title, what title?

Great books inspire great movies such as Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. It is also sometimes the case that great songs inspire great movies, such as the case of Dead Flag Blues and 28 Days Later: " the government is corrupt and we're on so many drugs with the radio on and the curtains drawn we're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine and the machine is bleeding to death" Sounds very contemporary, doesn't it? I am reading a thrilling futurology of a book written in 1924. Still untranslated into English, Berge Meere und Giganten retells the history of the world from 1900s to 3000s. Genetically modified organisms, technologies crashing traditional industries, global warming, internet... It's all there. I am still amazed that this gem hasn't been made into to a movie. But considering the dismal state of cinema these days, maybe this is a good thing.

First time I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it stroke a chord in me. It was as if the person I wanted to be in secret was out there doing the talking for me. When I first read Kafka, I felt that Kafka was to Garcia Marques, what Garcia Marquez to me. It would be a stretch to take this one step further with Robert Walser and Kafka, but it is no secret that Kafka read out Walser loud and laughed his guts out, and the first few pages of Geschwister Tänner struck a chord in me too. His life story is very interesting and sad at the same time. He spent a great deal of time in Weimarer Berlin, sitting in the Cafés and Bars, meticulously observed and wrote about the "creative" types there, something that I wish I had the time for when I was in Berlin. One time he went to a private school to become a butler. In the end, he was sent to the mental hospital, where he devised his own writing style and wrote what the experts now call his Micrographs, that contain stories fittin...

My goal is to finish Joyce's magnum opus before the next Bloomsday. The Germans got it right once again. "Know thy self!."

I am devouring the pages of the book like a newly risen undead devours human flesh. Seriously, if you are remotely interested in post apocalypse and/or zombie genres, get a hold of this book.

Let's see if the book will captivate me as much as Marilyn Monroe.

Heutzutage verbringe ich viel Zeit vor dem Computer. Ich meine nicht die Zeit, während der ich etwas produktiv mache. Ich meine die Zeit, während der ich darauf warte, dass die Ergebnisse der Tests für meine Dissertation-Software fertig sind. Ich habe mir  vorgenommen, diese Zeit für einen guten Zweck zu benutzen. Wie Ihr in diesen Zeilen bemerken werdet, hat sich mein Deutsch in letzter Zeit verschlechtert. Ich werde versuchen, minimal ein mal pro Woche einen Eintrag auf Deutsch zu schreiben, mit der Hoffnung auf eine Verbesserung. Dies Mal geht es um meinen Lieblings-deutschsprachigen Schriftsteller Franz Kafka. Zufälligerweise habe ich vorgestern in einem Buchladen ein Hörbuch mit zwei Novellen von Kafka entdeckt. Dies schien Mir es eine gute Methode zu sein, meine Deutsch-Aussprache zu verbessern. Ich kaufte das Hörbuch sofort. Mich täuschte die Aussprache in diesem Hörbuch tatsächlich nicht. Es war mein erstes Hörbuch - nein, die Hörbücher sind nicht so b...

Two of my recent passions are Dostoevsky and food. What a better way to celebrate them, by enjoying them together. That's why I bought the larger book on the left to accompany Crime and Punishment. I will try to cook the dishes mentioned in the book. The first dish that gets mentioned in the book is boiled beef with horseradish. Or as they call it in the fabulous language of  Russian Otvarnaya govyadina v khrene ( link to the recipe ). Did you know that horseradish (acirga or bostan turpu in Turkish) is the same species as Wasabi? I didn't know that. I'm eager to test the recipe...

