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Sunday, September 16th, 2007
Chapter 58: one of this book's longest chapters; a 20-page crescendo. By the last page of the chapter, the volume is nearly deafening, and it suddenly drops off to a whisper. This chapter brings out new complications in the debate the book has been engaged with, between illumination and painting, between absence and presence of the author, between seeing the world from above and looking toward the horizon, between tradition and innovation, between East and West -- none of these oppositions captures the meat of the debate but each is a facet. Here we hear the last words of the murderer and discover his identity -- and we hear the three master miniaturists composing an elegy for Master Osman's workshop and for the vanishing art of illumination. And there are moments where the narrative perspective shifts slightly and I can hear Pamuk speaking in his own voice about his writing. I feel like I am staring into the abyss. I am very much looking forward to reading the final chapter. Pamuk is a master of tragedy.
posted afternoon of September 16th, 2007: Respond
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Saturday, September 15th, 2007
In his review at the Times Literary Supplement, Dick Davis describes chapter 51 of My Name is Red as "one of the most beguilingly lovely ten pages or so of art history I've ever read," which seems to me very well-put.
posted morning of September 15th, 2007: Respond
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Friday, September 14th, 2007
The whole book The Magic Pudding is a huge amount of fun; but the last chapter is a big improvement over the rest in terms of the author's confidence and command of his voice. The rhyming and doggerel are more clever and inventive. The characters grow to fill out their roles in a way that they don't, really, in the first three chapters. And the courtroom sequence is just hilarious.
posted evening of September 14th, 2007: Respond
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They tell a story in Bukhara that dates back to the time of Abdullah Khan. This Uzbek Khan was a suspicious ruler, and though he didn't object to more than one artist's brush contributing to the same illustration, he was opposed to painters copying from one another's pages -- because this made it impossible to determine which of the artists brazenly copying from one another was to blame for an error. More importantly, after a time, instead of pushing themselves to seek out God's memories within the darkness, pilfering miniaturists would lazily seek out whatever they saw over the shoulder of the artist beside them. For this reason, the Uzbek Khan joyously welcomed two great masters, one from Shiraz in the South, the other from Samarkand in the East, who'd fled from war and cruel shahs to the shelter of this court; however, he forbade the two celebrated talents to look at each other's work, and separated them by giving them small workrooms on opposite ends of his palace, as far from each other as possible. Thus, for exactly thirty-seven years and four months, as if listening to a legend, these two great masters each listened to Abdullah Khan recount the magnificence of the other's never-to-be-seen work, how it differed from or was oddly similar to the other's. Meanwhile, they both lived dying of curiosity about each other's paintings. Later still sitting upon either edge of a large cushion, holding each other's books on their laps and looking at the pictures that they recognized from Abdullah Khan's fables, both the miniaturists were overcome with great disappointment because the illustrations they saw weren't nearly as great as those they'd anticipated from the stories they heard, but instead appeared, much like all the pictures they'd seen in recent years, rather ordinary, pale and hazy. The two great masters didn't then realize that the reason for this haziness was the blindness that had begun to descend upon them, nor did they realize it after both had gone completely blind, rather they attributed the haziness to having been duped by the Khan, and hence they died believing dreams were more beautiful than pictures. Chapter 51 seems to me like a huge achievement. It contains the climax of this book's inner story, the one about blindness and perfection, which I think is fully as mesmerizing and befuddling, as bestowing of clarity, as the outer story. I struggle to think of any other writer who can maintain this kind of structure in his tapestries -- Borges comes to mind but was not, after all, a novelist (in the contemporary sense of the word anyway -- and I'm not sure a sense of that word exists which would make it appropriate). Master Osman, who I believe has narrated once before but did not really grab me then, emerges as a powerful, tragic figure. (He is certainly the main character of this inner story.) This chapter marks the first time we are hearing about blindness, its seductive nature, its role in creation, from a character who has been identified throughout as nearing blindness. What could be more exquisite than looking at the world's most beautiful pictures while trying to recollect God's vision of the world?
posted evening of September 14th, 2007: Respond
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Ellen and Sylvia are in the city this evening. So: I get to take a bike ride, have some spicy food for dinner, read some more My Name is Red. Tomorrow after Sylvia's Mandarin class, is the first meeting of the chamber music workshop I'm taking this fall, we will be learning to play the Concerto Grosso #7 by Corelli. And Sunday is Sylvia's birthday party! Taking lots of kids to the Liberty State Science Center for the afternoon. Speaking of Sylvia's birthday, I just found out that a new Orhan Pamuk book is being published; it is Other Colors: Essays and a Story and it is coming out on Tuesday, which is the actual date of Sylvia's birthday.
posted afternoon of September 14th, 2007: Respond
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Thursday, September 13th, 2007
Music often makes me feel nostalgic, and I like that. So what is the feature of nostalgia-geared music compilations that makes me feel so hostile?
posted evening of September 13th, 2007: Respond
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L' shanah tovah!
posted afternoon of September 13th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, September 12th, 2007
I've had a Google Calendar account set up for about 2 years now. Wonder of wonders! I find that in the last month or so I am actually starting to use it to organize my time, to remind myself what I need to do. This is really a big step for me -- I have never in my life been able to get in the habit of keeping track of my schedule in written form.
posted evening of September 12th, 2007: Respond
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Alex died yesterday. Very famous parrot, this was the first I had ever heard of him. This morning, Sylvia and I watched a really nice video from PBS: Scientific American Frontiers -- the last video listed on that page, titled "Animal Einsteins", is half about Alex and half about chimpanzees learning arithmetic. Utterly charming. When I got home this evening, Sylvia wanted to watch it again.
...And again this afternoon! Sheba the chimp touches the numbers she is looking at and Sylvia says, "Sheba always has to make sure," grinning.
posted evening of September 12th, 2007: Respond
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Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
(Well, or tangling them up at least.) I woke up this morning with an image from my dream fully formed. A man about my age is at a family gathering -- the crowd includes his parents, brothers and sisters and their families, and his child or children. Maybe some of his aunts and uncles as well. He is stoned and is scribbling random-seeming lines on a large piece of blank paper as he narrates in a kind of vindictive, complaining way. A few people are listening to him, others are involved in their own conversations. He moves on to something else and his son (perhaps nephew), 4 or 5 years old, starts coloring in the scribbles, eventually coming out with a very nice picture of a scene from the fairy-tale "The Frog King". Thinking about this brought to mind Shekure's observations about dreaming from My Name is Red; and that made me suddenly realize that my insight on Friday about bragging and complaining is exactly parallel to Shekure's thoughts -- with the added clarification that what I was talking about was not "ways of thinking" but "ways of narrating" my thoughts, talking about what I am thinking. And that Shekure was not saying she wouldn't tell a dream; she was just pointing out that the relation would be a lie in fundamental ways.
posted morning of September 11th, 2007: Respond
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