered so the rich can sack other countries, having already sacked ours. The liberties that distinguish us from everybody else are being rolled up by fat cats and their congressional lackeys. Voting districts are being gerrymandered and elections rigged.

And where are the leaders of this most powerful and church-going society?

They’re huffing and puffing about flag burning (they can document maybe four instances), homosexuality (the evidence points to biological causes), gay clergy and the family values they’re helping every day to destroy by forcing families to work more for less. And they’re hoping these phony issues will distract us while they dismantle the republic and ship the remnant overseas to their stinking rich buddies.

This is faith? This is leadership? These are values? Patriotism? Feels like
betrayal to me, betrayal all prettied up and toilet-watered in piety.

What can be said in defense of legislators who give themselves a $3,300 pay raise and refuse to raise the minimum wage, of the churchgoers who rage about gays and abortion and stem cell research that would save millions of lives and can’t untie their tongues when it comes to institutional greed and hypocrisy?

And just as we thought we were getting a bit jaded here in the funhouse a former vice president and putative president comes knocking to tell us the water really is rising. And oh yeah, insurance rates are rising even faster.

—DM