Its almost the new year, christmas is only a couple of days aways,not much excitement for me during christmas, not that there was always a lot over the years! but will be the first christmas in a few years that i will be single!
Also the december blues are gone and they were just that, blues:-).The young lady mentioned in my last blog posting has become a good friend(nothing more, my feelings of confusion have gone away:-)).But friendships especially in this day and age and good ones as well
are hard to find !
Single life has been quite exciting though i must say, i met someone last night through a mutual friend and there were some kind of sparks? well atleast i thought so,lol, i guess she did too cause she wanted to go out sometime after the holidays when she is back from visiting her family,so something to look forward to in the new year and guess what she is a nurse, now why do i get along so well with nurses;-)!
Dec 22, 2010
Dec 8, 2010
December Blues!
Its December, time to reflect on the year, look at upcoming possibilities etc. etc. etc.
The year started of alright, was busy with work, things were good on the relationship front, everything was motoring along, mid-year everything changed, the only constant being i was still busy with work, end of the year nothing much has changed from mid-year.
I have been involved in a lot of activities on the social front lately,in a effort to live my life, now that i am single and my life essentially revolves around me. I met a few interesting people already, some have very rigid views on life in general some very relaxed views, either ways like i always say, to each his own, at the end of the day we are all good people? aren't we? good with a dash of bad?
So i met this girl who has kind of become a friend of sorts now,very nice, compassionate and caring person,we went out a couple of times and i guess it was mutual that we would be friends, i was not attracted to her from a love/lover perspective,but we decided to be friends,another friend in my life is always welcome:-)
Now here comes the twist, we did spend a bit of time after the first 2 dates together,and i think she is starting to grow on me? now i don't know if my feelings have changed or its just a friendship bond which is seemingly becoming stronger?
I cannot seem to read her either, i think her feelings towards me have not changed? but then i see hints of maybe they have, well i guess that can be attributed to the innate amounts of alcohol consumption that happens when we get together, either ways i am in the land of the confused and hopefully the picture will start to clear up!
Sometimes they say good friendships lead to something more.... i guess we will have to wait and see!
The year started of alright, was busy with work, things were good on the relationship front, everything was motoring along, mid-year everything changed, the only constant being i was still busy with work, end of the year nothing much has changed from mid-year.
I have been involved in a lot of activities on the social front lately,in a effort to live my life, now that i am single and my life essentially revolves around me. I met a few interesting people already, some have very rigid views on life in general some very relaxed views, either ways like i always say, to each his own, at the end of the day we are all good people? aren't we? good with a dash of bad?
So i met this girl who has kind of become a friend of sorts now,very nice, compassionate and caring person,we went out a couple of times and i guess it was mutual that we would be friends, i was not attracted to her from a love/lover perspective,but we decided to be friends,another friend in my life is always welcome:-)
Now here comes the twist, we did spend a bit of time after the first 2 dates together,and i think she is starting to grow on me? now i don't know if my feelings have changed or its just a friendship bond which is seemingly becoming stronger?
I cannot seem to read her either, i think her feelings towards me have not changed? but then i see hints of maybe they have, well i guess that can be attributed to the innate amounts of alcohol consumption that happens when we get together, either ways i am in the land of the confused and hopefully the picture will start to clear up!
Sometimes they say good friendships lead to something more.... i guess we will have to wait and see!
Oct 27, 2010
Snow: A review
In 2001, an extraordinary book called My Name Is Red appeared in English. It's impossible to recommend it without sounding eccentric - you try urging a friend to read a Turkish novel, brimming with stories within stories and Koranic dialectic, about murderous miniaturists working in the court of Sultan Murat III in 1591.
The novel is set around the 1,000th anniversary of Mohammed's journey from Mecca to Medina, when Islamic reformers were railing against artists in Istanbul. Its opening chapter is a monologue about a corpse, and the story takes in points of view from other perspectives: Satan says his piece, as does a horse, Death, a coin and the colour red.
Its translation brought its author, Orhan Pamuk, greater fame in the West, and, for all the book's violence, it could almost be read for entertainment. The book showed Pamuk could do everything - jokes, horror, plot, structure, erudition, love.
In Snow, Pamuk uses his powers to show us the critical dilemmas of modern Turkey. How European a country is it? How can it respond to fundamentalist Islam? And how can an artist deal with these issues?
The novel is set in Kars, in the far east of Turkey, close to Armenia - the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1908 remains in the characters' minds. For the three days of the story's main action, the town is cut off by snow, so, when a coup takes place, the world cannot intervene. The local paper, the Border City News, has a circulation of 320, and prints news before it happens. The residents watch TV constantly, even when there's nothing on, and most are paid to spy on one another. There is a high rate of suicide among the town's young women.
