Author Archives: oook

Leigh Fermor

Alas, this week’s online New Yorker doesn’t include Anthony Lane’s profile of Patrick Leigh Fermor, so only subscribers will enjoy lines like

As a rule, nature is judicious in the dispensing of talent; we are happy to revere George Eliot, say, secure in the knowledge that she looked like Seabiscuit. (pg 60)

Leigh Fermor’s travel writings have graced my shelves for about 20 years, but Lane’s vivid descriptions of Leigh Fermor’s WWII service in Crete and Egypt add still more dimensions.

Lane chooses his examples well. Here’s a nice bit that quotes Leigh Fermor:

…like many autodidacts, he sees no reason not to throw open to the public the overstocked library of his mind:

The scattered Bektashi and the Rufayan, the Mevlevi dervishes of the Tower of the Winds, the Liaps of Souli, the Pomaks of the Rhodope, the Kizilbashi near Kechro, the Fire-Walkers of Mavrolevki, the Lazi from the Pontic shores, the Linovamvaki –crypto-Christian Moslems of Cyprus– the Dönmehs –crypto-Jewish Moslems of Salonica and Smyrna– the Slavophones of Northern Macedonia, the Koutzo-Vlachs of Samarina and Metzovo, the Chams of Thesprotia, the scattered Souliots of Roumeli and the Heptanese, the Albanians of Argolis and Attica, the Kravarite mendicants of Aetolia, the wandering quacks of Eurytania, the phallus-wielding Buonariots of Tyrnavos…

That is Leigh Fermor on the dispersal of Greek communities. The list covers two pages, includes what could be a line of Edward Lear (“the Shqip-speaking Atticans of Sfax”), and closes with the phrase “to name a few.”

That’s from pages 4 and 5 of Mani: travels in the southern Peloponnese, and I see that I’d marked it in my copy. Strikes me that it ‘s a fine example of my own tastes for anthropogeographies –and in fact I have recordings of the musics of quite a few of those communities.

Addendum: Mercurius Complutensis quotes the whole passage.

This is all very fractal, or maybe it’s hologrammatic. I started looking for more bits to fill in gaps in my knowledge and an hour later was still just beginning. A few links:

George Moran on Touring the Vlach Villages of Greece

Souliots

Chams, and the continuing controversies –viz. Miranda Vickers’ The Cham Issue: Albanian National & Property Claims in Greece

On Dönmeh

This on linovamvaki:

I seem to remember coming across the term “linovamvaki”, used in Cyprus; sometimes it was used politically (to refer to people who were neither left nor right, but sat on the fence), but I believe that its roots went back to either Greek Cypriots who had converted to Islam or Turkish Cypriots who had converted to Christianity. Does anyone know this term? If so, I’d be interested to know exactly what it meant. ethnic Greek (ethnic Greek 21:21, 2 May 2005 (UTC) The “limnovamvaki” is a small piece of cotton that is worn on the outside and it was used by ethnic Greek Crypto-Christians in Cyprus. It was definitely not used by Turkish-Cypriots who converted to Christianity. Any Turkish-Cypriot who converted to Christianity was severely punished. The millet system saw to that. Anyway, the Greek-Cypriots used the “limnovamvaki” to hide their identity from other Muslims, but at the same time maintain their Greek identity by makiing themselves recognizable only by Orthodox Christian Greeks. ethnic Greek May 4, 2005 3:44 P.M. EST Thanks for this. I’d thought that it was “”lino”vamvaki” meaning “linen-cotton”; I’m not sure exactly what “limnovamvaki” means, though. ethnic Greek (ethnic Greek 21:48, 4 May 2005 (UTC) Yes, linovamvako is a fabric made of linen (lino) and cotton (vamvaki)–see Babiniotis or Andriotis dictionary. Presumably it followed the same sense-development as English “linsey-woolsey”: not just a particular fabric, but also a strange mixture or mish-mosh in general, e.g. half Greek/half Turkish. I don’t know about its ”specific” meaning (Greek language, Muslim religion? Christian mother, Muslim father?), which isn’t mentioned in the dictionaries. The story about the piece of cotton sounds, um, doubtful; the spelling limnovamvaki (lake-cotton?) doesn’t make much sense and isn’t recorded by the dictionaries. Perhaps what it really is is a troll? I am beginning to wonder if Charonite isn’t simply trolling us overly-earnest ns: take a look at the extravagantly implausible theories he propounds on his talk page. As for conversion (apostasy) from Islam, yes, that is punished in principle by death. –ethnic Greek 22:53, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
(buried in http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:KMkvpzEwj1UJ:www.mauspfeil.net/Greeks.html+linovamvaki)

I could continue all day, no doubt.

Pepys, and more on Jinxes

I don’t pay nearly enough attention to the serialized Diary of Samuel Pepys, though I glance at it pretty much every day in RSS summary. Thus, I’ve been missing the community created by the annotators and commenters who brighten each entry with erudition, miscellaneous carpings, and occasional doggerel. Monday’s piece (Friday 15 May 1663) is a case in point, with [among many others] Australian Susan’s addition, jeannine’s limerick, and Robert Gertz’ imagined dialog as wonderful enlargements on the text.

…and while we’re enlarging upon texts, three weeks or so ago I pointed to a r0ml posting about jinxes, and just this morning I happened on two Language Log entries (Pickle Jinx [16 Dec 2003] and High Jinx [17 Dec 2003]) in Far from the Madding Gerund that offer links to several antecedents in jinx research, and suggest an Opiesque/Sutton-Smithian research frontier…

Willinsky snippets

Brian Lamb points to a presentation by John Willinsky, noting that “the grand theme is the imperative (and potential) for technology to facilitate genuine learning in service of an education that transcends skills training…” The whole hour is a delight, and here are four extracts to inspire you to make the time to download and listen:

…a whole new relationship to the access to knowledge… 1:33
…why would people construct knowledge on that basis? (re: Wikipedia) 1:45
…learning is nothing unless it’s a contribution to others… 0:52
…pure, unadulterated self interest… (re: open access journals) 2:00

A shove from Solnit

Commencement speakers are expected to be eloquent, though their primary audiences are probably too distracted to recognize it when it happens, or to remember the details of the message. Rebecca Solnit crafted a barn-burner for the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley. There are lots of yessss! moments, but here are two bits that really got my attention:

The amazing thing about the novel 1984 is that Orwell could invent the Ministry of Truth, Big Brother, thought crimes, and the Memory Hole, but in his book women are still hanging cloth diapers on clotheslines. It’s easier to prophesy global politics than laundry, but our lives are shaped by both…

Books matter. Stories matter. People die of pernicious stories, are reinvented by new stories, and make stories to shelter themselves. Though we learned from postmodernism that a story is only a construct, so is a house, and a story can be more important as shelter: the story that you have certain inalienable rights and immeasurable value, the story that there is an alternative to violence and competition, the story that women are human beings. Sometimes people find the stories that save their lives in books.

Mencken comma where is he now that…

I’m sure that lots of people are getting out their Mencken quotations, umbrellas in stormy weather. Here are some especially trenchant bits, posted as part of a comment to a Washington Post op ed piece:

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.

…and he’s been gone for, what, 50 years…