English School Management Style in Turkey

Early in September at the beginning of a 51-day short story, Lucky suggested to Trabzon management, I’ll be happy to move to Giresun. You need a full time eloquent teacher there. It saves you time and money. It means you don’t have to send a native barbarian over by daily bus. Saves 2.5 hours two ways. Turn around time. Students will have a full-time talking monkey expressing clear pro-nun-ci-a-tion with a silent eye.

The ineffective English coordinator-director married to Mr. Fat Profit said, Ok and called the Giresun Die Rector conversing with wild specific gestures. She stopped yakking. Connection died.

She spoke with trembling hands it’s ok. She grabbed the teachers’ schedule and scratched out his name. I eliminate your name, identity and memory. I erase your existence here. You do not exist on my scheme of language inquisition and massive revenue if you only knew. We want our teachers to be happy, lying through her teeth. In Giresun they will help you settle in. Get a spacious apartment near The Department of the Forest. No hot water and a view of the Black Sea. Find your way. Etc.

Thanks this is my lucky day.

He traveled to Giresun by bus along the sublime Black Sea. The bus passed a long haul semi. The blue plastic canvas tarp read TRANSTIM.

Met a four transit. The rucksack truck carried refugees from Georgia to Grease. Three million lived in Germany. They were the pre-invasion poverty and destitute force seeking social welfare benefits.

B quiet, said Ata Leader born in 1923. Immigrant mothers covered children’s mouths. Don’t speak. If they discover us they will kill us with false hope, lies and acts of random kindness.

Police stopped TRANSTIM. They murdered adverbs and adjectives. Kill modifiers. Murder darlings.

In Giresun Lucky saw many people with bandaged hands - domestic victims…shhh no talking about reality.

4/10 Turkish women suffer domestic violence in terrified silence, speaking of unpleasant facts. If they go to a hospital, human services, or police to file a complaint they are exterminated with extreme prejudice. Liar, liar, pants on fire.

Everyone’s ego carried a gun reinforcing visual intimidation.

Shit Outta Luck

In Giresun, Lucky needing a temporary place to crash met Sooner Or Later (SOL) or Shit Outta Luck, a sad spinally hunched over articulate 28-year old part-time neurotic Turkish/English teacher. He was strong on grammar rules and weak on life.

I love rules, said SOL. I failed my government teachers’ exam by one point. What’s the point, asked Lucky pointing at the Black Sea. Being correct is never the point.

The point is to get a cushy government-teaching job, said SOL. Now I teach, cajole, bribe, insist and incite with grammatical insight, exam material to blind, deaf and dumb university students.

How to pass, how to pretend they know the grammar rules. How to keep their fucking mouth shut in a Big Ears No Mouth society. They struggle for jobs. They struggle in/out of university. They struggle to be free and independent. They struggle to escape the tyranny of oppressive, emotionally distraught neurotic parents and teachers like me with our obsessive-compulsive control issues.

Yes, said Lucky, I see a distinct similarity between your fate and young female Chinese university teachers. Your age is the same as students. You are their brother. In China teachers were sisters. Students’ attitudes were, ‘be my friend.’ It’s impossible to be objective treating them like siblings. It perpetuates dependency versus autonomy.

I motivate them in the simple present, said SOL. Subject+verb+object. My fate is future past perfect, he said.

I am simple present and empty, said Lucky. The day after tomorrow belongs to me. Welcome to the insane asylum. I celebrate with crazies.

I invoke the Light of God within.

I am a clear and perfect channel.

Light is my guide.

Welcome to Land of Erasers. Turkish university students at TEOL loved forcing erasers across paper with passion, purpose and dexterity.

Erase mistake’s memory. There’s the rub.

  

In Banks We Trust

Every morning scared Giresun citizens lined up at banks before opening time.

In Banks We Trust. Give me your coins. Give me your artificially valued numerical currency with implicit trust. Give me your economic life. Give me your insolvent fear of financial collapse and worthless exchange. Give me your tomorrows. Give me your unlimited potential. Give me your laughter and stupidity. Give me your hope, the last evil thing to die at low interest rates.

Stepping with energy along a frozen alley at dawn an old bearded man wearing a knit cap and layers of cloth carried a sharp saw and wicker basket over his shoulder. Going to The Department of the Forest to harvest kindling. His best friend stumbled behind him staying one step ahead of death closing in.

Age whispered, Faster, faster. Enjoy the time you are given.

