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Monday, June 9th, 2008
So I left work early today, to watch Sylvia auditioning for next year's Overture Strings, and to file away the folders of music I've had in the back of my car since YOEC's spring concert a few weeks ago. Arrived at South Orange Middle School, only to find the school and the rest of town dark -- a fire at a transformer station in West Orange shut down several towns around here. Well Ellen, Sylvia and I escaped the heat by driving over to Springfield, which still had power and by lucky coincidence, has the only public library around here that's open well into the evening. We chilled out, I read the first chapter of Nixonland and confirmed that I want to read the rest of it. Got back home just as the power came on. So the site was down for a while this afternoon but it looks like no data was lost. And here we are.
posted evening of June 9th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, June 7th, 2008
Today Mr. Pamuk turns 56 years old. (And it has been nearly a year since I first started reading his books.) I wish him a long and happy life of writing. 
posted morning of June 7th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, June second, 2008
I just found out about this: a new translation by Maureen Freely is out, not of Pamuk but of another Turkish author named Fethiye Çetin -- the book is a memoir of her grandmother, an Armenian Christian kidnapped by a Turkish officer. This sounds interesting on any number of points, and Mr. Pope's review makes it sound like captivating reading.
 See also this longer review and interview with Çetin, by Fréderike Geerdink.
posted evening of June second, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, May 29th, 2008
In the Turkish paper Zaman, Fehmi Koru has a column today about Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and with reference to Pamuk, that strikes me as most thoughtful, though the premise on which he hangs the column seems kind of insubstantial. Koru does not allude directly to the controversy I referenced yesterday -- which makes me think it is probably not as big widespread as my reading was leading me to believe -- but it was in my mind as I read his column.
posted evening of May 29th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
I see from a cursory look at the Internet, that people (or anyway, "nationalistic Turks") are comparing the acceptance speech given by filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan at Cannes, with that given by Pamuk at Stockholm (or well, rather with Pamuk's failure to acknowledge his motherland and with his reference before the Nobel was awarded, to the Armenian genocide), and finding fault with Pamuk's lack of patriotism. I don't know how widespread this is -- I've only read the Turkish Daily News article I linked above, which references some other articles and columnists, and a couple of Turkish bloggers. But it seems terrible to me -- every speech I have heard of Pamuk's has made reference to the importance of Turkey in his writing and in his mental life.* My first thought was, Well this seems sort of like American right-wing radio hosts bitching about Obama not wearing the lapel pin, or whatever their cause du jour is. But then I remembered Pamuk is currently living in exile, which makes his situation seem a lot worse than (obviously) Obama's. The nationalists in Turkey have a lot more power than the right wing here -- scary to think about when I'm so often outraged by how much power the right wing has here.
 * (Reading this I see I was not quite clear in my expression -- this derogation of Pamuk for inadequate patriotism would be terrible whether or not he spoke as often and as passionately as he does about his homeland.)
posted evening of May 28th, 2008: Respond
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 I found a paper by Otfried Lieberknecht describing Dante's encounter with Mohammed in the eighth circle of Hell, with reference to the idea that Dante borrowed the idea for his Commedia from the Islamic tradition of Kitab al-Miraj. It is called "A Medieval Christian View of Islam: Dante's Encounter
with Mohammed in Inferno XXVIII". Seems like it will be a very useful resource in approaching Pamuk's The New Life.
 Also: Jews and Muslims in Dante's Vision, by Jesper Hede, Aarhus University, Denmark.
posted morning of May 28th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, May 25th, 2008
Sylvia and I saw Prince Caspian tonight -- we enjoyed it and I would recommend it to people who are fans of the books. I don't think I'd recommend it as a movie to somebody who is not predisposed to like it; I guess my reaction to it was a little bit like Ebert's reaction to the latest Indiana Jones movie.  Good things: the talking animals, great; Trumpkin, great; the beautiful scenery and handsome actors were candy for my eyes. The camera work in the opening sequence was really startlingly good. Not so good: There wasn't really anything to distinguish this movie as a different film from the previous one -- where the two books are quite distinct from one another. A lot of the battle footage in particular, which made up a huge proporiton of the film, seemed like it could easily just have been lifted out of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Sylvia had a good time identifying the differences between the movie and the book, which I guess means the movie was faithful enough to the book, for them to stand out.
posted evening of May 25th, 2008: 2 responses
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 So my understanding of "allegory" is kind of vague, and I think mostly of examples of allegory rather than of a definition. So e.g. A White Bear was talking about The Phantom Tollbooth and The Wizard of Oz as examples of allegory, and I thought Sure -- ok, these stories tell about the main character being transported into an imaginary parallel reality where human character traits are cartoonishly represented by marvelous creatures, and learning/growing in the course of the experience. That matches up pretty well to my memory of learning the term "allegory" in high school English class.
So here's what I'm wondering about the Commedia: It fits that loose definition pretty well. But something is very different about it. In those books the lecturing about human virtue that is going on is beneath the surface, in the Commedia it is front and center. In those books the "main thing" is the story line and the character development of the main character, while the pedagogy is a side effect; in the Commedia the pedagogy is very much front and center, there hardly is a plot besides as much as there needs to be to keep the book moving. Is this a distinction between modern and classical allegory? Or just between these particular books? The pedagogy in The Phantom Tollbooth strikes me as much more effective than in the Inferno, but then I am not a 14th-C. Catholic.
posted afternoon of May 25th, 2008: Respond
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I've been looking through The Portable Dante -- I must admit I'm kind of bogging down in Inferno, reading it is feeling more like a chore than a pleasure. So I'm rethinking the idea of reading the full Commedia -- I prefer reading for pleasure. I was trying to compose a post about what in Dante is putting me off -- it is something to do with the difference between allegory and pedagogy, and Inferno having too much of the latter and too little of the former, but I'm not sure enough of myself writing about 
literary technique to phrase this properly.
Dante's sonnets are nice. I don't think I've read any of them before except "To Guido Cavalcante", which I've seen anthologized in several places. But the niceness of them is more to do with the imagery than with the narrative content, which seems pretty cloying to me. This line from De Vulgari Eloquentia (Book I § 2) made me laugh hard, FWIW: ...nam eorum que sunt omnium soli homini datum est loqui, cum solum sibi necessarium fuerit.
Non angelis, non inferioribus animalibus necessarium fuit loqui, sed nequicquam datum fuisset eis: quod nempe facere natura aborret....To man alone of all existing beings was speech given, because to him alone was it necessary. Speech was not necessary for the angels or for the lower animals, but would have been given to them in vain, which nature, as we know, shrinks from doing. I did a couple of double-takes going back and trying to figure out what "angels" is doing in that second sentence. Still not sure, but it makes for a lovely comic effect.
posted morning of May 25th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, May 16th, 2008
Looks from this article like the movie Blindness is going to be really dreadful. That's so disappointing! The book could absolutely be made into an excellent movie -- it is "cinematic", visual detail is such a key part of it. But Dargis' description gives me a sense of exactly how Blindness should not have been made into a movie -- with overt concentration on the allegorical aspects of the story. Saramago really played this down, except for the cathedral scene and a couple of spots while the characters were interned, and of course the very end -- but the end should be surprising, should take your breath away. If Meirelles is using blinding light effects throughout the movie, I can't imagine the end is going to feel meaningful at all.
posted evening of May 16th, 2008: 1 response
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