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READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
First explicit mention of Leyla and Mecnun comes near the beginning of Chapter 24, "The Engagement Party." Kemal is talking with his sister-in-law, Berrin, about the prospects for romance between Sibel's friend Nurcihan (who lives in Paris and has had romantic liaisons there) and Kemal's college friend Mehmet (who comes from a conservative family but does not want a marriage arranged by his parents). Berrin does not think Mehmet has any chance with modern (i.e. sexually liberated) women, because "they know if they go gallivanting around town with him too much, a man like this will secretly begin to think of them as whores."
"But the reason that Mehmet couldn't fall in love with them was that they wouldn't let him get close enough, because they were conservative and frightened."
"That's not the way it works," said Berrin. "You don't have to sleep with someone to be in love. The sex is not what matters. Love is Leyla and Mecnun."
(Also in this chapter is the first mention of Kemal's parents' friends the Pamuks...)
I am getting a slightly anthropological-ish feeling from the first part of this novel, from Pamuk's narrator explaining carefully the customs and mores of 1970's Istanbul. (I happened on a really good example of this last night but I'm not finding it now...) On the one hand this is not something I would necessarily expect from a memoir-writer -- but it seems somehow totally in character for Kemal, the obsessive documentarian of his obsession with Füsun, to leave nothing unsaid -- the obsession with Füsun becomes an expression of his obsession with his society and his place in it. Possibly this could be expressed by saying, Kemal (a bit like Ka in Snow, though the parallel is far from exact) is a neurotic cosmopolitan searching for Authenticity.
I pass by these walls, the walls of Layla
And I kiss this wall and that wall
It's not Love of the houses that has taken my heart
But of the One who dwells in those houses
-- Qays ibn al-Mulawwah
Thanks to Ayse Papatya Bucak of Reading for Writers, for pointing out the connection between Museum of Innocence and the Ottoman story of Layla and Mejnun -- Ms. Bucak calls Pamuk's book a rewriting of the old story, which tells how Mejnun goes obsessively mad after being refused by his love-object.
Interesting! I had never heard of that story but some quick experimentation with Google will demonstrate that its influence is very broad in the Islamic world. The New York Turkmen Institute has put online Sofi Huri's translation of Fuzûlî's version of the story, which appears to be the primary Ottoman version -- it was made into an opera by Azerbaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov (produced in NYC just this past Spring by Yo-yo Ma) -- Here are Erkan Oğur and İsmail H. Demircioğlu performing "Leyli Mecnun" from that opera:
posted evening of October 22nd, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Orhan Pamuk
I wonder when the narrative present of The Museum of Innocence is. The novel is rooted very firmly in time -- in the first few pages we see that the high point of the narrator's life was on May 26th, 1975 (a few weeks past my fifth birthday), and that his involvement with his distant relation Füsun had started a month previous to that, on April 27th (when I was still four years old) -- when is he speaking though? In chapter 4 he says, "As I sit down so many years later and devote myself heart and soul to the telling of my story..." -- I hope (and expect) his road to the present moment will be as much a part of the story as are the events he is narrating.
Kemal was 30 at the time of the happiest moment of his life, so was born in 1945, the same age as my uncle. So he could well be narrating in my present moment, as a 65-year-old. Pamuk is 57 years old now, perhaps his narrator is his age, in which case he would be speaking in 2002. Or maybe something else.
The excerpt that appeared in the New Yorker this summer under the title "Distant Relations" was adapted from chapters 2 through 6 -- I thought at the time that it would work much better in the context of a longer novel than as a short story, and I was right -- instead of getting to the end and thinking "well, then what?" you just turn the page and keep reading...
Update: The narrative present has to be after 2007; when Sibel leaves him in 1976, Kemal says "I would not see her again for 31 years." He opened the museum in the mid-90's -- there is a reference to him doing this "twenty years later."
posted evening of October 20th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
I am happy: The Museum of Innocence was published at long last today, the first novel Orhan Pamuk has published since I fell in love with his voice back in 2007. I have been anticipating this since last August when I saw it mentioned in McGaha's Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk...
I'm wondering idly -- only read a few pages this evening, they are nice -- they have the same beguiling prose quality I remember from the opening of The Black Book -- how well the metaphor of strolling through a museum will work for the experience of reading this book. Will I linger over certain images, walk briskly past others which are not as engaging? Will I want to stay past closing time or will I find myself wanting to go home early, when I have not even gotten to see the exhibit on the third floor?... I'm usually a bit intimidated by museums, I have not yet felt even a bit intimidated by Pamuk's prose* -- its inviting affect is the thing I love most about it. Well; we'll see.
Here are the epigraphs to this book:
These were innocent people, so innocent that they thought poverty a crime that wealth would allow them to forget. (from the notebooks of Celâl Salik)
[Celâl Salik? Is that Celâl from The Black Book? I sort of think so but not sure. Did the Black Book character have a last name? ...and, yes! the columnist in The Black Book is named Celâl Salik.]