My plan for my next Dostoyevsky novel was "Crime and Punishment." Then when I was killing time in the airport by window shopping for books, I came across "The Possessed": Both are from Dostoyevsky's mature period and are equally attractive to me. Crime and Punishment appears to be more about the human nature and ones struggle with coming in terms with its nature. The Possessed on the other side is a political novel. And in my uneducated opinion Dostoyevsky is the only writer I've read so far, who can give this specific human pursuit, i.e. politics, its right place and importance in the overall human condition. I am really in a dilemma, which one to start? Orhan Pamuk is convincing me to start with The Possessed. Asked of political novels he answers( link to the interview ): " Pamuk : I wrote one (political novel), right, but I don’t think it is a great genre that produces masterpieces. It’s rather a limited genre, despite the fact that Dostoy...

The world cup is running smoothly in South Africa, annulling the security concerns that some observers had. This is great news, not because I did not believe that this young country was not capable of hosting a global event, but because through this World Cup, South Africa will have the chance to erase this belief in the minds of the outsiders. I think they deserve this after all this years after overthrowing the last major racist regime in the civilized world. Incidentally, I was fortunate enough to read Disgrace ,one of the best books I've read in the last 5 years, just before the World Cup. It is by the South African Nobel Literature Prize Laureate Coetzee. This great book came at a time when I was about to reach the conclusion that two different persons of comparable intelligence and manners can reach completely opposite conclusions on a divisive subject solely based on their upbringings and the culture they belong to. This book about "white" intellectuals, "b...

"We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it." Bob Dylan - Visions of Johanna "Forget your perfect offering, There is a crack, a crack in everything, That's how the light gets in. " Leonard Cohen - The Anthem "And nothing's forever not even five minutes When you're headed for the finish line" Lou Reed - Finish Line "Savaslar birbirine benzer, Kazanan olmaz, Kazandigini sanma, Kaybettiklerine bak biraz" "All wars are alike, There is no victor, Don't think you've won, On your losses should you ponder. " Bülent Ortacgil - Biraz Umut Ver "Ölümle yasami ayiran o cizgi, Siyahla beyazi ayiramaz ki" "That line separating death and life, Cannot separate black and white." Besiktas Supporters - Football Chant

Alban Berg - The romantic side of 12 Toners Oscar Wilde - The romantic social critic

"The Thinker" may be in sculpture what Mona Lisa is in painting. This is at least true in Turkey. The sculptor of this and many more great works Aguste Rodin died today in 1917. I became interested in his works not by his most famous work, but through Rainer Maria Rilke, his good friend, and one time his assistant. It was he who thought Rilke the power of observation of simple things, and therefore inspired his "Dinggedichte" the poems of things. Such as "The Panther", which in my humble opinion, is the one of the warmest expressions of existentialism: The Panther Translated by Ronnie Pontiac His sight, passing by the bars, exhausted, sees nothing else. For him there are a thousand bars, a thousand bars, and beyond them no world. His limber lope and powerful pace ever turning in the smallest circle dance strength around a center where a great will stands numb. Sometimes the veil of his pupil parts silently an image goes in past the tense poise of still lim...

... so that I could read them again and again and again. There are three such books, which I artificially prolonged my reading to enjoy them. I will share them one by one as time permits. The Island of the Day Before This is one of the not so well known works of Umberto Eco. On the outside the book is on the quest to find an efficient method to measure the longitude in the middle ages. Unlike latitude, which could easily be measured by the angle of the north star, the longitude requires a working time reference. If I have a clock on London time, and observe that there is a 4 hour difference between midday times, you can deduce you have a 4/24 or 60/360 degrees difference. But a reliable clock that would withstand the high seas was hard to get those days. The main character is intertwined in a conspiracy that involves the de facto ruler of France - Cardinal Richeleu - and ends up as the only survivor of a ship sent out to search the international day line. As he tries to recover what h...