Ka, a poet, wants to know why. Some say it's because the women are beaten at home; others say they are protesting because they can't wear headscarves in school. "Why did your daughter decide to uncover herself?" an Islamist asks Kars's director of education, before shooting him. "Does she want to become a film star?" The Islamists don't know what to make of the suicides, since the Koran forbids the faithful to take their own lives.
Throughout the book, Ka stops to write poetry (mostly taken from the dialogue around him). He asks a woman he loves, "Do you think it's beautiful?… What's beautiful about it?" As a writer, Ka is at odds with the intrigues and fear around him. He is often blissfully happy, and we learn that one poem's theme is "the poet's ability to shut off part of his mind even while the world is in turmoil. But this meant that a poet had no more connection to the present than a ghost did. Such was the price a poet had to pay for his art!"
And yet the artists in the story are lethally relevant. When the coup comes, it comes on the stage of a theatre; even as members of the audience are being killed, people mistake the events for a fantastic illusion. For a while, Kars is run by an ageing actor who regrets that he's never played Atatürk. Even Ka, who is mistrusted for being too Western, becomes integral to the action.
At one point, Ka reflects on the writers he's known who have been lynched by Islamists, and it's a reminder that writing Snow has been an act of bravery, too. It's an unexpected sort of bravery, though, because Pamuk has made great efforts to enter the Islamists' heads. The effect is like meeting the possessed anarchists in Dostoevsky – these alternative views of the world find full expression, and make us question our own.
If Pamuk wrote about real situations and tried to find sympathy with true terrorists, more readers would be alarmed than already have been. But he tailors the terrorists to his requirements – the most seductive of them, Blue, hasn't killed anybody and dotes on puppies.
The author's high artistry and fierce politics take our minds further into the age's crisis than any commentator could, and convince us of every character's intensity, making Snow a vital book in both senses of the word. Orhan Pamuk is the sort of writer for whom the Nobel Prize was invented.
The novel is set around the 1,000th anniversary of Mohammed's journey from Mecca to Medina, when Islamic reformers were railing against artists in Istanbul. Its opening chapter is a monologue about a corpse, and the story takes in points of view from other perspectives: Satan says his piece, as does a horse, Death, a coin and the colour red.
Its translation brought its author, Orhan Pamuk, greater fame in the West, and, for all the book's violence, it could almost be read for entertainment. The book showed Pamuk could do everything - jokes, horror, plot, structure, erudition, love.
In Snow, Pamuk uses his powers to show us the critical dilemmas of modern Turkey. How European a country is it? How can it respond to fundamentalist Islam? And how can an artist deal with these issues?
The novel is set in Kars, in the far east of Turkey, close to Armenia - the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1908 remains in the characters' minds. For the three days of the story's main action, the town is cut off by snow, so, when a coup takes place, the world cannot intervene. The local paper, the Border City News, has a circulation of 320, and prints news before it happens. The residents watch TV constantly, even when there's nothing on, and most are paid to spy on one another. There is a high rate of suicide among the town's young women.
Ka, a poet, wants to know why. Some say it's because the women are beaten at home; others say they are protesting because they can't wear headscarves in school. "Why did your daughter decide to uncover herself?" an Islamist asks Kars's director of education, before shooting him. "Does she want to become a film star?" The Islamists don't know what to make of the suicides, since the Koran forbids the faithful to take their own lives.
Throughout the book, Ka stops to write poetry (mostly taken from the dialogue around him). He asks a woman he loves, "Do you think it's beautiful?… What's beautiful about it?" As a writer, Ka is at odds with the intrigues and fear around him. He is often blissfully happy, and we learn that one poem's theme is "the poet's ability to shut off part of his mind even while the world is in turmoil. But this meant that a poet had no more connection to the present than a ghost did. Such was the price a poet had to pay for his art!"
And yet the artists in the story are lethally relevant. When the coup comes, it comes on the stage of a theatre; even as members of the audience are being killed, people mistake the events for a fantastic illusion. For a while, Kars is run by an ageing actor who regrets that he's never played Atatürk. Even Ka, who is mistrusted for being too Western, becomes integral to the action.
At one point, Ka reflects on the writers he's known who have been lynched by Islamists, and it's a reminder that writing Snow has been an act of bravery, too. It's an unexpected sort of bravery, though, because Pamuk has made great efforts to enter the Islamists' heads. The effect is like meeting the possessed anarchists in Dostoevsky – these alternative views of the world find full expression, and make us question our own.
If Pamuk wrote about real situations and tried to find sympathy with true terrorists, more readers would be alarmed than already have been. But he tailors the terrorists to his requirements – the most seductive of them, Blue, hasn't killed anybody and dotes on puppies.
The author's high artistry and fierce politics take our minds further into the age's crisis than any commentator could, and convince us of every character's intensity, making Snow a vital book in both senses of the word. Orhan Pamuk is the sort of writer for whom the Nobel Prize was invented.
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