The Artificial Mountain

Well we were all set to build Indiana's first official mountain. But then some folks showed up all yelling about how this mountain we were building might destroy some habitats. "There's no need to worry about that, folks," our foreman said. "What we're gonna do is build this mountain from one-hundred-percent natural habitat. If anything we'll be adding thousands of tons more habitat to your state, in an upward direction." Well this got them to squawking amongst themselves. One old man came forward and asked did we have a permit. "Everything by the book," said the foreman. "Fact of the matter is we have a book full of permits, for anything you'd like." Did we have a permit for falling in love with one's own sister? Yessir, we did, and the foreman handed a copy of it to the old man. The old man smiled to break your heart. He called out, "Bitty!" and an old woman appeared out of the crowd with a sort of glow all over her face. It was the sweetest thing you'd ever seen, those two old people coming together after what must have been years. They held hands and ambled back to their car. The foreman waved them off with his hat in his hand, and wished them luck, and we turned to start on our mountain. Read More

There was a time during the middle of 2007 when every junior staff member at the magazine where I worked was looking for love on the Internet. The art director, an amiable Scandinavian in his mid-twenties, set up a white umbrella lamp in his tiny office and snapped some pictures of our coworker Rob that revealed a pair of bee-stung lips and dreamy eyelashes we had never quite noticed while sitting hunched in the glare of our computers. Rob had wanted the pictures for online-dating purposes, and he posted them, next to descriptive text that made him sound noble and introspective (maybe, all this time, he really was noble and introspective). Within a few weeks, Rob began dating a beautiful Cuban law student. I felt a sense of envy, maybe, but not of loss. I didn't quite want to date Rob. Sitting four feet away from me, day in and day out, he was too close already to want to bring into that other kind of closeness. But the rest of New York, it seemed, was too far away. Surely there were other offices on our block where people our age also toiled with computers and ideas. Why couldn't we meet them? We could invite them all to our office for Friday-afternoon beers, and the next week, they could have us over to theirs. Like many sensible things, it seemed impossible to arrange.

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In New York, they saved.

They saved on orange juice, sliced bread, they saved on coffee. On movies, magazines, museum admission (on Friday nights). Train fare, subway fare, their apartment out in Queens. It was a principle, of sorts, and they stuck to it. Mark and Sasha lived on the 7 train that year and when they got out, out in Queens, Mark would follow Sasha like a little boy as she checked the prices at the Korean grocers, and cross-checked them, so they could save on fruits and vegetables and little Korean treats. They saved on clothes. Read More

I like to tell my students that I wouldn't have moved to Turkey if Orhan Pamuk hadn't made me admire it from afar. I say this partly because it's true, but mostly because it shocks them, and that seems useful for my purposes. Their mouths drop open in disbelief, and they sit slackjawed while I tell them how The Black Book sold me on their city. With misty pictures of decaying opulence and narrow alleyways dotted with minarets, it made the word Bosporus name a strait that I needed to see. The scruffy, Diesel-clad Turks that I teach throw up their hands. Their ongoing perplexity at my decision to leave a good job in the US to teach at their Turkish university grows into something more. How could a novel by Orhan Pamuk make me think this was a good idea? Read More