orhan pamuk
Free On Friday
On Writing
All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to tuen this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy and joy.
Orhan Pamuk, from his 2006 Nobel acceptance lecture.
Short Weeks
I’ve been having three-day or four-day weeks of usually few lessons recently. It’s made me feel a bit like an Arts student.
Of course, it’s also the sign that next week is in fact the last week of school. And just around the corner… exams. Oh how woefully exciting.
Plans For The Weekend
Nothing much, actually. I intend to start some writing soon, either on The River or fragments of Singapura, or maybe a completely unrelated side project. On the other hand, I will be on Fallout 3 and LittleBigPlanet, no doubt. As far as school work is concerned, I’ll be finishing up the last couple of tutorials and reading up on my last lab session. And I also plan to start on my readings so I don’t get overwhelmed closer to the exams. I’ll be converting more of my Japan photos from RAW to JPEG and putting them up on flickr too. And I suppose that’s about it.
So it’s all a bit of slowing down over the weekend, I guess.
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Medicine Books
School
School is… busy. And not particularly exciting.
Thematics
I thought a bit about my current project yesterday, which is a novel in first draft, and which I ought to tell you about soon. Some themes just didn’t seem to work out as I wanted them to. Crucially, a few things stayed too well-hidden (needing a smart, obsessive conspiracy theorist to ever dig them out and believe in them) and a few others became far too obvious (which means that I thought too little of the reader, a point that I am in fact quite embarrassed to admit).
I ought to work these out soon.
Books
I’m reading Orhan Pamuk’s Other Colors right now (and quite enjoying myself). One of the things that’s mentioned in it has to do with the nature of books. Now, the memory isn’t exactly sharp in my mind now (I read this bit last Friday), but I seemed to recall him mentioning how there tended to be books we liked and reread in an attempt to remember that first experience, why we liked it and how it was back then; and then they are books that we love in an entirely different way, books that we go back to and discover again, books that we depend on and visit but never revisit. He describes these as being like “medicine” as I remember it.
And I started to think back to my shelf, and thought about which books fell into which category, like I was sorting out socks or something. It’s an interesting exercise. It helps you realise which books (or more specifically, which stories) matter most to you and which ones are confined to just being good memories. Despite loving a great bunch of books, the selection did reduce it to the daily-bread ones, the ones I had clearly to depend on so far and probably will for the rest of my life.
I’m sure you’ve got books like that too, not necessarily in a writer sort of way, but more in the way of being, of a person, of living. Treat it as a little exercise. Figure out which books matter to you. It might be interesting.
Opus
It was with more than a hint of sadness that I noted how Berkeley Breathed will have to stop work on his comics as he battles with Spasmodic Torticollis. I’ve always enjoyed his work, and my heart sinks a little to know that I won’t be seeing any more Opus or Bloom County. Still, all the best, Mr. Breathed, and I hope things get better for you soon.
Formats
Some things still aren’t quite ironed out here, so don’t worry if things look unusual around here. We’re sorting it out.
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