This ninth book in the Nightside series could be read as a stand alone, though some revelations / miracles would not have as such a great an impact on a reader unfamiliar with the series. (more…)
Archive for May, 2009
Play your part
“…the city’s sanitized streets have become a stage set on which New York plays itself, for an audience of tourists.”
After I read this, a quote from a New York Times article in December of 2007 in which Tom Wolfe was interviewed about the 20th anniversary of his book The Bonfire of the Vanities, I began to watch people, as if Manhattan itself were a stage.
Of course a writer like Tom Wolfe would be able to capture the essence of an entire city, and way of life, in just a short phrase. It’s uncanny how well it fits the entire attitude of New Yorkers going about their daily lives. When interviewed, Wolfe said that, were he to write his book today, it would be a completely different novel. While that may be true—the essence of New York today is a much more clean and composed façade—vanity is still at the heart of our way of being.
The past couple of weeks have been about reorienting myself in the city now that school is over and I have the time to live like a New Yorker again. While every trip has its purpose, the majority of my time is spent just people-watching.
Yesterday I was at the Met’s new Model as Muse exhibit, observing both the gallery itself, and the rest of the hoards milling around. It struck me, as it has many times in the past week or so, how easy it is to pick out those that don’t belong. The exhibit was mostly full of tourists. Real New Yorkers know not to visit the Met on a holiday afternoon.
I thought of all of those entries on Gawker and the Post that I read about the Met Costume Gala a few weeks ago for the exhibit’s opening. The crowd last weekend was slightly different. Not quite as glamorous, nor as put-together, nor as confident.
The difference between a New Yorker and a tourist is astonishing. It is a difference distinguishable by a simple cursory glance. On average, it amounts to about thirty pounds and a whole lot of attitude.
New Yorkers do seem to live their lives as if on a stage—performing for others, and for themselves. If you look at the photos of the Met Costume Ball, it captures New York at its best (and haughtiest). Those of us not privileged enough to be invited to the ball still act as if we should have been. A stroll across Central Park South around 6 pm the other day revealed finely tailored suits, with Blackberries as a permanent accessory, in sharp contrast to the tapered jeans and white sneakers of the Midwestern tourists that inexplicably pour out of the Plaza and Essex House.
And yet, to what end? We parade around in our pretty clothes and expensive haircuts in order to impress…our peers, ourselves, the tourists?
I guess it is only appropriate to bring up Shakespeare.
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Cultural Identity through Collective Melancholy (part of a summer series of books relevant to the Arab World)
To Pamuk, Istanbul is a city of hüzün, or melancholy, and while its inhabitants can fight this mood, they will eventually succumb to it. What is most striking about Pamuk’s memoir Istanbul is his ability to define himself through his city. He poignantly writes with allegiance to his notion of hüzün, understanding it as an almost compulsory element of living in an ancient, fallen city.
Not only is hüzün inevitable, to Pamuk it the force behind his own work as well as the work of all other Istanbullu (the people of Istanbul). He explains, “If hüzün has been central to Istanbul culture, poetry, and everyday life over the past two centuries, if it dominates our music, it must be a least partly because we see it as an honor” (91). Pamuk understands hüzün to be a definitive characteristic of Istanbullu because of the ancient city’s triumphant past and somewhat dismal present, which began after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
As Pamuk explains, first used in the Quran in reference to the year Muhammad lost his wife Hatice and his uncle Ebu Talip, hüzün denotes a melancholy that is collective rather than solitary. Pamuk reveals to his readers how the hüzün he shares with other Istanbullu has become crucial for his career path. As a means of explaining and documenting the presence of hüzün in his city and in its inhabitants, Pamuk incorporates photographs of a crumbling Istanbul and his complicated family as well as anecdotes of artists and writers who have influenced him.
One of the most interesting writers that Pamuk discusses is the Turkish writer Resat Ekram Koçu, who devoted a large portion of his life to documenting the everyday in Istanbul in his Istanbul Encyclopedia. While many have forgotten this author, others continue to praise his inexhaustible work. Pamuk explains, “Without falling into the strange habit of praising Istanbul’s strangeness, we acknowledge that we love Koçu because he ‘failed’… Koçu’s most beautiful and profound pages are the ones that remain between worlds, and (again, like the others) the price he paid for his originality was loneliness” (167). From documenting “a skilled child acrobat between the ages of 14 and 15 encountered between 1955 and 1956” to homes along the Bosphorus River to the junk dealers who stood outside of the men’s section of the hammams, Koçu’s attempt at writing a complete encyclopedia of life in Istanbul failed, yet those who remember him do so because of his dedication to the dismal and banal of Istanbul (160).
