[No. 4 Contents | JAST Homepage]

Dubai. An artificial country in which eighty percent of the inhabitants are foreigners like me, with a fifty percent underclass of Paki and Indian laborers who are only allowed in this Emirate to do menial work, and whose visas are cancelled at whim. They slave like Morlocks in Wells' The Time Machine, and are treated as sub-human in most circumstances. The masters of this society are quartered in huge villas with walls that do not merely symbolize their disassociation from the people here.

This is a perfect location for an American university to be dropped like a CARE package from a helicopter. This city/country (one city makes an independent political unit ruled autonomously by a Sheik) sends a few of its daughters to the American university to keep them from actually departing to American shores, where they might learn our ways too realistically; it must remain a movie, a stage set which everyone knows is not really real.

Of course, this university is real. We have 399 students, 225 of whom are working on BBA degrees, with 24 MBAs, and about 35 each in Fashion, Visual Communications, and Interior Design. We do uphold American standards. I teach essay writing and Writing the Research Paper and Creative Writing, which consists, since Carl is teaching it, entirely of poetry. The Dean is flexible; he's allowing me to start a new course in The Novel as Film, in which we'll look at Pride and Prejudice, Moby Dick, 2001, and others, somewhat as I did in a science fiction seminar at Bilkent several years back. But I must be careful to show no nudity in the films, and nothing anti-Islam, out of respect for culture here--course, it was merely written references to sex that have caused and continue to cause me so much hassle from that same Bilkent!

I'll begin an American Studies program here; currently the university is so American, so divorced from this culture, that it boasts a Middle Eastern Studies program, and fails to understand why this program is not a success. It's so American here, that the Americans don't reallly have a sense of being in another country: the stores are all lit up with American and British goods, all of them. With the exception of literary criticism, much of which is now easily available in my beloved Ankara, most American texts can be found easily. And they've surpassed America, which I think would be a disappointment to many locals (Emiratis) who "really" visit, departing this virtual reality for that [non-virtual?] one. The malls here--most American feature, perhaps--bigger, cleaner, and better than in the States. Everyone, with the exception of Americans like me, carries at the least one mobile telephone, and often two or three--in case one gets multiple phone calls! People commonly walk around the campus and in the stores, perhaps grocery shopping, talking loudly to people who are only "virtually" present.

They've out-Los Angeles'd L.A., for all the streets here have been replaced by fast highways--disconcerting, at first. During the month of Ramadan, anyone caught smoking or drinking or chewing on a Polo breath freshener in public is hailed or perhaps jailed by police.

Required to be in my office on campus over forty hours each week, I teach three five-hour courses, and I oversee 13 instructors of English, Psychology, Computers, and other disciplines in which the university, as of yet, offers only a few courses, required of every student. Nearly all instructors are Americans from the conservative Southern States, but we have one Turk named named Tüin Interior Design, and one Greek lady, who grew up in Ýstanbul teaching Psych and Sociology. Our students are from forty countries; we attempt to give them the American experience without the necessity of a journey to the actual site that might be . . . too American. Am I giving you the flavor of being here? The students are sweet and hardworking, more or less; I have favorite ones who are locals, dressed in black, but not veiled, wearing designer jeans underneath; I have excellent Indian and Russian and a few American exchange students. I advise two clubs: one is the Music Club, in which I share the old songs a few of your readers may have heard me attempt on the guitar, popular everywhere: "Country Roads," for instance. The other club I act as advisor for is the Popular Culture Club, just renamed the SFX Club for special effects, science (speculative) fiction, and the X files, xtra-sensory stuff, and the unknown--few students here are very fond of the X-Men in American comic books, which are readily available, and which I've loved all my life; and of course they crave American videos, which are obtainable here in censored versions for about twenty dollars each.

Everywhere is air-conditioned. You're not allowed to appear in a bathing suit on a beach, unless you're actually going in or out of the water, and camels are seen here as frequently as herds of sheep in Turkey.

End of letter from Dubai. Gönül, use any of this as you wish. I'm sorry I can't make it more coherent (here I echo Ezra Pound), but it hasn't cohered for me, except as an artificiality, a faux-réalisme.

I hope to hear from you soon. Thanks for writing.

Carl