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Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
Hmm. I seem to be using too many exclamation points of late... Not sure why (maybe excitement directed toward tomorrow's concert?) -- will try to keep that under control.
posted morning of April 8th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, April 7th, 2008
Minivet has a blog! With lots of playful etymology! Also, he links to an excellent feature from the NY Times.
posted afternoon of April 7th, 2008: 2 responses
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Sunday, April 6th, 2008
I didn't know about the Leningrad Cowboys until my dad sent along this clip today. Utterly fabulous. There are many songs of theirs on YouTube, and they have a couple of movies: Leningrad Cowboys Go America, Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses, Total Balalaika Show. Awesome.
 (Speaking of Scandinavian bands, it's always worth while linking to Hurra Torpedo's cover of "Total Eclipse of the Heart": you
will never think about 80's power pop in quite the same way.)
posted evening of April 6th, 2008: Respond
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Robert Fagles died this week, 74 years old. I am sorry to hear about it. I just loved his translations of Homer -- reading them really opened my ears to what epic poetry should sound like. I heard him read from Ulysses one Bloomsday several years back; if I remember right he signed my Iliad. (Sure where it is, I am however not; since then I got the big hardcover printing of his Iliad and Odyssey when they were published together. I wonder where I put the paperback copy? I may have loaned it out.) One of these days I will get to reading the Æneid, and I will be glad there is a Fagles translation available. (I remember making a start on Fitzgerald's translation, in my teens -- somebody gave it to me for my birthday one year -- and finding it impenetrable.)
 Looking at his Wikipædia entry, I see he also translated the Oresteia, the Theban plays of Sophocles, and the poems of Bacchylides. Of these, I loved Lattimore's Oresteia when I read it long ago (in a way I did not love his translations of Homer); I never would have thought a new translation was needed. And yet I would probably recommend Fagles unread to someone who asked what translation they should get. Lattimore's Sophocles did not make much of an impression on me; I ought to read Fagles'. Bacchylides I have never heard of (to the best of my recollection).
posted afternoon of April 6th, 2008: Respond
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Sylvia and her mom are using the computer to write an invitation to her upcoming sleep-over party. Sylvia: "Mom, could you spell something wrong? I want to do a spell-check!" ... "Dad, look! We're going to have 'lots of foon'!" This game is occupying her for a long time. (Speaking of games: she's very taken with the physics simulations which Thoreau linked a little while back. Thanks, Thoreau! Among other cool details she noticed that you can make David's pants fall off if you aim the cannonball correctly. She's still trying to smash David but I suspect it is not part of the software.)
posted morning of April 6th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, April 5th, 2008
Tyler Cowen says of Pamuk's books that "The Black Book is the one to read last, once you know the others." I wonder how true this is, and why. I am, coincidentally, reading The Black Book last (leaving aside that I never finished The New Life -- Cowen thinks I would understand it better if I had knowledge of "how Dante appropriated Islamic theological writings for his own ends," which is certainly possible), and it does seem like a good position in the reading order for it. On the other hand I have recommended it to some friends who have not read any Pamuk, principally on the basis of their liking Pynchon -- this book seems to me to have a lot in common with Pynchon's writing, which I don't think any of Pamuk's other books do, particularly much. I think Snow is a great book to have read first -- principally because I relate very strongly to the lines from its first few pages that I quoted here -- Ka driving into the blizzard is (in certain ways) like me starting to read Snow.
posted evening of April 5th, 2008: Respond
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Ragebunny's painting "Violin Birds" arrived in the mail a couple of days ago. Nice! It is labelled "artist's proof" -- I don't know quite what this means but, well, it makes it seem special, so that's all to the good. I took it in to the frame shop today and selected framing materials -- an orange mat surrounded by a black mat, and a thin camel frame, and UV-protecting glass -- and am looking forward to the result.
posted evening of April 5th, 2008: Respond
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You became someone else when you read a story -- that was the key to the mystery. The chain of mystery in The Black Book is spiralling wider and wider in Chapter 24. The story seems to have taken Galip's paranoid break with reality smoothly in stride and assimilated that into the "reality" of the book. Galip's identification with Celâl is a done deal; and now we are seeing Celâl as having discarded his own identity in favor of Rumi's*. In addition Celâl has asserted in the previous chapter, that being able to tell stories, to command the attention of an audience and (I am reading in) thus to weaken your audience members' identities and to intermix your own self into them, is a primary element of human existence, something without which a person is anguished and "helpless in the face of the world!"Meanwhile the unknown caller is competing with Galip for Celâl's identity, and Galip has a moment of suspicion that he has been lured into "a deadly trap."
 *I have not read nearly enough Rumi -- I reckon I am going to be missing a lot of nuance in this portion of the book. The story about Shams of Tabriz in Chapter 22, for example, is widely divergent from what I read about him in the closest reference work to hand; I don't know what to make of this. ...Well here is a program about Rumi which speaks of a disputed account of Shams being murdered by Rumi's disciples. So the Wikipædia article is just incomplete I guess. (The Wikipædia article on Rumi does mention the murder, and does not even say that it is disputed.) That program also links to some readings from Rumi in Persian and in translation.
posted evening of April 5th, 2008: Respond
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...as he read, he identified first with the usher, then with the brawling audience, then with the çörek maker, and finally -- good reader that he was -- with Celâl.-- The Black Book
A couple of jottings in furtherance of my essay idea:
- Identity confusion is important in Pamuk.
- I started to formulate this statement while I was reading Other Colors, and have since seen it borne out in The White Castle, The New Life, and especially The Black Book.
- Does this statement also apply to Snow and My Name is Red, which I read before it occurred to me? (beyond the obvious detective-story aspects of Red) -- the answer may well be yes but I think I would need to reread them with this in mind, to be sure. If not, it might seem appropriate to think of this as something Pamuk had "outgrown".
- The confusion that I'm talking about is (frequently) a confusion between the roles of Author and Reader. So it's an easy step to take, to confuse yourself-as-reader with Pamuk-as-author. Or so I think.
- As a side note, I wonder how this plays into my impression of these 5 novels, which is that each of them is written in a distinctly different style and voice -- though I think I can hear shades of the same voice underlying each -- if Pamuk is serious about giving up his identity when he writes that would help explain the differences. An alternate explanation is that there are four different translators involved in creating English versions of these five books -- only Maureen Freely has two translations. But I don't think those two are particularly more similar to each other than any other pair.
- I think the experience of losing track of one's identity while reading a story is a wonderful thing; it might be the primary reason I read novels. Understanding this is something I am taking away from reading Pamuk. Is this the same as saying "I read for escape from my everyday life", which seems banal and not really worth thinking about at length the way I have been doing? In Pamuk's novels it seems to be doing a lot more work than that.
- What larger ideas if any does this lead to? How is the beauty of Pamuk's books explicable in these terms? Would such an explication be "criticism"? (Note: I've had an ongoing conversation with myself about what is criticism, and is it something I would be able to write, for a while now.)
posted evening of April 5th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, April 4th, 2008
Hm. Response to No Country For Old Men is ultimately similar to my response to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which is namely that the acting and direction are beautiful but not, finally, worth sitting through all that shooting for without a story. (And that's not to say that movies with shooting are necessarily bad, or not as good as they would be with less of it: I thought Once Upon a Time in the West was fantastic.) The minimalism and creepiness seem a little studied.
posted evening of April 4th, 2008: Respond
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