Our friend's friend

Kevin MacDonald's documentary My Enemy's Enemy was broadcast last week on More4. Its focus was on Klaus Barbie's post-war career as a CIA agent in South America. It turns out he acted as consultant in the hunt for Che Guevara and was as involved in Bolivian politics until the early 1980s as he was in Lyon's in the 40s. One victim said he made her sit on a block of ice for 48 hours. This shameful history has been framed (by Andrew Marr on Start the Week for one) as a consequence of the US's hysterical anti-Communism, but it is curious how the victims tended to be students and union activists rather than "communist infiltrators". Barbie's downfall came only when his usefulness came to an end.

On a literary note, my limited knowledge of South American literature means I can think of only one novel about Nazi exiles in South America. And it's not South American but German. Gert Hofmann's wonderful (but unavailable) Before the Rainy Season is about a young German who travels to Bolivia with his fiancée to see his "uncle" on a Hacienda in the rainforest. It also happens to have one of my favourite opening lines:

Come on, I'm waiting for you here on the veranda, calls our uncle, if that is who he really is, for he has long been believed missing in South America.

"A Time of Gifts"

A couple of years ago The Sharp Side ran an hilarious list of genuine winners of British literary awards. At the time I doubted the existence of such books as C.A. Trypanis' The Cocks of Hades, believing it to be Ellis' jest. In order to do that, I had to elide my knowledge of the name of the winner of the 1959 Duff Cooper Memorial Prize. Ellis put me right in another post which also gives staggering examples of eligible books that didn't receive the Duff Cooper.

I knew Patrick Leigh Fermor's name because, when I first started reading, his book Between the Woods and the Water had just been published to the delight of many reviewers. I remember being put off by the anachronistic cover. But the anachronism was appropriate as the book recalls a journey began in the final month of 1933. Over this Christmas I read A Time of Gifts, the first in the series following the 19-year-old author as he walked from the Hook of Holland to Hungary via Germany and Czechoslovakia. This is the kind of journey I would like to make. On arriving in Rotterdam at dawn, all the cafés are closed. But then:

A shutter went up and a stout man in clogs opened a glass door, deposited a tabby on the snow and, turning back, began lighting a stove inside. The cat went in again at once; I followed it and the ensuing fried eggs and coffee, ordered by signs, were the best I had ever eaten.

When he reveals his intended destination, the café owner produces two glasses and they drink a toast to the journey ahead. While this is moving in the context of the book, there is also a heavy shade of melancholy: the hopeful future is now the dead past. This everyday yet singular moment, once buried under the larger movements of history, is miraculously alive again. Rare moments like this redeem the book which otherwise, perhaps due to the circumstances of its composition, is too frequently padded with impressionistic digressions. For instance, in Prague he says:

Fear, piety, zeal, strife and pride, tempered in the end by the milder impulses of munificence and learning and doucear de vivre, had flung up an unusual array of grand and unenigmatic monuments.

Oh rocks, one wants to say, get back to the journey! Perhaps I want the impossible: to be on the woodland paths myself. There just isn't enough of it here.

By coincidence, the latest NYRB has a review by Colin Thubron of several of Leigh Fermor's books. In particular, the reissue of A Time to Keep Silence, a book that describes "several sojourns in some of Europe's oldest and most venerable monasteries". Silence has apparently drawn criticism for A Time of Gifts. There is "political innocence" as he travels through Germany, where Nazi fervour was taking hold. Though Thubron doesn't name names, this is from the Clive James school of judgmental criticism. Beckett was also perceived to be an innocent (or worse) for not focussing enough on the issue when he was there at the same time (James Knowlson proved it was otherwise of course). If anything, however, such openness enables the reader to experience time as it is experienced: not the determined movement discerned by 20/20 Jamesian hindsight but the incessant, uncertain silence of the everyday. "When no buildings were in sight," Leigh Fermor writes "I was back in the Dark Ages". It reminds me of what Cioran said about Beckett: "He is one of those beings who make you realize that history is a dimension man could have done without."

Sunday afternoon

Sunday morning

Wrong key

BBC News "looks back at some of the key personalities from the worlds of acting, music and the arts who passed away [died FFS] in 2007". Among the 27 names listed there are eight actors, five musicians, two writers, two film directors, an alleged comedian and Anne Nicole Smith. There is no mention of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

More from the Sydney twanger

Returning on the train yesterday, I sat next to a chatty elderly lady. The journey had been uncomfortable for everyone on board, so we exchanged stories. She said she is an "art guide" in various locations in Sussex. Her favourite was Charleston, the country seat of the Bloomsbury set. It's also where they have a literary festival which, over the years, has enabled her to meet a few famous writers. She had liked Andrew Marr, she said, and Ian McEwan, all of whose books she has since bought and read. I nodded and smiled unconvincingly. But she didn't like that Clive James. This time my smile was more convincing! He was interested only in selling his awful book, she said. It reminded me of the interest stirred the day before when I read the Village Voice's books of the year feature in which Allen Barra recommends the book my neighbour scorned. He tells us that in it "Walter Benjamin, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Leon Trotsky take hits from which their reputations will never recover." What on earth, I wondered, had Benjamin done, said or written that could ruin his reputation as one of the greatest critics of the 20th Century? Garth Risk Hallberg of The Millions Blog helps to explain in part five of his long review. Of course, it's political. "How terrifying it is to see a fine mind in the grip of ideological fervor" Hallberg remarks, "I mean James', of course."

