READIN

Friday, July 4th, 2008

🦋 Orhan growing up

To the extent that he had been exposed to [Sufi mystic] literature in school, he had found it boring, antiquated, and irrelevant to his own interests and concerns. Furthermore, he had always associated those texts with fanatical Islamic obscurantists and right-wing Turkish politicians. Now, as he immersed himself in three of the greatest masterpieces of the genre -- Farid ud-Din Attar's Conference of the Birds, Jelal ud-Din Rumi's Mathnawi, and Sheikh Galip's Beauty and Love -- he was shocked to discover in them all the qualities he most admired in the best Western literature (and which were so sorely lacking in modern Turkish literature): dizzying intellectual complexity, sophisticated self-consciousness, playfulness, and the most refined stylistic elegance.

Chapter 2 of Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk concerns the actual story of Pamuk's childhood and young adulthood -- the story which has been transformed in various ways in many of his novels. Much of it seems very familiar to me -- mainly from The Black Book and from the essays in Other Colors. It is useful, I think, to see the ways the stories are rooted in reality; and I must say I'm liking McGaha's prose a lot -- it is elegant and easy to digest.

posted afternoon of July 4th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, July second, 2008

🦋 Misunderstanding

Maybe the most key thing I'm taking away from Nixonland (as of the ¾ mark), is that I've misunderstood the Nixon presidency, which I am too young to have any first-hand memory of, in a pretty fundamental way. My narrative has always been, Nixon was an evil man and wore his evil nature on his sleeve; Reagan was an evil man but was carefully costumed by his media handlers so as to conceal that nature.

Now it's sort of obvious when you think about it, that there's something wrong with my narrative. I didn't analyze it that carefully, it was more just a general sense of things. But Perlstein lays out very clearly how Nixon shaped his public image and how he was helped in this by a new generation of media professionals such as Harry Treleaven and Roger Ailes.

I also have had an unexamined image of Spiro Agnew as a dummy, a loudmouthed buffoon who lived only to vent his hatred of minority groups and student protesters. But Perlstein is giving me a much more nuanced picture of him as a smart (for a while) politician, whose spewed hatred was politically calculated rather than unthinking. (Also: I had no idea what Agnew looked like until I Googled for his photo this morning -- would not have recognized a picture of him. This strikes me as odd when Nixon's image is so familiar to me.)

posted evening of July second, 2008: Respond
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🦋 Can't get one past her

Tonight we were reading Chapter 6, about Huck's pap keeping him locked in the cabin upriver from town -- toward the end of the chapter Pap is blind drunk:

I don't know how long I was asleep, but all of a sudden there was an awful scream and I was up. There was pap looking wild, and skipping around every which way and yelling about snakes. He said they was crawling up his legs; and then he would give a jump and scream, and say one had bit him on the cheek -- but I couldn't see no snakes. He started and run round and round the cabin, hollering "Take him off! take him off! he's biting me on the neck!" I never see a man look so wild in the eyes. Pretty soon he was all fagged out, and fell down panting; then he rolled over and over wonderful fast, kicking things every which way, and striking and grabbing at the air with his hands, and screaming and saying there was devils a-hold of him. He wore out by and by, and laid still a while, moaning. Then he laid stiller, and didn't make a sound. I could hear the owls and the wolves away off in the woods, and it seemed terrible still. He was laying over by the corner. By and by he raised up part way and listened, with his head to one side. He says, very low:

"Tramp -- tramp -- tramp; that's the dead; tramp -- tramp -- tramp; they're coming after me; but I won't go. Oh, they're here! don't touch me -- don't! hands off -- they're cold; let go. Oh, let a poor devil alone!"

Then he went down on all fours and crawled off, begging them to let him alone, and he rolled himself up in his blanket and wallowed in under the old pine table, still a-begging; and then he went to crying. I could hear him through the blanket.

Well I wasn't sure Sylvia was ready for the notion of delirium tremens, so I said he must be having a nightmare; she replied, "Yeah, or maybe too much whisky." So, picking up on more than I was giving her credit for. Earlier in the chapter when Pap was going on about what a good man he was, Sylvia pointed out that he really wasn't, and that Judge Thatcher understood that, but "the new judge is kind of weird."

posted evening of July second, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Huckleberry Finn

🦋 Bad things happening in Turkey

The Independent reports that two officers retired from the Turkish army have been arrested over a plot to assassinate a number of targets* including Orhan Pamuk. Commentators are speaking of this as a coup d'état.

