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Saturday, July 21st, 2007
A brand new site is online called Kidlit: Grownups writing about children's books. Looks very promising.
posted evening of July 21st, 2007: Respond
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Chapter 15 is where this story is really beginning to come together for me. I had been liking a lot of disconnected stuff, and feeling fairly befuddled by the whole thing -- now all of a sudden I am grinning in agreement, underlining every other sentence, absolutely wincing when I see some bad news about a character I have come to love. The moment of transition might have been at the end of chapter 14, when İpek used Ka's phrase "the silence of snow" in a totally natural-seeming way. At this point I realize I am no longer condemning Ka for his narcissism (and myself for sympathizing with him) -- his narcissism seems like the most natural thing in the world to me. Another important cusp: "I think you're right," said Ka. "As it happens, I've already decided to answer the call that's been coming from deep within me my whole long life and open my heart to God."They caught his sarcastic tone -- for what it was worth. Knowing he was very drunk, they all suspected that this witticism might well have been prepared in advance. Up until now, I have been taking Ka's dialogue as generally pretty earnest. I think going forward, reading it with more irony assumed will make things easier to understand. -- Although that was not the case in reading Ka's conversation with Necip later in the chapter -- straight and ironic are both plausible interpretations, and both equally hard to decipher. I am really dreading Necip's fate.
posted evening of July 21st, 2007: Respond
➳ More posts about Snow
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Friday, July 20th, 2007
I am getting more attached to seeing Ka as a narcissist. Chapter 11, "Ka with Sheikh Efendi", portrays a mental space I am closely familiar with, viz. talking happily and effusively with a group of people while simultaneously feeling secretly scornful of them and fearing that they are not taking me seriously. But the words of Ka's conversation with the Sheikh have an otherworldly, unbelievable quality to them. So I am adding together the realistic portrayal of Ka himself and the unreality of his relations with others, and coming up with narcissism. I am feeling a little disappointed that I don't get to see the surpassing beauty of the poetry Ka is transcribing during his ecstasies. But that is likely part of the point being made here.
Hm... Now I just read chapter 13, in which Kadife comes across with a distinct fullness of character. Maybe the thing that makes Ka retreat from interacting with others into the privacy of his head, is religion, and Kadife's explicit refusal to discuss her beliefs allows him to treat her as an equal. The places I have noticed a particularly stilted quality in the dialog have all been conversations between Ka and Islamists -- Efendi, Nicep, Blue, Muhtar. (His conversation with İpek was pretty surreal too, but in a different way, and that's pretty easy to explain as a product of his infatuation.)
posted morning of July 20th, 2007: Respond
➳ More posts about Orhan Pamuk
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Thursday, July 19th, 2007
This was satisfying: Just now in front of the computer lab, I walked by a woman who was trying to get the vending machine to give her the Doritos she had paid for. I gave the machine a little shove and out they came.
posted afternoon of July 19th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, July 18th, 2007
Ka's tendency to narrate his subjunctive conversations with other characters is a bit disconcerting. I recognize my own behavior in it; but I also find that it dehumanizes the characters Ka is interacting with and makes him appear narcissistic -- so I am reading it as a criticism of me. And I guess also as a self-criticism on Pamuk's part.
posted afternoon of July 18th, 2007: Respond
➳ More posts about Readings
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Those lines I was looking for yesterday, from the first two pages: If he hadn't been so tired, if he'd paid a bit more attention to the snowflakes swirling out of the sky like feathers, he might have realized that he was traveling straight into a blizzard; he might have seen at the start that he was setting out on a journey that would change his life forever and chosen to turn back.But the thought didn't even cross his mind. Some more good stuff from the first chapter: "I'm an old friend of Ka's, and I begin this story knowing everything that will happen to him during his time in Kars." (Aside: I wonder what's up with the assonance between "Ka" and "Kars" -- it threatens to be distractingly cutesy. Does the pronunciation of "Kars" rhyme with "Mars" or with "parse", or something different?) "After a lifetime in which every experience of love was touched by shame and suffering, the prospect of falling in love filled Ka with an intense, almost instinctive dread." Chapter 3 opens with a description of what has led Ka to make this journey, which makes it sound sort of like a search for "the real Turkey" -- I was extrapolating to my own experience to think, it sounds a little like if I, beset by mid-life depression, made a trip to (say) Kentucky looking for the real America, which America is completely alien to me. More extrapolation: Ka's fear of fundamentalist Islam is like my fear of fundamentalist Christianity and what it's doing to America. But, I don't want to commit to this reading yet, I don't know that it's going to be at all useful in understanding the book. Ka's blurted confession in Chapter 4 has me loving him. It is the first point where he is fully human.
Snarkout tells me, "The Ka/Kars thing will not get less irritating,although it's a pun in Turkish; Kars is a real city in northeast Turkey, 'kar' is 'snow', so snow is what lies between Ka and Kars."
posted morning of July 18th, 2007: 2 responses
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Tuesday, July 17th, 2007
I like Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up To Me. But, it is seeming like it doesn't really hold anything new for me. So I've put it on the shelf for some time in the future when I feel like a comforting bit of psychedeliana. In its stead I have picked up Orhan Pamuk's Snow, which Dr. Snarkout was recommending to me. I read the first 40 pages or so a while back in the library; picking it up this morning my eyes leapt to the second page, and the lines (which I don't have the book to hand now to quote, but to the effect of): "He was tired and did not look up to see the snow coming down. If he had, and had noticed that he was heading into a blizzard, he might have turned back. But the thought did not even cross his mind." I'll look up the precise wording, which is more elegant than mine, later on.
posted afternoon of July 17th, 2007: Respond
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Monday, July 16th, 2007
Tonight we saw the New Zealand String Quartet performing four pieces by Mendelssohn, and challenging strongly my professed inability to dig classical music. I will say this, of "String Quartet #2 in A Minor Op. 13", which was my favorite piece of the evening and which the violist (Gillian Ansell) was selling as a love song in her introduction: I could not hear it as expressive of emotion. Rather it had the cold, haughty beauty of a fireworks display -- and indeed had many sensory ephemera in common with watching fireworks. A fantastic thing, it was.
posted evening of July 16th, 2007: Respond
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Saturday, July 14th, 2007
We are leaving tomorrow morning for Ithaca, for the Suzuki Summer Institute. It will be very good to get some time to unwind -- these last few weeks have been pretty stressful for me. (But hooray! On Friday, I finished up two important projects that have been bothering me, namely an HTML-to-text translation utility (which ended up being pretty simple; the main hassle was figuring out how to pipe both stdin and stdout for a child process) and converting a text reader to read XHTML input -- so no work projects to think about, much, on vacation.) Reading material for the trip is Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up To Me, set in a fictionalized Ithaca. Hoping to do some busking in the town center, which is a pretty busker-friendly environment.
posted evening of July 14th, 2007: Respond
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(In the manner of Big Bill Broonzy) They took my pick an shovel away Lord, I can' dig no more
Took my pick an shovel mama, can't dig no more
Where'm I gone go now, Lord these diggin hands is sore.
posted afternoon of July 14th, 2007: Respond
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