Apart from being a thinker whose sensibility - which can in no way be construed as ideological - has changed my life, Benjamin should be enrolled among James' angels. He was a victim of totalitarianism, killing himself in the Pyrenees when it seemed he wouldn't be able to escape the Reich. But because Benjamin practiced a syncretic version of Marxism, and would become popular, posthumously, with leftist academics, James can't let him die with dignity.

I am tempted to respond further but Praxis blog is more comprehensive than ever I could hope to be. It also reveals James' thoughts on Paul Celan's poetry: apparently he says it is "marred by its difficulty – a difficulty produced by Celan's need to find a refuge from harsh reality." Can there be a more insensitive reading? But James doesn't stop there: "Number me among the almonds Celan says. James responds: At the time I noted this instruction down, I couldn’t resist the unwritten addition: And call me a nut."

I shall have to resist writing anymore as I have two new year resolutions ready: one is to write fewer fire-fighting or abusive blogs and the other is to read as many of the four volumes of Benjamin's Selected Writings as possible. The latter should encourage the former.

PS: As I chatted about Charleston on the train, the cultural equilibrium was maintained when Geoffrey of Rainbow walked up the aisle. I'm not sure Clive would approve: George is obviously a pinko.

Kara tren gelmez m’ola, düdüğünü çalmaz m’ola...

Slide Show: Ankara Tren Garı'nda buharlı lokomotif parkından görüntüler.

Kara tren gelmez m’ola,
Düdüğünü çalmaz m’ola.
Gurbet ele yar yolladım,
Mektubunu salmaz m’ola.

Hayvanlar Aleminden Görüntüler

Hayvanların Dünyası:

Slide Show: Ankara Zoo. Ankara Hayvanat Bahçesinde bir fotogeziden görüntüler.

Meraklı Zürafa Yavrusu:

Fotoğraflarda göreceğiniz meraklı zürafa yavrusu çok afacan... Bakıcısının arkasından küçük bir odaya girmeye çalışıyor. Giremeyeceğini anlayınca kafasını sokup ne yaptığını anlamaya çalışıyor...

© fotoGezi.blogspot.com


Danseden flamingolar:

Bir ayaklarını havaya kaldırmış, tek ayaklarının üzerinde duran flamingolar bir bale gösterisi mi yapıyorlar? Atlar ayakta uyur derlerdi de hayret ederdim. Nasıl rahat ediyorlar diye... Ama bu pembeli beyazlı flamingolar, hatta fotoğraflarda göreceğiniz, yeşilin ve kahverenginin parlak tonları ile rengârenk bir ördek, ayakta bile değil, tek ayak üstünde uyuyor. Batmakta olan güneşin ılık ışıklarında tatlı bir öğleden sonrası uykusuna dalmış, siesta yapıyorlar. Ama içlerinden bir tanesi uyanık kalıp, nöbet tutuyor...

"I admired the fog and its affinity to the mountains"

Not the mountains in this case but Ditchling Beacon on the South Downs this afternoon (as taken on my phone camera after I'd cycled up through the fog). The line comes from Indian Summer (Der Nachsommer), a novel from 1847 by Adalbert Stifter - an influence on both Sebald and Bernhard - which Tales from the Reading Room inspired me to read. "It's a coming of age novel in which very little happens," Litlove writes "but its emotional climate is one of achingly suppressed passion." This is a perfect summary of the 380 pages (of 475) I have read so far. "It's extraordinary" she adds. It is that. I wonder how many other novels have such faith in such silence?

"I just can't blog about that crap any more!"

The main reason I write - this and everything else - is to have done with it. If I write something, I can forget for a while. Trouble is, the spikes that provoke the need for the soothing act of writing have multiplied of late. Instead of writing a response I daydream about floating off in the opposite direction with a serenely disengaged blog like Spurious and wood s lot or, like Ed Champion this week, turning full time to more respectable forms. (Perhaps these latter forms enable one to forget correspondingly larger things and for longer?). Then I saw this desperate post by a blogger focussing on "Internet Marketing, Social Media & Software Development":

I just can't blog about that crap any more! I have become known for being an honest blogger, and yet I have not been honest over the last four weeks and it’s started to show. This last week I have seen my subscriber numbers drop daily and it doesn’t surprise me one bit. I sit at my computer, feeling like nothing means anything anymore, staring at some pointless online video about affiliate marketing. I’m trying to write a review and all the while in my head I’m thinking "I don’t care, I really don’t give a shit, what am I doing?" and I imagine that comes through in my writing.

How I wish every such blogger would take heed of this cry. The advantage for the literary blogger is that the emotion expressed here is where literary blogging must start; if not in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart, then with what really matters.

Today, among many other possible links, there's Lenin's Tomb's report on a secret air war and "the rolling wave of massacres" it has led to, and of course its utter lack of presence in liberal democratic consciousness (the kind of cultural amnesia Clive James doesn't seem so bothered about). This leads to news about Mark Curtis's new book Dirty Wars, "a penetrating history of the British government's sponsorship of radical Islamic terrorism, from Iran, Afghanistan and Libya to the July 7 bombings". I wonder if it will get as many reviews as the Nick Cohen and Anthony Andrews abominations did this year?

Back to literature, there's Ellis Sharp's review of Lee Rourke first book of fiction Everyday, to which Mark of RSB responds with a necessary qualification of its definition of Establishment Literary Fiction (which is his theory and nobody else's). I also want to respond to Ellis' criticisms of Aharon Appelfeld's The Age of Wonders - mainly to explain why the clichés, the "lazy" sentences he identifies or the more serious focus on the author's Zionism (about which I won't argue) are not what make his novels unique.

