In 1999, writer Orhan Pamuk bought a three story building in Istanbul to interact as a museum with his new novel, “Museum of Innocence,” a first of this kind of hybrid application… He hired an architect, Ihsan Bilgin, before he started the novel to transform the building into a museum (more…)Archive for the ‘Anecdotes’ Category
The Museum of Innocence
Thursday, October 16th, 2008In 1999, writer Orhan Pamuk bought a three story building in Istanbul to interact as a museum with his new novel, “Museum of Innocence,” a first of this kind of hybrid application… He hired an architect, Ihsan Bilgin, before he started the novel to transform the building into a museum (more…)Too gentle for (t)his World
Saturday, September 13th, 2008
In the legendary movie ‘Down by law’ by Jim Jarmush three refugees (Roberto benigni, Tom Waits and John Lurie) ride a small boat in unkown territory. When they reach a familiar location, one of them exclaims: “We Keep Going in Circles”. At this exact moment the boat begins to sink. And so it is with destructive habits and vices we are unable -or even unwilling- to shake off. (more…)
Eco über Brown
Saturday, September 6th, 2008
“Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is an intentional attempt to dumb down for a mass audience Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.” Exactly my thoughts while attempting to read TDVC. Steve Sailor treats us to an elegant comparison review of the two, ending with a Borghesian discovery.
What we talk about when we talk about Love
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008
Carver had been up all night reviewing Lish’s severe editorial cuts wo stories had been slashed by nearly seventy per cent, many by almost half; many descriptions and digressions were gone; endings had been truncated or rewritten and he was unnerved to the point of desperation
More on Raymond Carver’s relationship with his friend and editor Gordon Lish at The New Yorker
1958
Monday, August 25th, 2008
Podhoretz detected a suppressed cry of brutality in the Beats , which he summarized as kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently, kill the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time, kill those incomprehensible characters who are capable of getting seriously involved with a woman, a job, a cause.
More on the generation of 58 at New York Times
Isn’t it funny?
Monday, August 25th, 2008 
A royal personage was making a tour through his provinces and noticed a man in the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to his own exalted person. He beckoned to him and asked: “Was your mother at one time in service in the Palace?” “No, your Highness,” was the reply, “but my father was.”
Mary Beard discusses two books on laughter and jokes in the NYRB?Cartoon by SCHOT
Mystery guest with weblog
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007
I died Thursday morning, a little before eight, on the fourth of March, eighteen fifty-two, in Moscow. Absolute bodily exhaustion as the result of a private hunger strike (by means of which my morbid melancholy had tried to counter the devil) culminated in acute anaemia of the brain – and the treatment I was subjected to, a vigorous purging and blood-letting, which was further complicated by the after effects of malaria and malnutrition.
A