Ottoman Beachcomber

The world was a very different place in 1983, at least in Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey. In this book you will go on travels in a simpler time to places innocent and charming. Join me as I outrun demons that are chasing me, dance in morning dew with unknown women, walk across borders in the dead of night, find my estranged wife in a 15th century Ottoman marketplace, and explore delightful villages far off the beaten trail.
This ebook is also enriched with photos from my personal archive, and liberally sprinkled with links to related websites and photo archives.

My writing career spans forty-five years. Most of my work has been devoted to composing long narrative poems that explore the clash between the real and the ideal, in the lives of historical figures and people I have known. As I reconstruct these lives, so I also reconstruct the English language. I believe that rethinking language is an essential task if we are to build more insightful and effective psychological models, and more realistic and accurate assessments of the quantum mechanical world we live in. The development of this language, which I sometimes call Steevtok and sometimes call meta-English, has been a slow, evolutionary process. It has required the re-thinking of spelling, grammar, and the conceptual implications of linguistic structures.
You can trace this evolution of language in my books. Ottoman Beachcomber, a prose travelogue about a personal journey to the Balkans and Turkey, is written in standard English. My other prose title is A Pilgrimmage tu Jerusalem. Here just the spelling is slightly altered, as I tell a tale of a spiritual journey. The Song of Elmallahz Kumming, Bouk 1, is the first in a series of 6 books of poetry about a messenger, Elmallah, coming to this world to awaken our species. This is a relatively early poem, but in it you will see the beginnings of a new language emerging. In The Song of Elmallahz Kumming, Bouk 2 Elmallah returns to a world that is still prehistoric, but on the threshold of early urban life. The Atternen Juez Talen, Era 1 is my latest book. It presents the first scenes in an epic historical poem about the Eternal Jew, an exceptional fellow, worldly and wise. Its opening scene is set in Jerusalem 2000 years ago. As you can tell by the title, the language in this poem has undergone significant transformation. Therefore, I provide a prose translation in the book, stanza by stanza.
To complement my life of writing, I have learned the arts and crafts of gold illumination, painting and bookbinding. Alas, I have also had to earn a living, notably building econometric forecasting models (yes, I love math, and still find reading things like 17 Equations that Changed the World or Six Not So Easy Pieces or Causality and Chance in Modern Physics more enjoyable and more useful than most poetry), and more recently as a Jewish educator.