TomDispatch describes more playpen confusion and the paradoxes Michael Schwarz demonstrates in a war written and directed by a bushbaby: "The More Force You Use, the Less Effective You Are".
--- well worth clicking to read in full
Congratulations to Orhan Pamuk on winning, and much more on standing up for the right to speak out and write on what must be said and written, whatever a state or a religion may do to repress those thoughts.
And praise for the Nobel Committee for making such a point with this choice. The Enlightenment lives from free and fearless literature.
SVENSKA AKADEMIEN
Press Release
12 October 2006
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2006
Orhan Pamuk
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2006 is awarded to the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk
"who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures".
The Permanent Secretary
Biobibliographical notes
Orhan Pamuk was born 7 June 1952 in Istanbul into a prosperous, secular middle-class family. His father was an engineer as were his paternal uncle and grandfather. It was this grandfather who founded the family’s fortune. Growing up, Pamuk was set on becoming a painter. He graduated from Robert College then studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University and journalism at Istanbul University. He spent the years 1985-1988 in the United States where he was a visiting researcher at Columbia University in New York and for a short period attached to the University of Iowa. He lives in Istanbul.
Pamuk has said that growing up, he experienced a shift from a traditional Ottoman family environment to a more Western-oriented lifestyle. He wrote about this in his first published novel, a family chronicle entitled Cevdet Bey Ve Oğulları (1982), which in the spirit of Thomas Mann follows the development of a family over three generations.
His second novel, Sessiz Ev (1983; The House of Silence, 1998), uses five different narrator perspectives to describe a situation in which several family members visit their ageing grandmother at a popular seaside resort with Turkey teetering on the brink of civil war. The period is 1980. The grandchildren’s political discussions and their friendships reflect a social chaos where various extremist organisations vie for power.
Pamuk’s international breakthrough came with his third novel, Beyaz Kale (1985; The White Castle, 1992). It is structured as an historical novel set in 17th-century Istanbul, but its content is primarily a story about how our ego builds on stories and fictions of different sorts. Personality is shown to be a variable construction. The story’s main character, a Venetian sold as a slave to the young scholar Hodja, finds in Hodja his own reflection. As the two men recount their life stories to each other, there occurs an exchange of identities. It is perhaps, on a symbolic level, the European novel captured then allied with an alien culture.
Pamuk’s writing has become known for its play with identities and doubles. The issue appears in his novel Kara Kitap (1990; The Black Book, 1995) in which the protagonist searches the hubbub of Istanbul for his vanished wife and her half-brother, with whom he later exchanges identities. Frequent references to the mystic tradition of the East make it natural to see this in a Sufi perspective. Kara Kitap represented a definite break with the governing social realism in Turkish literature. It provoked debate in Turkey not least through its Sufism references. Pamuk based his screenplay for the film Gizli Yüz (1992) on the novel.
Yeni Hayat (1994; The New Life, 1996) is a novel about a secret book with the capacity to irrevocably change the life of any person who reads it. The search for the book provides the structure of a physical journey but bordered by literary references, thought experiments in the spirit of mysticism, and reminiscences of older Turkish popular culture, turning the plot into an allegoric course of events correlated with the Romantic myth of an original, lost wisdom.
According to the author, the major theme of Benim Adim Kırmızı (2000; My Name is Red, 2002) is the relationship between East and West, describing the different views on the artist’s
relation to his work in both cultures. It is a story about classical miniature painting and simultaneously a murder mystery in a period environment, a bitter-sweet love story, and a subtle dialectic discussion of the role of individuality in art.
Pamuk has published a collection of essays, Öteki Renkler : Seçme Yazılar Ve Bir Hikâye (1999), and a city portrait, İstanbul : Hatıralar Ve Şehir (2003; Istanbul : Memories and the City, 2006). The latter interweaves recollections of the writer’s upbringing with a portrayal of Istanbul’s literary and cultural history. A key word is hüzün, a multi-faceted concept Pamuk uses to characterise the melancholy he sees as distinctive for Istanbul and its inhabitants.
