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Sunday, September 23rd, 2007
I picked up Other Colors again and started reading from the beginning, which turns out to be a very good order in which to read this collection. I am not quite getting the narrative sequencing Pamuk alludes to in the preface, but still I like it. The third essay, "Notes on April 29, 1994", which the author notes was written as part of a project in which "Le Nouvel Observateur asked hundreds of authors to describe their activities on April 29 in whatever corner of the world they happened to be that day."* (sort of like Jarmusch' Night on Earth?) -- this piece is utterly fabulous -- at every sentence my mind is running ahead with new worlds of possibility. Here is an incomplete sampling of the stuff I was thinking about while reading these few pages: TELEPHONE: His first sentence is "I disconnected the phone and ... a moment arrived when I imagined that someone was trying to reach me at that very moment to speak to me about ... a matter of huge consequence, but could not get through." Yeah, totally -- I would immediately start worrying about that. And I wonder, by "disconnect the phone" does he mean actually yank the cord? turn off the ringer? Weren't answering machines available in Istanbul in the '90's? -- And I don't actually know if they were but I assume. LETTERS, LOGOS, AND BRANDS: the mention of Islamist Refah Party at the end of the previous paragraph leads very nicely into the conversation about a proposed boycott of their supporters, mingling with an allusion to consumerism in Turkey. The teaser about "a simple calculation" makes me wonder. STREETS AND AVENUES: The statement at the beginning of this paragraph that Turkey has been plunged into an economic crisis within the past few months anchors the essay in time again. The disjointed scenes of people on the streets make me start imagining the city more clearly -- particularly striking is "men ... clutching sandwiches or cigarettes or plastic bags stuffed with money as they watched the rise of the dollar on the electronic notice board." The "madman who had recently arrived in the neighborhood" is awesome, and seems like he might be more anchored than anybody else on the street. "We had a few laughs." JOKES, LAUGHTER, AND HAPPINESS: The drinking protests seem very nice to me (remind me a little bit, in a different context, of "Drinking Liberally"), I like Pamuk's humorous approach to the conflict between Turkish intellectuals and Islamic Refah Party (which we see again in Snow): but I don't really know anything in particular about this conflict except via Pamuk. Here is the first mention of Rüya that includes her age. I guess she is about 18 now, wonder what sort of an adulthood she is embarking upon. ISTANBUL'S NOISE: More of the city. And now I am flashing on Almodovar's Madrid in Volver, which Ellen and I watched yesterday (and loved!), and thinking Oh my god, Almodovar could make such great movies with Pamuk's material. I don't know anything about the movie industry in Turkey, I wonder how much of a one there is. It doesn't look from IMDB like Pamuk has done any screenplays or had any of his books adapted; I would very much like this to happen but only if the right person were to do it. TELEVISION: Again, Almodovar -- he could so totally capture this sentence: After supper, I could tell from the synthetic colors flashing in their windows that quite a few people kept changing channels just as I did: a bleached-blond chanteuse singing old Turkish songs, a child eating chocolate, a woman prime minister saying everything was going to turn out fine, a football match on an emerald field, a Turkish pop group, journalists arguing about the Kurdish question, American police cars, a child reading the Koran, a helicopter exploding into flames in midair, a gentleman walking onto the stage and doffing his hat as the audience applauds, the same woman prime minister, a housewife telling an inquiring microphone a thing or two as she hangs up her laundry, an audience applauding the woman who has given the right answer in a general knowledge quiz... And movie or no, the pacing of the text in that sentence is just perfect. There is no possible way to improve on it. NIGHT: The noise of the city and the appearance of its streets -- very different now. FEAR, PARANOIA, AND DREAMS: Again with the disconnecting the phone. The dread he describes here is pretty easy for me to identify with. TOTAL: Such a sweet, and optimistic, ending for this essay. So terse. I find it hard to believe I have only been reading for about 3 pages.
*Some of the essays have a note at the top describing their origin and date of creation. I wish more of them did.
posted afternoon of September 23rd, 2007: Respond
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Patsy Cline, is who. I would love to hear Robyn cover some of her songs, maybe especially "Heartache".
posted afternoon of September 23rd, 2007: Respond
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Thursday, September 20th, 2007
I went over to Montclair Book Center today and picked up a wealth of Pamuk: The White Castle, The New Life, The Black Book, and his new collection of essays, Other Colors. First thing I read was his notes on My Name is Red, written during an airplane flight immediately after he finished checking the final copy. He says he is worried about the outer story of the novel, "that the mystery plot, the detective story, was forced, and that my heart wasn't in it, but it would be too late to make changes." I can totally understand him feeling that way -- it seems to me like it must have been a huge amount of work integrating the two stories and getting the product to flow naturally. He offers his aplogies to "my poor miniaturists" for "the intrusion of a political detective plot that would make my novel easy to read." But he doesn't need to worry about it (well obviously, duh, he won the Nobel Prize...), the outer story not only makes the book easier to read, but adds layers of meaning and beauty to it. I posted at KIDLIT about reading some of these essays to Sylvia.
posted evening of September 20th, 2007: Respond
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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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