Letter to my one blog visitor from Shiraz, Iran
Dear Solitary Blog Visitor from Shiraz, Iran:
How did you get to my blog? Were you Googling, perhaps, “marry russian man his mother cook chicken” or “map of the life of ari ben canaan” or “russian mushroom folklore ” as several visitors who have come to my blog from Google have done? Were you trying to get some purpose from what I write? Or just stumbling through on your way to somewhere much more important?
When I look at that dot, Shiraz, it sends shivers up my spine, which is the same feeling I get when I look at impossibly far away pictures like this, where Tashkent is close enough to show road signs to both Kabul and Warsaw-Europe and Asia.
What are you doing in Shiraz, once the home to fabled poet Hafez, who I learned about from Roya Hakakian, and the center of the arts in the Persian universe of the 13th century, city of flowers and mysticism? Are you composing poems, too? Or are you simply working and living your life quietly, listening to 70s era disco music that is still popular in Iran, oblivious to the headwinds of politics constantly blowing over your country from the West? Are you a man or a woman?
Are you a purposeful interloper, a hacker trying to ping the West? If you are really trying to take out your anger at America, the best place to start would probably not be my blog, but Amazon.com. That’s where all the Americans are online.
Maybe, as I was looking for pictures of Shiraz, I stumbled onto your blog without knowing it. If I did, would you let me know?
Sincerely,
V
Related:
On the Blog: The Women of Kabul; The Iranian Threat-Isn’t
On the Web: Iranian Women and Contemporary Memoirs