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Sunday, April 20th, 2008
This morning I planted the beginnings of an herb garden -- specifically, oregano, marjoram, rosemary, two kinds of mint, parsley. I'm happy about that and am hoping they flourish this summer -- before I have only ever grown herbs in pots and they never seem to do very well. I think it's going to rain today (though the weather forecast does not agree with me).
I want to put the screen door up on our back door today (which means I have to go to the hardware store for some screen, to repair the lower panel of the door). And, there is furniture to set up on our side porch. Lots of stuff to keep me busy around the house today.
posted morning of April 20th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about The garden
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Saturday, April 19th, 2008
The Apostropher has a new mix tape on line, along with a collection of links to his previous mixes.
posted evening of April 19th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Mix tapes
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Friday, April 18th, 2008
An essay in the December 2005 issue of The New Yorker, about his upcoming trial on charges of having "publicly denigrated Turkish identity." Translated by Freely. (I think this essay appears in Other Colors.) Link courtesy of Jane Ciabattari.
posted afternoon of April 18th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Orhan Pamuk
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Thursday, April 17th, 2008
I just got a flyer in my in-box advertising a folk singer's upcoming performance; among other things it says "Her voice is unforgettable - big, soulful, kiss-ass, and wise." I don't think I have ever seen the adjective "kiss-ass" used in a positive sense before.
 (Did they mean "kick-ass"?)
posted morning of April 17th, 2008: 2 responses
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That's the only explanation I can see for the amount of honking I heard this morning on the way to work -- in parking lots, on the road, at stoplights -- it was just outta hand. I mean a lot of it was directed at me, a simple explanation for that would be that I'm a lousy driver; but a lot between other drivers, at pedestrians... I got so acclimated to it during my brief commute, I even honked at somebody who cut me off -- I never do that.
posted morning of April 17th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
"OK, now that Zoe is out, the coast is clear for Jennifer and Richard to get it together as the Big Hair team. Maybe they can hook up with Marcel once the show is over." (Yeah okay, lame, whatever.)
posted evening of April 16th, 2008: Respond
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Wow, look at this: the Mathnawi of Rumi (and other works -- possibly his complete works?), with multiple English translations and commentary. Awesome.
posted evening of April 16th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Readings
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(From this interview with Horace Engdahl, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy.) Pamuk published The White Castle while he was in New York, being "his wife's husband" -- she was studying for her doctorate at Columbia University.
I had a little room at the library in which I wrote more than half of The Black Book. And very typical of a non-Western person coming through main cultural centers of Western civilisation, say London, Paris, New York, and then having a sort of an anxiety about his cultural identity, and, ah... I lived these things, and I faced the immense richness of American libraries and culture; and I began to ask myself, what is Turkish culture? What am I doing there? And at that time, I used to think that Turkey's cultural identity should only be a sort of ultra-Occidentalism.There, at the age of 33, I began to read old Sufi allegories, the whole classic texts of Islamic mysticism -- most of them are classical Persian texts -- with an eye on Borges, on Calvino: they have told me to look at literary texts as sort of structures which have metaphysical qualities. I have learned from Borges and Calvino to delete the heavy religious vein of classical Islamic texts, and see these texts as sort of, em, geometrical shapes; metaphysical structures and allegories; parables full of literary games.
 Also some interesting stuff in the interview about fluidity of identity and how that plays into his novels. Engdahl mentions René Girard -- Pamuk confirms that he likes what Girard has to say but says he came to Girard's stuff late in life; Engdahl asks if Pamuk sees jealosy as playing a major role in his work, and Pamuk agrees that it does.
posted evening of April 16th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about The Black Book
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Fantastic: Roy takes a stroll around the warblogs, with no less than Tom Tomorrow illustrating. Real-time blogging of the reaction here.
posted afternoon of April 16th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
Istanbul was an open book to him now; it harbored no secrets.
Galip's unravelling continues in Chapter 30 -- he accosts a stranger on a bus, asking "What does this snow signify? What does it augur?" -- and the reader is complicit in his insanity. The dream he recounts in this same interaction is breath-taking. I'm having a little trouble reading this chapter -- I have started it over a couple of times thinking I'm missing the point. Today when I restarted it I was approaching it from an angle of "maybe Pamuk has blown his wad, Galip already became Celâl in the last two chapters, if he's going to spend the next hundred pages talking about the same thing there is a lot of potential for it to get boring." But I started to get excited about the story again as I was reading -- now it's seeming like Galip's eventual metamorphosis may be into the city of Istanbul. (Particularly interesting in this regard is that Freely is translating the names of Istanbul streets in this chapter, which I do not think she has been doing in the rest of the book -- it seems totally appropriate here.)
posted evening of April 15th, 2008: Respond
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