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. 

 

sch 5/18 

Friday

 I can stand and walk this morning better than I have for all the throbbing in my hip and smelling like a locker room.

Email opened and there is the book reviews from The Brisbane Time. I read Putting together the jigsaw puzzle pieces of life with interest and out of interest:

The Melbourne-via-Adelaide author won the inaugural Horne Prize in 2016 for her essay The Suicide Gene, detailing her own history of ideation against the backdrop of her grandfather, who took his own life. The frank, shattering nature of that essay continues in the memoir A Kind of Magic, Spargo-Ryan’s third book but first long-form non-fiction work, which explicitly lays out the ways, big and small, in which mental illness impacts a life.

###

But if the purpose is to allow readers to physically feel the intense and often terrifying mental health struggle, Spargo-Ryan nails it – her beautiful prose is especially effective when she is describing panic and anxiety attacks with breathless run-on sentences, giving outsiders an idea of what it feels like to be inside those kinds of moments. The debilitating and all-consuming nature of living with mental illness is drawn with clarity, pushing up against the “degree to which people imagine mental illness is performative”.

I do not know why - it's foreignness itself? - but I do like the way the Aussie's write their reviews. They do not seem so stodgy as, say, The New York Times.

I also found out Orhan Pamuk has a new novel, Nights of Plague, which is reviewed under Ancient versus modern in a story of sickness and murder.

A number of early reviews have noted that the premise of Nights of Plague is reminiscent of Albert Camus’ existentialist classic The Plague. But Pamuk’s expansive style and thematic preoccupations are quite different. Running through all his work is a concern with the conflicts that arise between ancient traditions and the forces of modernisation. This is often played out in his novels as a complex historical interaction between the values and cultures of East and West.

In Nights of Plague, there is a religious angle (the population of Mingheria is divided between Muslim Turks and Christian Greeks), but the immediate point of contention is the draconian measures that are put in place to control the spread of the disease, which are enforced in such a clumsy manner that they not only arouse fear and suspicion among the people of Mingheria, but also expose the inadequacies of the rickety imperial bureaucracy.

Pamuk has always been conscious of the ways in which different literary genres can overlap and inhabit each other. On a conceptual level, the richly imagined world of Nights of Plague recalls one of his greatest novels, My Name is Red, in that it combines two familiar genres – the historical novel and the detective story – and gives them a twist.

Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and I think has things to say to us Americans, but most importantly - he writes a damned good story.

With this story of the fitful birth of a nation state, Pamuk opens up far-reaching questions about the tragic contingencies of history and the forging of national myths. It is an extraordinary achievement (and uncannily prescient, given that Pamuk began writing it four years before the 2020 pandemic).

At nearly 700 exposition-heavy pages, Nights of Plague is well into baggy monster territory, and it does have its longueurs, but the skill with which Pamuk synthesises its disparate elements, and the convincing palpability of its imaginary setting, conspire to make the novel one of his finest creations.

And now it is 5:45, and I need to move towards work. I feel strange having been gone, and am nervous if I can work today. Not many places will hire the likes of me. 

I worked all day. It was a close one - the hip pain gave way to the knee. I was ready to give up by 2 pm. 

After work, off to Payless for groceries. I had to have missed a bus, or else the schedule was off. During my half hour wait to get the bus home, I realized how deserted was the bus station, and how it was getting colder. I did not get back until 6:30. I paid rent. Then I ate my dinner.

I read Giving Attorney General power over prosecutors “least preferred” route in dispute and Indiana higher education commission advances funding model, despite some pushback. The first gives me hope and the second feels like déjà vu all over again - not a good feeling.

What I am going to do now is call it a day. I am tired, hurt, and do not have the energy to do any more writing or reading. One more post added for pretrial detention. The brain rebels at any more words.

"Colonel Tom" got a rejection today:

Thank you for submitting "Colonel Tom" to Gordon Square Review. While we appreciate the chance to read your work, we regret that we are unable to accept it for publication.

One of the unfortunate realities of literary publishing is that editors will always have to pass on a lot more work than they accept. As writers ourselves, we understand the frustration of rejection, but please know we appreciate your time and efforts and are honored you trusted us with your work.

Thanks again, and we wish you the best in placing your work elsewhere!

Best,

Nardine Taleb

Prose Editor

Gordon Square Review

gordonsquarereview.org

I will watch a little TV, probably not going to stay up for Graham Norton. Vegetate.

It is getting cold & snow is expected for tomorrow.

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The Guardian Reviews Orhan Pamuk's New Novel

 The Guardian published Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk review – a playful approach to big themes this past weekend. I found Pamuk in prison, and you will find many entries here about him, just use the search the blog function. Of the review, I found the following interesting:

Orhan Pamuk likes to play new games. Every one of his books has differed markedly from the others, yet each shares a capacity for disconcerting the reader. This one is long and intellectually capacious. It tackles big subjects: nationalism and the way nations are imagined into being; ethnic and religious conflict; the decline of an empire; the political repercussions of a pandemic. It includes many deaths.

Yet, for all the weight of its subject matter, its tone is lightly ironic, arch, even flippant. It has many flaws. It is repetitive; it contains far too much exposition. All the same – formally and in terms of content – it is one of the most interesting books I’ve read this year.

*** 

The novel’s chronology is as far from straightforward as its narrative strategy. The clock in Mingheria’s central post office shows two different times simultaneously. Time pleats. People think back to their childhoods. Mina looks forward to their futures, reflecting on what historians will make of the events she is describing. Phrases such as “It would later be revealed” or “Our readers will discover” recur. There are premonitions and spoilers. Strands of the plot are set up as whodunnits, only for the answer to be given offhandedly and too soon. Characters’ back stories are introduced late, sometimes at disproportionate length. Our layered narrators seem to keep forgetting what we know already, or don’t know at all. The Pilgrim Ship Mutiny is referred to several times before we are told about it. Every piece of action is subjected to reprises from different points of view. It is confusing, I think deliberately so. This is a novel whose structure is not like scaffolding, more like a very complex piece of knitting.
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Pamuk (and/or Mina) flout the normal rules of storytelling; the mantra “show, don’t tell” is completely ignored. When a pair of newlyweds are at last alone together, he says to her, “First let me tell you of the state the international quarantine establishment finds itself in’”, and does so, at great length. “Allow me to digress,” says another character. He needn’t have asked permission – in this fictional world, digression is the norm. And yet none of these infringements of literary convention seems to matter much when set against the exuberance of Pamuk’s invention.

Pamuk seems to me to be a most important post-imperial writer. Which should interest those Americans who think we have entered our own post-imperial phase.

sch 9/26/22

Orhan Pamuk on What Makes a Writer

Okay, I find Orhan Pamuk a very interesting writer. I have already cribbed a bit from his Nobel Prize lecture and what I think he says about being a writer is more than worth passing along:

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man – or this woman – may use a typewriter, profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I have done for 30 years. As he writes, he can drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time he may rise from his table to look out through the window at the children playing in the street, and, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or he can gaze out at a black wall. He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.