If a man could pass thro' Paradise in a Dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, and found that flower in his hand when he awoke -- Aye? and what then? (from the notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
[This is very nice, and definitely calls to mind the opening of The Black Book.]
First I surveyed the little trinkets on the table, her lotions and her perfumes. I picked them up and examined them one by one. I turned her little watch over in my hand. Then I looked at her wardrobe. All those dresses and accessories piled one on top of the other. These things that every woman used to complete herself -- they induced in me a painful and desparate loneliness; I felt myself hers, I longed to be hers. (from the notebooks of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar)
*Oh wait, sorry, I am forgetting about The New Life. So make that "have not in most cases".
posted evening of October 20th, 2009: 1 response ➳ More posts about Epigraphs
While I'm thinking of it, a lovely passage from Unamuno's Por las tierras de Portugal y de España (quoted by Antonio Garrosa Resina in his essay on The Rivers of the Douro Valley in Literature):
Un río es algo que tiene una fuerte y marcada personalidad, es algo con fisionomía y vida propias. Una de mis más vivos deseos es el de seguir el curso de nuestros grandes ríos, el Duero, el Miño, el Tajo, el Guadiana, el Guadalquivir, el Ebro. Se les
siente vivir. Cogerlos desde su más tierna infancia, desde su cuna, desde la fuente de su más largo brazo, y seguirles por caídas y rompientes, por angosturas y hoces, por vegas y riberas. La vena de agua es para ellos algo asà como la conciencia para nosotros, unas veces agitada y espumosa, otras alojada de cieno, turbia y opaca, otras cristalina y clara, rumorosa a trechos. El agua es, en efecto, la consciencia del paisaje.
A river is something which has a strong, marked personality, is something with a life and physiognomy of its own. One of my strongest desires is that of following the course of our great rivers, the Duero, the Miño, the Tagus, the Guadiana, the Guadalquivir, the Ebro. To experience them. To take them from their deepest infancy, from their cradle, from the well-spring of their long arms, and to follow them through their falls and rapids, through their narrows and pools, through fields and river-banks. The vein of water is for them something like the conscience for us, sometimes foaming and agitated, other times full of mud, turbid and opaque, other times crystalline and clear, whispering along. Water is in effect the self-awareness of the landscape.
(This piece, and Resina's essay in general, reminds me a bit of Saramago's blog entry on Castril de la Peña.)
Found it! -- Many thanks to Deborah for sending me Unamuno's poem "Portugal" (an unpublished fragment), from which the line quoted in The Stone Raft is taken.
Portugal, Portugal, tierra descalza,
acurrucada junta al mar, tu madre,
llorando soledades
de trágicos amores,
mientras tus pies desnudos las espumas
saladas bañan,
tu verde cabellera suelta al viento
-- cabellera de pinos rumorosos --
los codos descansando en las rodillas,
y la cara morena entre ambas palmas,
clavas tus ojos donde el sol se acuesta
solo en la mar inmensa,
y en el lento naufragio asà meditas
de tus glorias de Oriente,
cantando fados quejumbrosa y lenta.
Portugal, Portugal, o barefoot land,
nestled by the sea, your mother,
weeping lonely
over tragic loves
while the salty foam
bathes your naked feet,
your green locks loose to the wind --
locks of whispering pines --
your elbows resting on your knees
and your dark face between your palms,
cast your eyes where the sun goes down
alone in the immense sea
and in this slow shipwreck reflect
on your Oriental glories,
singing fados, plaintive and slow.
(Not making any claims about the quality of this translation -- it is done on the fly. If you have any ideas about how it could be improved, feel free to mention them in the comments.) It's a pretty poem -- in his (engaging) essay on The Rivers of the Douro Valley in Literature, Antonio Garrosa Resina notes that Unamuno composed it during a visit to Oporto in 1907. I'm a little uncomfortable with the juxtaposition of "junta al mar, tu madre" in line 2 and "soledades" in line 3 -- I must be mistranslating this -- not sure what the (plural) "soledades" is referring to but it can't be (singular) Portugal, who is next to her mother the sea... maybe it's "weeping over tragic solitary loves." (Also: is the "slow shipwreck" the sunset? I think Portugal's glories being "Oriental" is a reference to the subject of The Stone Raft, the treaty which gives Portugal imperial dominion over all lands to the east of a particular longitude, Spain over lands to its west.)
There they are now, as Unamuno described them, his swarthy face cupped in the palms of his hands, Fix your eyes where the lonely sun sets in the immense sea, all nations with the sea to the west do the same, this race is swarthy, there is no other particularity, and it has sailed the seas.
