READIN

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

🦋 Tying some threads together

(Well, or tangling them up at least.)

I woke up this morning with an image from my dream fully formed.

A man about my age is at a family gathering -- the crowd includes his parents, brothers and sisters and their families, and his child or children. Maybe some of his aunts and uncles as well. He is stoned and is scribbling random-seeming lines on a large piece of blank paper as he narrates in a kind of vindictive, complaining way. A few people are listening to him, others are involved in their own conversations. He moves on to something else and his son (perhaps nephew), 4 or 5 years old, starts coloring in the scribbles, eventually coming out with a very nice picture of a scene from the fairy-tale "The Frog King".

posted morning of September 11th, 2007: Respond
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Sunday, September 9th, 2007

🦋 Grave sins

Since chapter 31 of My Name is Red I have been feeling a little at odds with Pamuk's desire to advance the plot, which has been seeming to interfere with the lovely character development and aphoristic nature of the first half of the book. With today's reading however, chapters 43 through 47, he is coming back to the narrative style that I have fallen in love with.

Chapter 47 ("I, Satan") is especially nice -- it has been too long since we heard from the coffee-house storyteller, whom I am identifying as Pamuk. He (like Pamuk) obviously has a polemical point -- is not impartial -- but his voice is lovely and seductive enough, and I'm close enough to in agreement with his side of the argument, that I am letting my guard down and just basking in his voice. Here's what his Satan has to say about moralizing preachers:

I am not the source of all the evil and sin in the world. Many people sin out of their own blind ambition, lust, lack of willpower, baseness, and most often, out of their own idiocy without any instigation, deception or temptation on my part. However absurd the efforts of certain learned mystics to absolve me of any evil might be, so too is the assumption that I am the source of all of it, which also contradicts the Glorious Koran. I'm not the one who tempts every fruit monger who craftily foists rotten apples upon his customers, every child who tells a lie, every fawning sycophant, every old man who has obscene daydreams or every boy who jacks off. Even the Almighty couldn't find anything evil in passing wind or jacking off. Sure, I work very hard so you might commit grave sins. But some hojas claim that all of you who gape, sneeze or even fart are my dupes, which tells me they haven't understood me in the least.

Let them misunderstand you, so you can dupe them all the more easily, you might suggest. True. But let me remind you, I have my pride, which is what caused me to fall out with the Almighty in the first place...

posted evening of September 9th, 2007: Respond
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Monday, September third, 2007

Al-Ahram Weekly looks like a very useful resource for learning about what's going on in the Islamic world. I am reading an essay about Snow right now, written on the occasion of Pamuk's receiving the Nobel Prize; and a review of My Name is Red.

posted afternoon of September third, 2007: Respond
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Saturday, September first, 2007

🦋 Whose Name is Red?

Ah ok, I got it, not just a distinct character but a distinct type of character -- by my count there are three or four types of narrators so far in this book: {Black, Mr. Uncle, Mr. Elegant, the Murderer, Orhan, Shekure, Esther, and the various miniaturists}; {Dog, Tree, Gold Coin}; and {Red} -- Maybe the Murderer should get a set of his own.

Pamuk has impeccable timing. As evidence of this look at the following paragraph, ignoring the minor infelicities of the translation. Red tells how he came to be:

Hush and listen to how I developed such a magnificent red tone. A master miniaturist, an expert in paints, furiously pounded the best variety of dried red beetle from the hottest climes of Hindustan into a fine powder using his mortar and pestle. He prepared five drachmas of the red powder, one drachma of soapwort and a half drachma of lotor. He boiled the soapwort in a pot containing three okkas of water. Next, he mixed thoroughly the lotor into the water. He let it boil for as long as it took to drink an excellent cup of coffee. As he enjoyed the coffee, I grew as impatient as a child about to be born.

Chapter 31 feels very important to me in a similar way to chapter 29 of Snow. It comes about halfway through the book, just after a couple of important plot elements have occurred, and it distances the reader from the immediacy of the narration. And I think we may be seeing the heart of the book in this passage:

"What is the meaning of red?" the blind miniaturist who'd drawn the horse from memory asked again.