***

But once we shut ourselves away, we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people’s stories, other people’s books, other people’s words, the thing we call tradition. I believe literature to be the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us. But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature’s eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people’s stories, and to tell other people’s stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other people’s stories and books.

 I am going to suggest Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence as an example of how Pamuk put his words into action. It may give you some ideas, too.

Fishers, Jack Ryan, Inspiration, Rejection and Revision

 Off to church and then back. An hour watching Jack Ryan, and sorting through email. I took a two-hour nap that was to last only an hour. I meant to get back to a short story tonight, but that does not seem likely. This will be all the writing I may get done today. I made a trip to the convenience store; otherwise, I have strayed far from my chair.

Some insight into the creativity of Orhan Pamuk: Itineraries of Affect (LARB).

As we see and read the sequence of text-images, we learn that the apparent artistic focus reflected on the notebook page can actually be ancillary to, or a vehicle for, attaining the creative engagement of writing. For example, the bifold image of an iconic white Istanbul ferry (one of many) is both rendered against the meditative hues of a blue-green sea and accompanied by text, again broken into poetic lines. The Istanbul ferry, a leitmotif in Pamuk’s writing, waits as if to transport the author. On the right-hand side, the horizon line is marked by the phrase “distant mountains,” a mnemonic of sorts for Pamuk’s process of writing/illustrating.

What else I have published about Orhan Pamuk. 

Some fun things from Antigone: Living Descendants of Mark Antony and Shakespeare’s Latin and Greek

Another rejection for "Problem Solving":

Thank you for your submission to Two Hawks Quarterly. We enjoyed the opportunity to read your work, but unfortunately we will not be able to use it in our forthcoming issue.

Thank you for considering us, and we welcome the opportunity to see more of your work.

Sincerely,

Michel

Editor

Two Hawks Quarterly

The last item read today was Lincoln Michel's Adjusting the Levels in Revision.

This level-adjusting method can be useful in revision, but as supplement and not replacement to other revision techniques. You still need to carefully plot your story and polish your prose. You still want a sound structure, memorable characters, lovely sentences, and so on and so forth. Hey, no one said writing was easy. And once you are done? Well, you start all over again.

I have decided to just delete what has not been read in my email. Preparation cuts into action; procrastination can come in different ways. Work needs to be done. My lungs ache.

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Orhan Pamuk, The Art of Fiction No. 187 From The Paris Review

 I finally got a chance to read Orhan Pamuk while in prison. If you search the blog, you will find that I am a fan. I think the following examples from Orhan Pamuk, The Art of Fiction No. 187 (2005) may explain why he has attracted my interest.

INTERVIEWER

When you’re experimenting with ideas, how do you choose the form of your novels? Do you start with an image, with a first sentence?

PAMUK

There is no constant formula. But I make it my business not to write two novels in the same mode. I try to change everything. This is why so many of my readers tell me, I liked this novel of yours, it’s a shame you didn’t write other novels like that, or, I never enjoyed one of your novels until you wrote that one—I’ve heard that especially about The Black Book. In fact I hate to hear this. It’s fun, and a challenge, to experiment with form and style, and language and mood and persona, and to think about each book differently.

The subject matter of a book may come to me from various sources. With My Name Is Red, I wanted to write about my ambition to become a painter. I had a false start; I began to write a monographic book focused on one painter. Then I turned the painter into various painters working together in an atelier. The point of view changed, because now there were other painters talking. At first I was thinking of writing about a contemporary painter, but then I thought this Turkish painter might be too derivative, too influenced by the West, so I went back in time to write about miniaturists. That was how I found my subject.

Some subjects also necessitate certain formal innovations or storytelling strategies. Sometimes, for example, you’ve just seen something, or read something, or been to a movie, or read a newspaper article, and then you think, I’ll make a potato speak, or a dog, or a tree. Once you get the idea you start thinking about symmetry and continuity in the novel. And you feel, Wonderful, no one’s done this before.

Finally, I think of things for years. I may have ideas and then I tell them to my close friends. I keep lots of notebooks for possible novels I may write. Sometimes I don’t write them, but if I open a notebook and begin taking notes for it, it is likely that I will write that novel. So when I’m finishing one novel my heart may be set on one of these projects; and two months after finishing one I start writing the other.

sch 11/5

Political Writing, The Morally Dubious & The Morally Complex, Repression

Public Books' Literature: What to Make of Complicity? asks a question that might not seem pertinent to Americans.

“The problem that troubles the novelist [is] how to justify a concern with morally dubious people in a contemptible activity,” notes South African writer J. M. Coetzee, “ … how to treat something that, in truth, because it is offered like the Gorgon’s head to terrorize the populace and paralyze resistance, deserves to be ignored.” Here, in the essay “Into the Dark Chamber,” Coetzee points out that literature exposing political terror—in this case, torture, the existence of which is repeatedly denied by repressive regimes—can actually become an inadvertent tool of that terror.

We might assume that literature can be mobilized to resist oppression by exposing it. But, what Coetzee emphasizes is that, in exposing the crimes, literature can also replicate the terms of the “game” and intensify fear, quashing the possibility of resistance—in part what torture is designed to do. For Coetzee, then, the “true challenge” for the novelist becomes “how not to play the game by the rules of the state, how to establish one’s own authority, how to imagine torture and death on one’s own terms.”

We do not have torture and political killings here in America, do we? (Report: Black people are still killed by police at a higher rate than other groups; Buffalo shooting: How far-right killers are radicalised online)

In prison, I read Orhan Pamuk, and I think highly of his work. It is something I think Americans need to think about – the slipping away from a great imperial power to an important nation-state. The Public Books essay examines Pamuk and Bilge Karasu, in light of Turkey's oppressive government.

Twentieth-century Turkey shaped its history through a fraught relationship with both language and literature. To cut ties with its Ottoman past and become westernized, the Republic of Turkey introduced a language reform in 1928, which Geoffrey Lewis termed a “catastrophic success,” that deeply changed the Turkish language, altering its vocabulary, syntax, and alphabet. It then mobilized novelists to write a Turkish consciousness into being, turning literature into a tool of nation-building.

Perhaps more importantly, 20th-century Turkish history is filled with examples of language being used as a tool for oppression, wielded to deny countless identities and experiences. After the 1980 military coup, for instance, the Kurdish language became anathema and called “mountain Turkish,” supposedly named Kurdish because of the sounds of footsteps in the snow, kart-kurt.

Such examples might seem far-fetched (and ridiculous). Yet, they reveal the ways in which language and literature have been contorted to aid oppression. Karasu approaches language and literature, both passions of his, suspiciously, also with this history in mind.

I have history on my mind, too. American history is now fraught with politics - DeSantis vs. Harris on Florida's African American history curriculum: What to know. We have politicians mangled language as much as history: Why words no longer mean anything in politics: Thanks, Marjorie Taylor Greene.

