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Friday, September 5th, 2008
Intrepid cartoonist of historical events Kate Beaton has started an LJ community dedicated to history postings. This looks like it will be a great thing!
 (Also, I notice it's Kate's birthday in a couple days. So: Happy Birthday, Kate!)
posted evening of September 5th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, September third, 2008
 Ayse posts the first sentence of Museum of Innocence in my comments:
It was the happiest moment of my life, I did not know. (See the comment thread for discussion of the translation.) The official website for the book is here -- only in Turkish naturally, but with two lovely photo galleries: Pamuk in his study, and Pamuk around the town. There is also a Wikipædia entry of course, in English and in Turkish, but practically nothing written about it on the English site as yet. ...And, Banu Güven of MSNBC Turkey interviewed Pamuk about his new book yesterday. I am wishing I could understand Turkish...
posted morning of September third, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, September second, 2008
 Pamuk's new novel is out! (In Turkish only; the German translation will be published in two weeks, and hopefully the English will be available before too long.) Today's Zaman has a short piece with some information about the novel, a love story which will be Pamuk's longest book excluding his first.
Additionally, Pamuk has written two articles related to his new novel. The first article sheds light on the literary, personal and philosophical sources of "Masumiyet Müzesi," and the second one discusses the themes of famous love stories in general. The publication dates of the articles are not yet known. So exciting! I can't wait to read these.
posted morning of September second, 2008: 22 responses
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Monday, September first, 2008
I guess this must be a common dilemma for historians (or "popular writers of history" -- Wyden is a journalist, not a historian): whether to relate the course of events from an eagle's-eye view, and risk losing the lived experience of the events, or to follow the people who are living the events, and risk losing the larger picture. Wyden errs quite clearly (and I think consciously) on the personal side -- his narration is vivid but the connecting thread between episodes is quite weak. It would help if he could pay a little more attention to giving dates -- each chapter is pretty much continuous so if he gave a date at the head of the chapter it would be much easier to fit the chapter's events into the broader narrative. As it is the reader needs to spend a fair amount of time flipping back and forth to figure out what year it is right now (or I do, anyway). Right now the Fascists are about to launch an attack on Madrid, and I had somehow gotten the idea it was the fall of 1937; as it turns out it is still 1936. I certainly do not want to fault Wyden for this choice however -- the personal narratives are a great thing, they make the book shine. I would much rather read this way with a bit of confusion about the course of events, than a dry narrative of troop movements.
posted afternoon of September first, 2008: Respond
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In comments to NickS's covers post, Matthew links to a fantastic version of "Strawberry Fields Forever", by Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. Lovely! And it gives me a chance to remember Ellen's brief memoir "1996", published in In My Life: Encounters with The Beatles,  about playing Anthology 2 for her fourth-grade class in East Harlem. "Draw me what you hear in the music," I say. They show me giant strawberries growing next to an apartment building, the sun's rays as streams of musical notes, the word music in big colorful letters, a strawberry tree identified with phonetic spelling swter breey fealds.
It was Ellen's first full-time teaching job (after many years of adjuncting), and she had a good time with the class, and her students had a good time learning to read and write. "So were you a Beatlemaniac?" Yazmine asks. "Oh, sure, of course," I answer in all seriousness. "I always will be."
Los Fabulosos Beatlemaniacs, below the fold.
posted morning of September first, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, August 31st, 2008
The story of Spain's gold reserves being transported to Moscow in 1937 seems like it would make really excellent raw material for a thriller. I wonder if such a thing has been written or filmed.
posted evening of August 31st, 2008: 2 responses
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I found a radio interview with Orhan Pamuk -- the January 22nd episode of Robert Harrison's show "Entitled Opinions" on KZSU. The blogger at Coisas do Gomes alerted me to this interview when he posted this quote: There were unfortunate institutional attempts in Turkey to purify Turkish in mid-thirties and forties but I don't believe in it. My standard for using the language is the language I hear from my grandmother, from my mother, from my father. I am a conservative, in the sense that I want to keep Turkish as it is. In my novels I use the language of my mother, of my grandmother, which is actually the language I also hear on the streets. This is nice; and I also like, later in the interview:
When I published my Istanbul book, some four years ago in Turkey, my readers from the younger generation object to the fact that this is not the colorful, happy, sunny Istanbul -- and I agreed with them. I wrote my Istanbul, and that's the Istanbul I like. The Istanbul of long winter nights; black and white, a poor black and white place, where the ruins of Ottoman empire, the ruins of all extravagant, wooden Ottoman buildings, they're in ruins -- that's how I spent my childhood, playing football among the Ottoman ruins, among the wooden houses, which were in the next two decades burned down one by one. My Istanbul, in the fifties, sixties, seventies, was an extraordinarily provincial place, where the sense of community was out, the sense of being outside of Europe, but so close to Europe, and still being poor; the sense of "nothing will change here, there is no future here," was still hovering around; perhaps a place where the presence of the loss of Ottoman empire, that this city had once upon a time, was once the capital of a great, magnamious (?) and very rich empire, now is in ruins and leading a poor, provincial life, hoping to develop a relationship with Europe...
I believe I have read similar sentiments to this in a published article of Pamuk's -- it sheds new light on them, to hear them straight from the horse's mouth.
posted evening of August 31st, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, August 30th, 2008
So everyone is very excited about Bolaño's 2666, which will be available in English translation soon. I wish I could be! I just found out about this author's existence pretty recently, from Orbis Quintus IIRC; and I have had too much else on my reading plate to think about getting acquainted with him. Looks like I am going to miss out on a pretty major literary event; but I sort of don't want my first acquaintance with Bolaño to be this book. I reckon sometime down the road a little, I will start reading his short stories and work my way up to 2666 -- the cutting edge continues to elude me. MetaFilter offers up some resources for readers interested in getting acquainted with Bolaño. (via Conversational Reading.)
posted evening of August 30th, 2008: 2 responses
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Thursday, August 28th, 2008
Via the magic of Google, I just found out that a band I never heard of, Elysian Fields, has a song (without lyrics) called "Dog of Tears." I guess there's no way it could be anything other than a reference to Blindness. Busy, busy, busy! I will listen to it later on.
posted morning of August 28th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
La Pasionaria addressed her July 19, 1936 call to arms to "people of Catalonia, the Basque country and Galicia, and all Spaniards." I'm curious about the ethnic distinctions: I know "Basque" is a different group from "Spanish," different language and all; and I had some idea that there is a distinct dialect of Spanish called Catalan , and that some Spaniards think of Catalonians as a separate group. My first clue that there might be a distinct Galician ethnicity came when I was reading The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, and group of characters was identified as coming from Galicia -- but there it sounded more like the kind of kinship people might feel from having the same hometown, without it necessarily distinguishing them strongly from people from the next town over. So, well, I'm wondering why Ibárruri chooses these regional identifiers. Galicia is the northwestern corner of Spain, Basque country is along the northern shore, Catelonia is in the northeast. Are all the southern and central portions of Spain ethnically homogeneous, distinct from these three? Ibárruri was a Communist, and I would have thought drawing these distinctions would not be in keeping with her ideology; but that's just off the top of my head.
 The Wiki article on Nationalisms and regionalisms of Spain has some information that seems useful.
posted morning of August 26th, 2008: 3 responses
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