Pamuk’s latest novel is Kar (2002; Snow, 2005). The story is set in the 1990s near Turkey’s eastern border in the town of Kars, once a border city between the Ottoman and Russian empires. The protagonist, a writer who has been living in exile in Frankfurt, travels to Kars to discover himself and his country. The novel becomes a tale of love and poetic creativity just as it knowledgeably describes the political and religious conflicts that characterise Turkish society of our day.
In his home country, Pamuk has a reputation as a social commentator even though he sees himself as principally a fiction writer with no political agenda. He was the first author in the Muslim world to publicly condemn the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. He took a stand for his Turkish colleague Yaşar Kemal when Kemal was put on trial in 1995. Pamuk himself was charged after having mentioned, in a Swiss newspaper, that 30.000 Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in Turkey. The charge aroused widespread international protest. It has subsequently been dropped.
Literary Prizes and Awards: Milliyet Roman Yarışması Ödülü (1979, shared with Mehmet Eroğlu), Orhan Kemal Roman Ödülü (1983), Madaralı roman Ödülü (1984), the Independent Award for Foreign Fiction (1990), Prix de la Découverte Européenne (1991), Prix France Culture (1995), Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (2002), Premio Grinzane Cavour (2002), the IMPAC Dublin Award (2003), Ricarda-Huch-Preis (2005), Der Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (2005), Prix Médicis étranger (2005), Prix Méditerranée Étranger (2006).
Works in Turkish
Cevdet Bey Ve Oğulları. – İstanbul : Karacan Yayınları, 1982
Sessiz Ev. – İstanbul : Can Yayınları, 1983
Beyaz Kale. – İstanbul : Can Yayınları, 1985
Kara Kitap. – İstanbul : Can Yayınları, 1990
Gizli Yüz : Senaryo. – İstanbul : Can Yayınları, 1992
Yeni Hayat. – İstanbul : İletişim, 1994
Benim Adım Kırmızı. – İstanbul : İletişim, 1998
Öteki Renkler : Seçme Yazılar Ve Bir Hikâye. – İstanbul : İletişim, 1999
Kar. – İstanbul : İletişim, 2002
İstanbul : Hatıralar Ve Şehir. – İstanbul : Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık, 2003
Works in English
The White Castle / translated from the Turkish by Victoria Holbrook. – New York : Braziller, 1991. – Translation of Beyaz Kale
The Black Book / translated by: Güneli Gün. – New York : Farrar, Straus, 1994. – Translation of Kara Kitap
The New Life / translated by Güneli Gün. – New York : Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997. – Translation of Yeni Hayat
My Name is Red / translated from the Turkish by Erdağ M. Göknar. – New York : Knopf, 2001. – Translation of Benim Adım Kırmızı
Snow / translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely. – New York : Knopf, 2004. – Translation of Kar
Istanbul : Memories and the City / translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely. – New York : Knopf, 2005. – Translation of İstanbul : Hatıralar Ve Şehir
Works in French
La maison du silence / trad. du turc par Münevver Andaç. – Paris : Gallimard, 1988. – Traduction de: Sessiz Ev
Le livre noir / trad. du turc par Münevver Andaç. – Paris : Gallimard, 1994. – Traduction de: Kara Kitap
Le château blanc / trad. du turc par Münevver Andaç. – Paris : Gallimard, 1996. – Traduction de: Beyaz Kale
La vie nouvelle / trad. du turc par Münevver Andaç. – Paris : Gallimard, 1998. – Traduction de: Yeni Hayat
Mon nom est Rouge / trad. du turc par Gilles Authier. – Paris : Gallimard, 2001. – Traduction de: Benim Adım Kırmızı
Neige / traduit du turc par Jean-François Pérouse. – Paris : Gallimard, 2005. – Traduction de: Kar
Works in German
Die weisse Festung / Aus dem Türk. übertr. von Ingrid Iren. – Frankfurt am Main : Insel, 1990. – Originaltitel: Beyaz Kale
Das schwarze Buch / Aus dem Türk. von Ingrid Iren. – München : Hanser, 1995. – Originaltitel: Kara Kitap
Das neue Leben / Aus dem Türk. von Ingrid Iren. – München : Hanser, 1998. – Originaltitel: Yeni Hayat
Rot ist mein Name / Aus dem Türk. von Ingrid Iren. – München : Hanser, 2001. – Originaltitel: Benim Adım Kırmızı
Schnee / Aus dem Türk. von Christoph K. Neumann. – München : Hanser, 2005. – Originaltitel: Kar
Der Blick aus meinem Fenster : Betrachtungen. – München : Hanser, 2006
So, refreshed back in the cozy site of our life in Weißensee in Berlin, we've collected our parrot and unpacked our bags, e-mailed some friends and family, chatted with others on the phone, and are enjoying a nice sunny autumn afternoon before all work begins again on Monday.