I need to address politics because they affect the world my characters in habit. I had a valid objection with "Road Tripping" that I was too dismissive of one character's politics. These politics are ones that I think are pernicious, even malicious, but I did some correcting. It is not that the character's complaint are dismissed out of hand, but that the methods of MAGA are to be opposed. Whether I also made clear the MAGA characters are not at all malicious in themselves, but many are dupes of those unconcerned with fixing problems, only their retention of power. Anything less would make the character a strawman rather than a representation of a human being. 

That I cannot agree with a point of view does not mean that there is not sincerity in the POV. Insincerity will be treated differently. Making character with a sincerely held belief sound like a doofus just because I dislike the belief feels like an act of complicity -  a sensible reader will see the propaganda rather than an honest portrayal and discredit the whole story. Then there is the complicity where an honest representation becomes co-opted to normalize the oppression.

It is possible that Bilge Karasu was primarily an aesthete and Orhan Pamuk plays it too safe against the Turkish state. But their works are decidedly engaged with their milieu’s violence. They highlight indeterminacies in literature that are especially pertinent for political commitment, understood in the sense of giving voice to the oppressed. Karasu and Pamuk are committed to this project, if not to a clear political cause. Their perceived lack of commitment says less about their works and more about the binary between political commitment and aesthetic autonomy.

But especially when writing about political and ethical responsibility, literary experimentation seems to allow for a more nuanced political commitment, rather than being antithetical to it. Like Coetzee had suggested, fictional representations of political terror can always be co-opted by the terror they expose. As such, their only hope out of the conundrum might be to represent their vulnerable, complicit position.

So, what do I do with a character who sees the damage done by his own apathy to political (which I read as ethical) issues?

Amy Engel On Eschewing Judgement for Moral Complexity and Context I think is relevant here:

The second issue I wanted to highlight with this book is the ways in which violent crime and the death penalty impact not only the family of the victim, but also the family of the perpetrator. During my years as a lawyer, I worked on a variety of cases—embezzlement, health care fraud, drug trafficking, federal hate crimes, and one death penalty murder. When I think back on all the cases I worked on, it’s the death penalty trial that sticks with me the most. It wasn’t just the grueling, relentless hours of work or the frustration with the way death penalty trials are conducted in this country. It wasn’t even knowing that a few exhausted, over-worked lawyers were all that stood between a man and death. It was the impact the trial had on our client’s family that I can never forget.

I still vividly remember the moment the jury announced a sentence of life in prison rather than the death penalty. I watched my generally poker-faced colleagues burst into tears, all of us sobbing as we hugged one another and our client. But what I remember most clearly are the faces of our client’s family, the sheer relief that his life had been spared, tempered with the knowledge that they would never again see him outside of prison walls.

In the years since that trial, it is those family members my thoughts have turned to again and again. It’s their stories, their existence, that thread through my latest novel. They had done nothing wrong. Their only crime was raising and loving a man who would one day be involved in a criminal conspiracy that would end in murder. They weren’t guilty of any crime, but they were treated as an extension of the perpetrator, painted with the same broad brush. The family of the victim was treated with empathy and kindness, as they should have been. But the family of our client was looked at with scorn, their pain ignored by almost everyone in that courtroom. As if being related to someone on trial automatically meant their heartbreak wasn’t real or valid. When thinking about violent crime, we tend to only consider the victim and their family. The family of the accused is, at best, forgotten and, at worst, branded as guilty along with the defendant. I think it is easier for us that way. Viewing people in black and white, good and evil, right and wrong, is so much simpler than diving into the nuances, of forcing ourselves to confront all the murky grayness of real life.

Having come from the same profession, I know of what she writes. 

Another writer I like is James Lee Burke, I will close out here with him and bring the political/ethical issues back to America with this excerpt from James Lee Burke Reckons with History, the South, and the Hatred Burning Through America:

David Masciotra: Your recent work deals heavily with American history. What is the reason for shifting from contemporary stories to those that more closely scrutinize American history?

James Lee Burke: That’s a very good observation you make. My compulsion throughout my entire life has always been historical. I think that the past, as Faulkner said, is not even the past. We’re still in it. To try to block it from our lives, as we have a way of doing in this country, because we’re still a young Republic, is an invitation for disaster. American history is extraordinary. Much of it is beautiful, but much of it is horrible, and we try to deceive ourselves about the latter. Writing now, it is clear that we’ve recreated the 1840s. We’ve brought back the era of nativism. The Republican Party has become the Know Nothing Party. Donald Trump is just a vulgarian who has stumbled his way into darkness with the help of very angry people. Writing about history makes sense, because it is the same group.

sch 8/4

Orhan Pamuk on Being From the Margins

I think I knew of Orhan Pamuk before prison. Certainly nothing more than he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but when I found his novel Snow in the Fort Dix Leisure library I jumped on the brook. what I thought of him and his other three novels I read during my imprisonment will have to wait till I get to those notes but suffice it so say that this writer is one I think everyone should read. Those who are not from the mainstream should very much read him. 

Being out and with time on my hand and internet access I get to do some research on those I have read. The following is lifted from his Nobel Prize lecture:

As for my place in the world – in life, as in literature, my basic feeling was that I was ‘not in the centre’. In the centre of the world, there was a life richer and more exciting than our own, and with all of Istanbul, all of Turkey, I was outside it. Today I think that I share this feeling with most people in the world. In the same way, there was a world literature, and its centre, too, was very far away from me. Actually what I had in mind was Western, not world, literature, and we Turks were outside it. My father’s library was evidence of this. At one end, there were Istanbul’s books – our literature, our local world, in all its beloved detail – and at the other end were the books from this other, Western, world, to which our own bore no resemblance, to which our lack of resemblance gave us both pain and hope. To write, to read, was like leaving one world to find consolation in the other world’s otherness, the strange and the wondrous. I felt that my father had read novels to escape his life and flee to the West – just as I would do later. Or it seemed to me that books in those days were things we picked up to escape our own culture, which we found so lacking. It wasn’t just by reading that we left our Istanbul lives to travel West – it was by writing, too. To fill those notebooks of his, my father had gone to Paris, shut himself up in his room, and then brought his writings back to Turkey. As I gazed at my father’s suitcase, it seemed to me that this was what was causing me disquiet. After working in a room for 25 years to survive as a writer in Turkey, it galled me to see my father hide his deep thoughts inside this suitcase, to act as if writing was work that had to be done in secret, far from the eyes of society, the state, the people. Perhaps this was the main reason why I felt angry at my father for not taking literature as seriously as I did.

***

I have already mentioned the two essential feelings that rose up in me as I closed my father’s suitcase and put it away: the sense of being marooned in the provinces, and the fear that I lacked authenticity. This was certainly not the first time they had made themselves felt. For years I had, in my reading and my writing, been studying, discovering, deepening these emotions, in all their variety and unintended consequences, their nerve endings, their triggers, and their many colours. Certainly my spirits had been jarred by the confusions, the sensitivities and the fleeting pains that life and books had sprung on me, most often as a young man. But it was only by writing books that I came to a fuller understanding of the problems of authenticity (as in My Name is Red and The Black Book) and the problems of life on the periphery (as in Snow and Istanbul). For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, to own these pains and wounds, and to make them a conscious part of our spirits and our writing. 

