May
4
2009
Nein, nein, says Yiangoulis
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*Apologies to those who’ve unsuccessfully attempted over the last two months to post a comment and thanks to Matt Weber for bringing the glitch to my attention. For someone who spends most of his time hauling, or thinking about hauling, lobsters from the seafloor, you’re not a bad tech consultant.
Left to right: Andriani Psaras, Yiangos (aka Yiangoulis) Psaras, Georgos Psaras, Vassiliki Psaras (my grandmother), Anastasia Psaras
During my childhood years in Cyprus, my parents used to occasionally take me and my sister to visit my grandmother’s brother, Yiangoulis, and his wife, Anna. Their house, with its acres of backyard citrus orchards, was off the road to Kourion, our favorite beach, and so often we would pull off the cypress-flanked road into their driveway for a coffee and ‘glyko karidaki,’ a Cypriot dessert of whole green walnuts that have been boiled and preserved in a thick sugar syrup.
James Joyce
Despite living on a fruit farm, Yiangoulis was almost always buttoned up as if he’d just returned from some august country club beyond the lemon groves and droning cicadas. A tall lanky man, with round black wiry glasses, long delicate fingers and small sharp eyes, he didn’t look like a Cypriot (in fact, now that I think of it, he looked like James Joyce). He was a gambler and backyard magician who would offer us money if we solved one of his riddles, which inevitably involved numeric puzzles or matches arranged in infuriating geometric formations.
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Mar
4
2008
Orthodoxy in Kenya (Part II)
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The following photos constitute the second and final part of my photo essay on Kenyan Orthodoxy (for Part I click here). They were all taken in Western Kenya, mostly in remote Luo villages in the tropical forests around Lake Victoria. Although Western Kenya’s principal city, Kisumu, had a reputation even then for being unsafe at night, and although the Lake Victoria region of Western Kenya is hardly prosperous, the region’s slow paced village life, rolling tea fields, tracts of fertile farmland, and tropical lushness all conveyed a sense of peace and relative abundance (although the same cannot be said of Western Kenya’s Rift Valley, a vast flat arid plain dotted with Masai communities living in abject dirt-and-flies poverty). This bucolic impression may have been exaggerated by the fact that I had spent so much time in the Nairobi shantytowns, which make for miserable living from any perspective. Nevertheless, whatever truth there may have been to the idyllic picture of Western Kenya was shattered in recent months when the region, especially Kisumu and the Rift Valley, experienced some of Kenya’s goriest bloodletting in the post-election bedlam. There was no hint then of what was to come, at least not to the transient visitor’s eye. The only violence I had experienced was from an Anopheles mosquito, which injected me with a dose of malaria and soon had me curled up in a trembling, feverish heap just in time for the seven-hour potholed drive back to Nairobi.
SLIDESHOW OF PHOTO ESSAY (part II)
-Constantine Markides
IN 1922, a young woman named Hadley Richardson thought she would surprise her husband, who at the time was in Switzerland on assignment as a war correspondent, by bringing to him almost all of his fiction-all unpublished-from their Paris apartment. It turned out a surprise all right, but not the sort she intended. While her train was still stationed in the Gare de Lyon, she briefly left the compartment to buy some mineral water. On returning she found that the valise-which contained not only the manuscripts, but also the carbon copies, duplicates, etc.-was gone. In hindsight the traumatic loss seems only appropriate, even fortuitous, for that young writer-Ernest Hemingway-who would develop a ‘less is more’ credo and whose mascot, if we might ascribe him one posthumously, may as well have been a scalpel.