Three images from Scotland to start with, just for record-keeping,
one from Edinburgh
and two from the incredible Island of Arran.
Of course, much more is happening in the world, and here's a link to some sound thinking on the formation of a Palestinian government of unity being hindered by playpen policy:
La conjonction de ces trois facteurs - les tergiversations d'Ismaïl Haniyeh, la maladresse de Mahmoud Abbas et enfin l'intransigeance américaine, qui ne veut toujours pas d'un gouvernement dirigé par Ismaïl Haniyeh, même s'il est constitué de membres du Fatah et de technocrates après que Washington eut plaidé pour des élections démocratiques en Palestine, ce qui a été le cas - a achevé de ruiner les chances de constitution d'un gouvernement d'union nationale.©
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What follows from The New York Times is extremely funny and the entire article a great read on the absurdity of the "more secure playpenned world" we are now all living in. I will quote only one paragraph and provide the link to the full article.
Security Barriers of New York Are Removed
By CARA BUCKLEY
[3rd paragraph] Officials found that the barriers obstructed pedestrian flow — and, in the case of planters, often ended up being used as giant ashtrays. Counterterrorism experts also concluded that in terms of safety, some of the barriers, which building owners put in of their own accord, might do more harm than good.
Take a look around in Berlin at some of the streets that we have lost for the creation of the bushbaby's safer world!
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And finally for today, a recommendation for a really good cinema experience. Now I know why I never wanted to be queen or be anywhere near royalty! You have to go see it; Frears is ingenious and the actress Helen Mirren incredible!
The Queen, a film by Stephen Frears
Tenet Recalled Warning Rice
Former CIA Chief Told 9/11 Commission of Disputed Meeting
By Dan Eggen and Robin WrightWashington Post Staff WritersTuesday, October 3, 2006; A03
Former CIA director George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission that he had warned of an imminent threat from al-Qaeda in a July 2001 meeting with Condoleezza Rice, adding that he believed Rice took the warning seriously, according to a transcript of the interview and the recollection of a commissioner who was there.
Tenet's statements to the commission in January 2004 confirm the outlines of an event in a new book by Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward that has been disputed by some Bush administration officials. But the testimony also is at odds with Woodward's depiction of Tenet and former CIA counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black as being frustrated that "they were not getting through to Rice" after the July 10, 2001, meeting.
Rice angrily rejected those assertions yesterday, saying that it was "incomprehensible" that she would have ignored such explicit intelligence from senior CIA officials and that she received no warning at the meeting of an attack within the United States.
Rice acknowledged that the White House was receiving a "steady stream of quite alarmist reports of potential attacks" during that period, but said the targets were assumed to be in the Middle East,
including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Israel and Jordan.
"What I am quite certain of, however, is that I would remember if I was told -- as this account apparently says -- that there was about to be an attack in the United States," Rice said. "The idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible."
The meeting has become the focus of a fierce and often confusing round of finger-pointing involving Rice, the White House and the 9/11 Commission, all of whom dispatched staffers to the National Archives and other locations yesterday in attempts to sort out what had occurred.
Now back in Edinburgh and off to the Lyceum this evening for their new production of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice.