***

This means that my father was not the only one, that we all give too much importance to the idea of a world with a centre. Whereas the thing that compels us to shut ourselves up to write in our rooms for years on end is a faith in the opposite; the belief that one day our writings will be read and understood, because people all the world over resemble each other. But this, as I know from my own and my father’s writing, is a troubled optimism, scarred by the anger of being consigned to the margins, of being left outside. The love and hate that Dostoyevsky felt towards the West all his life – I have felt this too, on many occasions. But if I have grasped an essential truth, if I have cause for optimism, it is because I have travelled with this great writer through his love-hate relationship with the West, to behold the other world he has built on the other side. 

***

A writer talks of things that everyone knows but does not know they know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader is visiting a world at once familiar and miraculous. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end to hone his craft – to create a world – if he uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he knows it or not, putting a great faith in humanity. My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble each other, that others carry wounds like mine – that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that all people resemble each other. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a centre. 

A message even dim-witted me got through his head from reading  Pamuk's novels was how Turkey sits between West and East and has its own history. Think about that Midwest writers thinking we're too far from the center of writing to have any impact or anything useful to say, Go read Pamuk's Snow.

Orhan Pamuk News

 The Literary Saloon reported there is Orhan Pamuk news. He has a new novel coming out in English and a new one in Turkish.

I first read Pamuk in prison and was greatly impressed and have written about him here.

sch 9/18/22

Orhan Pamuk Has a Website

 I found this on 7-25-2021 but did not have a good look until October 10, so I am not putting the date into the title.  I guess I can do that.

Orhan Pamuk is a writer I found in prison and there are other posts here regarding him. I think he is important for Americans to consider as our American Empire fades. On his website there are interviews   and reviews of his work - including Margaret Atwood's review of Pamuk's Snow.

He deserves to be better known in North America, and no doubt he will be, as his fictions turn on the conflict between the forces of ''Westernization'' and those of the Islamists. Although it's set in the 1990's and was begun before Sept. 11, ''Snow'' is eerily prescient, both in its analyses of fundamentalist attitudes and in the nature of the repression and rage and conspiracies and violence it depicts.

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Orhan Pamuk in Trouble

 One the writers I first read in prison is winner of the Nobel, has again run afoul of the Turkish government as as reported by The Guardian:

Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk is being investigated by the Turkish state for “insulting” the founder of modern Turkey and ridiculing the Turkish flag in his new novel Nights of Plague.

This is what authoritarian government looks like. We do not need it here. 

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Going Nowhere

No church today because I had no ride. I thought I would sleep in. I got up around 5:30. I spent 3 hours with email and on the article. My eyes started bothering me around 8:30, so I napped. That nap lasted about 1 hour.

I ate a breakfast of hummus. Being out of Coke, I walked down to what used to be the Village Pantry. It changed hands on Friday. No longer the same crew working there. I wonder if they even knew the change was coming. On the other hand, it explains why the stock was getting short. They had been out of my Lucky Stikes early in the week, and I had been riding the bus down to the next closest convenience store. When I went into the old VP Friday, when I found it was under new ownership, they were still out of my cigarettes and also out of RC and Coke. Since it rained yesterday, I went to Payless and got supplies and a Chinese meal (the first customer at China Kitchen is not what I will do again - service was too slow - but I noticed the cooks were likely Mexicans; a bit of Muncie surrealism). Today, I went down to the old VP and got a fountain Coke. I was not about to pay $3 for a 12 oz bottle. Forty years ago, when I last lived in this neighborhood, when March Supermarkets owned the Village Pantries, this was the location for VP training. Well, March Supermarkets are long gone, they sold off their convenience stories even before that, and now the last bastion has fallen. I cannot help it is not a sign of decay.

 Martin Mull died.

Good thing this writer did not visit Anderson, Indiana.

‘Disbelief’ as US-UK trade deals under threat after Britain axes negotiators is important to me. I think the stupidity behind Brexit is the same kind of stupidity behind Trumpism. That stupidity ruins what it touches.

I spent the rest of Saturday working on the article. It came to me that I am doing something like a Master's thesis in a month. That did not make me feel any less tired. Not that the humidity helped. A miserable day that the rain did not relieve.

I admire the works of Orhan Pamuk - for his writing but also what his writing might tell us in America of what post-imperialism may be like. The Guardian points out that Pamuk is not the only Turkish writer: Five of the best books about Turkey.

I read Arundhati Roy in prison and really liked her. What she is doing now is political activism, and it is putting her in danger. Arundhati Roy wins PEN Pinter prize amid prosecution threat over Kashmir comments.

I was not happy with the Biden-Trump debate. I will not go full-on Chicken Little. It obscures what Trump did and did not do in the debate: Correcting Trump’s Unanswered Debate Lies.

I have a bath prepared and then there is laundry. I would like to think I can resist the siren's song of my article, but I know I am lying to myself.

‘I can see him now. I will see him forever’: Donald Sutherland remembered by Keira Knightley, Elliott Gould, Ralph Fiennes and more

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Thinking About Literary Lineages

 Indiana, the Midwest, has its literary history. Hoosiers have Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Booth Tarkington, Ross Lockridge, Jr, George Ade, Gene Stratton Porter, and a few more known more now by name than by their work. I should add Theodore Dreiser, but I do not think he really liked Indiana and, in my opinion, belongs more to Chicago, if not to himself. The Midwest has, broadly, Toni Morrison, Jonathon Franzen, Nelson Algren, James T. Farrell, Sinclair Lewis, and more whom I cannot recall.  Yes, Ernest Hemingway was from Chicago and wrote about Michigan in his Nick Adams stories; yes, F. Scott Fitzgerald was from Minneapolis and The Great Gatsby has characters from the Midwest; but neither made much of their roots and really do belong to some place else.

I have no idea where I fit into these lineages. Excepting George Ade and Gene Stratton Porter, I have read them all. Morrison amazes me and feels untouchable for this white, old man. Franzen is to me the cool kid who thinks too highly of himself. Dreiser, too grumpy, too remote for me to do much more than admire. Tarkington is too sentimental, too prone to turn a blind eye to what Dreiser stares with fascination. Vonnegut, I admire, but I know he is too singular to do more than pay attention to his humanism.

In the past two years, I found Lockridge influences me, has influenced me, and utterly terrifies me in his attainment in his one novel. I wasted too many years to follow him too far. His depth lies beyond me.

Orhan Pamuk led me to an interest in Turkish writers, so I read LitHub's Ayşegül Savaş on the Work and Career of Turkish Writer Tezer Özlü. This paragraph for that essay inspired this post:

All writers are part of a literary lineage, of course, though these lineages are rarely neatly marked, even if it appears that way in retrospect, from texts that constitute a national canon. If literature is also a map of human experience, then certain experiences are conspicuously absent from the canonical landscape.

