My Cruise to Greece and Turkey: Part 3: Izmir, Chios and Karfas

Thurs. July 13--Izmir, Turkey

The clock tower in 
the main square of Izmir, Turkey

The main attraction of Izmir is 45 minutes away--the ruins at Ephesus and the home of the Virgin Mary. We had seen both the last time we were in Turkey, so this port of call was not a highlight. Izmir itself is a large city with a massive labyrinthine bazaar and a cruise pier a few miles from the center of town. Jerry stayed on board and I took the shuttle bus in. I wondered around the boiling city until I found the tourism center and acquired a map which led me to the agora of Smyrna, an ancient metropolis founded by Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE. I trudged pass souvenir shops, restaurants, and fish markets to emerge at the ruin with its columns, running water, headstones, and archways (including the Faustina gate, named for the wife of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius who rebuild the city after a devastating earthquake.)

Oddly enough, the highlight of the agora for me was browsing in the tiny museum gift shop. Amid the magnets, postcards and reproductions of busts and statues was a display of classics in English for 69 and 79 Turkish lire--the equivalent of $3 or $4 dollars US. The titles were off-beat, second-tier works by major authors--Jacob's Room and A Haunted House by Virginia Woolf, A Tale of the Stone Age by HG Wells, The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell, several short works by Stefan Zweig, etc. I was suddenly transported to the Strand Bookstore. They were all cheap and had simple, attractive covers. All published in Turkey in English. I don't know why I wanted to but I took a picture, maybe to capture this unexpected island of rare English literature in a remnant of the ancient world. I wound up buying two postcards, a magnet that said Turkey with pictures of different cities in each letter and Chess by Zweig, a slim novella I'd never heard of before with a preface on Zweig. I will have to read the other titles at some point.

Hitchcock's Marnie: Pure Film and Woman as Object

Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery in Hitchcock's Marnie. 
Hedren's character is more tightly wound than her hair bun.

The recent documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut prompted me to view the master filmmaker's works I had not previously seen. Top of the list was Marnie, the 1964 psychological "sex mystery" starring Hitchcock ice blonde Tippi Hedren, who became a star in his The Birds the year before. The doc also pushed me towards The Girl, the 2012 HBO film detailing the Svengali-ish relationship between director and star which was broadcast about the same time as Hitchcock, the film starring Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren, was released. The latter movie focused on Hitch's unique marriage to his collaborator Alma Reville and the production of his masterpiece Psycho. I also want to revisit Vertigo, the 1958 Hitchcock classic which topped previous champ Citizen Kane as favorite all-time film in an annual poll of film critics. In the documentary detailing the famous interviews between Hitch and the French filmmaker/critic, several scholars said that Vertigo was the essence of filmmaking and defined the movies for them. At the end of The Girl, a title reads that Hitchcock died a few years later with only a few more films to his credit and that Marnie was his masterpiece. In a behind-the-scenes featurette on the DVD of Marnie I ordered from Netflix, another scholar says "If you don't love Marnie, you don't really love movies."