The prosecution is apparently calling for Islamicists (including Prime Minister Erdoğan) to be banned from politics in Turkey.

* (In the context of Turkish politics it is difficult to find the correct adjective to qualify the targets. I was going to say "liberal" but that is not correct as I'm sure their list included some Islamicists.)

posted morning of July second, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, July first, 2008

🦋 Pamuk in 2005: a chronology

These are the events leading up to Pamuk's trial in 2005, as related in Chapter 1 of Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk. I've converted them into tabular format for easy reference.

posted evening of July first, 2008: Respond
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Monday, June 30th, 2008

🦋 Huck Finn

Sylvia and I are taking a break from Despereaux to read Huck Finn -- she was a little skeptical when I suggested that, but two chapters in she is totally enthralled. And me too: I haven't read this book since I was about Sylvia's age or a couple of years older, but it feels like an old shoe.

posted evening of June 30th, 2008: Respond
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🦋 Bookstore: shopping with Sylvia

I met Ellen and Sylvia for dinner this evening in Montclair -- Sylvia started art camp at the Montclair Art Museum today, where she is happily learning how to draw animals. In one of her classes they are doing a group project, a sculpture of Huckleberry Finn -- Sylvia has never read it, so while we were eating we decided to swing by our favorite bookstore and pick up a copy... of course it is hard to leave there without a bunch of books. Our haul:

• Huckleberry Finn
• Tom Sawyer -- nice to have this on hand for when she's read Huck Finn -- it is a lesser book of course, but I remember it being a fun read.
• The Prince and the Pauper, to round out the kid-friendly Twain selections.
• The Golden Compass -- people keep recommending this to me; I should take a look. Sylvia is loving the Harry Potter books these days, and this seemed like it would be in a similar vein.
• Teddy Roosevelt -- Sylvia's pick (after she found out that no, we're not buying Dragonology today), from a series of biographies of important Americans. Teddy Roosevelt is, she explained, her favorite president: I'm not totally clear on whether this is because 26 is her favorite number, or vice versa.
• The Cave -- my pick.

posted evening of June 30th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, June 27th, 2008

🦋 Cartoon mice

Last night, Sylvia and I started rereading Despereaux, the story of a young non-conformist mouse which I found a little cloying last time we read it but which she loves. And it's sort of a cool coincidence: when we went to the movies this evening, we saw a preview for the forthcoming movie of Despereaux. Nice -- I can picture it being a much better movie than book. A lot of what irritates me about the book is the precious authorial voice, which I think will not be there as strongly in the screenplay -- who knows, perhaps not at all, if the author of the book is not writing the screenplay. I don't know whether she is or not. (Update -- IMDB says, not. And Matthew Broderick is doing the mouse's voice, which seems like, well, possibly a good choice.)

posted evening of June 27th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, June 26th, 2008

🦋 Context and Presentation

Last night's post about Nixonland was not completely fair, maybe. I mean I feel like I'm getting a lot out of the book; I am getting more of a sense of context for the events around the time of my birth that I have always perceived as major cultural markers -- in this evening's reading I am catching up on the pre-Roe v. Wade anti-abortion movement and the anti-sex-education movement (still very active during my own childhood; I haven't heard much from them recently, but maybe they're still out there); the media circus surrounding Chappaquiddick; and Woodstock.

I wish the information were presented with more care though. There are a lot of clunky sentences, awkward constructions; bits of information that are not connected to the information surrounding them; logical leaps that don't make sense. It would be different if Perlstein were doing Gonzo -- and occasionally I get a sense that he's trying to do that, or something like it; but it doesn't fit in with the rest of the book.

posted evening of June 26th, 2008: 2 responses

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

🦋 Focus and detail

Halfway through Nixonland I am liking it less than I was a quarter of the way in. Something seems to have gone wrong with the editing, with the result that the details Perlstein presents are serving to confuse the narrative rather than to focus it.

I want the narrative focus to be on Nixon and his crew, with the news of what's going on in America and the world there to provide context for their story, and to show how their tactics play out. And this is mostly how the first and second parts looked. But toward the end of Part II and in Part III so far, lots of scattered detail is being given about the news events of the day, but it is failing to coalesce -- it is drawing my attention away from the machinations of the administration, rather than pointing them up.

(One possibility is, I was so much less familiar with the news events being described in the early part of the book, that I was able to see Perlstein's narrative structure without getting lost. I'm not sure this would make sense though, indeed it sounds kind of backwards.)

posted evening of June 25th, 2008: Respond

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