The first work of Özlü’s I read—in my “free” time from class reading—was her second novel, Journey to the Edge of Life, a metaphysical travelogue in the footsteps of Özlü’s favorite writers: Italo Svevo, Franz Kafka and Cesare Pavese. I found it refreshing that this Turkish author had chosen her own writers to follow, breaking away from the great wall of texts. When I read Cold Nights of Childhood next, it confirmed for me that her work didn’t belong to any school or style, that her voice was uniquely her own: consciousness distilled into narrative form.

When younger, I had ambitions to be an Indiana writer, the one writer that caught my attention was William Faulkner. Thinking I could never attain his level of skill, that I lacked anyway to write of my history as he had done, led me to give up writing until nothing else remained for me in this life. Sometime influences can stifle. Ayşegül Savaş's essay makes this point quite well. 

Would that I had read something like what Ms. Savaş writes here 40 years ago:

I had enrolled in the Turkish literature classes hoping to find out what sort of topics I should inherit, not knowing yet that the greatest challenge for a writer was the ability to discern her own curiosities. In my first encounters with Özlü’s work, I considered that it was an outlier, a one-off voice that had broken away from the great wall to follow its writer’s obsessions. Yet, this is also the mark with which all literature must be distinguished: the unique investigation of what it is to be alive, riding the current with open eyes.

 Prison gave my writing two things. First, time to work on my writing. Secondly, I took the opportunity to read as widely as possible with the intent to learn from what I wrote. There I found Alasdair Gray and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates and Milan Kundera and Carlos Fuentes and Ralph Ellison and Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann and Haruki Murakami and Kenzaburō Ōe and J.M. Coetzee and Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison and Marttin Amis and Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk and the Russians. And whatever lineage I belong to includes them, too. We must make our path, have our own guides.

sch 2/1

5/12 to Now: Struggling Through Time

Time got out of hand, and health issues have tripped me up - it has been as difficult to sit as it has been to concentrate. This is another attempt at catching up, of which I have been doing far too much of this year. 

5/12: Relapsing, Losing Time, Muncie Happenings, Southern Indiana Democrat News 

Missed Matins (and then Vespers), piddled with email and blog posts, made a run to the grocery, was late for a lecture at Minnetrista, and ended the night trying to control pain. I think I started Legends on Netflix (which I will recommend).

I got the last 45 minutes or so of Tea & Talk: Dr. Lara Kuykendall— Constance Coleman Richardson and Other Unforgettable Indiana Artists. What I heard most of was about Ms. Richardson. The slides impressed me for not being kitsch landscapes that we see so often in Indiana. The lecturer mentioned her best paintings have a darkness in them. That I saw and it touched a nerve for me. It is what I am trying to do - get at the darkness here rather than perpetuate the sunny naive innocence propaganda of a virtuous rural life. We call that conservatism. Or is it the fodder for our conservatism that makes life here more precarious, more restrained than even in surrounding states, by saying look at how "those" people live, it is so much better here with our green corn fields that "they" ridicule? That we are not being conned into taking less because we are more virtuous than those living in the big cities? One painting had a ruined shed or farmhouse. It recalled the Romantics love of ruins. That is a sign that not all is well with the land. A comment was made about the dominance of skyscapes. That is how it is here in the flatlands. It reminded me of a sentence in Sinclair Lewis's Main Street about the oppresiveness of the wide skyline. As late as I was, it was a good time.

And then a night of trying to cope with the pain and discomfort. 

 Some notable readings:

Farmers Market Returns to Minnetrista With New Features for 2026 (The Muncie Journal) - a wonderful experience, one of the best things about Muncie at one of the best places to visit in Muncie.

Huh? Muncie fashion show puts self-expression in the spotlight (Star Press). This I might check out, even though I am absolutely not fashionable!

GROW WIWO will present its third annual fashion show, "Defined, By Design," on May 29 in downtown Muncie.

The event will be from 5 to 9 p.m. at Canan Commons, according to a community announcement.

This year’s theme highlights individuality and the role of fashion as a form of self-expression. The fashion show will feature five categories, each showcasing the latest spring trends and innovative designs. Attendees will see a range of styles, from ready-to-wear outfits to bold statement pieces, reflecting the diverse fashion scene in Muncie.

Up north here, we often forget there is life further south: Indiana Primary: What southern Indiana Democrats are facing Republican incumbents this November

 5/13: Writer's Group, Emails, Not Much Else

The writer's group still likes what I am reading of "Scenes from a Small Indiana Factory Town." The reading was a bit tough; the pain throbbing was a distraction.

I got supplies at payless. Forgot to go to the bank to check on a transaction.

One thing I will put into another post is my listening to Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk videos on writing.

5/14: Published, Email under Control, Miserable Afternoon and Evening

 I have already published the news about getting "Going For The Kid" published. Corresponded with KH and talked to him. Off to Payless for meds. The evening and night spent going between bed and bath. Nothing good to say about anything.

5/15: So Far, Not So Much

Up around 5 AM and have not accomplished much in the past 3 hours or so of work. Two, three, other posts cleaned up and set to be published after this. 

Group session later, and still have not gotten my notes on here.

 Consdering a road trip only I cannot get myself together to get ready for it.

CT scan later this afternoon, maybe find out what has been causing my problems.

Mostly, I am just tired and wanted to sleep. 

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Frauds & Myths & Advice

 For writers & other creative types only.

I’m A Fraud. Please Don’t Tell Anybody! by Michael Barrington (Lit Mag News) offers this thought for you:

Charles Dickens sits at the head of a long oak table, peering over his spectacles. Jane Austen raises an eyebrow. George Orwell taps a pen thoughtfully. Margaret Atwood in her low, ironic, monotone, tells me to sit. My application lies before them, thin and unconvincing. I mumble almost incoherently about my professional identity issues.

“Has he suffered enough?” Dickens asks the panel as though it was a prerequisite. No answer.

“Has he observed society with sufficient wit?” Austen enquires demurely. No answer.

“Has he told the truth?” grunts George Orwell almost absentmindedly while scrutinizing the Burmese tattoos on his knuckles. No answer.

I am jittery, a bundle of nerves, and attempt a response, apologizing for the quality of my work.

“Nobody is making you write. So don’t whine,” Atwood says, looking me straight in the eye, her soft Canadian accent cutting through the tension in the room. “And oh, by the way, you might write from the heart, but you’d better polish with your brain.”

At which point I am advised to try again in a few decades and summarily dismissed.

 ***

And perhaps that is where the unease originates. The expectation that writing should feel certain, when in fact it rarely does. When writing is not mastery, but a disciplined form of uncertainty. And the more I read about writers, the more I suspect that feeling like a fraud is not a disqualifying condition—it may, in fact, be a prerequisite. A sort of secret handshake. Perhaps if you’re certain of your brilliance, you may have taken a wrong turn somewhere. Personally, Kurt Vonegut’s words playing in my head like a mantra, keep me grounded: “When I write,” he says, “I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”

***

And maybe I am a fraud. That thought doesn’t quite go away. But neither does this quiet pull back to the page, this small, persistent hope that if I keep showing up, something honest will eventually meet me there.

 Along with Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, I found Mario Vargas Llosa on YouTube. I read his book on writing while in prison and have read several of his novels (including Feast of the Goat). I found reading him more than worthwhile.