Noticed that in Germany nothing's changed> cdu pols are claiming not to be distancing themselves from Buttons Angie, which of course means they are or wouldn't need to deny it.
In Berlin there's still no new coalition for the city-state. SPD playing hardball with both potential partners of equal strenght (weakened PDS and strengthened Gruene).
The bushbaby and cunilingus are still claiming they didn't know anything was coming before 9/11 and therefore were so immediately prepared to start so many military interventions.
And this is nice place to be.
There is no void like the void in the head's of people who claim that voids are nihilistic!
Herzog by Bellow is great.
Even Bret Easton Ellis hit the mark with Lunar Park.
It's possible to have a full heart and a full mind and an incredibly sensually fulfilling erotic life all at the same time.
That's what Herzog was trying to learn and what Bret EE admits he couldn't and what I experience with the utmost joy everyday.
Refer to my verbal mood (conjugatable only in present and future tenses) "Voluptarium".
The voluptuous will inherit the earth, because they're the only ones glad to be on it!
That's a revolution!
Stags drunkenly stumble up and down the ravines from pub to pub with football (soccer) transmissions and dreams that some girl might find there combined alcohol fumes attractive.
Hens flock together in the back of buses and drink fifths of vodka from plastic-bag wrapped bottles, moan about loss of chewing gum packets, mistake a gay couple for possible prey for pointless flirtation by claiming one is, or looks, like Harry Potter. The two Scots behind the couple are jealous of the attention and offer one of the hens some gum.
Covens of mixed sex college kids come around the corner with determination to find the next pub offering student discounts (2 pints for one, or such) on inebriating substances.
The castle is illuminated and from the garden in the ravine behind it BBC is broadcasting live some version of "whoever wants to be a millionaire must laugh at anything".
The buses have usually no back doors.
The food is in general good.
And watching the natives is a source of infinite entertainment!
Pictures later.
This editorial from the Times is exactly right, and the sooner the busbaby is not allowed influence beyond his own little playpen, the less the sound of his raging baby rattle will unsettle the world!
Bush Untethered - New York Times
And here the beginning:
New York Times - September 17, 2006 - Editorial---
Bush Untethered
"Watchng the president on Friday in the Rose Garden as he threatened to quit interrogating terrorists if Congress did not approve his detainee bill, we were struck by how often he acts as though there were not two sides to a debate. We have lost count of the number of times he has said Americans have to choose between protecting the nation precisely the way he wants, and not protecting it at all. On Friday, President Bush posed a choice between ignoring the law on wiretaps, and simply not keeping tabs on terrorists. Then he said the United States could rewrite the Geneva Conventions, or just stop questioning terrorists. "
Anyone who recognizes this post's title, at least as an echo, is probably committed to doing what it suggests, since it is a "free" translation of the first essay in the new issue (n° 96) of L'Infini, «Rallumons les Lumières», by Philippe Sollers.
He also, in this piece, writes that «Les Français vont mal parce qu'ils n'aiment pas leurs Lumières.» I would add that not only are the French doing badly because they don't like their Enlighteners, but the whole world is equally bad off!
And that largely because most are too puritan or fundamentalist or sexually hung-up to deal with these libertines! Yes, the great writers of the Enlightenment were also committed to sensual pleasures. 
And, as Sollers also reminds us in this excellent piece, Voltaire summed it up this way: «J'ai toujours préféré la liberté à tout le reste.» And when he said he had always preferred liberty to everything else, he was also denouncing ANY sacrifice of it for security or "morals" or "beliefs" or "social pressure".
Thinking is free, thinking is freely questioning everything, always, never finding the "final" answer, because always continuing to question.
Besinnen! Contempler! Consider!
To hear what the famous parrot Koko has to say about our niece's USC student apartment cavorting in the internet, just click on his name.
Cinq ans après le 11 septembre 2001, le monde n'est pas plus sûr et Al-Qaida n'a pas atteint ses objectifs politiques et religieux. La "guerre" contre le terrorisme a, quant à elle, fait d'innombrables victimes. Des milliers de morts et des libertés sacrifiées, un peu partout dans le monde, à la faveur de l'instauration d'un climat de peur généralisée et d'une demande de sécurité.