"The meaning of color is that it is there before us and we see it," said the other. "Red cannot be explained to he who cannot see."

"To deny God's existence, victims of Satan maintain that God is not visible to us," said the blind miniaturist who'd rendered the horse.

"Yet, he appears to those who can see," said the other master. "It is for this reason that the Koran states that the blind and the seeing are not equal."

posted afternoon of September first, 2007: Respond

Friday, August 31st, 2007

🦋 Mr. Uncle

Chapter 29, in which the foul deed is done, is totally gripping. I am starting to wonder (well -- I had been wondering, but this chapter is making it worse) whose name is Red -- I think it might be Black somehow.* The principal reason I'm thinking this is because Enishte Effendi (lovely nickname, I think it means "Mr. Uncle") has his chapters titled, "I am your beloved uncle" -- your beloved uncle, as if he is talking to Black. Just a hunch tho.

A few nice things from this chapter:

• Enishte and the murderer discussing guilt -- that the artist is motivated in part by "fear of retribution" -- "how the endless guilt both deadens and nourishes the artist's imagination."
• Enishte's compliment to the murderer: "What your pen draws is neither truthful nor frivolous."
• Enishte's final, long speech about the destiny of their art.
• "Just before I died, I actually longed for my death, and at the same time, I understood the answer to the question that I'd spent my entire life pondering, the answer I couldn't find in books: How was it that everybody, without exception, succeeded in dying? It was precisely through this simple desire to pass on. I also understood that death would make me a wiser man."

*Mm, strike that -- I just looked in the table of contents and noticed chapter 31 will be titled, "I am Red". So, apparently Red is a distinct character. That's my assumption at this point anyhow.

posted evening of August 31st, 2007: 2 responses

Thursday, August 30th, 2007

🦋 The dreams we recount

Here is what Shekure has to say about dreaming, in Chapter 26:

Dreams are good for three things:

ا :	You want something but you just can't ask for it. So you'll say that you've dreamed about it. In this manner, you can ask for what you want without actually asking for it.
ب :	You want to harm someone. For example, you want to slander a woman. So, you'll say that such-and-such woman is committing adultery or that such-and-such pasha is pilfering wine by the jug. I dreamed it, you'll say. In this fashion, even if they don't believe you, the mere mention of the sinful deed is almost never forgotten.
ج :	You want something, but you don't even know what it is. So, you'll describe a confusing dream. Your friends or family will immediately interpret the dream and tell you what you need or what they can do for you. For example, they'll say: You need a husband, a child, a house...

The dreams we recount are never the ones we actually see in our sleep. When people say they've "seen it," they simply describe the dream that is "dreamed" during the day, and there's always an underlying purpose. Only an idiot would describe his actual nighttime dreams exactly as he's had them. If you do, everyone will make fun of you or, as always, interpret the dreams as a bad omen. No one takes real dreams seriously, including those who dream them. Or, pray tell, do you?

It is impossible to pick from this cornucopia a signature line -- so much in it that just arrests your thoughts and makes you backtrack, retrace the steps of reason that have brought you to where you are.

posted evening of August 30th, 2007: Respond

🦋 Two unrelated passages

I am finding that the narrators I identify most closely with in this book are Esther (who reminds me fairly strongly of a like-named relative of mine) and Shekure. As I was reading this passage in Shekure's narration:

Just then, when I saw that he'd opened his pink mouth like a child would have, I unexpectedly felt, yes, like putting my breast into it. With my fingers on his nape and tangled in his hair, Black would place his head between my breasts, and as my own children used to do, he'd roll his eyes back into his head with pleasure as he sucked on my nipple...

I realized that I would never be able fully to understand it without also thinking about these lines from Robyn Hitchcock's Globe of Frogs:

And when she feeds the flowers
Up they rise their pretty little heads
And when she waters them
They glow and smirk and smile in their beds

Update: Hm, well this post is getting me some interesting search engine referrals anyway...

posted morning of August 30th, 2007: Respond
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Sunday, August 26th, 2007

🦋 Aging and Death

"Stork"'s fable ب (in chapter 13) contains what may be my favorite line in the book thus far:

Once upon a time, not so very long ago and yet not so recently, everything imitated everything else, and thus, if not for aging and death, man would've never been the wiser about the passage of time.