 

 

 How to Write Mythic Fiction: Stop Borrowing Old Myths and Start Creating New Ones (K.M. Weiland)

In many ways, mythic fiction is more popular than ever. Even as the Hero’s Journey has arguably lost some of the obsessive luster from decades past, storytellers and audiences alike are more entranced than ever by myth, fairy tale, cultural symbolism, and psychological archetypes. Yet in some ways, I feel like we’re also in a time in which we have somewhat lost touch with the underlying touchstones of why these forms are meaningful.

For the most part, we understand the idea of mythic fiction through a few specific lenses. On the one hand, we might think of the old stories—fairy and folk tales (e.g., Beauty and the Beast, Bluebeard’s Wives, the Girl With No Hands, Vasilisa the Beautiful, etc.) or mythological stories that largely arose from interpretations of the supernatural (e.g., Kronos and the Titans; Isis, Osiris, and Horus; Eros, Psyche, and Aphrodite; Thor and Odin, etc.).

We also experience all these stories through the more anthropological perspective found in the works of Joseph Campbell, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, and others like them—who not only collected the old stories, but studied their underlying similarities, patterns, and symbolic messages.

From here, we might also think of the influence of archetypal psychological approaches, such as Carl Jung’s, in which the symbolism becomes increasingly internalized. These explorations are what gave birth to the fascination for modernizing such (arguably) ancient forms as the Hero’s Journey.

Increasingly, contemporary storytellers and audiences also understand myth and archetype specifically through popular culture’s reinterpreation of these myths and their underlying structures—most famously with Star Wars, but since then through an ever-increasing number of stories that seek to understand and tap the deep power and resonance of these old storyforms.

Not that I think it is possible to write an epic about Indiana, albeit Raintree County made a damn good stab at the epic. I do not have the time left me to write a book like that, even if I had the talent.

 Here are four reasons I think the writing of mythic fiction is particularly important right now:

1. Our Relationship to the Old Stories Has Grown Thin

2. Mythic Fiction Requires the Partnership of Intuition and Intellect 

3. Mythic Fiction Reconnects Writers to the Deep Source of Story

4. The Need for New Myths in a Changing World 

And my critique of my writing:

Reading We Could’ve Been Happy Here made me think that I did not do enough with personal relationships in my stories. Not all, maybe not even in the best of them. But that was not the idea. What I wanted to do the personal and what I will call the economic. Probably read too much Dreiser. Who is a chore to read. He is not sentimental in a sickly way. Mostly, this email goes back to what we have been talking about all along - that what we grew up with is no longer fashionable. We might be the tail end of the Industrial Age. We have not retreated from the world into emotional navel-gazing. Perhaps I could turn up the emotional stakes, but I can neither see how nor do I want to revise further. The novella might actually do better at the emotional stakes in the Daria stories and in the Kate Harvey parts. The Mike Devlin divorce story was already emotional enough - even if it had to do with Mike trying to play hero. I was joking about camels, but there is little I see in some published stories that concern political/social issues. Also, not fashionable? Science fiction - some of it, anyway - does not shy away from these kinds of issues. I do think I did get how these people live and love in their environment. After all, we did. We were just trying to figure out how to have a life in a world of economic and social uncertainty, and we did not have the luxury of navel-gazing. A bit more thoughtfulness might have helped us, but there is the humanity, isn't it? 

 

sch 6/8

Writing - Be Yourself

 The following is from Lincoln Michel's Seeing with an Artist's Eye.

I think this critical brain is also the brain that admires the achievements and analyzes the craft of great works. It is the “artist brain,” to be reductive. The artistic impulse comes—in my experience at least—from noticing the gaps in existing art and wanting to fill them. The opposite instinct might be called the “fan brain,” which lauds turning off your mind in favor of “enjoying” the work. I thought of this distinction this afternoon when I saw yet another round of fans being upset at a George R.R. Martin quotation about Tolkien....

If I had a "critical brain" when younger, then my memory is even worse than I think it is. Maybe that is why I threw my hands up and quit when I realized I could not write like Willaim Faulkner and I had nothing like what he had to write about.

Right now, some young writer is reading ASOIAF and thinking, “Okay, Westeros is pretty cool but I hate how Martin does X and the world skews Y and is missing Z.” That will be the seed of the next great fantasy series that will inspire someone to find the gaps in it. Or perhaps their eye is looking at the worlds of N.K Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy or Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, to pick two of my own favorite recent fantasy works. Or they’re reading horror or postmodern fiction or lyrical poetry. It’s the same in any genre and medium. For another example, horror writers have noticed Lovecraft’s racism (hard not to notice, of course) and then taken cosmic horror on a different path: see Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom.

It took me burning down my life and a friend telling me I needed to write again before I understood that I could not write like William Faulkner because I was not William Faulkner. Too little, too late, but persevere in doing what I gave up once upon a time.

Writing Tips: Be Yourself by Melissa Donovan us from her Writing Forward blog:

Being yourself doesn’t mean there’s no room for improvement — and here’s where I always struggle with the be-yourself advice. I’ve encountered plenty of writers who feel that study and practice are unnecessary, that writing should be “raw” or “from the gut.” But many elements of good writing must be learned, from the act of typing to using correct grammar, story structure, and even the process of getting a book from concept to publication. There’s this myth floating around that art doesn’t need to be studied, practiced, or improved. Which is ridiculous. Anyone who’s picked up an instrument or a paintbrush knows that your first attempt is just a bunch of noise or color, but in time and with patience, your hundredth or thousandth attempt could be something worth sharing with the world.

So I believe in being yourself — in being true to who you are and what you love, but I also believe that everything should be tempered, and that we should strive to improve our craft. We can simultaneously accept who we are and where we are on our writing journey while keeping in mind where we eventually want to land, and all the landmarks we’ll pass along the way.

An Interview With Three Finalists for the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Speculative Fiction 

 By the way, it was reading Joyce Carol Oates that I understood it was possible to transfer Faulkner's use of history to the North. Orhan Pamuk gave me a clue about what to write about, the failure of empire. It has been pretty much a steady stream of rejections since then! But every rejection feels better than quitting. Each one makes me think harder about what I am trying to do. Good luck! Keep working, please!

sch 7/3

Foreign Writers & An American Conservative Canon (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

The book review Rêver la littérature mondiale by Jérome David will be behind the Times Literary Supplement's paywall, but it does serve as my theme for this post.

Equal parts anecdotal and analytical, David’s essay explores the history of the discipline from an unapologetically personal per­spective. If world literature is a chimera, perhaps it is also a dream.

I think World Literature exists because humanity shares existential qualities regardless of local specificities. It seems to me a tension exists between exoticism (such as the location and politics of, say, Orhan Pamuk's Snow) and generalities (the ethical demands of life of the individual in society and an absurd universe). That is what I will call the reader's perspective.

For writers, such as what I am trying to be, there is what I will call the dialog of technique and themes. Magical realism did not start with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but he brought its techniques and themes to the forefront. The Magic Mountain shows how to bring ideas to life.

