Showey Yazdanian's Blog

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

– Tremendously engaging read, really upset me toward the end.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain

– One of the best books I’ve read in years – unforgettable account of a young soldier on a brief hiatus from war. Ecstatic that this is going to be a big-time movie directed by Ang Lee.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

– Seduced by the lovely writing until I realized that the plot is plain silly; the book has annoyed me ever since.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

– The book is a collection of linked stories that tell a grander tale; I manfully soldiered on until the end, but really book seemed like some kind of writing exercise.

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Word on the Street, Hacks the reading/book festival, has something new in it this year…me!

If you’d like to hear me read from or about Loopholes, please join me at:

June 23 – CIUT Radio Interview – 89.5 FM – 10 PM

June 28 – The Bookshelf – 41 Quebec Street – Guelph, Ontario – 1 PM + AFTER-PICNIC

June 30 – Niagara Literary Arts Festival – 7pm at Patrick Sheehans’s Irish Pub (St. Paul Street, St. Catharines)

A quick note to say that you can now buy Loopholes directly from the Quattro Books website (author’s note: buying directly from the publisher is generally a more author-friendly way to do things…but feel free to find the book on Amazon or Chapters, it’s all there and they are shipping nicely).

My comic novella Loopholes will be launched tonight at The Supermarket, 268 Augusta Avenue, Toronto. I am immensely excited and it must be admitted somewhat nervous. I should probably also add that on June 23 I will be interviewed on CIUT 89.5 FM and will be reading from Loopholes at The Bookshelf in Guelph on June 20.

Next stops: Bangkok, London, Stockholm, Paris and Svarlbard, Norway….IN MY DREAMS.

The glorious cover of Loopholes

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In the Alps, where prize stallions apparently roam free. ????????????????????? I was cheap jerseys not expecting to see these animals.

How nice of you to wholesale jerseys China visit my blog! You may know me as the author of Loopholes, which will be launched by Quattro Hej Books ホームページをオープンしました。 on June 2, 2015 and is destined to be an world! inter-galactic bestseller. Herein you will find book reviews, some travel writing and the cheap jerseys odd reactionary screed Robin about politics. If you wish to express your approbation, mild difference of opinion or moral outrage…fire at will using cheap jerseys China “Leave a Comment”.

Wonderful. It’s 6:30 AM and the Athens metro is closed. There is no explanation given as to why: people simply sulk outside the shuttered station gates. We tried running to a different metro station. It was also closed. We had a ferry to catch at 7:30, so we caught a taxi.

When the ancient and affable taxi driver learned we were going to Mykonos, he cackled his head off and made some kind of an obscene gesture. I don’t understand why, but it probably has something to do with the fact that Mykonos is the centre of Greek gay life. He was also deeply amused by the concept of a female police officer: ‘MAMZELLE POLIZIA HAHAHAHAHA’. Finally, he gave us a long diatribe about politics in Greek which ended with the pronouncement “Merkel Mama, Obama Papa”.

We make the ferry, which is the approximate size of a planet, with 5 minutes to spare.

…The Greek Saga Continues…

The Theatre of Dionysus at the Acropolis site. Athens supported a lot of theatres.

The Athens airport contains a sophisticated and very pointed jab at the British, and specifically the Greek arch-nemesis, the nefarious Lord Elgin. This jab takes the form of a human-sized computer screen bearing the message “Should the Parthenon Marbles be Returned to Greece?”. Travellers are then invited to vote yes or no, by means of connecting jigsaw pieces which show how perfectly the missing marbles “fit” atop the Parthenon. I tried to vote ‘no’ merely to be irritating, but the program made this very complicated, and probably impossible (I gave up).

Anyway, the day after we visited the Acropolis Museum we finally paid a visit to the Acropolis site itself, and you can see the Greeks’ point: they’ve politically sorted themselves out now, the country is stable, the site is immaculate, and there are a lot of conspicuous holes all over the Acropolis where the Elgin marbles should be. The Parthenon is effectively stripped bare, and the Acropolis museum is reduced to displaying a series of pointedly passive-aggressive placards grumbling about Elgin. I would point out, however, that the National Archaeological Museum of Greece houses a spectacular Egyptian collection, which has not been returned to Egypt.

The rear of a statue at the Archaeological museum. Because bottoms are funny.

Some would argue that it was the Turks, not Elgin, who really ruined the Parthenon. Greece was under Ottoman control from roughly 1457-1829, and at some point the Turkish garrison thoughtfully stored a large casket of gunpowder right in the Parthenon, because apparently nowhere else would do. One day someone shot a cannon by mistake, the gunpowder ignited, and the rest is history. The Greeks were very displeased by this, but they still reserve their most powerful archaeological hate for Elgin.

The Parthenon was also destroyed by the Persians in 479 BC. King Darius was irritated by the Athenians’ support for a rebellion somewhere in Asia minor, so he levelled the entire Acropolis. This was essentially his only victorious battle, however, as the Persians were utterly humiliated everywhere else.