I've been listening to the 4AD records super-group This Mortal Coil lately. This legendary label had names like Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance back then. Their 1991 Album Blood has a daunting cover of The Byrds song " I Come and Stand at Every Door. " The lyrics are the Pete Seeger -Pete Seeger is the country musician who wanted to cut the cables with an ax when Dylan went electric in the Newport Festival- translation of the great Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet's poem on Hiroshima, " The Little Girl ." Here is the This Mortal Coil Cover in Youtube: (ktunnel: This Mortal Coil - I Come & Stand at Every Door) This song reminded me the genius of Dylan once again. I mean who can tell the horror of an atom bomb in such a concise and mysterious manner: Darkness at the break of noon Shadows even the silver spoon The handmade blade, the child's balloon Eclipses both the sun and moon To understand you know too soon There is no sense in trying. Here is a great video...

"One time, a lonely cage went looking for a bird." Franz Kafka was born 125 years ago this day. Read Kafka, ask questions.

After a long, somehow slow, but tasteful period of reading I've just finished Kafka's The Castle . I read it in German, which is something I recommend to those who can, as the English translation of this never completed work is a Kafkaesque tale itself. The German is so free flowing, and free of cold long sentences, that even reading out loud and listening to flow of the words is a pleasure itself. The tale of a land-surveyor who is not a land-surveyor who is lost in the Maelstrom of his choices amidst the calm and dark waters of a perfect Bureaucracy which is not perfect definitely took the place of 100 Years of Solitude as the best book I've read. On the "screenplay" side -where the screen is inside my mind- the tragicomic scenes exceed the Marquez works, to the point where I laughed to the absurdity. However the surreality in the Castle is not magical like in Marquez works. They are so real that you feel you should simply -or maybe forcefully- accept them. W...

Literary critics cannot agree how to read Kafka after all these years. There are many different readings of his masterpiece "The Castle", ranging from Marxism to magical realism. Being a big Gabriel Garcia Marquez fan, I tend to agree with the magical realist reading. However there is a crucial point to make. If the magician in Marquez's magical realism is the sort of the magician that Gandalf is in Lord of The Rings, entertaining the young Hobits with his tricks, than the magician of Kafka is a dark one, a dark Voodo sorcerer jailing his victims to the depths of their inner fears. Still the Castle pulls me this moment from the side of my bed...

Here is a neat site . What DailyLit does is simple and elegant. If you are one of those like me who cannot find the time they would like to have for reading, Daily Lit parses online books that are public (The Divine Comedy, The Communist Manifesto, The Prince, The Paradise Lost and more) into daily digests and sends to your e-mail. You can set the period, and the time of the e-mails. Great idea, well execution.

My trip to Turkey, which I described in my previous post, was rewarding both sensually and intellectually. I bought many book in Turkish. Even though I am able to read in German, I am not as fast as I am in Turkish. One of the books I bought was Umberto Eco's 5 Moral Pieces . One of the pieces is an excerpt from a correspondence between Eco and the old Milanese Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, which was published as a series on a major Italian newspaper (which was published later as a book titled Belief or Non Belief ). This piece has helped me clarify my thoughts on secularism and it's constituent role in democracy. In one of his letters the Cardinal asks Eco the question "how can one be sure that the principles on which he bases his actions are absolute, if he they are not based on a eternal and absolute force such as God...". Eco replies by stating that a set of moral principles based on the basic paradigm of not treating others in a way that would make upset us, had ...

My favorite author of all time, and arguably one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Gabriel Garcia Marquez turned 80 today. 2007 is also remarkably 40th anniversary of his masterpiece 100 Years of Solitude, a book where he writes the history of the human civilization while masterfully ornamenting the story with magical happenings like a beautiful girl who simply is taken back to heaven because of their beauty, or a drought lasting 8 years, and 25th anniversary of his Nobel Literature prize. A Colombian friend once told me a TV interview of the master where he likened his writings to cooking a soup of words, stirring the soup and tasting it and carefully adding words to reach the correct taste. It is exactly how I felt about his books, his words inspire complex tastes in my body... From his stories such as "Nabo, the Man Who Made the Angels Wait"- which tells of a black boy who refuses to die to sing- "Blacaman the Good, the Vendor of Miracles" - t...