Reading the review of Blowfish (Necessary Fiction) brought to mind both aspects of world literature.

Where is the American novelist who attempts disorientation? It seems to me that our current political and social problems have us retreating into reassuring that the strangeness of existence has a Hollywood ending of security. Perhaps there are novels and novelists who are doing what is done with this novel and by this novelist. I can think of American novels that did confront the disorientation of living in a world without security: The USA Trilogy and Naked Lunch.

Toward the end of Blowfish, the unnamed thirty-something female protagonist hears a harsh truth from a friend. “You should know something,” the friend says. “­You’re always thinking about yourself.” She’s right: The sculptor has spent the entirety of the novel planning, attempting, or moving on from trying to die. But apart from this preoccupation, nothing else about this book or its narrators is reliable. As soon as Jo Kyung-ran settles into a theme or conflict, she subverts it. Although it is tempting to reduce the book to a moralistic or predictable parable, its relentless disorientation does not seem accidental. It’s more a knowing tease. 

As for a story's universality, what is more universal than the subjects of the "arbitrariness of life and death"?

Jo might agree that their bond is a miracle of fate. Or, more likely, she scoffs slyly at her protagonists’ need for a tidy narrative that ignores the arbitrariness of life and death. In her author’s note, Jo confesses it had never taken her so long to write a novel: “I would think about the act of writing, the meaning of it.” There is no lesson to be learned or meaning to be gleaned. Matters of life and death can be just as urgent or pointless, or both, as taking the subway or creating a sculpture. Just like her protagonist’s works, Blowfish is evidence of that physical, aimless, sometimes futile, attempt. 

Engelsberg Ideas's essays always make me think, even if I do not always agree with them - such as The case for a conservative canon. I never thought the conservative claim to a more substantive moral core than liberalism was anything than a fig leave for asserting power. But when this essay started examining Nathaniel Hawthorne, I paid attention. Hawthorne is one American writer who I think is underestimated; as terrifying as Poe, a more quietly weird Melville; too conscious of passing time and moral standards.  

Yes, I was one who had to read The Scarlet Letter in high school. If the essayist is correct, our reading was not butchered.

Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, embodies many of the characteristics of the conservative mind. Most English classes today, if they read the book at all, tend to butcher it – but Kirk understood it as a truly fine literary achievement. In this story of sin and shame, Hawthorne dramatised the eternal tension between the individual and society and captured his complicated relationship with his Puritan ancestors. 

I have no use for his lingering Calvinism and the idea of original sin - yet predestination and original sin dominates the American culture. Which is one of several reasons I joined the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Orthodox reject predestination for free will and see The Fall as creating a fallen world without us carrying the burden of Adam's sin. 

Reading the short stories, there seemed to me a conflict between American history and ideas current at the time of their writing.

‘Hawthorne was no idolizer of the past’, Kirk wrote, ‘he knew the past to have been black and cruel, often; but for that very reason, apprehension of the past ought to be fundamental to the projecting of any social reform. Only through scrutiny of the past can society descry the limitations of human nature.’ Just as the American Republic was being engulfed by the self-interested radicalisms of antebellum politics, Hawthorne offered a warning about the hubris of moralistic extremism.

If "moralistic extremism" refers to the sides of the slavery issue, then Hawthorne's warnings were wrong. Abolition cannot be seen now or then as a self-interested radicalism. It was the very thing that conservatism claims for its justification: substantive morality.

I prefer "moralistic extremism" and self-interested radicalism referring to moral causes fronting for narrow, partisan, temporal political purposes, so that leaves Hawthorne hitting the mark. We certainly could use that kind of thinking nowadays. Our new puritans seek not to lead us to a more Christ-like life, but to our giving them control over our bodies and consciences.

In other works, from The Blithedale Romance to ‘The Birth-Mark’ and more, Hawthorne pilloried the new puritans of his time for failing to understand both the tides of history and the unchanging nature of the human person. Their senseless optimism, he knew, would not ameliorate suffering in the world – it could only cause more of it. Kirk admired this realism and noted that Hawthorne has much to teach a careful reader. ‘By heroic efforts, Hawthorne suggests, man may diminish the influence of original sin in the world; but this struggle requires nearly his undivided attention,’ he wrote, ‘Whenever man tries to ignore sin, some avenging angel intervenes, progress material and spiritual collapses, and the reality of evil is re-impressed upon men’s minds by terror and suffering. Only one species of reform really is worth attempting: reform of conscience.’ This is much-needed conservative wisdom in an age of shrill utopianism.

Returning to world literature, what is more universal than "nature of the human person"? I would add Hawthorne to that conversation.

In The Guts of the Russian Brontosaurus-Cow: A Conversation with Vladimir Sorokin by Joshua Cohen, I see the following as speaking to what foreign writers can teach us about writing.

INTERVIEWER

The Sugar Kremlin, like certain strains of your work, partakes of multiple genres, multiple forms—folktales, theater or film scripts, letters, dreams, and songs—but there’s a sense that this variousness isn’t yet another postmodern reinvention of the novel so much as a waking-up-from-a-long-nightmare declaration that the novel never existed. Do you recognize this reading? What does the novel mean to you?

SOROKIN

It seems to me that the best novels are produced when authors creatively disrupt the form of the novel. We need simply recall Gargantua and Pantagruel, Ulysses, or War and Peace. These are referred to as great novels, even though, formally speaking, it’s almost as if they weren’t novels at all. They’re simply novels that are well suited to their time, which is why they turn out to be great novels. The contemporary world is so complex and protean that it is no longer possible to describe it with linear prose and squeeze it into a traditional novel’s structure. In order to conceive of the contemporary world, I make use of complex optics, which can be referred to as faceted vision, like what insects have. Keeping in mind that, today, in post-Soviet Russia, the imperial past, which was not buried in time, presses in on the present like a glacier, the question of the future is suspended. As young Russians admit to me, “We do not feel the future as a vector of life and development.” This is an absolutely pathological situation and a writer needs a special sort of vision in order to adequately re-create this on the page (you’ll notice I say “re-create” and not “describe”). For this, I make use of a system of mirrors set up on two platforms–one is the past and one is the future. You can call this postmodernism or grotesque metarealism, I don’t mind either way. But the grotesqueness of Russian life didn’t begin with post-Soviet Russia, we need only recollect the worlds of Gogol.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you prefer the verb re-create to describe? What’s the difference? And why, when it comes to the contemporary, does recreation-on-the-page seem to be possible or at least more possible than description? Has something happened to realism or reality?

 SOROKIN

I don’t like the term description of the world, it contains a clear reference to secondariness—to illustrativeness. No, instead, a writer must conceive of his own worlds—not describe the world that’s already been created. Tolstoy, Kafka, and Joyce were able to create their own worlds, which is why their prose stuns with its intellectual authenticity.

Mario Vargas Llosa, The Art of Fiction No. 120 Paris Review (1990) presents the idea from a different perspective:

INTERVIEWER

But among your contemporaries that you do read, whom do you particularly admire?