Worthy of attention:
internationales literaturfestival berlin
The 6th international literature festival in Berlin has just begun and promises to be very rewarding for all who come in contact with it.
The site also has an English link.
Yesterday evening's keynote address by Édouard Glissant (F/USA) highlighted the possibility of beauty in art as the glory of difference in the world with all the potential for human understanding that implies.
From- Guy Debord: Œuvres; Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2006, p. 1509 ("Note de l'éditeur pour Tuer n'est pas assassiner d'Edward Sexby [1657]")
... cette tyrannie d'aujourd'hui, si insolemment surdéveloppée qu'elle peut même assez souvent se faire reconnaître le titre de Protecteur de Liberté [...] et qui s'est enfin donné la puissance de défier une vérité aussi éclatante que le soleil lui-même, et le témoignage de vos pauvres yeux, en vous faisant admettre qu'il est bel et bien midi à dix heures du matin.
... today's tyranny which is so insolently over-developed that it can rather often even lay claim to the title of "Freedom's Protector" ... and which has finally granted itself the power of disputing a truth as dazzling as the sun itself, and what your own poor eyes tell you, by getting you to admit that it is indeed noon at ten o'clock in the morning.
When the blitheringly babbling iranidiot "debates" the bottomlessly blurry brained bushbaby on worldwide live tv with live-streaming online, chanceless chancellorette angie can provide for a few serious moments in lieue of commercial pauses by demonstrating button popping while the lithely licking lapdog blair tries to catch them in his astonishment banned open mouth.
Where there is serious conversation, these four should be required to listen and learn.
»Es verging Zeit, bis ich in Schüben begriff und mir zögerlich eingestand, daß ich unwissend oder, genauer, nicht wissen wollend Anteil an einem Verbrechen hatte, das mit den Jahren nicht kleiner wurde, das nicht verjähren will, an dem ich immer noch kranke.«
- Günter Grass in seinen soeben erschienenen Memoiren: Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, Steidel Verlag
Indeed, we should all be so capable of coming to terms with ourselves, our past, our world, and especially with everything 'we couldn't do anything about' at the time!
For Grass, "It took time for me to grasp, in spurts, and hesitatingly to admit that I had unknowingly, or, more precisely, unwilling to know, participated in a crime that became no smaller over the years, that refuses to fall under some statute of limitations, that I continue to suffer from."
Möge Grass weiter mahnen! Solche Stimmen braucht die Welt!
And also this little snippet from Guy Debord's 1967 still 100% current La Société du spectacle:
34
Le spectacle est le capital à un tel degré d'accumulation qu'il devient image.The spectacle is Capital at such a level of accumulation that it becomes image.
From M.Heidegger: Besinnung, (GA Bd. 66), p. 428 : Die Herrlichkeit des Da-seins ruht auf der wechselweisen und selbsteigenen Übersteigung im verzehrendem Kampf, der das Verschwiegenste verbirgt und doch jeder kleinen Hilfe unsäglich dankbar bleibt. The glory of the human-being-there rests on an alternating and self-possessed exceeding [of all limits] in the debilitating struggle which conceals what is most discreet and is however inexpressibly thankful for every little bit of help.
There is actually a chance (even if slim) to boot the hypocritical Hillary out of the Senate. She has disgusted me ever since she voted for the playpen military adventure in Iraq, for the so-called "patriot act", and she has refused since then to take any clear stand for justice and human rights.
If you have the chance to vote in the NY Democratic Primary on September 12, please take a look at Tasini's website:
Jonathan Tasini For New York
He is FOR gay-rights and equal treatment of gay partnerships, FOR universal medical care insurance, FOR education for all, FOR human rights,
AGAINST the Iraq War, AGAINST the bushbaby curtailment of rights in so-called "security" laws,
etc.
Even if Hillary ends up being the Democratic candidate, she should learn, as did Lieberman, that not all (bush)baby's asses should be kissed!
Here the text of the resolution unanimously passed yesterday evening:
