Bear News: Late July Edition

Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Wow--a pretty scary story, but a good example of how to remain cool-headed during a bear encounter. 

What else is happening? Well, here's the Bear News roundup: 

From Bozeman to Belgrade: Moving the Borderlands Lodge N & P

Saturday, April 10, 2021

A lot has been going on over the past couple of months. For me personally, the biggest project has been moving. Yes, after twelve years in its present location, the Borderlands Lodge is headed to Belgrade: Belgrade, MT, that is--the little Montana town with a Balkan flavor. 

I've lived in a lot of apartments over the years. There were four in Montreal when I was in college, and then another four in Istanbul when I lived there in the 90s. I won't even try to count how many places I rented when I was a graduate student/post-doc researching in Istanbul, Baku, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Ufa, Moscow, Simferopol, Batumi, and Tbilisi, not to mention Princeton, Providence, and NYC. 

When I got my job at Montana State in 2009, I was living again in Istanbul, having flown out to Turkey--for the second time in my life--on a one-way ticket and no concrete plan for return. I'd finished my PhD and was feeling somewhat invisible after two long years looking for tenure-track work in the USA as a professor. I was riding out a post-doctoral research grant I'd received and, other than applying for various jobs, no real idea of what was going to happen next. 

Moving from Istanbul to Bozeman in the summer of 2009 was an adventure. I didn't have a lot of stuff, so I shipped out what little I had stored at my parents' place in Ann Arbor, then used the remainder of the moving expenses MSU had given me to rent a car and drive out to Montana from Michigan. It was a great trip, and gave me a feel for the enormity of the distance and the land extending between my childhood home and my new adult one. 

N & P: İmparatorluklar Arası Türkler Edition

 Saturday, January 23, 2021

This has been a pretty busy week up here at the Borderlands Lodge. School started last week, so there has been plenty to do. Still, things are slowing down a little bit. Whereas I fielded probably 20-25 email messages from students last week, this week was a bit calmer, but still there were a lot of questions. It's always like that in the spring, which is when I teach a big 100-level class.

One kind of cool thing that happened was receiving notice that my first book, Turks Across Empires, has been translated into Turkish. 

News & Propaganda: Brand New Year Edition

Saturday, January 2, 2021

Well, 2020 has come to an end, and many are no doubt celebrating. Not me. I'm happy to have time on this earth no matter what, pretty much, so you won't find me wishing for a year to be over prematurely. 

I wonder what would have happened if, one year ago, we had all been told ahead of time about what 2020 would be like. How would we have responded? I think a lot of us would have freaked out, myself included. But once you're actually in the middle of a situation, you find ways of managing. 

Not that my situation has been especially difficult. I've been alone, which for some people would be torture, but I happen to mostly enjoy my own company. I'm also still able to work. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how destructive this past year has been to the lives of others, so I don't feel particularly put out by my own rather trifling inconveniences. Mostly, I've been reading a lot and trying to finish the book I've been writing on Nazım Hikmet. Actually, the book is pretty finished-looking at this point. What I need now is a publisher.   

And what about in the Turkic-Russian borderlands, what's going on over there? Well, let's take a look...

N & P: Christmas at the Borderlands Lodge Edition

Saturday, December 26, 2020

On the heels of last week's International Monkey Day edition, now we've got still more special days this week and next. All of these holidays just keep coming.

While I enjoy getting a tree and putting it up in my place here in Bozeman, Christmas has never been a particularly big holiday for me in this part of the world. As an adult, I've appreciated Christmas most of all during the years when I was abroad. As I've written elsewhere, back when I was living full-time in Turkey in the 1990s, Christmas felt like my own personal secret holiday of sorts, something most of the people around me were not celebrating, or even aware of. That's how I like my holidays sometimes: in isolation.  

And indeed, Christmas this year was spend largely in isolation. I made ribs and mashed potatoes, with margaritas on the side. A friend came by to eat and drink on the landing leading up the stairs to my balcony. So, we were distanced by about 10-12 feet and outside. Otherwise, I spent the day the way that I've spent most of the past nine months: working on my book, reading, and taking an hourlong walk. 

In other words: exciting times, all around. The other day I found a can of split-pea soup in my cupboard and literally thought to myself: "Oh, split-pea soup. That might be fun."   

So yeah, on second thought I guess nothing exciting is happening here, after all. 

And what about the Eurasian borderlands, you are asking, what's been going on there? Well, let's have a look...

N & P: International Monkey Week Edition

Friday, December 18, 2020

For those of you who are unaware, this December 14 marked international Monkey Day. 

I'm a big fan of monkeys. I remember when I was in Agra, India, in 1999, I was sitting on the balcony of my hotel. A guy was walking down the street with a bag of groceries in his hand. From my vantage point, I could see a monkey hanging out first in a tree, and then on top of a tall wall. Concentrating on the pedestrian's plastic bag, the monkey made one big leap, grabbed a bunch of grapes out of the bag, the leapt up again onto the wall. In seconds, the grapes were gone. The man stopped, looked up at me, watching him, and shrugged. There was nothing to be done. 

Well, I guess that's monkey business for you. 

And what about in the Eurasian borderlands this week, was there no monkey business go on there? Let's have a look...

N & P: Trimming the Tree Edition

Friday, December 11, 2020

This past Sunday I participated in one of my favorite Montana traditions: cutting down a tree and decorating it. 

The practice up here is to buy a permit for $5 at the hardware store, then go to a national forest and saw down a tree. Growing up in a pretty suburban neighborhood in Ann Arbor, and then really only living in large or large-is cities since then, I'd never experienced something like that. The first time I did it in Bozeman was on Christmas Day, 2009, when I went north of the Bridgers to cut down a tree with a group of local Russians. For the last several years I've been cutting down my own tree to the south of Bozeman, usually with a group of friends with whom I picnic, drink, and stalk trees. 

This year, of course, things are different. But there was a pandemic bonus: rather than the $5 that the rapacious hardware store extorted from us, now Montanans pay just $2.50 to get our permit online. Merci buckets, Recreation.gov!

It was nice to see some friends, outside at a quite socially distanced space. I brought a couple of beers and a turkey club sandwich and joined in the conversation with friends I hadn't seen for months. Then I borrowed a saw and cut down my tree, which I then dipped into an enormous vat of hand sanitizer. 

All in all, a nice day. And there was a strange feeling of nostalgia associated with it as well, as I had kicked off my quarantine back in March by taking down last year's tree. I wonder what the world will look like by the time I throw out this one. Better, I hope. 

And yes, that is a Santa Claus hat on top--purchased on the streets of Istanbul many a year ago. I've never been one for putting crosses or stars on the tree. Loyal readers of the JMB should know, at any rate, that the Borderlands Lodge is one of the last remaining outposts of secular Kemalism in Gallatin County. 

It's good to be in the mountains and, for the moment at least, healthy at the Borderlands Lodge. It's nice to have a tree, and even better to have friends willing to lend you a saw and set up a bonfire. 

And in the Eurasian Borderlands? What is going on there? Well, I thought you'd never ask...

N & P: End of Semester Edition

Friday, December 4, 2020

The fall semester has come to an end at Государственный университет Монтаны--at least pending the final revision of grades over the next couple of days. As always, the end of the classes been a rather bittersweet experience, but then again all good things come to an end. Yet, it seems like just yesterday that I was writing my Back to School edition of the N & P. Or something along those lines. 

It was nice to get back to teaching in the fall, even if it was online. Now that the semester is over, however, it's also good to put it behind me. We've got an extra-long winter break this year--I'll end up going about eight weeks between my last class in the fall and first of the spring. Normally, I would be lighting out for the territory at around this point, but instead I'll be biding my time at the Borderlands Lodge, plotting my next move. There's a book to be finished, and a publisher to be found.  

I also hope it snows soon.

Meanwhile, across the Turkic-Russian borderlands a number of interesting developments have been taking place, including:

N & P: David Halberstam Edition

Friday, October 16, 2020

As I've been writing a biography in recent years, I also read a lot of biographies. Many of these are more scholarly or academic-type volumes, but a lot have been trade-press works of varying quality. Especially with regard the latter, I pay particular attention to the writing and what you might call the "storytelling" aspect of the book. I pick biographies mainly based upon how interesting I find the subject, regardless of how closely connected they might be to my interests in the Turkic-Russian borderlands. This year I've read bios of Charles Schultz, Vladimir Mayakovsky, L. Frank Baum, Jim Henson, and Rudolph Nureyev, to name just a few. 

For the past couple of weeks I've been reading David Halberstam's book on Michael Jordan, which was first published over 20 years ago. I love Halberstam's writing, and have read probably eight or nine of his books over the years. Breaks of the Game is, of course, a classic, but others like War in a Time of Peace and The Best and the Brightest are also really impressive. 

In Playing for Keeps, Halberstam's book on Jordan, I found the organization of the writing--and the chronology of the book--particularly exceptional. It starts in Paris in 1997 and ends in Chicago one year later, but throughout its 32 chapters the book goes backward and forward constantly. Some might complain that Halberstam was "jumping around" too much, but not me. In fact, I'd say that this work was masterfully put together. It's a cliche to refer to a book as a "tapestry," but that's really the effect here. Whereas most biographies plod slowly forward, Playing for Keeps zooms in and out, hitting at different moments of Jordan's life and then circling back in time in a manner that kept me interested. The chronology of the book also had the effect of tying together Jordan's playing career in a much more coherent manner than simply telling the story from beginning to end. 

I'm not trying to write the kind of book that Halberstam would have written. As an academic and scholar, I've received too much training on specific areas of the world and developments in modern history to do that. Trying to say something bigger and important about an era, as opposed to talking about a single individual in a vacuum--or simply recounting the details of a person's life--will usually slow down a narrative to a certain extent. But still, it's so inspiring to read the books of such a beautiful writer. I actually shed a few tears when I got to the very end of Playing for Keeps this morning. 