Next is Michael Roloff catching up on some recent Handke publications, including news of Morawische Nacht, a 500-page "prose work" forthcoming from Suhrkamp. After the last novel though, I'm not sure if I care anymore.

Some thoughts on the death of criticism

"It's tough being a serious critic in these relativist times" says John Crace in his article Is criticism dying, or is that just your view? (link via TEV). "These days, all opinions and prejudices are equally valid. So if you think [Mark] Wallinger is crap, then he is crap." But this is why serious criticism remains a challenge. Rather than dying, criticism begins with relativism. Criticism is as inevitable as breathing, wrote one of the last century's greatest critics in 1922. Serious criticism is breathing only at higher altitude.

Crace writes about the subject in relation to Ronan McDonald's new book The Death of the Critic. He wants critics to reach a wider market like scientists, philosophers and historians. A good way to do this would be to advertise the names of good but neglected critics but I don't see any here, which is a shame. McDonald is said to put criticism's decline down to three things: "the egocentrism of the 1980s", "the evidently self-serving practice of friends reviewing each others' books" and "the legacy of the Oedipal desire of the generation of critical theorists who learned at the feet of men like Leavis to kick aside the old values of their teachers." This is a bizarrely journalistic diagnosis by an academic! The fate of criticism follows the fate of art: so what about the legacy of Modernism and consumerist democracy? We might have very prominent novelists but, in terms of literary history, they produce hollow echoes that no amount of prize committees and fresh-faced pundits can insist are anything else. This too is a problem of criticism. It doesn't know how to prescribe without appearing elitist. My solution is to ignore it. Charging others with elitism is a form of self-hatred. As McDonald says, "the relativists are making judgments, even if they insist they are not". But he also says "In a world of celebrity critics and blogs, there has to be place for a more evaluative response of the academic". Indeed, welcome aboard. But what are these unnamed celebrity critics and blogs doing if it isn't evaluative?

However much one refutes relativism, it keeps coming back to haunt. That is its essential nature. Justin O'Connor's argument against it quoted by Crace reiterates Eliot, but then refutes itself with the example:

regardless of whether you like Ian McEwan's novels, you have to accept that his judgments on literature carry more weight, simply because he is a practitioner, engaging with writing every day.

If this were true, he could say the same of Barbara Cartland. Perhaps even more so as she wrote more. I can't be sure if O'Connor's article goes onto say this, but it's how these writers engage that makes the difference. The reason both authors fail my test of criticism is because their fiction relies on an unchallenged narrative authority. Such is their lack of engagement. I'll be more taken with the words of a writer who cannot engage with writing or, equally, one who is aware that he engages too much! I'm encouraged that McDonald "would like to see more of an overlap between critical and creative writing" because that's precisely how I see literature going on.

It's revealing the serious criticism perceived here to be missing is defined as "academic" - something assumed to be above vulgarities like commerce and populism - yet is also routinely dismissed for its "wilful obscurantism". There are contradictory demands here. It seems there is a desire for unpretentious consumer guides that also offer a definitive, philosophically-engaged overview placing works within the literary canon. So O'Connor affording McEwan weight can be seen as a means of covering both bases: the author's popularity combining with the evident craft of his books. Instead I would say those who offer worthwhile criticism are those, regardless of profile, who address the pressing issue of authority. The worth being, in simple terms, its way of opening up art's complex relation to life. Saying "Mark Wallinger is crap" does the opposite. Let's all make that criticism die.

A share of essential bewitchment

What follows is Emilie Colombani's review of Maurice Blanchot's Chroniques littéraires du Journal des Débats avril 1941-août 1944, new from Gallimard. The French original will appear next month in Transfuge magazine. Our thanks are due to Charlotte Mandell for this translation.


Cautious minds might be surprised at first glance to note that just a few years after Maurice Blanchot’s death, and to honor the centennial of his birth, Gallimard (under the imprint Les Cahiers de la NRF) has published a book by Blanchot that has such a "journalistic" title. Nothing could seemingly be further from a newspaper review than the work of the man who introduced us to a concern for "plain" speech, the search for the "neuter," and an obsession with purity in literature. The titles of the collections of essays by the author of The Space of Literature in fact resound in our ears like so many denials of that non-essential speech, that stream of inchoate words that in Blanchot's view, following the traces of the Mallarméan precept, are the characteristic of oral communication, a communication that will never "make up for the defects of language," whose insistent rumor journalism, especially these days, so often takes pleasure in spreading. What’s more, we know the symbolic, if not falsely polemical, quality of the dates themselves on which Blanchot published these articles, from April 1941 to August 1944. Evil dates, according to some distasteful inquisitors, who will note that the Journal des Débats was one of the publications authorized by Vichy. To those people one can only counter with the lucidity of the texts and this plea for freedom, which appears in the course of an article on Tocqueville where Blanchot exalts "the spirit of discernment during a time when the unquestioning mind was triumphing, the purely intellectual passion to know and not to be duped when enthusiasm is driving everything, even politics." How can we not see this as an indictment in miniature of the totalitarian inclinations that dominated Europe at the time? Of course we have to admit that by his deliberately "disengaged" position, hostile to any partisan spirit and to any stance that might betray his systematic mind, this close friend of Emmanuel Levinas would always remain the custodian of a distinct tradition that holds art as something that cannot be appropriated by the sirens of current events, even if they be malevolent. Some might find this displeasing, and it is true that Blanchot's aristocratic taste for shadow and secrecy may have given rise to a number of questions. But that a writer so sure of his resources could claim as his own the sole happiness of meditating on literature and "on the silence unique to it," to use the expression that figures as an epigraph in a number of the first editions of his texts, no doubt seemed too strong for some to ignore.