(As far as the translation: I really like the inelegance of "would've never been the wiser". I think it sounds a little funny, but in an arresting way, not an annoying.)

...Cool! I found a magazine about translation (sadly in Spanish, which I do not read) with the original of this passage and translations into Spanish, English and French:

Her şeyin her şey tekrar ettiği ve bu yüzden yaşlanıp ölmek olmasa insanın zaman diye bir şeyin varolduğunu hiç farkedemediği ve âlemin de zaman hiç yokmuş gibi hep aynı hikâyeler ve resimlerle resmedildiği hem eski hem yeni bir zamanda, Fahir Şah'ın küçük ordusu, Selahattin Han'ın askerlerini, Semerkantlı Salim'in kısa tarihinde de anlattıği gibi, "perişan" etti. (Orhan Pamuk)

En un tiempo no demasiado lejano pero no demasiado cercano, cuando todo se repetía de tal manera que de no ser por el envejecimiento y la muerte los hombres no habrían percibido que había algo llamado tiempo y cuando el mundo era ilustrado con las mismas historias y pinturas como si el tiempo no existiera, el pequeño ejército del sha Fahir "pulverizó" a las tropas del jan Selahattin, según se cuenta en la breve Historia de Salim de Samarcanda. (Rafael Carpintero)

Once upon a time, not so very long ago yet not so recently, everything imitated everything else, and thus, if not for aging and death, man would've never been the wiser about the passage of time. Yes, when the worldly realm was repeatedly presented through the same stories and pictures, as if time did not flow, Fahir Shah's small army routed Selahattin Khan's soldiers -- as Salim of Samarkand's concise History attests. (Erdag M. Göknar)

Jadis, naguère, tout n'était que répétition du même, á l'infini. En ce temps-là, s'il n'y avait eu la décrépitude de l'âge et la mort au bout, les hommes n'auraient pas eu la conscience du temps, ne voyant pas le monde passer comme il va, mais suivant la série, immuable, des histoires et des images, répétées à l'infini. Jusqu'au jour où, selon la Brève Chronique de Salim de Samarcande, la petite armée de Fâkhir Shah "fit mordre la poussière" aux soldats du Khan Salâhuddîn. (Gilles Authier)

(The context is an article about Pamuk titled "Un autor en busca de tres traductores" by Rafael Carpintero, which I'm guessing means "An author in the (grasp?vision?...?) of three translators"....no, "in search of" says the Spanish dictionary.)

posted evening of August 26th, 2007: Respond

🦋 I Will Be Called a Murderer

I have gone very quickly from having trouble with the narrative structure in My Name is Red to being totally entranced by it. I particularly love the variations on "my name is" in the chapter titles. "I Will Be Called a Murderer"! That strikes home before I even start reading.

posted evening of August 26th, 2007: Respond

🦋 From the East

My Name is Red is set in Istanbul in 1591, at the height of the Ottoman Empire's power. In discussions of the innovation of artistic style (which I referenced yesterday), the innovation is generally identified as coming "from the East" and/or from Europe. But now in Chapter 12, in "Butterfly"'s ج fable, I see the princess of Kasvin identifying the æsthetic tradition which identifies artistic style as a flaw, as coming "from the East" -- she does not say this in a derogatory manner, which is how I had read the previous references.

So this is making me wonder whether Ottoman culture saw itself as not at all innovative. "From the East" makes sense (I think) as a description of the source cultural traditions; my understanding is that Turks originated in central Asia and migrated to the west, to Anatolia. (My understanding is also that "Ottoman" means the same thing as "Turk"; that could be totally wrong.) In this case "from the East" would have a separate meaning when it was used to identify the source of traditions, and when it was used to identify the source of putatively pernicious innovations.

posted morning of August 26th, 2007: Respond

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