A young girl carrying a bouquet of red balloons walked past crumbling Ottoman walls. Her head scarfed mother gripped her hand in morning’s desperation. Stone stories sang as red, pink roses wearing thorns said hello to men haggling over silver fish. Are you passing through, said fish man, Yes, said balloon girl, there are not many things you need to remember about your visit to Earth. This is the day of my dreams.

 

 Give us a quick Giresun tour one fall afternoon.

You take a path away from bland towering apartment blocks watch time shops, sartorial dummies and modernity into a neighborhood of eighty-year old plastered stone/straw homes. A smiling curious Kurdish woman on her balcony asked quest-ion words. You shrugged. You didn’t know. You smiled. She smiled. Smiling is the answer. She shared Kurdish stories. Leaf plane shutter images whispered family and community minus alienation.

You wandered down another path and met a shaggy golden retriever chained to a wall. He was happy to have his ears scratched by Lone Wolf. Everyone stared at you playing with the dog. When they were distracted by nothing as usual you cut the chain. The dog ran free. Trailing thread a tailor emerged from his shop yelling, where’s my fucking dog?

Red, yellow and white wild roses said hello. A man planed wood for an axe handle at his shop. Honing laughter’s axe his bushy moustache and sharp eyes said he studied biology. His methodical passion reminded you of your father in his basement workshop on Independence Street. He respected his tools.

You visited a kind seamstress in her hole-in-the-wall shop. She fashioned a coin bag with satin ribbon drawstring refusing money accepting a smile.

You sat outside a teahouse. Across the street hard-working men and women with weathered faces haggled over farm tools, axes, hoeing instruments.

Young black haired men with strong backs, dark eyes, solid boots and motivation carried sacks of hazelnuts (Findik) to a wholesaler. He weighed them on a scale. Men sold their nuts. My wife loves my nuts, laughed one. His friend said, my wife never says show me your nuts she says show me the money honey.

Late light slanted off cobblestones.

A nursery gardener shook dirt off a small tree and cut roots. He helped an old woman bag it. Planting it in her garden she heard a woman crying in a Bursa cemetery water soil with tears near a gravedigger pounding a sledgehammer.

Everything must go.

Verifying her existence a woman studied her undulating reflection in a window of female dummies sporting wedding dresses. She glimpsed a serious fleeting vision of her calm beauty self-reliance and wisdom without a care in the world.

It will be cold in January, said Bamboo. Turning pages, yellow leaves sang, what a long strange trip it’s been.

The Language Company

 

Intention and motivation

Attention

To: Secret Agent Wordsmith.

From Godot: Nobody shows up. Nothing happens.

Discernment is everything in his mute Turkish life. Silent speculative tongues babble on community islands. Hustle tea with brown details. Clown town. Mother leads fashionable daughters. An old man’s shoulder weights a box of hazel’s nuts. A battered pewter teacup sits empty. A flaneur primps.

Inbreeding statistics reveal genetic truth and future medical issues at rural population control centers. Confront basic Turkish insecurities – loss and awareness with repressed aggression, sullen anxious attitudes, pervasive psychotic disorders and phobia.

What you don’t see between unemployed words is fascinating.

A cripple without legs heard laughter’s lymphatic memory. They were amused by a smile stirring sugar’s anger. A reader read a weather forecast to a friend. Rain. A black bearded man carried a chainsaw into a Giresun forest with intention and motivation.

The Invisible Ghostwriter

Down below love’s labyrinth looking for sexual partners 50,000 symbolic woodcarvers gesturing possibilities fostered benign footsteps telling 4,000-year old stories behind fish markets hearing catatonic voices seek meaning.

Quest-ions ran around looking for answers, Where are you? Come out come out wherever you are my bright little star.

Worry beads between male fingers worried themselves to death.

Alone and feeling cold, an old man stirred tea with ambivalence.

Love conspirators sang the blues.

Harmonic convergence polished black dress shoes.

A beautiful Trabzon university girl with shattered dreams and zero hope of being a boat captain attended an economics class.

Do the numbers. ABC. 

Chance

It’s come to our attention, said Deep State, we need more police – yes that’s correct...more police...moreguns, ammunition, uniforms, plastic hats, plated belt buckles, shields, face masks, tear gas canisters (made in Brazil) water cannons, green parks in Istanbul, collapsed mines in Soma killing 301, authoritarian boredom, fear, self-censorship, zero social networks, NO judiciary, more imprisoned journalists, more GREED and less wisdom, compassion, freedom and tolerance.

A new directive was issued. Verb 3.

Eating is important for a balanced diet.