There is however no rhetorical posturing in Blanchot, nothing even that could signal that exclusive and rather outmoded cult of "art for art’s sake." If, like Valéry’s Monsieur Teste (about which one of the most brilliant readings ever offered can be found in this collection), Blanchot is more fascinated by the workings of the mind than by its results, he is not one of those Neo-Parnassians who live idly remote from the preoccupations of the city. For him as for Sartre, although in a very different way, literature can only be a matter of "communication," yet in the noblest and strictest sense of the word. Every work forms with its audience a dialectic relationship where the distinction between essential and non-essential is never simple. The presence in this collection of a large number of texts which are actually "book reviews" in the strictest sense in that they comment on the recent publications of novels that were not necessarily destined to be epoch-making (and in fact were not) bears witness to this. Who remembers Luc Dietrich's L’Apprentissage de la ville, Julien Blanc's L'Admission, or Elisabeth Porquerol's Solitudes viriles? Authors who were obscure even in their own time and yet whose works carried within them, despite their defects and their weaknesses, the demand for literary questioning: "We cannot help but try to discover why these works, so different in method, seem to falter at the same point on the slope, and even if successful, resemble each other in their common lack of success." Adherence to this "impossible community" of minds so dear to Hölderlin, the terms of which Blanchot would revisit later on in The Book to Come and The Infinite Conversation, comes at this price, and cannot dodge the threat, consubstantial with the work, of its "disaster." We also sense, in this series of articles that follow a chronological order (which is by nature impervious to the syntheses of thought) a constant desire to submit texts and authors to an interrogation whose precise forms Blanchot does not yet grasp at that date but whose urgency he anticipates. The writer and thinker's work is present here in gestation – that taste for the margins, for the boundaries of the work established and mummified by public recognition, a mummification that keeps increasing as the recognition grows – thus his surprising pages on the Notebooks of Montesquieu (an author so long museified in those impeccable monuments that are The Spirit of Laws and Persian Letters, and in whom we had not suspected such reflexivity), or on the work of Balzac faced with the demiurgic challenge of La Comédie Humaine, or these reader’s notes full of perplexity on Chateaubriand's or Sainte-Beuve's relationship to politics, a strange and paradoxical relationship in which we might recognize, between the lines, the link both of vigilant demand and imperious rupture that Blanchot felt with his own century. For the author of The Madness of the Day was not only one of the writers who along with Kafka, Pessoa, Musil, Freud and Broch most keenly confronted European literature with the almost somnambulistic relationship it has with its founding myths, that share of essential bewitchment that still survives in the core of rational thought and its certainties. He was also one of those discreet observers who in a kind of peaceful and nostalgic shadow never stopped reminding us that literature in its infinite movement is this long waking dream that saves us from all the sleeps of reason.
Emilie Colombani

Violence and better critics

"The Paris intelligentsia disengage from real life". This is a headline you can expect to read every few weeks in the British press, particularly in the supposedly sophisticated, supposedly left-wing journals like the New Statesman whose turn it is this month to sneer. As Bernard-Henri Lévy said last week in response to US claims that "French culture is all but dead", the sneering tells us more about the British than it does the French. The author, Andrew Hussey, did more or less the same last year writing about Jonathan Littell's novel Les Bienveillantes, and I really don't want to respond by repeating what I said then. But, if it helps to counter the influence of such cheap, insidious articles, here goes. He begins with a dark scenario of what's happening in Paris now:

In the suburbs, gangs of rioting immigrant youths are once again setting fire to cars and fighting running battles with the police. Unlike in the riots of 2005, which nearly brought the government down, the gangs are armed this time, mainly with cheap hunting rifles and air pistols. They move in small, predatory packs with the stated aim of shooting policemen.

It's like a scene from Resident Evil: Extinction (which I was watching as I wrote this); and almost as artificial.

Against this scene Hussey sets the character of Phillippe Sollers, "the epitome of snobbish, bourgeois, mondain Paris", whose book Un vrai roman: Mémoires is the "biggest literary event of the Parisian festive season" - that is, as defined by the same Parisian press who no doubt provided the juicy details of the riots. He is appalled that Sollers has nothing to say about not only the riots but the "cultural significance" of the Sex Pistols and rap music, and assumes Sollers hasn't heard of either. To Hussey, burning cars and popular music is more real than the life and mind of a 71-year-old man. Yet why are the gangs of rioters not out-of-touch themselves because they know nothing of the cultural significance of Tel Quel, Mozart, Voltaire or Nietzsche? Maybe both are out-of-touch. What might being-in-touch mean? Such are the questions endlessly begged by articles like this.

However, Hussey is right to say that "[o]ne of the most interesting facts about the riots of 2005 and 2007 has been the absolute silence of Parisian intellectuals on the subject". Indeed it is, particularly if it's true. Apart from Sollers himself, there is absolute silence here about names of the silent ones. He decides nothing has been said "because it doesn't fit in with their idea of the real world". So why not use the space available to report on the intelligentsia's idea of the real world? That would tell us more about France, wouldn't it?! Hussey instead sticks with his narrow definition reality as that which is violent, loud and fashionable. Hence:

If Sollers is largely unknown in the anglophone world, this is simply because French writers no longer occupy the central place they did in the days of Sartre or Camus.

