Orhan Pamuk says #8: The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life.

"...Ipek laughed as if Ka had just told a very good joke, but before long her face turned deep red.  During the long silence that followed, he looked into Ipek's eyes and realized that she saw right through him.  So you couldn't even take the time to get to know me, her eyes told him.  You couldn't even spend a few minutes flirting with me.

Don't try to pretend you came here because you always loved me and couldn't get me out of your mind. You came here because you found out I was divorced and remembered how beautiful I was and thought I might be easier to approach now that I was stranded in Kars.

By now Ka was so ashamed of his wish for happiness, and so determined to punish himself for his insolence, that he imagined Ipek uttering the cruelest truth of all: The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life."

[from Pamuk, Orhan. Snow, New York:  Vintage International, 2004, p. 38.]

Page 352: "Nothing to worry about," Shanzenbach commanded. "Did I tell you I've bought on consignment ten cases of Bellett wine? Château de Crémat."

[From page 352 of the book]

"Nothing to worry about," Shanzenbach commanded. "Did I tell you I've bought on consignment ten cases of Bellett wine? Château de Crémat." He put his arm through Félix's as they walked toward the wreck. "It goes splendidly with your wife's monkfish soup I've heard so much about. It'll remind you of damp rocks. I'll have Covarelli bring a case by your house tomorrow."

"round and herby" says Elizabeth Gabay, with delicate
notes of lilac, peach, & rose

Félix knew from the looks on the faces of those three old men that a change, outside of regulation and good reason, had come over them. He decided to let it pass with the reassurance Shanzenbach gave him, and because of the close affinity he felt toward Owen and Georges. If he asked for a breathalizer test on any of them, they would've failed and then the atmosphere would've degenerated into one of embarrassment.

 

 

Baron G is a flinty, dry white of considerable complexity
made entirely from the Rolle grape.

This time I sat in the driver's seat. Revenant was next to me, and Ebert, Shanzenbach, and Owen sat in the back. I looked anxiously at the priest.
    "You don't know how to drive stick, do you?" he asked.
    I shook my head.
    "Where's that cop?" Revenant said, twisting around to the rear. "Hah! He's pulled up in back of us; the curious pain in the ass."
 

[Oenology note: the Bellett (or Bellet) vineyards were originally cultivated by the ancient Phoenician Greeks around 500 BCE.  The wine from Chateau Cremat is "the very best" (says Robert Parker), of "extremely high quality."  The whites can be made from a wide variety of grapes but the most popular variety is Rolle.  Rolle is a grape that is native to the area around Nice and is used in the production of these white wines. It's similar to Chardonnay. According to my hyperlinked references, "Bellet wines were highly appreciated by Louis XIV, and also by Thomas Jefferson."]

 

 



She tried to keep her father behind her until she could meet the commitments of her face. (from Grace Paley's "Faith In the Afternoon")

Grace Paley

I'm reading two collections of short stories by Grace Paley, who's been around the scene for a while, I know, but I never went down her street.  All I can say is, I love her.  Here are some snippets from Enormous Changes At the Last Minute:

He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber's snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart.  He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment. [ from "Wants"]

I know you Kitty.  You're one of that crowd.  You're the kind thinks the world is round.  Not like my sister, he said.  Not Anna Marie.  She knows the real shape.  She lived, Anna Marie.  What did she have, when she was a kid, what'd my father give her, a little factory to begin with, embroidery, junk, but she's shrewd and crooked and she understands.  My two brothers are crooked.  Crooked, crooked, crooked.  They have crooked wives.  The only one is not crooked, the one who is straight and dumb like you Kitty, he said, dragging her to him for a minute's kiss, is her husband, Anna Marie's.  He was always dumb and straight, but they have got him now, all knotted up, you wouldn't unravel him if you started in August. [ from "Come On, Ye Sons of Art"]

There is a family nearly everybody knows.  The children of this family are named Bobo, Bibi, Doody, Dodo, Neddy, Yoyo, Butch, Put Put, and Beep.  Some are girls and some are boys.  The girls are mean babysitters for mothers.  The boys plan to join the army.  They are very narrow-minded.  They never have an idea.  But they like to be right.  They never listen to anyone else's ideas. [from "Gloomy Tune"]

I have to tease a little to grapple any sort of a reply out of her.  But mostly it doesn't work. It is something like I am a crazy construction worker in conversation with fresh cement.  Can there be more in the world like her?  Don't answer.  Time will pass in spite of her slow wits. [from "Distance"]

Paley, Grace.  Enormous Changes At the Last Minute, New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1999.

Page 248: We were in the Middle Ages, drinking wine from the salty marshes of the Camargue...in the company of two atheists and a collection of sculpted granite saints.

From page 248 of the book--

I laughed and ate more of the cheese and some of the sausages from Arles.


Sausages in Arles market

Shanzenbach moved us along, carrying a couple bottles of Listel wine made in the Camargue, on the Mediterranean shore, and steered us into a 14th-century church.   



Interior, Church of St. Trophime, Arles

There we were afforded absolute silence and near refrigerator coolness in the midst of a town full of parties and singing and dancing.   We sat in the back. Shanzenbach opened the wine, dispensing it in tiny paper cups stolen from Mr. Fourbiere of Arles. We were in the Middle Ages, drinking wine from the salty marshes of the Camargue, celebrating a Papal ritual in support of the Great Schism, in the company of two atheists and a collection of sculpted granite saints.



the salty marshes of the Camargue

The Great Schism of 1378–1417.  Rival popes had seats in Rome and in Avignon.
The election of Pope Martin V during the Council of Constance 1414–17 put an end to it.

 

 

Photo Credits:
1. Sausages in open air market, courtesy of Dimitrios Dalagiorgos.
2. Listel wine, courtesy of Vranken-Pommery Monopole, Berlin.
3. St Trophime, courtesy of Wikipedia.
4. The Camargue, courtesy of Alamy/PCL, Manchester Guardian.

 

 

Orhan Pamuk Says #7 "You can't start out again in life, that's a carriage ride you only take once."

Sitting in the carriage with the book in my hand... I felt a strange contentment and peace of mind, an easy feeling inside me, whose reason I understood only much later, as I thought and thought about it, ...I decided that the pleasure came from that book I was holding, from looking at the cover and remembering how Nigan, Turkan, and Sukran, one after the other, had read to me from it that day:  an Englishman lived for years alone on a desert island because his ship had sunk, no, not entirely alone, actually he had a servant....  I knew it wasn't this thought that filled me with peace, I knew it was something else.

I had before my eyes the road and the memory of this day, which was so lovely to contemplate.  But the thing that pleased me above all was the feeling that once back home, because of the book in my hand, I might be able to relive those delightfully confusing moments now past.

I would always tell myself so many years later: You can't start out again in life, that's a carriage ride you only take once, but with a book in your hand, no matter how confusing and perplexing it might be, once you've finished it, you can always go back to the beginning; if you like, you can read it through again, in order to figure out what you couldn't understand before, in order to understand life, isn't that so?



From Orhan Pamuk's second novel, Silent House, originally published in 1983 and just this year translated from the Turkish by Robert Finn.

You got to love Richard Ford. I just finished his book The Lay of the Land and highly recommend it, and the trilogy, of which it is the 3rd part. He punches you in the gullet all the time.

 (You got to love Richard Ford. I just finished his book and highly recommend the trilogy, of which it is the 3rd part. [1-The Sportswriter; 2-Independence Day] He punches you in the gullet all the time. The following are excerpts from The Lay  of the Land, this first one is from toward the end of the book.  It is November 2000, after the Gore vs. Bush presidential election.)



"When I'm turned loose from this current challenge, I am going to sit down and write another letter to the President, which will be a response to his yearly Thanksgiving proclamation--generally full of platitudes and horseshit, and no better than poems written for ceremonial occasions by the Poet Laureate.  This will be the first such letter I've actually sent, and though I know he will not have long to read it and gets letters from lots of people who feel they need to get their views aired, still, by some chance, he might read it and pass along its basic points to his successor, whoever that is (though of course I know--we all do). 

 It will not be a letter about the need for more gun control or the need for supporting the family unit so fourteen-year-olds don't steal cars, own machine pistols and shoot people, or about ending pregnancies, or the need to shore up our borders and tighten immigration laws, or the institution of English as a national language (which I support), but will simply say that I am a citizen of New Jersey, in middle age, with wives and children to my credit, a non-drug user, a non-jogger, without cell-phone service or called ID, a vertically integrated non-Christian who has sponsored the hopes and contexts and dreams of others with no with for credit or personal gain or transcendence, a citizen with a niche, who has his own context, who does not fear permanence and is not in despair, who is in fact a realtor and a pilgrim as much as any.
      


...I'll write that these demographics confer on me not one shred of wisdom but still a strong personal sense of having both less to lose and curiously more at stake.  I will say to the President that it's one thing for me to give up the Forever Concept and take on myself the responsibilities of the Next Level--that life can't be escaped and must be faced entire.  But it's quite another thing for him to do, or his successor.  For them, in fact, it is very unwise and even dangerous.  Indeed, it seems to me that these very positions, positions of public trust they've worked hard to get, require that insofar as they have our interests at heart, they must graduate to the Next Level but never give up the Forever Concept.  ...there is an important difference worth considering between the life span of an individual and the life span of a whole republic."



[p. 466.]

Richard Ford

"Chances are, with the year I've had, I was headed there anyway....When I asked what it was I had to do before I was sixty, maybe it's just to accept my whole life and my whole self in it--to have that chance before it's too late: to try again to achieve what athletes achieve when their minds are clear, their parts in concert, when they're "feeling it," when the ball's as big as the moon and they hit it a mile because that's all they can do. When nothing else is left. The Next Level."

"More tears are falling.  I could laugh through them if I didn't have a potentially self-erasing pain in my chest.  What is it I'm supposed to accept?  That I'm an asshole?  (I confess.)  That I have no heart?  (I don't confess.)  But what would be the hardest thing to say and mean it?  What would be the hardest for others? 

"...and of course, the answer's plain, unless we're actors or bad-check artists or spies, when it's still probably plain but more tolerable: that your life is founded on a lie, and you know what the lie is and won't admit it, maybe can't.  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

"...deep in my heart space a breaking is.  And as in our private moments of sexual longing, when the touch we want is far away, a groan comes out of me.  'Oh-uhhh.'  The sour tidal whoosh the dead man exhales.  'Oh-uhhh.  Oh-uhhh. '  so long have I not accepted, by practicing the quaintness of acceptance by....'Oh-uhhh.  Oh-uhhh.'  Breath-loss clenches my belly into a rope knot, clenching, clenching in.  'Oh, oh, ohhhhhpp.'  Yes, yes and yes. No more no's.  No more no's.  No more no's."

"As I said, acceptance is goddamned scary. I feel its very fearsomeness here in my bed, in my empty house with the storm past and Thanksgiving waiting with the dawn in the east. Be careful what you accept, is my warning--to me. I will if I can."

[All excerpts above from Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land]



Orhan Pamuk Says #6 Can't you sleep? Isn't it too soon to confess the truth? You are not allowed to think about what you did today or what you're going to do tomorrow.

 

 "You've just gone to bed. You're in familiar surroundings, nestling inside sheets and blankets that are steeped in your own smells and memories; your head has found that pocket of softness in the middle of your pillow; you're lying on your side, and as you curl your legs up against your stomach, your forehead tilts forward, and the cold side of the pillow cools your face: soon, very soon, you'll fall asleep and, in the darkness that engulfs you, you'll forget everything--everything.




Photo courtesy of Amanda Ruggeri

 

    

      "You'll forget the...unfinished work...those who've blamed you, those who will blame you, your financial troubles, the rush of time, your loneliness, your shame, your defeats, your wretchedness, your pain, and the catastrophes--in just a few minutes you'll forget them all.

 

     "...Waiting with  you in the darkness, or the half-light, are all those ordinary and oh-so-familiar wardrobes, chests of drawers, radiators, tables, trays, chairs, tightly shut curtains, discarded clothes, and cigarette packs--the matches are in the pocket of that jacket, and next to it is your handbag and your watch--all waiting, waiting.  ...You are ready.

     "You are ready.

     "But still you can't sleep."

 

 

     "If my memory, my powers of imagination, and my bedraggled dreams do not cave in from exhaustion in the course of my long travels, I'll keep on drifting through that gray land between wakefulness and sleep until my eyes light on a place I know...whatever it is, I'll go inside, and after opening every door and searching every room as if the house itself were the lost recesses of my own memory, I'll go into the last room, blow out the candle, stretch out on the bed, and, surrounded by strange and alien objects, fall asleep."

 

 

[Text excerpted from Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book. New York: Vintage International Books, 2006, pp.246-250]

[Photo credits: (1) Siena at Night, Amanda Ruggeri; (2) Orhan Pamuk, Innocence of Objects.]