I'm not going to argue with italicizing the quoted portion and capitalizing its first letter, I mean it's not in the original but it reads fine; but how could "la cara morena" possibly be understood as referring to Unamuno's face rather than as part of the quotation? This makes no sense at all to me -- it's an interesting image but it can't be the image intended in the original passage. Note how "moreno" is used again referring to the Portuguese race -- this is the only distinction between them and other peoples with the sea to the west. Here's my attempt at an improvement, relying heavily on Pontiero for a sense of the flow of the passage:
There they are now, as Unamuno described them, Your dark face between your palms, cast your eyes where the sun goes down alone in the immense sea, all peoples with the sea to the west do the same, this one is dark-skinned, there's no other distinction, and has sailed the seas.
Here's a new line of attack for a problem that's been bugging me a little while; when I was reading The Stone Raft I was enchanted by the line, which Saramago attributes to Unamuno, "Fix your eyes where the lonely sun sets in the immense sea." Haven't had any luck figuring out where that line came from, if he's quoting an actual Unamuno poem -- I don't know what the Spanish being quoted (in Portuguese, and then translated) is, and the English does not seem to match up with any existing translations...
Tonight I had the thought, why not try writing something with that line as a starting point, and taking as read that it was from a poem of Unamuno's... A first try (and assuming this line of inquiry bears any fruit, some more updates as time passes) below the fold.
1. Fix your eyes where the lonely sun sets in the immense sea, he said in Spain, might just as well have said in California. Dark-eyed surfer dude shading his swarthy brow -- peer into the pomegranate clouds of sunset. This rainy eastern beach chills me to the bone.
2. I wish I could look
to where the lonely sun
sets in the immense sea --
my thoughts will not stay here, tonight,
nor yet with you, at home;
my restless heart craves stasis, craves
a still, still settling, slow.
My hand commits to paper
what my brain already knows, and hopes,
in dreams I see your dark eyes
in the cloudy twilight shore.
Ellen and I spent most of the weekend setting up our dining room to paint it: covering the floor with newspaper and drop-cloths, taping edges and corners, and applying primer. It's not a huge room but it's a fairly intimidating job because of how the room is put together: lots of molding everywhere that requires attentive care and the use of a brush instead of a roller, including an insane crown molding that has 12 surfaces -- besides the crown molding there is a chair rail and a baseboard, and three doorways and a window. There will be a whole lot of taping, too, which we have not even started yet; for now we are priming everything together. We made pretty good progress! Finished off a can of primer, we've done everything except one section of crown molding and most of the ceiling. we'll finish that up tomorrow night and then the fun of applying the actual colors begins.
Ellen is primarily in charge of the color selection, with input from her friend Lisa and (a bit) from me -- she has settled on some colors from the Benjamin Moore catalog that look pretty nice to me, I will try and find them online and link to a sample.
I am really enjoying Channel 13's presentation Reel 13 on Saturday nights, although it is consistently making me stay up past my bedtime... Last night they showed The Pink Panther -- which I have watched a couple of times before but always glad to see again -- Adaptation -- which I watched when it came out, but had forgotten completely; what a fun, gripping, moving film! -- and this beautiful animated short, Le Loup Blanc by Pierre-Luc Granjon:
I tend to just think of The Pink Panther as a Peter Sellers vehicle -- I had forgotten how much worth watching the rest of the cast are, in particular David Niven and Claudia Cardinale. And the music! Obviously the theme is a great song, but there are a lot of other gems in the soundtrack as well. I sort of want to know what the movie is parodying -- I had been thinking of it as a parody of James Bond films, but Ellen pointed out that it came out in 1963, only a year after the first Bond film... It could be a parody of the thriller genre maybe?
posted afternoon of October 18th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Animation
Last night I dreamed about cooking -- I was making a stewed chicken and rice dish and bizarrely using my espresso pot to cook it in. It came out beautifully -- the grains of rice were soft and puffed up so they looked like orzo -- and they overflowed the pot like popcorn, spilling out onto the stovetop, which was already covered in some kind of red sauce that I had been cooking before that. It looked really tasty and lots of people were there hungry and wanting to be served...
As long as I am thinking about recipes, here are a couple of links: The NY Times Magazine reprints a recipe for Worcestershire sauce originally published in 1876 (although it contains the direction "refrigerate", which surprises me -- were refrigerators standard kitchen appliances in 19th Century NYC?*), and an updated version from Boston chef Barbara Lynch. The updated version is made with Vietnamese fish paste so does not require any fermentation time, it's ready to serve right away; the old recipe takes a month to mature. Worcestershire sauce traces its ancestry to the Malay condiment kecap, as does Ketchup; at The Language of Food, Dan Jurafsky looks at the history of this condiment. And here is an old piece by Malcolm Gladwell on The Ketchup Conundrum.
* Wikipædia reports that "At the start of the 20th century, about half of households in the United States relied on melting ice (in an icebox) to keep food cold, while the remaining half had no cooled storage at all, possibly excepting a 'root cellar'." So I'm thinking "refrigerate" is a modern edit of an 1876 recipe.
posted morning of October 17th, 2009: 2 responses ➳ More posts about Recipes