For "central" read "fashionable". As the Literary Saloon suggests, it could be that this is due to a lack of English translations - which in turn suggests something about the constricted nature of English-language culture. Such possibilities don't seem to fit with Andrew Hussey's idea of the real world:

Meanwhile, somewhere not too far beyond the cafe tables of the Boulevard Saint-Germain, sirens blare, the police vans tear up the ring roads to the banlieue and another evening of car-burning and violence begins.

This is pure literature. It might be of cultural significance that the writers and thinkers who matter are no longer seduced by or appeal to fashion. We've seen how (for want of a better phrase) younger intellectuals have moved beyond the shallow end of philosophy and literature to find for themselves writers and thinkers who speak of what matters now and always. Soon I'll be posting a translation of a new article by a French writer who has done just that. I'm pleased to say it will also mark the 600th post on this blog.

Links in space

A few items for potential weekend reading:

Good advice: Richard Ford is interviewed by Anthony Byrt:

I ask him for his own take on the relation between writing and truth. Ford pauses, before adjusting [Frank Bascombe's] advice: "Just putting down everything that you think is not going to uncover the truth; what uncovers truth in something is the habit of art. It's when you think, 'I've got to make something out of this for someone else, which I will make well enough that they can make use of it.'

Reading biography: Richard Crary overcomes despair.

Chicago: Edmond Caldwell's story that gets stranger on each read.

Letter: And talking of Chicago, Mark "Midas" Sarvas finds Bellow gold amongst the rest cluttering his home.

Godard: From six years ago, Mike Figgis describes watching the most beautiful film of the 21st Century:

At one point in the screening, I found myself nodding off (it was hot and I was tired) and then something happened on screen and I was holding back some unidentifiable grief and trying not to weep.

Cock-end: Charlie Brooker demonstrates how I behave whilst reading Oliver Kamm on Stockhausen.

Finding a space

How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?

I don't have an answer, I just wonder how many more people happened to read Doris Lessing's Nobel acceptance speech because of the internet? Of course, reading online is different from reading a book, even Felicity Finds Love; the hope if offers, for example, of a possible unity as abstract as its binding is real. But reading Lessing's speech and then The Literary Saloon's report on the NBCC's survey results, I wondered about the impact blogging has - not on reading - but on writing. So many more people are writing for a large audience. What an extraordinary change! What impact might this have?

Writers are often asked: "How do you write? With a word processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?" But the essential question is: "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?"

Yes, many more are finding a space: however the word is disguised, a whole day may indeed pass in writing ... etc.

"This Was Thomas Bernhard"

This is the first of an eight-part documentary by the German channel 3SAT on you-know-who. The English language Thomas Bernhard site has kindly put together a single page with all eight embedded for our uncomprehending viewing pleasure. As Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle once sang, I Wish I Could Sprechen Sie Deutsch.

No great loss

Daft not to notice it before: this blog's uncertain direction, or its slightly irregular tone. A little Blanchot, then much Bernhard. Can two other writers be any more different? Three years ago the daydream was to create a space for this kind of post from that time or this one from last week. Both promote an alternative to the prevailing way of thinking about literature. Sometimes I wish it was made up of these kinds of posts only. I've long admired Spurious' tenacious focus on the solitary encounter; its patience in face of the one true end. Last month's post on discomfort with critical distance in Alexander Irwin's Saints of the Impossible and last Thursday's on the devotional songs of Rickie Lee Jones are just so good; inspirational and tranquilising. The blog is itself a literary example of the voice "close to speech" that it wants to hear (albeit a speech in the densest silence of the night):

a speech-song, close to popular idioms, vernacular, and the devotion revealed in a happy deformation of song, the stretching of some part of its elements - its becoming jazz-like, improvisational. And a sense of that voice trying to find something, discovering, and not only the heart of the narrative (in Rickie Lee Jones' case, the Passion). A voice that also discovers something of itself - that looks for itself in the singing. That sings to dwell in itself, looking for itself, losing itself.

But one can't change who one is. When I regret not being Spurious I always recall EM Cioran's brief memoir of Beckett in Anathemas and Admirations:

He disparages no one, unaware of the hygienic function of malevolence, its salutary virtues, its executory quality. I have never heard him speak ill of friends or enemies, a form of superiority for which I pity him and from which, unconsciously, he must suffer. If denigration were denied me, what difficulties and discomforts, what complications would result!

How Spurious must suffer! And then there's my Bernhard:

You have to publish, so that you’re done with what you have to say. Or you destroy everything, burn it in the oven. Just like my mother out of rage burnt the one photo of my father, I burnt whole novels. No great loss.

Spot the difference

This blog's cheerful presentation of the temporary exterior of Cardiff Library and that of a similar one in Kansas City rather hides the appalling differences. Whereas the latter features "influential books that represent" Kansas City, the former features the kind of books with which libraries in this country waste shelf space. This doesn't so much encourage reading as challenge the bookstall at the airport. And I wonder if it's like this because the city councillors appealed to publishers to, er, sponsor the design?

Apeman!

When Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award recently, I thought what many others must also have thought: oh God, not another "ambitious" work about the US occupation of Vietnam?! I was as despairing as the customer on Amazon responding to The Name of the World: "Please, can these supposed writers of fiction just stop writing about the faculty of small liberal arts colleges?". Perhaps Johnson can write a post-911 next! In his infamous review of Tree of Smoke BR Myers' claimed that:

Underlying the hype [about the novel] is the silly notion that if a work introduces plenty of characters and traipses after them for enough years and pages, it is ipso facto ambitious.

"The true mark of an ambitious work", he adds, "is its style and depth". I agree, but I would add that now another mark is restraint, if not also outright refusal of established literary procedure.

In relation to this, listen to Is there too much culture?, an enthralling podcast from the director Mike Figgis, as part of the Free Thinking "festival of ideas in Liverpool", in which he diagnoses cultural stagnation. He asks us to imagine the youth of 1957 aping the youth of 1907. But it's unthinkable. Yet the youth of 2007 ape those of 1957; the sound and look of popular music now is basically the same as then. Figgis puts this down to an excess of memory. He says we need to let go, and looks forward to a time when the dam breaks and the stagnation is washed away. In real terms, he wants an end to the archival nature of culture (which would upset the British Library podcasters who ran a panel precisely on the importance of saving an author's entire output!). How this might happen, he doesn't say, but the diagnosis is sound when it comes to "ambitious" novels, and to most current literature too, in which aping the past is endemic. So I wonder, can a writer precipitate the collapse? Ah, now that's an ambition.

The mire of words

As I haven't read the book, I can't say for sure whether BR Myers' hatchet-job on Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke is fair, but I had a similar response to The Name of the World, which I had picked up because of the intriguing title and impressive encomia. I found the writing awkward and indistinct; like so much of US fiction in fact: an apparently thoughtless mix of the literary and colloquial, with each undermining the other. Of course this is an unforgivably impressionistic description. In mitigation, I don't have a copy and Myers' review does rather confirm it. (Terry Pitts' review of Marianne Wiggins' The Shadow Catcher seems to identify something similar.)

Myers reduces the issue to the rotting of the "application of word to thing". Literary prose "becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot." However wrong he is in his identification of a cure, I think he's identified the central problem. It's been addressed from a different angle recently, and the crisis that led to Modernism can, in crude terms, be traced to a felt disintegration in the relation between representation and the thing it represents. Kafka expressed it when Gustav Janouch asked his opinion of the drawings of Oscar Kokoschka:

I do not understand them. Drawing derives from to draw, to describe, to show. All they show me is the painter's internal confusion and disorder. [...] In that picture the roofs are flying away. The cupolas are umbrellas in the wind. The whole city is flying in all directions. Yet Prague still stands - despite all internal conflicts. That is the miracle.

Expressionism then is Establishment Literary Fiction now; both rely on an embedded confidence in its chosen medium; producing culture as in mould. Kafka's words help me to understand what's missing from most of the fiction I feel obliged to sample: the hard-won voice.

Karda Kışta Sinop Yollarında

Aralık ayında, kış günü, hadi Sinop'a gidelim dedik. Planlarımızı yaptık, hazırlandık. Tam da gideceğimiz gün kar yağışı, tipi başlamasın mı... Ama biz, "Pilavdan dönenin kaşığı kırılsın!" düşüncesiyle, karda kışta, su perisi Sinope'nin ve süperstar Ajda'nın şehri Sinop yollarına düştük. Sinop'ta pilav yer miyiz bilmem ama umarım hamsili pilav olur... Rivayet olunur ki, yine bir Sinop'lu, filozof Diyojen de içinde yaşadığı fıçının önünde güneşlenirken, "dile benden ne dilersin" diyen Büyük İskender'e "gölge etme başka ihsan istemem" demiş. Dile kolay! İskender bu...

Daha Ankara'dan çıkmadan kar yağışı arttı. Ama biz zincir takıp yola devam ettik. Ilgaz Dağı geçidini, Kastamonu'yu geçtik, gece vakti Sinop'a ulaştık. Bir de ne görelim, Sinop ılıman mı ılıman, bütün Anadolu karlar altındayken, Sinop'a yağmur yağıyor... Gece vakti pek göremedik ama, otelimiz deniz kıyısında. Sıcacık otelimize yerleştik, sıcak suyla duşumuzu, banyomuzu yaptık. Oh Karadeniz'i de pek severim zaten... Akşam da bize bir balık ziyafeti hazırlamasınlar mı... Yeme de yanında yat... Biz de yedikten sonra yattık zaten...

Sabahın o muhteşem masmavi ilk ışıklarıyla uyandım. Aman Allahım, o ne güzellik öyle... Boşuna değil yani su perisi Sinope... Sinop körfezi günün ilk ışıklarıyla aydınlanırken, sıcak odamdan körfezdeki balıkçıların ağlarını toplamasını izliyorum... Sinop limanı Karadeniz'deki balıkçıların sık sık sığındıkları güvenli bir doğal liman. Tabii hemen fotoğraf makinamı kapıp sizin için fotoğraflar çektim.



Sinop limanının masmavi gök ve denizine karşı mükellef bir kahvaltıdan ve sıcak bir kahveden sonra her türlü hava şartlarına karşı önlemlerimizi alıp Sinop çevresini gezmeye çıktık. Ne ilginçtir, Karadeniz yazın ayrı güzel, kışın ayrı güzel oluyor...

