6.29.2007

Turkish Maps and Legends

Yesterday I helped a friend pack a container for moving, and the result of carrying hundreds of pounds of a tasteful book collection down two flights of stairs is aching hamstrings. These tender 'strings of mine reminded me, naturally, of the mountains and passes that comprise the heart of Inner Asia, especially since for light bedtime reading I've been working through Peter Hopkirk's corpus. This morning when I woke up rather too early for my lackadaisical tastes I finished off his Trespassers on the Roof of the World: The Secret Exploration of Tibet.

A lot of Westerners attempted to reach Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, by traveling through the extremely sparsely populated and desolate plain in the north of Tibet, the Chang Tang. The harsh climate and the eventual discovery of their parties usually defeated them before they were able to reach Lhasa, and in any case, the so-called race to Lhasa had been won by a Bengali, Sarat Chandra Das, one of the so-called native explorers, or pundits, trained in surveying.

In any case, thinking about the northern part of Tibet reminded me of something I stumbled on recently about Khotan. Kashgar would be usually be the gateway for any 19th century Western explorer who attempted to enter Tibet from the north or who wanted to explore the Tarim Basin, and when I recently did a Google search on Khotan, as I periodically do, I was somewhat surprised to find some new information that had been added to the wikipedia entry for the Kingdom of Khotan.

Under the sub-heading of Culture, there is this new (at least new to me) bit of information:

In his Diwanu Lughat at-Turk, the 11th century Turkish scholar Mahmud al-Kashgari included a verse describing the Muslim conquest of Khotan:

Like river torrents
We flooded their cities
We destroyed their monasteries
And shat on the statues of the Buddha.
Now I am certainly familiar with the Muslim conquest of Khotan in 1006, and I've been searching for references to it in Tibetan sources connected with the Western Tibetan kingdom of Ngari somewhat desultorily since the Qarakhanids were also active in Western Tibet and there seems to be some connection between Khotan and Ngari in resisting these incursions, but I had never seen this particular and unfortunately scatalogical reference. Further investigation via wikipedia reveals that Mahmud al-Kashgari wrote the first comprehensive dictionary of Turkic languages, the Dīwān ul-Lughat al-Turk (Arabic: Collection of Turkic words) in 1072. This, of course, is the source mentioned above.

But that's not all. There is a fascinating map in this text showing the distribution of Turkic tribes. Here is some more information on how to read the map.

Well, of course I had to look and see if there has been a translation of this text, and sure enough, after rummaging around on the Internet with my extreme flopping fish google-fu, I found this:

Maḥmūd Kāshgarī, 11th cent.

Türk şiveleri lügatı = Dīvānü Luġāt-it-Türk / Maḥmūd el-Kāşġarı ; inceleme, tenkidli metin,vİngilizce tercüme, dizinler, Robert Dankoff, James Kelly.

Duxbury, Mass. : Tekin, 1982-1985 (Printed at the Harvard University Printing Office)
3 v. : folded map ; 28-29 cm. + 7 microfiches (11 x 15 cm.). ( Doğu dilleri ve edebiyatlarının kaynakları ; 7. Türkçe kaynaklar ; 7 = Sources of Oriental languages and literatures. Turkic sources ; 7 )


Actually, it wasn't Google, but the good old Harvard Hollis Catalog. But don't discount the difficulty to find this reference though.

There was also this reference from my notes:

Mahmud al-Kashgari, Diwan Lugat at-Turk ("Turkic Lexicon"), translated with Introduction by Zifa-Alua Auezova and Index by Robert Ermers, Almaty "Daik-Press" 2005. ISBN 9965-699-74-7.


I'll probably have to scour the Interlibrary loan for that one though since I'm not sure where I stumbled across that reference. In any case, the vitriolic tone of the above passage from the "Turkic Lexicon" might provide another nugget or two of information about Khotan, something I'm always on the lookout for. I wonder if the city was named explicitly since the reference given in the wikipedia article is singularly uninformative and somewhat hard to find in the U.S.

6.26.2007

Unknotting Knoxville

A few farewell photos of Knoxville, mainly of the part of town called the Old City. The Old City is a few square blocks that consist of very old buildings under heavy development. Unfortunately it's penned in by a highway and the railroad, but it is rapidly gentrifying with design and architects' offices. Great bit of graffiti. My sister tell me that this local artist is well known and that people will pry off the plywood at building sites to keep she often sketches on. Summer thunderstorm sky over downtown Knoxville.

The old JFG Coffee building where they roasted coffee since 1926. It's been recently closed and operations moved elsewhere. Repurposed bowling alley as car lot. Doesn't get any more post-modern than that, does it? Bricolage amongst the suburban detritus.

