John Dolan's "Erdogan Pizza"
Have you been to the English Deer Park?
It’s a large type minstrel ranch
This is where C. Wilson wrote Ritual in the Dark
Have you been to the English Deer Park?
Hey tourist it wasn’t quite like what you thought
Not quite like what you thought
John Dolan has an excellent new book called Erdogan Pizza, named after a restaurant he stumbled upon in Macedonia. Dolan is a very fine writer and his work is entertaining, educational, and funny. I'm not a big reader of travel books, I'd rather just go. I've read a few, Xenophon's Anabasis leaps to mind. You might quibble, “Joe, that's a war book.” Well, in many ways so is Erdogan Pizza.
Dolan was once a literature professor, don't stop reading, and struggling poet. OK, struggling poet is redundant. I remember years ago, a poet friend was all excited about getting on some new poetry website. I remarked, “Julia, no one reads poetry on the internet either.”
Two decades ago, at the start of that great American idiocy, George W. Bush's Iraq War, Dolan switched his attention. Using his adolescent infatuation with war, he created the War Nerd — a typical overweight, deskbound, American warmonger, though entirely atypical in his knowledge of war and history. He writes of the time,
“Suddenly every mainstream pundit was pretending to be a military expert, offering opinions about military hardware (which had obviously been borrowed from a quick glance at Wikipedia) and making foolishly optimistic predictions about the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. My reaction, as someone who spent his wretched adolescence reading military manuals and periodicals for several hours a day was pedantic outrage. How dare these amateurs claim an Iraq occupation would be a ‘cakewalk’! They knew nothing about guerrilla war!”
I remember talking to Dennis Kucinich at that time. He was about to announce his candidacy for president. He claimed the invasion would be a hard, bloody, door-to-door struggle. I replied, “Dennis, the old man destroyed the Iraqi army a decade ago. Going in will be easy. The war begins with the occupation.” And he wanted to be president, well, at least he was against the idiocy.
Dolan is no advocate for war, but as he so correctly writes about America's basically nonexistent antiwar politics, “The bigger problem was that the antiwar people so despised military history that they were proud of not knowing it.”
Much of the humor in the book comes from Dolan's adopted persona of an average American neurotic, though he’s so convincing I'm a little concerned it might be all too true. Despite its war obsessed global image, the world has no idea what a crazily nervous, bubbling with fear place America really is. Dolan personifies it well. You’re surprised he's able to get out the door on any given day, much more travel across the planet to places like East Timor, Paraguay, and Albania. Maybe his wife and travel companion Katherine are responsible for getting him out the door?
As a budget travelogue, Dolan hits all aspects of transportation woes, bare bones shelter, bodily functions, and run-ins with border officials. Food wise, not so much. He reveals a propensity for visiting McDonald's whenever he can. Jesus, how American is that?
But the real gift of Erdogan Pizza is Dolan's historical knowledge and beautiful expositions. In this respect, Dolan is completely un-American. Much of this knowledge is focused on military history, but you have to know the bigger picture to really give understanding to history's unending bloodbaths. A couple Dolan observations,
“But defeated armies can learn, can coalesce, can develop a grim, vengeful determination. And if all you’ve got to offer against that is “morale” or “élan” or any of those seductive French nouns, you’re going to have trouble.”
And,
“This is one of those stories with no character arc, no narrative turn, no happy ending. Paraguay exists today only as an odd quirk of geography. We tend to forget these stories of annihilation, because…well, because the annihilated don’t usually have much to say. But they’re around us, under our feet, always there to remind us that not all stories have three acts and a moral.”
He tells a very funny story about visiting the 18th century Fenestrelle Fortress in northern Italy. It's multilevel, built onto the side of a cliff, which means to explore it you need to climb. For any true war nerd, physicality ain't part of the equation. He writes,
“Oh how we climbed. We saw many interesting things (he said grudgingly). The gunpowder storage, with a grid of metal to divert lightning strikes away from the gunpowder, huge airy corridors to keep the powder literally dry, and―wonder of wonders―a window that had once been graced with a glass pane. They had no choice, because this magazine was totally enclosed, a building within the larger building, with no natural light. So to let the wretched soldiers load powder kegs, they had to put a lit candle on the far side of this one window that let into the room. Without glass, it would’ve been enlightenment on somewhat too grand a scale even for the 18th century.”
The book ends with a wonderful story of the Countess Gore-Booth sisters, Constance and Eva. Constance played a significant role in the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. Both were immortalized in verse by no less than Yeats, who was a friend and sort of co-conspirator. In the end, commenting about the life of the sisters, Dolan writes,
“They were wild, in a way that we can’t appreciate now because ours is, let’s face it, a very cautious, tame era. We soft-pedal different aspects of their histories as we go.”
“But no matter when you squint at them, you have to admit one thing: They were fiercer beasts than this language can offer now.”
Amen
If you're interested in very entertaining travel writing from across the globe combined with a superb knowledge of history, you can do no better than Erdogan Pizza.