READIN

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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🦋 R.I.P.

Tom Hunter has been sick with Kreutzfeld-Jacob disease; he passed away on Friday morning. Memorial service is this Saturday. Light a candle and think of him.

posted morning of June 25th, 2008: Respond
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🦋 Pamuk: a bibliography

This is the bibliography from Michael McGaha's Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk: The Writer in his Novels, which professor McGaha has graciously allowed me to reprint here. I am hoping to extend it as time goes by, and to keep the links up to date. Contributions in the comments section are of course welcome.

Note: I have added some entries that are not in McGaha's bibliography. To differentiate these I have enclosed anything I add in square brackets.

posted morning of June 25th, 2008: 2 responses
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Monday, June 23rd, 2008

🦋 People vs. Pamuk

I'm making my way through chapter 1 of Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk, which deals with the events around Pamuk's being prosecuted in 2005 for "hostility to Turkishness" and his eventual exile. Man this is confusing stuff -- not McGaha's fault, his writing is pretty terse and straightforward. But there are a lot of conflicting issues competing for my attention as I try to figure out what's going on. Pamuk is hoping to win the Nobel prize for literature (he did not, but won it the following year, at which point I think the prosecution had already happened -- I don't know if he was still living in Turkey at this point); Turkey is hoping to be considered for admission to the EU, and busy revising its laws (including the one under which Pamuk is charged) to abide by international human rights law; Turkish nationalists are opposed to the EU and see the prosecution as an avenue for preventing it. Erdoğan, a moderate Islamist, who was prime minister in 2005, had been prosecuted some years earlier (if I understand correctly) by Turkish nationalists for expressing hostility to secularism; and he could not have been prime minister if it were not for the liberalization going on to further Turkey's chances of acceptance into the EU. I want to make a timeline of events but I don't think I'm up to that point yet.

I totally want to make a hypertext version of this book's bibliography* -- it is chock full of useful articles, a lot of which are available on the web. Loving this line from Pamuk's acceptance speech when he was awarded the Friedenspreis of the German Book Trade:

Even as [the novel] relates our own lives as if they were the lives of others, it offers us the chance to describe other people's lives as if they were our own.

Note: it seemed funny at first, for Pamuk's trial to come at the front of the book, which is otherwise arranged chronologically; but as I read it is making some sense to me to have this before the novels rather than after -- it gives a sense of the environment in which Pamuk is writing and coming to write, and a context for his cosmopolitanism and Turkish identity.

*And, update: Dr. McGaha has granted me permission to post the bibliography. I hope to put it up tonight or tomorrow.

posted evening of June 23rd, 2008: Respond
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🦋 New words

Sylvia and I were studying the ChinesePod lesson called "I'm Bored" (wǒ wú liáo) tonight -- her pick; she thinks it will be very useful to be able to say she's bored in another language. She got hooked on the assonance between wú liáo and ululate, another recently acquired word. Cute.

posted evening of June 23rd, 2008: Respond
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🦋 Before You Listen

NickS, mix-tape-maker extraordinaire, is now blogging about music -- his first post was up on Saturday. His blog: Before You Listen.

(Hm, and I realize now I have been blogging about mix tapes for a year now and never posted about the ones I got from NickS, back in 2005 IIRC. They really gave me a new approach to thinking about music, viz. thinking about how songs might sound on a tape together.)

posted evening of June 23rd, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

🦋 A vacation from context

Allow me to recommend: Dorothy Gambrell's new collection, Cat and Girl volume II. The only cartoon collection I have seen with an index. If you order quick, you can get your copy inscribed. (Note: I think to do this, you have to order direct from catandgirl.com, not from Topatoco.)

Also: here is a new interview with Dorothy, with links to some older ones, in COMIXtalk. I did not know about her extra-Cat and Girl cartooning efforts; she also does Very Small Array and for a while drew The New Adventures of Death. (Looks from the interview, like she considers Donation Derby and Cat and Girl to be two separate things -- I have always somehow considered the former to be a subset of the latter, I guess because they are on the same site and the styles are so closely similar.)

posted morning of June 22nd, 2008: 1 response
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🦋 Milestones

Sylvia is getting bigger and more independent... Yesterday evening she and Kaydi (who spent the night at our house) walked without adult accompaniment to the playground, a distance of about ¾ mile and which involves crossing several minor streets and one moderately busy one. This is (I believe) Sylvia's first time taking such a walk without a grown-up. They wanted to take Pixie along but we will see about that next time. They met some young kids there named Dahlia and Shay, and claimed to be 10-year-olds.

This morning Sylvia discovered my name could be shortened to "Germ", and that I should be from "Germany". Great... Took a walk to town with girls and dog, for to buy bagels.

posted morning of June 22nd, 2008: Respond

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

🦋 The Cave

I've really enjoyed Dr. Holbo's couple of recent posts about Plato's cave allegory, and I was happy to read today that Saramago has a novel about (or "which touches on") the allegory -- it is his The Cave, translated in 2002.

posted evening of June 21st, 2008: Respond
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🦋 Inspiring

I find it really inspiring to read, in the preface to McGaha's Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk (which arrived in today's post, hooray!), that McGaha was able to acquire a working reading knowledge of Turkish in about six months time. (Past the age of 60!) Granted he was living in Istanbul at the time and learning Turkish was his primary activity; still it's enough to make me think I should really work at language learning, that it will not be fruitless if I apply myself.

Sylvia and I just took a ChinesePod lesson about "My Dog" (wǒ de xiǎo gǒu, a phrase Sylvia knew well from class) and learned how to tell Pixie to "come here" (guò lai) and "sit down" (zuò xia).

posted evening of June 21st, 2008: Respond
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