6.25.2007

My Grandparents and Father Jules Daigle

I have kept few mementos of my adopted maternal grandparents. I had a leather bag full of things belonging to my grandfather, but that bag molded over in the Southeast Texas heat and humidity while in storage in a shed. I think somewhere else in storage I have some of his things, but I don't have anything of my grandmother's since I was not in Texas when she died, and she had been sick for so long with Alzheimer's, that most of her possessions had been discarded or absorbed into the family.

Last night I was looking through a stack of my sister's books, and I found my grandparent's copy of A Dictionary of the Cajun Language by Rev. Msgr. Jules O. Daigle, M.A., S.T.L. It's signed by Monsignor Daigle, but unfortunately there is no date. Here is the information that I've been able to find about Father Daigle from here:

Jules Daigle, born December 4, 1900, is the son of Oscar Daigle and Eliza Landry and the 6th of 17 children. Father Daigle spent the first 2 years of his career in Baltimore, Md. and the final four he studied in Rome. He boasted that all of his professors went on to become Cardinals. Father Jules Daigle, who was ordained at the Vatican in 1926, returned to Louisiana where his sermons in Cajun French drew overflow crowds. After 48 years as a priest, he retired in 1974 and began a writing career. By 1984, using his own money, he published his 600 page dictionary which immediately became a best seller and supported many charities. His influence has spawned successful education programs teaching French to South Louisiana's children and adults even after his death on January 2, 1998.


He was also the author of a book called Cajun Self-Taught. Apparently, he was fluent in eight languages and a main proponent of the preservation of Cajun French. He certainly had some acerbic things to say about topics such as "Is Cajun bad French or just different French?" and "Other myths about the Cajun language". He had earned the right to be cantankerous, for he states in the introduction that he has been using the language for 84 years.

On the backside of the front cover in what I think is my grandfather's handwriting is his and my grandmother's names and their address. They must have purchased this somewhat close to the end of my grandfather's life, for the address indicates that it was after they had sold their house and moved closer to my mother so that she could care for them as they grew infirm.

I was able to find one book review of Father Daigle's dictionary:
Mary Patricia Trenkle, The French Review, Vol. 59, No. 5. (Apr., 1986), pp. 836-837. Although Father Daigle was convinced that Cajun was a separate language from French based on a variety of factors such as vocabulary, question formation, the uses of après, donc, and voir, abbreviations and repetitions, Trenkle remains skeptical. I leave that matter to the experts in the field and those that like to smash their heads against the language versus dialect debates.

I've always regretted not having been taught Cajun French by my grandparents, especially after I started studying French in high school. They didn't teach it to their kids, but it wasn't until recently that I realized the stigma attached to speaking it from the beginning of the 20th century to about the 1970s. From the same page above that gave me that biographical information on Father Daigle:

The French language was once so dominant in Louisiana that official state documents were published in French and English. In 1898, the State Constitution provided that "the French language may be taught in those parishes and localities where the French language predominates". But in 1921, the Louisiana Constitution prohibited the teaching of French in public schools. Children were spanked for merely uttering French words on the school grounds.

It's been said that the stigma against Cajun French was because que ce n'est pas le bon francais, but the stigma must've been stronger than that, for my grandfather even went so far as to change the ending of his name, Babineaux, to an -o, Babino, to make the name appear more Italian. I'm uncertain when he did that, but my maternal aunt, being the maverick that she is, changed her name back to the original spelling several years ago. I should look and see if I can find the documentation for the spelling change of his name. I'll have some more posts about this kind of stigmatization later.

I'm sure my sister will hold onto the dictionary. It doesn't look used at all, but I'm sure my grandfather and grandmother had little need of it, except as a reminder of their heritage and to honor Father Daigle.

Waitin' and Grabblin'

Ah, the delicious dichotomy of sexual mores that is the South.

One can see several billboards around Knoxville promoting abstinence. Yes, and by abstinence, I mean sexual abstinence, not abstinence from deep-fried foods and the flesh of swine roasted over various types of wood. These billboards have been around since I visited here previously in 2005, but they appear to be in good repair. The name of the organization is called Just Wait. Apparently, it is a local organization, for the homepage declares eagerly that:
"We have gone from teaching in 3 counties to 13! We have gone from a staff of 3 to now more than 10! We now see over 25,000 students and have the privelege of sharing the life-changing message of abstinence until marriage."

I had assumed that this was a national organization. One wonders where the funding is coming from. Their graphic design is somewhat effective, I suppose, in a cheery vacation bible school sort of way. The most eye-catching of the billboards is the image on this t-shirt, which at least gave me pause to investigate what was going on further. I'm not so sure about the veracity of their slogan "Safe Sex Isn't", but apparently, you can add sexual education to the list of topics such as politics and religion that aren't to be discussed in polite company but can be trumpeted from billboards.

Now for the grabblin', brought to my bemused attention courtesy of the weekly here in Knoxville, The Metro Pulse. And what is grabblin', you naturally ask? Welp, according to catfishgrabblers.com, it is:
"... the art of fishing with your hands. In the spring of the year the catfish move to shallow water to lay their eggs. Spawning is triggered by the increasing length of the days and the warmer water temperatures. Spawning in the Tennessee River area usually starts about late May."