Turkish female robots with bored black eyes conducted international surveys wearing skintight jeans promoting small chattels.

Remember to accessorize your demeanor with high heels and a serious facial expression of:

1) disgust

2) stupidity

3) monochromic awareness

4) worry

5) anxiety

6) fear

The die was cast.

Fate and Destiny sang a duet.

Timing played Danishan melodies at 1644 hours.

Giresun Before Dawn Mid October 2012 6:02 a.m.

Mild air outside designer storm windows fitted with rubber air current verb modifiers played through grammar-based pine trees eating kabobs in The Department of the Forest.

Mother, may I sleep forever? Yes my sweet, she purred stirring tomatoes content in the context of creating a lifetime of dependency while baiting a sharp fishhook sentence snaring a gentle reader, Let’s Eat the alphabet.

Are you a victim or participant, asked Quest-ion.

A victim, said Turkish student-citizens. We are (free) willing victims. We eat loss for breakfast with twenty-eight varieties of olives. I am a proactive participant, said a linguistic Chinese waif. You are Other, said victims, a barbarian and a rouge element. We share everything, said Other. Eat your freedom like Lone Wolf, said a reliable narrator having their ears cleaned with sanitized stainless steel tools by a Cambodian woman waiting for Mr. ATM.

I have nothing to say and I’m saying it. That’s nothing, said Milling Around in Asia. I have nothing to do and I’m doing it. I sleep, eat and fuck. So what, said Curious, I have no reason to live except to find out what happens next in this adventure. I don’t have time for negative losers. Get a life.

Inside a frozen sterilized room planning his great escape under the cover of Sacrifice, a national holiday 26-31 October, Lucky scribbled by tenor sax. Blue Train echoed through empty rooms with acoustic memory.

This geographical derivation detour wasn’t his glass of tea or chai in local lingo.

I agree, said Z, Ya got get a move on. Get back where you belong. You did your work here, brought people some luck, helped others develop courage, made field notes and street photography, I don’t belong anywhere, he said, It’s ok, where you go there you are, your heart’s in Asia.

Where’s Franz Kafka when u need him? He’s living in Anatold you so as an unmuting amusing assumed mute protagonist so he is. The bureaucrazy night dream mare plays on...

Write another chapter, said Z to calm your tortured heart.

Scene: Giresun, 4,000 years later. I’ve been here before, said a fish in a bowl. What’s water? It’s all I know. It’s the first thing an infant needs and the last thing a dying person requests.

I am amused by Freedom said a woman opening her legs getting to the verb.

One word. One vision. One day. One dream. One chance.

Make it new day-by-day. Make it new.

Opportunity cost. Return on investment. Cost-benefit ratio.

Lucky paid now.

Putting profit before people, Trabzon English Language School paid later.

The Language Company

Humble Attention

Earlier in the tale of two cities, Sit Down in Trabzon called Lucky in Giresun.

There’s a meeting tomorrow of all the native speakers. Catch a bus today, this afternoon, tonight, there’s no hurry, the meeting is tomorrow. What time? 9:00 a.m. All the native speakers will meet here and go to the local police station. And then? You need to bring your passport and four passport photos. Ok, and then?

Lucky was through this process before – bureau crazies, clerks, bored administrator traitors, self-important regal dignitaries well fed, others less so, intent on pushing, writing, typing, folding, stapling, sorting, reading, mutilating, massing papers, filing, speaking cardiovascular wage slave vocabularies pretending to be busy intent on bent necked acquiescence of humble attention to DUTY as complacent dreams explored new fantasies filled with vague prospects of retiring before dying of tedious boredom.

And then? We will go to the bank and get you a tax number, oh and by the way, you don’t happen to have $2,500 or $3,000 in your pocket to open an account do you? No? I didn’t think so, well it’s not important, don’t worry about it, Ok I won’t, Ok then see you later, what time are you coming, Around 6-7 keep the key for me, Yes, I don’t know where it is, I’ll ask one of the other teachers to wait for you, don’t worry about it, Ok thanks see you later.

On the G to T bus a father and son sat squeezed like fresh orange juice and nervous son with his fish mouth open conditioned by his father to be afraid of TIME kept checking his gigantic round watch.

Black Sea extended its long blue story.

Amazon Women Kill Males

After eating, Turkish businessmen splashed aromatic tonic on their hands, patted jowls and slicked back thinning hair. One man adjusted spectacles. Eating fish fast made him sweat. Sharing a joke about bones he smiled at an assassin writing a character sketch.

