The READIN Family Album
Me and Sylvia, on the Potomac (September 2010)

READIN

Jeremy's journal

Even now, I persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.

Jeffrey Eugenides


(This is a page from my archives)
Front page

Archives index
Subscribe to RSS

This page renders best in Firefox (or Safari, or Chrome)

Monday, April 21st, 2008

🦋 Nothing to tell

I am finding this next-to-last chapter of The Black Book, "The Crown Prince", bountiful fodder for my thoughts. Thinking further tonight I reckon my initial reaction was a little hasty and missed: that Galip is insane, and so is the Crown Prince he is telling about; and that Pamuk is by no means writing a manual for healthy living -- I can make of his book what I want to, but his role as a novelist is to conjure and to describe.

I was wrong about the prince only destroying western books: he also burns The Thousand and One Nights and has the Mathnawi removed from his residence -- it seems significant to me that he does not destroy this book, but that might just be me reading in.* I will remember this line when next I'm reading Rumi: "Every time he leafed through the stories in this utterly disorganized book, he found himself identifying with the dervish saint who believed disorganization to be the very essence of life." -- I have never heard that said about Rumi or about Sufi but it seems like a glorious doctrine.

After battling with books and the voices inside them for ten long years, Prince Osman Celâlettin Efendi finally realized he would only become himself if he could speak in his own voice, and speak forcefully enough to drown out the voices in those books.

The prince's realization here mirror's Celâl's column in Chapter 23, "A Story About People Who Can't Tell Stories" (Ooh! A-and! I had totally forgotten that his column in Chapter 16 is called "I Must Be Myself"!) -- his ultimate unspoken recognition that he is not an author, that he has no story to dictate, brings "the very silence that both men sought. Because it was only when a man had run out of stories to tell that he came close to being himself, the Prince would say." -- this Prince puts too much importance on generalizing from his own experience.

Off to read some more...

*And why no reference to the Koran?

posted evening of April 21st, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about The Black Book

🦋 My Name in (very small) Lights

Woo-wee! Dorothy used my contribution to support her workaholic lifestyle. Can't wait for the book to be finished and available.

posted evening of April 21st, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Cat and Girl

🦋 Reading selves

The Crown Prince's idea that the books you read define the content of your soul -- that you are the narrative voices from the books you've read -- is interesting to consider in light of religion: if the only book you have read is your faith's holy scripture, you are completely defined by the faith. This is a pretty obvious reading I think but Pamuk did not really make it explicit (yet). I didn't really notice this last night but all the books the prince talks about ridding himself of are western; I expect he is not forgetting the Islamic texts and probably not the non-Islamic Turkish and Persian writings that make up the Oriental portion of his personality. (Update: Went back to check my memory; this is incorrect.)

(...Also, of course, very much worth bearing in mind that while Pamuk was writing this book, he was moving from an "ultra-Occidentalist" mindset to a more nuanced view of Turkish culture, and reading classical Persian texts for the first time.)

posted afternoon of April 21st, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Orhan Pamuk

Sunday, April 20th, 2008

🦋 Nice pix

A bunch of new photos are online at the READIN Family Album, including Sylvia, Ellen and Michael's trip to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.

posted evening of April 20th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about the Family Album

🦋 The Crown Prince

Once upon a time, there lived in our city a prince who discovered that the most important question in life was whether to be, or not to be, oneself. It took him his whole life to discover who he was, and what he discovered was his whole life.

This penultimate chapter of The Black Book is really knocking me around. The childish prince's discovery about reading is what I have been getting out of this book and much of Pamuk's other writing, but he (and he seems to be speaking for Celâl/Galip? -- And is it right to think that Pamuk is making this duality into a personification of Istanbul?) is taking it the opposite way from how I have been. His notion that "it was incumbent on me to free myself from all those books, all those writers, all those stories, all those voices" seems wrong to me: those voices are my "self", and I've been reading as if this were what Pamuk was saying/pointing out -- as if Galip's insanity were rooted in a failure to acknowledge this illusory/transitory nature of identity.

...Hoping to find some answers in the final chapter, though that may be the wrong thing to hope for... Awesome passage below the fold. More thoughts about this chapter collected here.

posted evening of April 20th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Readings

🦋 Chores

This morning I planted the beginnings of an herb garden -- specifically, oregano, marjoram, rosemary, two kinds of mint, parsley. I'm happy about that and am hoping they flourish this summer -- before I have only ever grown herbs in pots and they never seem to do very well. I think it's going to rain today (though the weather forecast does not agree with me).

I want to put the screen door up on our back door today (which means I have to go to the hardware store for some screen, to repair the lower panel of the door). And, there is furniture to set up on our side porch. Lots of stuff to keep me busy around the house today.

posted morning of April 20th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about The garden

Saturday, April 19th, 2008

🦋 Funk

The Apostropher has a new mix tape on line, along with a collection of links to his previous mixes.

posted evening of April 19th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Mix tapes

Friday, April 18th, 2008

🦋 Another Pamuk Link

An essay in the December 2005 issue of The New Yorker, about his upcoming trial on charges of having "publicly denigrated Turkish identity." Translated by Freely. (I think this essay appears in Other Colors.) Link courtesy of Jane Ciabattari.

posted afternoon of April 18th, 2008: Respond

Thursday, April 17th, 2008

🦋 Weird

I just got a flyer in my in-box advertising a folk singer's upcoming performance; among other things it says "Her voice is unforgettable - big, soulful, kiss-ass, and wise." I don't think I have ever seen the adjective "kiss-ass" used in a positive sense before.

(Did they mean "kick-ass"?)

posted morning of April 17th, 2008: 2 responses

🦋 Something about this beautiful spring weather just makes people cranky and impatient

That's the only explanation I can see for the amount of honking I heard this morning on the way to work -- in parking lots, on the road, at stoplights -- it was just outta hand. I mean a lot of it was directed at me, a simple explanation for that would be that I'm a lousy driver; but a lot between other drivers, at pedestrians... I got so acclimated to it during my brief commute, I even honked at somebody who cut me off -- I never do that.

posted morning of April 17th, 2008: Respond

Previous posts
Archives

Drop me a line! or, sign my Guestbook.
    •
Check out Ellen's writing at Patch.com.

What's of interest:

(Other links of interest at my Google+ page. It's recommended!)

Where to go from here...

Friends and Family
Programming
Texts
Music
Woodworking
Comix
Blogs
South Orange