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Thursday, June 26th, 2008

🦋 Context and Presentation

Last night's post about Nixonland was not completely fair, maybe. I mean I feel like I'm getting a lot out of the book; I am getting more of a sense of context for the events around the time of my birth that I have always perceived as major cultural markers -- in this evening's reading I am catching up on the pre-Roe v. Wade anti-abortion movement and the anti-sex-education movement (still very active during my own childhood; I haven't heard much from them recently, but maybe they're still out there); the media circus surrounding Chappaquiddick; and Woodstock.

I wish the information were presented with more care though. There are a lot of clunky sentences, awkward constructions; bits of information that are not connected to the information surrounding them; logical leaps that don't make sense. It would be different if Perlstein were doing Gonzo -- and occasionally I get a sense that he's trying to do that, or something like it; but it doesn't fit in with the rest of the book.

posted evening of June 26th, 2008: 2 responses
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Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

🦋 Focus and detail

Halfway through Nixonland I am liking it less than I was a quarter of the way in. Something seems to have gone wrong with the editing, with the result that the details Perlstein presents are serving to confuse the narrative rather than to focus it.

I want the narrative focus to be on Nixon and his crew, with the news of what's going on in America and the world there to provide context for their story, and to show how their tactics play out. And this is mostly how the first and second parts looked. But toward the end of Part II and in Part III so far, lots of scattered detail is being given about the news events of the day, but it is failing to coalesce -- it is drawing my attention away from the machinations of the administration, rather than pointing them up.

(One possibility is, I was so much less familiar with the news events being described in the early part of the book, that I was able to see Perlstein's narrative structure without getting lost. I'm not sure this would make sense though, indeed it sounds kind of backwards.)

posted evening of June 25th, 2008: Respond

🦋 Pamuk: a bibliography

This is the bibliography from Michael McGaha's Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk: The Writer in his Novels, which professor McGaha has graciously allowed me to reprint here. I am hoping to extend it as time goes by, and to keep the links up to date. Contributions in the comments section are of course welcome.

Note: I have added some entries that are not in McGaha's bibliography. To differentiate these I have enclosed anything I add in square brackets.

posted morning of June 25th, 2008: 2 responses
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Monday, June 23rd, 2008

🦋 People vs. Pamuk

I'm making my way through chapter 1 of Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk, which deals with the events around Pamuk's being prosecuted in 2005 for "hostility to Turkishness" and his eventual exile. Man this is confusing stuff -- not McGaha's fault, his writing is pretty terse and straightforward. But there are a lot of conflicting issues competing for my attention as I try to figure out what's going on. Pamuk is hoping to win the Nobel prize for literature (he did not, but won it the following year, at which point I think the prosecution had already happened -- I don't know if he was still living in Turkey at this point); Turkey is hoping to be considered for admission to the EU, and busy revising its laws (including the one under which Pamuk is charged) to abide by international human rights law; Turkish nationalists are opposed to the EU and see the prosecution as an avenue for preventing it. Erdoğan, a moderate Islamist, who was prime minister in 2005, had been prosecuted some years earlier (if I understand correctly) by Turkish nationalists for expressing hostility to secularism; and he could not have been prime minister if it were not for the liberalization going on to further Turkey's chances of acceptance into the EU. I want to make a timeline of events but I don't think I'm up to that point yet.

I totally want to make a hypertext version of this book's bibliography* -- it is chock full of useful articles, a lot of which are available on the web. Loving this line from Pamuk's acceptance speech when he was awarded the Friedenspreis of the German Book Trade:

Even as [the novel] relates our own lives as if they were the lives of others, it offers us the chance to describe other people's lives as if they were our own.

Note: it seemed funny at first, for Pamuk's trial to come at the front of the book, which is otherwise arranged chronologically; but as I read it is making some sense to me to have this before the novels rather than after -- it gives a sense of the environment in which Pamuk is writing and coming to write, and a context for his cosmopolitanism and Turkish identity.

*And, update: Dr. McGaha has granted me permission to post the bibliography. I hope to put it up tonight or tomorrow.

posted evening of June 23rd, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

🦋 A vacation from context

Allow me to recommend: Dorothy Gambrell's new collection, Cat and Girl volume II. The only cartoon collection I have seen with an index. If you order quick, you can get your copy inscribed. (Note: I think to do this, you have to order direct from catandgirl.com, not from Topatoco.)