Başın öne eğilmesin, Aldırma gönül, aldırma, Ağladığın duyulmasın, Aldırma gönül, aldırma. Dışarda deli dalgalar, Gelip duvarları yalar, Seni bu sesler oyalar, Aldırma gönül, aldırma. Görmesen bile denizi, Yukarıya çevir gözü, Deniz gibidir gökyüzü, Aldırma gönül, aldırma.

Tabii Sinop denince akıllara hemen Sinop cezaevi geliyor. Şehrin orta yerinde, kayalıkların üzerinde haşmetli bir tarihi bina. Sonradan Kerem Güney ve Edip Akbayram tarafından bestelenen Sebahattin Ali'nin meşhur şiiri de burada yazılmış.

Nazım Hikmet de burada yatmış. "Dört nala gelip uzak Asya'dan, Akdeniz'e bir kısrak başı gibi uzanan, Bu memleket bizim..." diyen Nazım Hikmet'in güzel şiirlerini bilmeyen yoktur herhalde tüm dünyada... Ama bir başka özelliğini, ressamlığını bilir miydiniz? Burada tanıdığı Sinop'lu fırıncının yağlıboya bir tablosunu yapmış. Üzerinde 1940 yılının tarihi var. Ankara Kalesinde Galeri Z'nin özel koleksiyonunda görebilirsiniz. Doğrusu Nazım Hikmet'in bu yönünün bilinmemesine çok şaşırdım tablosunu görünce... İşte de fotoğrafı... Yani fotoGezi olmasa haberimiz bile olmayacak... Böyle şeyleri de ancak fotogezi.blogspot.com'da görebilirsiniz tabii... Şimdi ise rengârenk, cıvıl cıvıl turistleri ağırlıyor Sinop cezaevi. Emekli gardiyan Pala ise, turist rehberliği yaparak işini sürdürüyor. Hem kendi işine, hem de burada yatmış olan mahkumlara ilginç bir saygısı var.



Dışarıda tarihi bir taş yapıdaki kahvede oturup sıcak bir çay içiyoruz. Sinop'ta tabii ki yalnızca cezaevi yok. Hele öyle bir kumsalı var ki mutlaka görmek gerek. Yazın da bir başka güzel olur burası.



Limanı ve kalesi de muhteşem. Zaten denizi doğal bir liman ve Karadeniz'deki irili ufaklı gemiler için bir sığınak olan Sinop'un rıhtımı da balıkçı tekneleriyle dolu. Martılar bir bulut halinde limana inip inip havalanıyorlar.

Ertesi gün dönüş yoluna çıkıyoruz. Kastamonu yolunda muhteşem manzaralı dağlardan, tepelerden geçiyoruz. Kar yağışı iyice artmış. Ilgaz yolu kapanmış. Önümüzde kar aracı ve trafik ekip aracı olmak üzere arkadan da biz geliyoruz. Akşam hava kararıyor. Dışarıda her taraf kar. Etrafı alacakaranlık, harika bir mavilik kaplamış. Ama diğerleri pek de öyle düşünmüyorlar. Neyse, gecenin geç saatlerinde Ankara'ya dönüyoruz.

New Blanchot collection

For those of you with French, Chroniques littéraires du Journal des débats: Avril 1941-août 1944 is a new, 685-page collection from Gallimard of weekly reviews written by Blanchot.

A third of the reviews have already appeared in the English translation of Faux Pas and this collects the rest. It includes pieces on, among others, Dante, Rabelais, Descartes, Blake, Joyce, Mallarmé and Valéry.

The rest of us will have to wait for a translation :(

A crucial moment in the history of art

Adam Kirsch redeems himself from scorning book blogs by noting the utter wrongheadedness of Peter Gay's new book Modernism: the lure of heresy. Along the way, Gay writes "the modernist novel is an exercise in subjectivity" and "for Mondrian subjectivity was all". This "subjectivity", Kirsch writes

... is precisely what is missing from the most genuinely modern artwork. Where is the self in "The Waste Land," a poem that notoriously has no "I," and whose speakers seem to follow one another like voices overheard in a crowd? What could be more "objective" than the geometric grids of a Mondrian painting, which could almost be generated by an algorithm?

Gay's gross misunderstanding suggests that this grand overview of Modernism is worse than unreliable. Yet many other reviews have been respectful if not also full of praise. Rupert Christiansen notes only two "significant" errors, not one being Kirsch's, and says "one could recommend the book wholeheartedly to a bright A-level student or undergraduate in search of a broader picture", Sophie Ratcliffe hails it as "an enormous achievement" and Terry Teachout calls it a success and Modernism "a thing of the past".

What stands out in the reviews is the coverage given to the artists' extra-artistic opinions and behaviour. As Tim Rutten explains, Gay spends time assessing "T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism and Charles Ives' homophobia" and Knut Hamsun's "chilling idolatry of Hitler". While this is certainly relevant to Modernism, it isn't unique to it, as we know from Peter Ackroyd's biography of Dickens, so why the fuss? In this light it's significant for this history that Gay is, as Rutten also explains, "unsympathetic - even slightly uncomprehending - in his treatment of Samuel Beckett". Perhaps this is because Beckett doesn't offer such easy assimilation with biographical nuggets. He was above all an artist.