Ancient serious women in scarves accepted mountain village hard life. Young women divorced from confronting nature, soil and invisible roots appeared dazed and confused facing steep cobblestone Trabzon streets confronting miles of shops, window dummies and aggressive male textile hawkers yelling, “BUY FROM ME. SPECIAL MORNING PRICE. HAVE A LOOK-SEE. GET LUCKY.”

Shoppers’ visual examination loved text-based consumption paradigms.

Lucky hung out observing the flow as cats prowled for scraps, bodies with a voice cautioned parking spaces and lost souls attempting sad cellular telecommunication connections stumbled through temporary life inconveniences below Roman walls.

An abandoned Roman castle overlooking Giresun had a secret tunnel to a nearby is-land where Amazon women lived. They mated annually. Keep the race going. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, said an Amazon woman to her Black Sea lover. Take your time. After you make love to me I will kill you and eat your heart. I have something to look forward to he said, Yes, death is a new adventure. Nothing ever happens again.

Mosque mullahs calling the pious echoed exhortations swirling down cobblestone alleys past Giresun boys riding spoke less bikes between crumbling yellow Ottoman walls and mackerel sellers admiring haphazard silver fins lying dead eyed glossy on ice crystals melting into a refrain, The Sea! The Sea!

12 October 12

Turkish peasants love guns in a hunting culture.

Bang-bang, you shot me down. Bang-bang I hit the ground. Bang-bang that awful sound, Bang-bang my baby shot me down.

Are you the hunter or the prey?

Giresun munitions shop until you drop dead sold rifles, double-odd, pistols, bullets, calibers, double gaged gangrene, lock, stock and barrels of talking monkeys and circus clowns. Guns on weary authoritarian desperadoes waists itched bedraggled large breasted concubines as hip-hop head wrapped plastic hearted lovers cried.

Hearing suffering’s universal broken laughter a stranger composed a melody....”I Am So Tired.”

I didn’t get here by whining, said a sad neglected child bride victim of sixteen conceiving a child out of fear and loneliness facing future abandonment in an arranged marriage. Have a healthy progeny or get stoned to death for adultery, said her mother stirring tomatoes.

- Citizens play ‘walking chicken’ on narrow sidewalks.

- Drivers confront mechanical anxieties with bravado.

- Everyone's so excited as emotional paleontology squirmed dialogue with an EIQ of -7.

- Citizens remain traumatized since birth and younger than memory’s fascination.

- Sex is a DUTY said The Posture Police.

*

The creature behind the black curtain at the shooting gallery in a Giresun shopping center was s-l-o-w on the trigger to hide two graphic red and black bulls-eyes on a target screen after Lucky, exploring as usual parted the curtain asking what, oh what’s behind the blackness? Low and behold. Tear guts. Targets galore, said the creature. Lock n’ load. Fire when ready Freddy keep hands steady.

Happiness is a warm gun.

The Language Company

Get to school fool

Get to school fool: the Turkish TEOL Push Them Through Language Skool was, how do you say depressing oh my yes students on hard luck streets among Roman ruins showed him, illuminated him into their sadness and loss. Serious big time long lost time depressed.

Theydontknowwhatheydontknow or carets ate all.

According to history’s short story 10,000 Greek warriors escaping starvation and being pursued by Persian hoards ran down Trabzon mountains yelling, The Sea! The Sea!

They built Sumela Monastery in 386 A.D. on a remote mountain cliff at 3,900 feet facing the Altindere valley. Orthopedic Greek monks painted alfresco du jour stories with Apostles. Emperors came and went. Ignorant 20th century tourists defaced faces with pens, trowels, keys and bleeding fingers. Erase the past, yelled Turkish Authority taking a page out of Chinese and Khmer revisionist plans.  

Green and yellow forests, high rocky peaks and gorges inhaled fresh mountain air. Dirt paths escaping civilization’s eternal chaos forded deep rushing rivers climbing through autumn leaves hearing crescendos of water music singing, Pilgrimage. Up. 

OLD BOOTS

Creativity is a verb.

He accepted Z’s advice on not trying to be perfect. Don’t try. DO. He remembered her counsel. You will abandon this beautiful mess.

In Trabzon, he discovered new Merrell hiking boots for 112 bones to replace three-year old Hanoi relics. Soft slow in-step and out-step. Stepping is freedom.

Walking makes the road.