One last thing--I couldn't help but notice how much the much-ballyhooed 10-part Michael Jordan document released this summer picks up on so many threads from Halberstam's book. I really liked the documentary, and it's one of the reasons why I ended up finally buying this book a few months ago. But still--I kind of think Halberstam should have gotten some credit here. Obviously, if different creative types are working on the same subject, there's bound to be a lot of overlap. But the insights of the documentary--I see a lot of them in Halberstam from more than 20 years back. 

David Halberstam died 13 years ago in a traffic accident at the age of 73. He had published 20 books, of which Playing for Keeps was one of his last. What a career that guy had. I wonder if anyone's ever considered writing a biography of him. 

***

Meanwhile in the Eurasian borderlands, the world continues to turn. Stories from the region which caught my eye this week include: 

N & P : Padre Possibility Edition

 Friday, October 9, 2020

While I'm a stalwart supporter of the Detroit Tigers baseball team, I occasionally engage in flirtations with various National League temptations. This occurred for the first time when I was a university student in Montreal. The 1$ (Canadian) bleacher tickets in the late 80s-early 90s at Olympic Stadium and easy access via the metro made the Expos my National League mistress of choice for some time. These loyalties, such as they were, were eventually transferred to the Washington Nationals. 

This year I've been meeting up furtively with another team in the hours after the Detroit Tigers have lost yet another game. While Dan Dickerson and Jim Price are packing up their microphones in Detroit, I've been listening to a different radio broadcasting team on the Pacific coast. I've been fooling around with the San Diego Padres.  

Why the Padres? Family connections--my maternal grandparents lived there for many years. Moreover, because the Tigers crushed the Padres in the 1984 World Series, I've always felt a certain patronizing magnanimity toward their squad. I've never feared them, and the Tigers rarely play them anyway. 

And I've always liked the idea of San Diego. It seems like a nice place to live. It reminds me vaguely of the Crimea. Nice weather, a lot of Navy people, proximity to the ocean, little green men. That kind of vibe. 

Out here in Montana, moreover, I like listening to the West coast radio broadcasts late at night. The Padres tend to be one of the last games of the evening to finish up, so I usually end up with them. A lot of great relationships have started off with far less. 

So don't call it an affair: I was just enamored by the lure of possibility. 

Alas, while the Padres made the playoffs this year and extended their season beyond Detroit's, they lost in the--which series was this again?--to the Dodgers. So now I've lost my baseball mistress as well.

***

And what about the Eurasian Borderlands, you might be asking? A lot has been going on this past week, including: 

N & P: Farewell, Tigers Edition

Friday, October 2, 2020

The Detroit Tigers' season has come to an end, and I sure will miss them. True, the team hasn't been good in recent years. And this season was something of a joke--just 60 games, with all sorts of weird rule changes and a couple of franchises swimming up to their necks in Covid. 

Nevertheless, listening to the Tigers on the radio--or at least an internet-based radio feed--has been so great this summer. As I mentioned in a post devoted solely to baseball this summer, I've always preferred baseball on the radio over TV, and this year especially. For long stretches, it's been great to these games, piped-in crowd noise and all, and forget about everything that's been going on. 

No, it hasn't been perfect. But Dan Dickerson and Jim Price, the Tigers' radio broadcasting duo, have done a great job this season. As I've written elsewhere, I love listening to them--they seem to genuinely like one another and always talk about the Tigers--and even their opponents--in a generous, positive, yet quite nuanced manner. Even though the Tigers have been pretty bad in recent years, listening to their games with Dan and Jim has been such a pleasure. They're great. 

I was listening to an interview the other day with Tiger Pitcher Daniel Norris. The "Van Man" is one of my favorite players on the team. Somehow, he was able to talk about how this was a good year for him because he regained confidence in his arm and developed a new pitch. It was so great to hear someone describe their life in terms other than the relentlessly negative narratives that--understandably, of course--have dominated this year. 

But that's baseball for you--it's a game of yearly rejuvenation, even as we get older--and even if the seasons don't always go the way we'd like them to.  

***

All of this fun and games notwithstanding, a lot has been going on in the Eurasian borderlands over the past week: 

N & P: End of Summer Edition

Friday, September 25, 2020

Summer is over. And what a summer it's been! Actually, I can't complain. Bozeman is a beautiful place, and I always felt like I had plenty to do. Luckily, I was at a stage in my book project in which just staying at home and writing was probably the best thing for me. 

Now the weather is getting colder. It's not crispy--the way it gets in New England around these times--but rather more like a big deep wind that brings darker and colder climes. 

N & P: Leonine Woes Edition

Friday, September 18, 2020

I'm having a difficult time masking my disappointment in the 2020 version of the Detroit Lions. Honestly, I figured that with the way this year has been going, it would kind of make sense for an historically inept franchise like the Lions to finally pull through. 

But no--and I should have known. Once again, this team would find ways to lose in some crazy way, as happened again versus Chicago in their season opener. And it seems like these collapses always happens against the Bears. Even the Lions' best player, kicker Matt Prater, had a bad day. 

Before Detroit's loss on Sunday, over the past 15 years NFL teams leading by 17 or more in the fourth quarter had been a combined 779-3. 

So, nothing has appeared to have changed with this team. But at least the Lions have managed to bring back some consistency--a sense of normalcy, you might even say--to our confused world.