Also: here is a new interview with Dorothy, with links to some older ones, in COMIXtalk. I did not know about her extra-Cat and Girl cartooning efforts; she also does Very Small Array and for a while drew The New Adventures of Death. (Looks from the interview, like she considers Donation Derby and Cat and Girl to be two separate things -- I have always somehow considered the former to be a subset of the latter, I guess because they are on the same site and the styles are so closely similar.)

posted morning of June 22nd, 2008: 1 response
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Saturday, June 21st, 2008

🦋 The Cave

I've really enjoyed Dr. Holbo's couple of recent posts about Plato's cave allegory, and I was happy to read today that Saramago has a novel about (or "which touches on") the allegory -- it is his The Cave, translated in 2002.

posted evening of June 21st, 2008: Respond
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🦋 Inspiring

I find it really inspiring to read, in the preface to McGaha's Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk (which arrived in today's post, hooray!), that McGaha was able to acquire a working reading knowledge of Turkish in about six months time. (Past the age of 60!) Granted he was living in Istanbul at the time and learning Turkish was his primary activity; still it's enough to make me think I should really work at language learning, that it will not be fruitless if I apply myself.

Sylvia and I just took a ChinesePod lesson about "My Dog" (wǒ de xiǎo gǒu, a phrase Sylvia knew well from class) and learned how to tell Pixie to "come here" (guò lai) and "sit down" (zuò xia).

posted evening of June 21st, 2008: Respond
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🦋 Longing for the past

This was kind of weird: as I was reading chapter 13 of Nixonland (about the buildup to the '68 convention in Chicago), toward the end of the chapter as I was reading about how New York City discontinued the use of police call boxes after one was booby-trapped -- I just got this visceral wave of "Stupid fucking hippies, depriving me of the opportunity to live an idyllic Ozzy-and-Harriet life!"

Ahistorical, yes; and about 30 years out-of-date. I have felt many times in my life, a similar sort of nostalgia-by-proxy for the 60's -- but always with the idea that I would have run in Abbie Hoffman's circles.* This was more about a desire to be square and comfortable. Not sure quite where it came from -- it is certainly not Perlstein's agenda to advance this kind of reactionary thinking.

*I don't mean to say this kind of reactionary thinking is better than the other -- just to distinguish it from what I was thinking today. I believe it draws more on romanticism than the longing-for-the-50's I'm writing about here, for whatever that's worth.

posted evening of June 21st, 2008: Respond

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

🦋 Nixonland themes

So far (as I begin reading part 2, about the election of '68), Nixonland seems to divide roughly into:

• History of the struggle for racial equality, and how Nixon and his conspirators used the unrest to build their party.
• History of the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement, and how Nixon used the war as a wedge against Johnson.
• History of and speculation about the internal workings of Nixon's various campaigns and about Nixon's personal take on his opponents.

I'm pretty familiar with the Vietnam stuff and am skimming it a bit. I have (as noted below) only a passing familiarity with the racial unrest stuff and am finding that the most interesting part of the book so far. I didn't know much at all about the internal workings of Nixon's campaigns, but I'm having pretty mixed reactions to Perlstein's speculation -- some of it seems facile, some obviously true (and unnecessary), occasionally it is insightful and useful.

posted morning of June 17th, 2008: Respond

Saturday, June 14th, 2008

🦋 American History

I am being continually surprised, as I read Nixonland, at the extent of the racial violence that occurred in America in the early to mid-60's -- and secondarily surprised at myself for being surprised. I am more ignorant of my country's history than I like to think of myself as being. Take for instance the Watts riots -- I have of course heard of these before and had a notion of their importance; but somehow I had assumed they were a concrete event that took place over a week or something at a particular time and place. Come to find out instead that for a period of at least a few years, a large area of Los Angeles was borrderline anarchic and prone to break out in mass violence. Similarly I had no idea of the frequency with which white mobs assembled in Chicago, and for how long that went on. Thanks for schooling me, Mr. Perlstein.

(And thanks, Edge of the American West bloggers, for giving me inspiration to do some history reading -- I'm finding your this day in history posts fascinating.)

posted morning of June 14th, 2008: Respond

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