To Pamuk, it was Koçu’s sensitivity to the hüzün of Istanbul and its innate presence in each Istanbullu that makes him notable and praiseworthy. Pamuk thus understands success in terms different from most of his western readers. Rather than associating success with happiness, he perceives melancholy as a means by which one can obtain a greater understanding of oneself, one’s home, and one’s peers.
Pamuk notes that in realizing and embracing this notion of hüzün, “The melancholy I itched for–and would later claim¬–that mood that spoke to me of defeat, obliteration, and degradation, also allowed me a respite from all the rules that needed to be learned, all the mathematics problems that needed to be solved…” (300). It is in unraveling the character of Istanbullu that readers find themselves questioning their understanding and opinion of melancholy.
While it is not technically correct to say that Istanbul is a part of the Arab World, Pamuk writes of themes that have relevance among countries of the Arab World. First, the majority of people from both regions have a common faith, Islam. Additionally, the Ottoman Empire ruled over Turkey as well as parts of the Arab World, including areas of Tunisia, Sudan, Egypt, present-day Israel, present-day Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, and Iraq.
During the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire, both Turkey and the Arab World witnessed defeat and economic disparity. Currently, the economic, political, and social struggles that take place in these countries due to conflict within and outside of each country’s or territory’s borders or disputed borders also yield to collective melancholies.
Perhaps hüzün alludes to a common ground in these cultures, dating back to the first use of the word hüzün in the Quran. The use of this word in a text that has defined law and language in countries that are part of the Arab World illustrates the very way it permeates Arab and Islamic culture, that is, through art, literature, and daily life. In both Turkey and the Arab World, it seems that hüzün is perhaps a necessary and constructive presence in people’s lives.
As Pamuk points out in light of the Sufi interpretation of hüzün, “it is the absence, not the presence, of hüzün that causes him [the Sufi follower] distress. It is the failure to experience hüzün that leads him to feel it; he suffers because he has not suffered enough, and it is by following this logic to its conclusion that Islamic culture has come to hold hüzün in high esteem” (91).
Istanbul. Pamuk, Orhan. Vintage, New York: 2004.
So You Think You Can’t Appreciate A Wonderfully Inspirational Show?
The premiere of So You Think You Can Dance was last night on FOX. Since when did FOX become the must watch network? The network that okayed the production of Joe Millionaire, Fastlane, and The Swan, that canceled Arrested Development, Wonderfalls, and Firefly? Now FOX is the home of 8 shows earning season pass status in my already crowded TiVo.
But the most darlingest show on my season pass list, or, you know, in the world, is quite possibly So You Think You Can Dance. What started as an adorable summer show a couple years back has finally garnered the attention of FOX execs, and this fall a new season will be aired during the fall.
Before we get to next season, we can enjoy this summer’s talent pool, led by Brandon Bryant and Natalie Reid (the girl whose place went to Katee Shean). Both were the contestant bumped at the last possibly moment, (more…)
Post-Post-Confessional Poetry: An Interview with Anna Journey
It would certainly be no understatement to contend that Anna Journey’s recently published collection of poetry, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, is, say, a direct descendant of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel–at least so far as literary lineage travels. It would be a mistake, however, to leave things at that by summing up Journey’s new work as a two-dimensional successor of the confessional/surrealist genre. Certainly, Journey’s major claim to fame at this moment is her discovery of Plath’s unpublished poem Ennui (which can be found published on the online journal Blackbird), but her work extends into a deeply personal realm, and can ultimately be traced back only to Journey herself.
Journey, who is currently working on her PhD in Creative Writing, started out as a ceramics major–”I wanted to be a potter and live on a mountain,” she explains, laughing, “then I realized I could get away with the visual craziness in my art… in my poetry.” When asked about the personal content of her poetry, Journey admits that she frequently begins a poem with an autobiographical image or event, but she doesn’t, ultimately, give any priority to the factual basis for her memories, as evidenced by the heady surrealism that her words invoke. “I have a real interest in charting images [and] an obsessive imagination [involved with] the southern gothic and digging around for family ghosts,” she remarks. The numerous family members brought up within her text are definitely purposefully placed, she implies, but not necessarily…real, as such: “I feel free to combine family members in a way that seems important to me. This is my way of trying to reconnect with lost, irretrievable members.”