For further details, I refer you to this page. And why do I bring this up in a discussion that is presumably about the sexual mores of the South? Simply put:


Yes, it's a take-off on the infamous Girls Gone Wild video series whose highly repetitive commercials afflict those cursed with insomnia and who happen to stumble (or is it thumble with a remote control?) upon one of the many channels that hammer these products ad nauseum and ad infinitum in the wee hours of the morning.

However, Girls Gone Grabblin' simply must be infinitely more charming, for who can resist the following ad copy:
"Believe it or not! We now bring you the first and only Girls Gone Grabblin' DVD ever produced. Be one of the first to watch & be amazed as 35 Southern Women bring you the thrill of catching catfish weighing up to 44lbs. with their hands and wrestling them to the bank."

Folks, I too find it hard to believe that this is the first and only Girls Gone Grabblin' DVD produced. But I predict that in this specialized case, the supply will create the demand, for who can resist the allure of not 10, not 20, but 35 Southern women catching catfish and wrestling them? It would take a stronger and far more virtuous man that I, given my predilection for all things deep-fried and the fact that these are not, I repeat, are not farm raised catfish fed Purina Mills Catfish Chow so they'll taste right once cleaned.

Grabblin'. You couldn't make this stuff up.

6.24.2007

"Boy, thou uproarious shark of heaven..."

Heavens, how have I not read Kim until now? I am assuredly on a Raj-era India literature kick, but I lay the blame squarely (or rectangularly as the case may be) at the feet of Book Eddy here in Knoxville, those purveyors of $1.50 soft cover books that I cannot resist. I'm also working my way through Orwell's Burmese Days, although that is a dreary trudge given that it is mainly set in the hot before the monsoon in Burma and supremely depressing in the inability of anyone to really communicate with one another.

Does not the title of this post suit Kim, even though it is taken from A Clockwork Orange? One of the great characters in literature, comparable to the immortal and redoubtable Zorba the Greek in sheer joi de vivre.

If you have a taste for it, and mine waxes and wanes dependent on some mysterious cycle unknown to me, there has been a fair amount of post-colonial criticism of Kim as well, most significantly and beginning with, I assume, Edward Said, "Kim, The Pleasures of Imperialism," Raritan, 7(1987): 27-74. One can also sample online a paper in a similar vein by a former student,
Nandi Bhatia, at my alma mater, the University of Texas, Austin. The paper is titled, "Kipling's Burden: Representing Colonial Authority and Constructing the "Other" through Kimball O'Hara and Babu Hurree Chander in Kim."

I did not know that John Lockwood Kipling was the curator of the Lahore Museum that figures prominently in the beginning of Kim. If that's a fair representation of Kipling Père, then he was a burra sahib indeed in language skill and art acumen. It's been a long time since I've read it, but I'm certain that Stanley Abe's "Inside the Wonder House: Buddhist Art and the West," in Curators of the Buddha, ed. Donald Lopez (1995) deals with Kipling's depiction of the Lahore Museum. Perhaps Dr. Abe was able to give an accurate account of Kipling Père's true abilities.

I also seem to remember that a former professor of mine at the University of Texas, Dr.
Janice Leoshko, writing something on this very subject. Ah, here it is:
Janice Leoshko, 'What is in Kim?: Rudyard Kipling and Tibetan Buddhist Traditions', South Asia Research, (Fall) 2001, pp. 51-75.

Quite an interesting topic, given the state of knowledge about Tibetan Buddhism at the time of the composition of Kim (1901-1902, I believe). I cannot remember offhand if L. A. Waddell's work on Tibetan Buddhism with the lengthy title of
Buddhism of Tibet or Lamaism, With Its Mystic Cults, Symbolism and Mythology and in Its Relation to Indian Buddhism had been published at this point. Yes, it had in 1895. My, Waddell seems to went off his nut later on in life, if the following publication is any indication: Phoenician Origin of the Britons, Scots, and Anglo-Saxons (2nd ed. 1925). I wonder if anyone has written a biography on him.

There is this, English in Tibet, Tibet in English: Self-Presentation in Tibet and the Diaspora, by Laurie Hovell McMillin. Sounds like just the thing for exploring some of these issues based on the table of contents. One of her chapters covers Kim.

There is still the question, at least in my mind, of Kipling's sources for the Kulu and Kangra districts and the religious practices there. I shall have to procure a copy of Dr. Leoshko's paper once I have significant library resources.

Good lord, Peter Hopkirk has also published a book of note on Kim.
Entitled Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling's Great Game, it is said that "the author visits the locations of the novel and discusses the real-life personages that may have possibly inspired its characters." I believe this man has had entirely too much fun mucking about Central Asia and writing about the Great Game and the exploration of Central Asia and Tibet.