The Other Turk Who Also Loved Apples

Almost 12 years ago now, I published The Turk Who Loved Apples, a memoir that tried to make sense of my decades of travel. As a piece of literature, it was, of course, unimpeachable, a high point for 21st-century nonfiction. As a commercial product, it wasn’t quite that. Overall, it sold a few thousands copies and was eventually remaindered; today you can buy it for Kindle, or in a used bookstore. Oh wait! Amazon says they have one paperback left in stock: “order soon”!

Part of the difficulty in selling the book, I think, lay in summarizing it. Was it a picaresque tale of a young man’s adventures around the world? An instruction manual for aspiring independent travelers? A maundering compilation of anecdotes that go nowhere? A complex, free-association depiction of constant travel’s effect on the brain’s ability to construct narrative? Oh, wait, I’ve got it:

So, this is what showed up in my inbox the other day, courtesy of a Google alert I set up back in 2013. The summary goes quite in depth on the book, detailing the cast of character we meet along the way (“wise Sufi mystics, ambitious viziers, cunning merchants, and lovelorn poets”), analyzing themes (cultural identity, love and loss) and literary style (“richly descriptive and infused with a sense of whimsy“), and, most important of all, analyzing the physical book’s craftsmanship (“the text is presented in a clear and legible font, making it a pleasure to read“). It honestly sounds like a great book. Maybe.

Obviously, this was not my Turk Who Loved Apples but Mehmet Murat Somer’s, and at first I was excited at the idea that he and I had written divergent books that had somehow employed the same, highly specific title. Maybe this would be like something out of Borges, and the more I looked, going back further and further in time, the more I would find other books called The Turk Who Loved Apples. A 19th-century ethnography. An epic poem, written in Farsi, from 1832. A compilation of speeches, delivered by an obscure French revolutionary, produced in 1791. A play in three acts. A Romanian children’s book of rhymes and moral instruction. An illuminated manuscript of contemporary warfare. An untranslatable scroll. A cave painting. Each one, I would learn, had also been a commercial failure, soon forgotten, soon replaced.

Alas! Mehmet Murat Somer did not publish Elmaseven Türk in 2010. This book is a fantasy, a hallucination. He is, however, a real person, the author of a dozen (or more?) crime novels that are typically titled The _____ Murder: The Kiss Murder, The Gigolo Murder, The Serenity Murders, and so on, all of which revolve around an unnamed amateur detective who also happens to be, as the Guardian put it, “a catsuit-clad, Thai-boxing transvestite.“ The series is called, in English, the “Turkish Delight” mysteries, and in Turkish “Hop-Çiki-Yaya,” which Somer told the Guardian “was a cheerleading chant from Turkish colleges in the early 1960s, and it came to be used in comedy shows to mean gays. If somebody was queenish, then they’d say ‘Oh, he's Hop-Çiki-Yaya.’ By the 70s, it wasn’t being used anymore—so I brought it back.” This sounds pretty awesome, and it makes me wish even more that he’d written The Turk Who Loved Apples.

It should not surprise you, at this point, to learn that the fanciful, erroneous summary of The Turk Who Loved Apples was generated by AI. (I used the Copyleaks AI Detector extension on Chrome, which determined the summary was 100% AI.) It feels like a classic AI hallucination, believable and superficial yet wholly imaginary.

What I can’t figure out is why it exists. Who would bother asking an AI to create this, then publish it to the web? No one googles The Turk Who Loved Apples any more, if they ever did, and especially not in comparison with the other works AI-analyzed on the site, whose titles have a decent amount of search weight: Xeriscaping, Northern Lights, The Constitution of Liberty, Walden (“a gentle nudge towards introspection“). None of the pages rank in Google search, according to my tools, and there is only one tiny, fake-looking ad that simply links back to the homepage. There are no affiliate links to buy the books in question. In other words, this thing ain’t making money.

The site, which seems to have sprung into being only last month, is wirsindarbeitsschutzfit.de, German for “We are fit for occupational safety.” The site’s copyright notice, however, is in Polish and for Książki dla każdego, or “Books for everyone.” I have a feeling that intended everyone is as imaginary as the books themselves.

The Internet is full of slop like this. Much of it is AI-generated these days, but these things have been around for a long time—translations that get reverse translated, copy-paste jobs, slapdash output from content mills. When it seems like someone is trying to make a buck off the sites, I can understand. What mystifies me are sites like wirsindarbeitsschutzfit.de, where they have no reason to exist. They’re not making money, they don’t seem to be trying to game Google, there’s no spy-worthy intelligence hidden in the page code. No one seems to be responsible for them—they’re not even student projects.

And there is so much of this stuff out there, taking up server space and bandwidth. Someone had to pay for this, even if it was just to hire a programmer off Fiverr. What were they hoping? That they’d catch the attention of the one person who was still googling “The Turk Who Loved Apples”? And then what?

To a degree, I like these overlooked and forgotten corners of the Internet. Much of it is slop, but there remain tons of ancient websites, text-heavy and hand-coded, left on university servers from the dawn of the web and still counting their hits, though they rarely get any. What’s beautiful is that they still work, are still readable, and still function side by side with the rest of the Internet, even if they won’t look great on your phone. The website Neal.fun has a wonderful archive of Internet Artifacts: the first mp3 (of Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner”), the first coffee-pot webcam, early iterations of Amazon and eBay. The Usenet archives still exist, for Pete’s sake, and if you know the nickname I used in college, you can search them for my earliest posts. Our ability to continue to explore these artifacts, even as more recent sites get blipped from existence, makes me love and cherish the Internet even more. I still fail to understand it, but the love is there, truly, and especially for the apples.

I’ll just wind this up with another buried-lede note of news: I am in the process of recovering the rights to The Turk Who Loved Apples from its publisher, Da Capo (which is owned by Hachette now, I think). This means I’ll be free to do with it whatever I want—change the title, the cover, the interior—and sell it myself. But what should I do with it? Suggestions welcome! 🪨🪨🪨

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