Other themes that reappear constantly throughout Journey’s writing: red hair and a whole lot of flora and fauna. The red hair, certainly, no mystery–Journey’s back cover photo enlightens me as to its source. The recurring red-haired heroine or siren in her work is a sort of magical character and a representation of the self, according to Journey, who is attracted to hair in a literary context because of its untamable and potent qualities. The nature imagery Journey pinpoints as residual influence from her years in Virginia (and particularly in Richmond, where most of these poems were written). “I felt something mythic about Richmond,” she tells me, “I guess I just felt mystic underpinnings in the small city, felt the nature was driving its way up through the ground…I’m influenced by environment wherever I’m living–in this case, the [landscape of the] southern gothic of Richmond as well as of the Texas bayou.”
Journey’s early influences included Charles Wright and T.S. Eliot, although her major influence for the poetry in this compilation was Norman Dubie. Her particular favorites in If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting are the first and second poems, and she is currently working on releasing a selection of poems on Blackbird, as well as on a second manuscript. If Birds Gather is absolutely not to be missed – the imagery is unmatched, Journey’s style is incredibly refined and her attitude is, well, full-blooded as a jackrabbit in the springtime.
Fantasy from CU: Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners
My biggest problem with Magic for Beginners is the lack of endings. Kelly Link even addresses this on her website. (The answer at the bottom of this review.) Interesting enough, no closure.
“The Faery Handbag” was the first story and grabbed me from the start with its distinct teenage narrator. We are given morsels of what promises to be an entertaining story: a mysterious grandmother who tells stories about her life in a magical world, young teenage love, family conflicts, a quick glimpse into the world of second hand clothes shopping. This was engaging and mystifying, especially with the gap between generations becoming something magical. Honestly, if I had read any of the other stories first, I would have put down the book immediately. However, this story ends too soon.
“The Hortlak” made no sense to me and I was impatient with all of the characters. Again, no resolution. You’re left desperate for a resolution, just like Eric. I don’t get Batu, I don’t know what he is, what his motives are for running the All-Night store, why he has such odd pajamas, including one pair with a customer’s teenage diary all over it.
“The Cannon” was more entertaining, a short story in the form of an interview, but it ended too soon when there is no plot to speak of.
“Stone Animals” centers on modern day family problems, not as engaging. A family moves into a new house. There are martial problems. There are a large number of rabbits sitting outside their new home.
“Catskin” was more in the realm of fantasy that I am familiar with, but I wasn’t engaged.
Unfortunately, I didn’t ‘get’ “Some Zombie Contingency Plans” which involves an ex-con crashing a house party and asking whomever he meets about their zombie contingency plans. It felt like I was in the mind of a schizophrenic.
“The Great Divorce” focuses on a man who marries a dead woman he can’t see or hear and they talk through a medium and they have children (dead, living is a recessive gene apparently). The great divorce between the living and the dead – and how does this guy doesn’t now he’s being scammed and just thinks he feels her? The story veers off at the end leaving the characters behind.
The title story “Magic for Beginners” has won several awards, so I expected to fall heads over heels in love with the story as so many readers already have. Inside the story is an odd television show that has no set schedule, airs on any channel, and the actors can play any character (you figure it out from the wardrobe). Jeremy and his friends are obsessed with the show. One day, the show crosses over into the real world and needs Jeremy’s help. While Jeremy’s parents are a bit out there and their problems seem a bit too farfetched, the idiotically complicated relationships among his friends are amusing and believable, even if they seem like flat characters. The scene that felt the most sincere was Jeremy metaphorically pouring his heart out into the silent phone calls. He confides in it like a phone diary.
Perhaps what makes this story, and “The Fairy Handbag” resonate with me is that I share relevant experiences with the characters. Meanwhile, the other stories felt foreign and strange, even though I’m an avid fantasy reader. One reviewer called this collection surrealist and that description feels a lot more accurate than fantasy.
From Kelly Link’s FAQs (kellylink.net)
Q: Why don’t your stories have . . .
KL: Endings? Sorry about that. I like to think of the places where my stories stop as more of a jumping-off place. What happens next is probably interesting, but if I’ve written a successful story, you’ll go on thinking about what happened next and maybe you’ll come up with some interesting ideas on your own. Besides, endings are a bit too much like tails on people. Attractive, maybe, but usually not all that convincing.
Kelly Link received her BA from CU, and has returned to teach on occasion.