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Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
But Galip is insane.
--The Modesto Kid
(I'm stretching, stretching these last two chapters of the Black Book because I just don't want the story to end!)
I've become very attached to the following reading of the events portrayed in The Black Book. It seems like it might be susceptible to an Occam's Razor argument. - In Chapter 19 ("Signs of the City"), Galip goes insane.
- The second half of the book takes place in a different reality than the first; that is to say, Galip's insanity has the effect of moving him into a different world. What is happening in the old reality of the first half is not really germane to the discussion.
I'm not sure what this gets me -- I don't want to say, the events described in the second half of the book are the flow of our reality, because they seem so rooted in paranoia; and I also don't want to say, they are Galip's fevered hallucinations as he lies on a hospital bed in "the reality outside the story", because that seems banal to me.
Later, when he himself went over to Aunt Hâle's, he looked at the great purple flowers on her dress and saw that they were printed on a background that was the exact same shade of pistachio green. Was this a coincidence, or the strange leftover from thirty-five years ago, or a reminder that this world, like the gardens of memory, still shimmered with magic? Pamuk's interjection in the last chapter ("But I Who Write") is a stroke of genius. We the readers are allowed, encouraged, to privilege our own readings of the novel's events over what the author intended. This passage moves me to tears: That night, Galip saw Rüya among the baby dolls in Alâaddin's shop. She had not yet died. Like the dolls around her, she was blinking and she was breathing, but only just; she was waiting for Galip, but he was late; he just couldn't manage to get there; he just stood there at his window in the City-of-Hearts Apartments, staring at Alâaddin's shop in the distance, watching the light stream from its window onto the snow-covered pavement as tears rolled from his eyes.
posted evening of April 23rd, 2008: Respond
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 Two very cinematic items in the news today -- the search for the Rev. Adelir Antonio di Carli, who tried to cross the Pacific strapped to helium balloons in an effort to raise money for a spiritual rest-stop for Brazilian truckers, continues. (Every element of that sentence adds another tint to the rainbow of absurdity -- I am thinking David Lynch could have a lot of fun with this one. Or -- Fellini!)  And, the dismissal of charges against James O'Hare and David Daloia, who wheeled their possibly-already-dead friend Virgilio "Fox" Cintron to the Pay-O-Matic at 9th Ave. and 52nd to cash his Social Security check -- John Waters material, or maybe the Coen Brothers in their Big Lebowski mode.
 (Also in today's paper, this story about a pretty amazing-sounding teacher and his high-school geography class.)
posted morning of April 23rd, 2008: Respond
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Monday, April 21st, 2008
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
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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
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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
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Sunday, April 20th, 2008
 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
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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.
 Because to spend an entire life waiting to become the ruler of an empire would drive anyone mad; because to watch one's elder brothers dream the same dreams and then succumb to madness, one by one, was to court the same dilemma; because the dilemma -- to go mad or not to go mad -- was a false one; because they could not help going mad, if they recalled -- if only briefly, during their interminable wait -- that their forefathers had, upon ascending to the throne, traditionally had all their younger brothers strangled. His illustrious ancestor Mehmet III was a case in point -- upon becoming sultan, he'd ordered the deaths of 19 younger brothers, some of whom were still at their mothers' breasts -- and seeing as anyone could read about that incident in any historical account of the era, seeing as it was his duty as a prince to acquaint himself with the history of the empire over which he might one day rule, just to read about a sultan killing his younger brothers was enough to drive a prince mad; because if, after years of wondering if or when he might be poisoned or strangled or killed in a way that was later made to look like a suicide, a prince went mad, it was his way of saying, "Count me out of the race"; because waiting for the throne was like waiting for death, and madness, the easiest escape route, was also the perfect expression of his deepest and most secret desires...
↻...done
posted evening of April 20th, 2008: Respond
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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
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Saturday, April 19th, 2008
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
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Friday, April 18th, 2008
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
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