The Acropolis aside, we’ve also seen a number of other superb sites: the Temple of Zeus, the ancient Agora, and Hadrian’s library. Athens is essentially one huge pile of rubble, and it can be very confusing because the various eras of rubble overlap. There’s ancient rubble, dating from the glory days of Athens the city-state in the 4th Century B.C., Roman rubble, dating from 88 B.C., when the Romans took over, and finally there is medieval rubble, from Byzantine/Ottoman rule. In practice this means that ancient libraries and pagan temples were knocked down to make room for Roman versions of the same, and then converted into Byzantine churches when Constantine was in power, and then were not infrequently transformed into mosques. Basically, pre-20th century peoples were very good at recycling: instead of demolishing buildings, they simply rearranged the pieces.

That said, you can tell Greek rubble from Roman rubble quite easily. The Greeks were great at poetry and culture, but their buildings were quite primitive: they simply took stone and mashed them together. Roman buildings are made of actual bricks, with cement that holds firm to this day. Yes. In terms of construction, Rome>Greece. However, in terms of philosophy, drama, and mathematics, it was Rome that firmly looked to Greece. These days we mostly look to these countries for excellent holidays, but that is neither here nor there.

Behold the Acropolis…rendered in Lego. Life-size (not really).

The road back to Kastraki from the Meteora was lovely and scenic and full of fragrant trees. We got lost, but did find a man grilling souvlaki on the roadside, who shouted at us until we capitulated and ate some. His wife served fried potatoes and a salad with olives that was superb, and we were only cheated minimally on the bill. We ran around like pointless idiots for a while until a nice gentleman stopped his Mesozoic-era jalopy for long enough to gesticulate at a dirt road through the mountains. His car stalled, but oh happy day: he was right, the improbable path terminated at the rubbish-tip behind our hotel. We made the train to Athens with plenty of time to spare.

Athens is underrated: excellent food, friendly people and superb sightseeing – including, of course, the Acropolis. On the whole, I’m quite pleased that we saw the Acropolis museum first. It put the whole Acropolis in context, the primary context being that the Athenians were apparently a proud, noble and just people who were buggered by just about everybody: the Persian, the Spartans, the Turks and finally and most hatefully of all, Lord Elgin of Scotland. The Persians razed the Acropolis to the ground and the Turks accidentally blew it up, but between 1801-1812, Lord Elgin, who always maintained that he was “conserving” Greek culture from its imminent destruction, simply packed up the nicest bits and mailed them home to Britain. I actually saw the famous “Elgin Marbles” in London at the British Museum and they were very nice indeed: sparkling gorgeous marble frescoes that once decorated the very highest heights of the Parthenon. This is a highly sensitive political issue, as Greece desperately wants the Elgin marbles back, so the British Museum considerately pastes a sign on the exhibit that reads something to the effect of, “We know that this is a highly sensitive political issues, but we’re keeping them anyway.”

A beautiful Kore. I didn’t take this picture. I stole it. Much like the British stole a real Kore.

The British also nicked one of the six “korae”, which are 2000-year-old immense statues of beautiful women that are used in lieu of regular Doric columns to hold up the “Etheulaion”, another prize site on the Acropolis. Oh, and one of the korae was accidentally blown up by the Turks: a recurring theme in this tale. You can view the blown-up beautiful kora, sad and headless, in the Acropolis museum.

Look closer. There’s a monastery at the top. How did it get there??

Showey’s adventures in Greece continue!

…I took exactly one look at the third monastery and correctly deduced that it was run by women. The place was spotless and daintily decorated with neat, bright gardens of flowers. Also, there was a large sign that read “Rousanou Nunnery”. My final clue was the clutch of enterprising nuns milling about everywhere, selling everything from their famous pine-tree honey to paintings of their monastery on tiny white stones. The nuns keep beehives in the back, smoking out bees in white beekeeping outfits. We bought a jar of honey, which leaked. As with all of the monasteries, it is verboten for women to wear trousers. Rather than booting the shameless trouser-wearing hussies off the mountain headfirst, the Sisters kindly provide skirts, which must be returned at the end of the tour.

The fourth and final monastery of my day was Agiou Nikolaou (there are six in total). Nikolaou is accessible by means of a 15-minute vertical climb up narrow a staircase, and most visitors are too pooped by this point to bother with it. Bravely I soldiered on armed with nothing but a cream-cake and a can of Fanta. The highlight of the monastery was an original, completely unrestored 16-century fresco of sinners being subjected to horrible tortures. There are sinners being pierced through the head, sinners being stabbed in the heart, sinners being decapitated – and they all move on a conveyor belt of blood into the jaws of a horrible satanic beast. Jesus Christ floats above them all, smiling beatifically: follow me, children, or terrible tortures await you. The other highlight of the Agiou Nikolaou Monastery was the thoroughly corrupt ticket-master. A millennial Greek, irritable and with a mouth full of chewing gum, he offered me a “special price discount” of 1 Euro on the 3 Euro fare, but neglected to print me a ticket. In practice this means that he probably pocketed my money, robbing the monks in the process. The only Greek words I know are “souvlaki”, “Pythagoras” and “Opa!”, none of which convey indignation. In closing I will say that the monks seem to be robbed a lot. They should take some lessons from the business-savvy nuns, but probably won’t. The same ticket-master also got volubly irritated when I got bored of my borrowed skirt and removed it. He piously told me to cover my legs. Then he probably went and robbed another monk.