REFLECTIONS ON LARB

added energy to our neighborhood! If respectable people are now frequenting these streets it is because of his museum.”

Tekin then complained about the coverage of Gezi events by the international media. “They represented this city as if it was a war zone,” he said. “In fact not much had changed here. All the violence took place around the park. It was peaceful in Çukurcuma.”

Ahmet Ok, who runs a leather shop on the other end of the street, begged to differ. Living in an apartment in Cihangir, Ok experienced firsthand how the tear gas used by the police affected even the residential areas that had nothing to do with the events.

Ok told me how things have changed over the last four years as people from the United States and Europe started renting houses in the neighborhood. He said he had been a tourist guide for more than 25 years; when I suggested whether he was bored sitting behind a desk all day long in his shop he said he had lately become an avid reader of books. (He confessed to enjoying My Name is Red, Pamuk’s IMPAC winning novel, more than the Innocence.) “I heard that Pamuk is about to finish a new book and that it is about a boza seller,” he said. “I wonder whether he will build a museum for the boza seller as well.”

Pamuk has frequented the streets of the neighborhood for the last 13 years. When he is in town (which is not always, since Pamuk is lecturing at Columbia University one semester a year) he visits the shops and talks to their owners. In Turkish we call antique dealers antikacılar, which is a neutral word. Antika insan (an antiquated person), on the other hand, is not so neutral: it means a weird kind of person, which the protagonist of Pamuk’s book arguably is. (Following the death of his lover, he collects everything she left behind.) During my childhood, my relatives told me that writers, artists, and such people were antika insanlar, and that I should keep my distance from them. Seeing how much the Nobel laureate, his antique-dealer neighbors, and the thousands of protestors who had wanted to preserve trees in a public park had in common, I feel glad that I have never taken their advice.

Roula Nassar, in memory of a miracle, 2019, ink on paper, 19 x 33 1/4 inches.

BENJAMIN ALDES WURGAFT

“On Reading Jonathan Gold” is my personal celebration of the food writer Jonathan Gold and his version of Los Angeles. I felt lucky to have it appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books in November 2018, just months after Gold’s sudden passing, because it was in Los Angeles that I started to rediscover myself as a writer, and Gold’s work and the Los Angeles Review of Books were both crucial parts of that process. I hadn’t moved to Los Angeles in 2012 entirely by choice; I had lived in Northern California for 10 years and celebrated fog and sweater weather, not bright sunshine. But I did love good food, and as I navigated L.A., Gold’s restaurant reviews gave me guidance. That’s how I found Chef Wes Avila’s Guerrilla Tacos truck, where Avila made the best, and most creative, tacos I had ever eaten. It was through Gold’s writing that I started eating chapulines at Guelaguetza, and driving for hours to search for food trucks that seemed potentially mythic but always, eventually, appeared out of the night like lighthouses, illuminating their crowd. I had done some food writing up north, but I suddenly felt I had been missing out on something profound, a set of links between plate and place and people that even discussions of terroir, which Northern California’s food scene is full of, couldn’t touch. Gold was a master of those links. At the same time I found my way into something else: an arts space called Betalevel, in Chinatown, which boasted a regular evening of talks called the Errata Salon. All kinds of people spoke: librarians, writers, artists, local faculty. I joined in too. We talked about all kinds of topics, from personality tests to telephone booths to Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat novels, to Robert Hooke’s 1665 Micrographia. The big lesson was that no topic was too small to prompt serious reflection. You could call this Proustian, but the style was not to take yourself too

seriously, to never elect yourself Proust. For some of us it became a workshop for smart nonfiction writing, a place to test out our ideas before trying to publish. I was showing up for Errata Salon talks at about the same time as I started submitting work to LARB, and I thought of them as sharing a similar loose and playful spirit. They both helped me to shake off some of the stiffness that had crept into my prose in grad school. I miss the Errata Salon to this day, and wish I could sit in that dark basement, munching pretzels and learning something unexpected about Vanishing Point or the history of Los Angeles street names. I’m curious about many things, as a writer and a scholar, and one of my basic principles is that there doesn’t need to be an official story about how my interests relate. Intellectual life is not, for me, built out of a singular obsession, but of many different things, and being curious about epistemology and being curious about, say, Sichuan restaurants in Alhambra, are likely to be different kinds of curiosities, served by different ways of writing. That happy disunity is something that writing for LARB has helped me to discover. I still think of LARB as my favorite journal of the appetites, wide-ranging and ardent, but resistant to doctrine wherever doctrine would block honest reflection about the world. To my knowledge, the journal has not followed my constant suggestions and served larb (the famous Laotian and Thai meat salad) at one of its gatherings, but I live in hope.