Orhan Pamuk Speaks - What I Found on YouTube

 I read Pamuk after I turned 50. What has attracted me to his novels is his writing about places and times. 

He sees the Turk as European and Middle Eastern. He sees Turkey as both modern and historical; a place trying to find its place as a former empire, a former Great Power, and a modern state of importance. 

 So what? It has to do with me being in the Midwest. The East Coast has its economic, cultural, and political power. The South lies across the Ohio River with its scars of slavery and the Civil War. The West's romance is hours to the west.

Let me put that another way. 

Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, Colson Whitehead, Michael Chabon, Gore Vidal, Joseph Heller, Dennis Lehane, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Norman Mailer, John Updike, and Stephen King are to the east of me.

William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Conner, Jessamyn West, Walker Percy, John Kennedy O'Toole, Jonathan Franzen (being from Missouri) and William Styron are to the south. 

Turning west I find John Steinbeck, Larry McMurty, Craig Johnson, Cormac McCarthy, A.B. Guthrie, Mark Twain (who also suddenly seems the most cosmopolitan of American writers - he could be southern, he spent time fitting into the east, and, if I could fit a slave state into the Midwest, and Midwestern), Raymond Chandler, Annie Proulx, Dashiel Hammett, and Ross MacDonald.

Those belonging to my Midwest: Kurth Vonnegut, Booth Tarkington, Theodore Dreiser, Nelson Algren, Sinclair Lewis, Toni Morrison, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Richard Wright, and Michael Martone.

Put another way: the Midwest supplied the men who destroyed the Slave Power, then built the factories that supplied the country and the world, and then lost the peace to the South and saw their factories shuttered. It is an empire that lost its power and holds onto former eminence while wandering in the desert searching for its future.

Yes, I think Pamuk might have something to teach us. 

He is also an engaging human being with a lively intelligence.

Orhan Pamuk in Conversation with Merve Emre 

A Dialogue on Facts Fiction History: Umberto Eco - Orhan Pamuk (Full Version)

Orhan Pamuk - VO (4) - William Marx (2022-2023)

Big Think Interview With Orhan Pamuk | Big Think

Why he made a nveol into a museum

 

Finally, what I had collected into a YouTube Playlist

My other Orhan Pamuk posts are here. 

 

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