VARGAS LLOSA

When I was young, I was a passionate reader of Sartre. I’ve read the American novelists, in particular the lost generation—Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos—especially Faulkner. Of the authors I read when I was young, he is one of the few who still means a lot to me. I have never been disappointed when I reread him, the way I have been occasionally with, say, Hemingway. I wouldn’t reread Sartre today. Compared to everything I’ve read since, his fiction seems dated and has lost much of its value. As for his essays, I find most of them to be less important, with one exception perhaps—“Saint Genet: Comedian or Martyr,” which I still like. They are full of contradictions, ambiguities, inaccuracies, and ramblings, something that never happened with Faulkner. Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand, because his technique stunned me. He was the first novelist whose work I consciously tried to reconstruct by attempting to trace, for example, the organization of time, the intersection of time and place, the breaks in the narrative, and that ability he has of telling a story from different points of view in order to create a certain ambiguity, to give it added depth. As a Latin American, I think it was very useful for me to read his books when I did because they are a precious source of descriptive techniques that are applicable to a world which, in a sense, is not so unlike the one Faulkner described. Later, of course, I read the nineteenth-century novelists with a consuming passion: Flaubert, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Hawthorne, Dickens, Melville. I’m still an avid reader of nineteenth-century writers.

As for Latin American literature, strangely enough, it wasn’t until I lived in Europe that I really discovered it and began to read it with great enthusiasm. I had to teach it at the university in London, which was a very enriching experience because it forced me to think about Latin American literature as a whole. From then on I read Borges, whom I was somewhat familiar with, Carpentíer, Cortázar, Guimaraes Rosa, Lezama Lima—that whole generation except for García Márquez. I discovered him later and even wrote a book about him: García Márquez: Historia de un decidio. I also began reading nineteenth-century Latin American literature because I had to teach it. I realized then that we have extremely interesting writers—the novelists perhaps less so than the essayists or poets. Sarmiento, for example, who never wrote a novel, is in my opinion one of the greatest storytellers Latin America has produced; his Facundo is a masterwork. But if I were forced to choose one name, I would have to say Borges, because the world he creates seems to me to be absolutely original. Aside from his enormous originality, he is also endowed with a tremendous imagination and culture that are expressly his own. And then of course there is the language of Borges, which in a sense broke with our tradition and opened a new one. Spanish is a language that tends toward exuberance, proliferation, profusion. Our great writers have all been prolix, from Cervantes to Ortega y Gasset, Valle-Inclán, or Alfonso Reyes. Borges is the opposite—all concision, economy, and precision. He is the only writer in the Spanish language who has almost as many ideas as he has words. He’s one of the great writers of our time.

There's a reading list for you.

sch 8/15 

Where Being A Writer Can Endanger Your Liberty

 Reading Orhan Pamuk interested me in Turkish novelists. I came to believe that they have something to teach Americans - having a dual identity, how to live with history, the legacy of a lost empire. 

However, I have not read Elif Shafak.

The Guardian published yesterday Elif Shafak: ‘As a writer in Turkey, you can be attacked, put on trial, imprisoned’. Yes, being a Turkish writer can be a hazard.

Although Spanish was her second language, English became her safe space, in which she wrote poems and kept up her diary. Many years later, after publishing her early novels in Turkish, she made the decision to switch over entirely to English. “There came a moment in my life when I felt so suffocated,” she says. “But that was a very scary thing to do, because you’re nobody. You have to start from scratch again. At the same time, paradoxically, it was liberating, because being a novelist in Turkey is really hard, and being a woman is even harder. Everything you say, everything you write, can be attacked, targeted; you can be put on trial, exiled, imprisoned – words are heavy, you know. Writing in another language gave me the cognitive distance that I needed to be able to take a closer look at where I come from.”

The second novel that she published in English, The Bastard of Istanbul, dealt with the Armenian genocide of 1915, which the Turkish state still does not acknowledge. It was longlisted for the women’s prize in the UK but found a different sort of notoriety in Turkey itself, where she was prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness”. Though she was later acquitted at the request of the prosecutor, she was also investigated for obscenity for 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, and for an earlier novel, The Gaze. Neither of those cases has been resolved, as a result of which she has now gone into voluntary exile from her homeland.

This could be America, if the MAGA Republicans and the Christian Nationalists get their way. Who else pushes book banning with such gusto? 

“For me,” she says, “the biggest turning point was being put on trial after The Bastard of Istanbul. I was pregnant at the time. And by coincidence, I was acquitted the day after I gave birth. The whole year was really unsettling. There were groups on the streets spitting at my picture and burning EU flags. I was accused of insulting Turkishness, even though nobody knew what that meant. And it was quite surreal, because the words of fictional characters were taken out of the novel and used as evidence in the courtroom, as a result of which my Turkish lawyer had to defend my Armenian fictional characters.”

 Ideas are dangerous weapons, worse than nuclear bombs. Novels carry their viruses. Those who would control your thinking know the dangers of books. Elif Shafak has ideas.

The ninth novel the Turkish author has written in English and her 13th overall, There Are Rivers in the Sky is a story of “three characters, two rivers and one poem”, she says. The rivers are the Thames and the Tigris, and the poem is Gilgamesh. But Shafak wanted to make a drop of water the unifying motif, she explains, because “when we talk about climate crisis we’re talking about a crisis of fresh water, which affects everyone, but in some parts of the world it’s particularly bad. Seven of the most water-stressed nations are in the Middle East and north Africa, and it has massive consequences for women and impoverished people.”

***

“To whom does cultural heritage belong?” Shafak asks. “It’s a particularly important issue for many of us coming from the non-western world. Of course, it belongs to all humanity. But at the same time, it belongs to the minorities of the region, which we never talk about. It’s very complicated. There are multiple layers, you know. That’s why I wanted to write this novel – to tackle it.”

I think my own ideas are facile, works in progress at best, but I am working on them. How about you? It may be that this country needs your voice - maybe even more in the coming years.

And a review of her latest novel from The Financial Times, There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak — a fascinating stream of storytelling.

The art of writing may “represent a desire to efface dualities, dissolve hierarchies and transcend boundaries”. But does fiction about “fractured or fluid” realities need to show its hand as overtly as Shafak’s does? In her defence, this much-loved fixture of anglophone bestseller charts began, in Turkish, as the bearer of scandalous tidings about repressed truths: not least, the fate of Turkey’s Armenian minority. She could not then assume any cosy consensus about the virtue of diversity. That hinterland fuels her didacticism. 

 Besides, from the Chelsea foreshore where Victorian “toshers” sift mud for treasure, to the holy mountain of Sinjar where Yazidis encounter the arid savagery of Isis, she animates ideas into densely imagined scenes that make past and present “bleed into each other”. There Are Rivers in the Sky melds science, scholarship and myth, domestic drama and moralised history. It becomes just as much a hybrid entity as the Assyrian lamassu that intrigues its characters — a divine creature with “the head of a human, the body of a bull and the wings of a mighty bird”. The beast may be outlandish, but it still beguiles.

sch 8/4