Timeworn boots remembered Hanoi alleys, Sapa Mountains, 101st Screaming Eagles wandering Hue with ghosts, Saigon pagodas,

Angkor Wat temples, faded colonial yellow buildings near a corroding Kampot iron bridge,

Battenbang genocide survivor stories, serene Luang Prabang monks receiving alms before dawn on winter mornings, Nam Ou river songs in Laos,

Phongsali tribal dialects, Pakse cotton threads, sacred Banlung animist jungles, Siem Reap lovers,

Nepalese villages below Annapurna, Boudhanath circumambulations, Vientiane genius kids developing social intelligence and character with curious laughter and Trabzon hospitality.

At Sumela boots built for comfort not for speed explored terra firma. Then he strolled along the Black Sea to Giresun.

The Language Company

Metamorphosis

Ebru had apartment keys. A broom and mop.

Certified by Deep State Central Cleaning Company.

Dust my room. 

Alerted to transcendental shifts by Ebru, the bald strapping German TEOL teacher paid 170 Lira to take a Dolmus bus seating twelve through Giresun careening up and down hills as the driver played a tactile aggressive horn past sad-angry husbands, sad-angry wives, morose backpacked kids, ebullient silver fish sellers, grizzled tea men huddled in shady alleys, hawk nose women chattering laundry, boy clerks soaping glassy watch out time windows with fateful despondency seeking clarity, negotiating twists, turns and exists to reach a harrowing slick 65 degree upward slope leading to a white apartment bordering The Department of The Forest at the end of the yellow brick road.

He unlocked the door. Five empty freezing rooms.

The kitchen counter displayed empty soda bottles, a black plastic bag of cheap harsh stale tobacco, a box of lavender herbal tea flowers, 1/2 jar of Nescafé, one white coffee cup, one spoon, a sharp knife from chapter one, a fork in the road and one bright yellow plate.

On a white laminated shelf was a first edition of Metamorphosis by Kafka, signed by the author.

“Read this,” said Silence the loudest noise in the world.

Next to it was a black key for a teachers’ cabinet at TEOL.

“Call Trabzon,” the German man informed Ebru. “We have an MIA.”

She rang Sit Down in Trabzon playing his weeping guitar while the world slept.

“Lucky Foot took a hike,” she said.

“Call out the SWAT team and dogs. Hunt him down. Kill him with extreme prejudicial kindness.”

She called SWAT. The line was busy.

The German returned to TEOL and gave Ebru the key. She approached the cabinet. A rancid smell smashed her nose. “What’s that god awful stench?”

Gagging, she threw up all over a teachers’ desk littered with empty tea glasses, cell phones and half eaten Simit pretzels. Regaining her composure she approached The Cabinet of Dr. Cagliari (1920).

She heard a ticking sound. Maybe it’s a bomb. I should call the bomb squad.

They arrived. A man in a bombproof origami suit applied a stethoscope to the front panel. Yes something is ticking. He drilled a hole and pushed an all-seeing microscopic eye into darkness. A mirror inside the cabinet reflected a thin piece of pulsating metronomic metal. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

“We’ll have to open this with thrilling caution. Get the Die Rector.”

The Die Rector, an economist knew what to do. “Let’s assume there’s no fucking problem. Give me the key.”

Ebru handed it over. Everyone backed up hard drives. The Die Rector, 56, who was scheduled for a heart-valve transplant in January, unlocked the door.

Inside was The Language Company by Zeynep, class rosters, green, yellow, orange highlighters, a silver magnifying glass, telescope, world globe, hourglass, rotten mangoes, a bag of hazelnuts, radioactive isotopes, a red rose with thorns, a dissolving image of a smiling ghost playing with Lone Wolf and Winter Hawk in a mountain meadow, a mirror, a dozing Black Mamba, a high voltage Dream Sweeper Machine from Hanoi, a Honer blues harp in the key of C, a magic carpet, one sugar cube, a glass, spoon, dry brown tea leaves, an empty bottle of Xanax, a ticking metronome, a bamboo forest, dusty footprints and rusty loudspeakers squawking:

We are Authority, Power and Control.

Surprise!

Two things happened. He saw his reflection and suffered a minor heart attack. The aggressive Black Mamba struck him in the neck, injected 100ml of venom slid to the floor and escaped to survive another day.

The victim collapsed writhing on the floor. He died in two minutes no more no less.

Ebru screamed, Oh no.

The bomb squad man stopped the metronome. “Time has ceased. Call an ambulance.”

The German called the Trabazon orifice. “We have a D.O.A. Die Rector in rigor mortise.”

“That's a you problem, not our problem. You deal with it,” said Trabazon. “Don’t bother us with petty details. No evidence no case. Die Rectors are a dime a dozen.”

The Language Company