I've now got a copy of Gabriel Josipovici's review of the book hidden behind the Irish Times' pay wall. He calls the book "appallingly bad" and offers far more errors:

The Rite of Spring dates from 1913, not 1911; The Waste Land is not ‘five poems assembled under one title’, and to believe it is surely disqualifies one from speaking at all on the subject of Modernism; the figure with the enormous penis in Baselitz’s early painting, Great Night Down the Drain is not female (Baselitz tells us he was thinking of an image of Brendan Behan); L’Année dernière à Marienbad is not taken from a novel by Robbe-Grillet. And so on and on.

But his critique differs from all the others by arguing that Gay's discussion of Modernism as "a single historical epoch" is inadequate to the subject:

The book is a wonderful example of Walter Benjamin’s theses on history and his argument that because positivist history does not question it cannot get a handle on the multiform events that form the past. To compare Gay’s plodding 500 pages with five pages of Barthes or Blanchot or Erich Heller is illuminating: for them Modernism is not a period, like Mannerism, but a crucial moment in the history of art, when art arrives at an understanding of itself, a degré zéro beyond which there is only silence. Grasping this they can see what it is Modernist artists were really up to, from Mallarmé to Beckett, and they can see the relations of Modernism to Romanticism and beyond, to that first modern European intellectual and spiritual crisis, the Reformation. In so doing they are at one with the authors they are looking at. Compare Gay’s bland, ‘No doubt Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the choral last movement had much to answer for,’ with Wendell Kretschmar’s impassioned lectures in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus on why Beethoven never composed a third movement to the piano sonata opus 111 and on Beethoven and the fugue. In a few pages Mann succeeds in conveying the issues that faced Beethoven and have faced composers ever since, while Gay cops out comprehensively with his ‘much to answer for’. The best that can be said for this sorry production is that it provides us with a lesson on the poverty of a certain kind of history, but, at 500 pages, that is a lesson that most students will be happy to dispense with.

Poetic injustice

What's more absurd than a 15-day prison sentence for breaking blasphemy laws in Sudan? Well, a liberal democracy giving a nine-month suspended sentence to a naive young woman for writing bad poetry. Clive James must be really worried.

Scorning book blogs: replacing a deleted post

Apparently all my scorn in the post this replaces should have been directed at Adam Kirsch and not Gail Pool. Profuse apologies to Gail Pool. In mitigation, Wolcott's review is ambiguous about where the quotation comes from, though seeing as it's a review of a specific book, you would have thought such a long quotation would be from there. I deleted the post and replaced it with this near identical version, and though I'm sure it was covered at the time of publication, it still deserves a kicking.

Literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity, and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve.

The key words here being "I know". This is James Walcott quoting from Adam Kirsch's attack on book blogs. Kirsch fails to provide any specific examples of book blogs, but he wouldn't have written that sentence if he knew Dan Green's The Reading Experience or Richard Crary's The Existence Machine. And if he doesn't know either, then he is unqualified to generalise about book blogs. Not that it stops him.

The only useful part of most book blogs, in fact, are the links to long-form essays and articles by professional writers, usually from print journals.

The key words here being "only", "professional" and "usually". A professional editor would demand examples and clarification of the other two words. Another obvious use of book blogs is to provide self-satisfied professionals with a straw man, and if those useful links are "usually" to print journals, what do the exceptions reveal?

It so happens I'm also a professional writer, though not in the field I would prefer. What I consider more important is that which I write out of a need to speak. The last "long-form essay" I wrote was a year ago, about Richard Ford's Sportswriter trilogy. The form suited what I had to discover. Usually, however, a shorter blog post is appropriate. It's often much more of a challenge to write short. Sometimes I wish James Wood used a fifth of the words he writes nowadays. (Which reminds me of a critic of Derrida's long-winded style, influenced, he said, by having to pad-out three-hour seminars. Compare this with the concise reviews and essays by his friend and mentor Blanchot, who remained outside professionalism.)

And it's early days: book blogging is a new form of criticism under restraint. It has good, bad and indifferent practitioners. As a reader, I make the same decisions online as I make in the bookshop and the library. I don't dismiss fiction because of Tom Clancy anymore than I dismiss online criticism because of Amazon customer reviews.

Literary parasitism

In these seemingly anti-literary times, authors tend to do all they can to support literature; Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas is the first I've seen to treat it like a disease.

Scott Esposito in the superb Quarterly Conversation on my favourite novel of the year. It's a deceptively simple book to follow but fiendishly difficult to summarise. Scott does a brilliant job at that, and is quite right to recognise that it falls away in the second half. But what a fall ...

Derrida - the movie

Today I have been mostly watching this fascinating fly-on-the-wall documentary about Derrida (via Fark Yaralari). Halfway through I remembered it was on December 1st, 2000 that I attended a lecture given by Derrida at Sussex University to mark the opening of the Centre for Modern French Thought. It was so cold in the lecture hall that Derrida wore a white scarf while his host wore a black one. He came across then as he does here: austere yet warm. From what I can remember, he lectured on hospitality, arguing that we must welcome strangers into our lives as if they were family (I think he even said "we should offer them our beds"!). The audience, made up of the cheerfully curious and of career-focussed tutors and postgraduates, tore into his arguments with demanding questions. He welcomed them in the spirit of his lecture; something I appreciated even if I couldn't follow the discussion. Sadly, both Derrida and the Centre for Modern French Thought (which hosted a video of the event) are now closed.

N-n-n-nineteen

Joyce Carol Oates still bothers people — in all kinds of ways. For more than forty-five years she has been steadily producing novels, short stories, poems, essays, plays. Between the beginning of 2000 and the end of 2005 she published nineteen books. She has written over seven hundred short stories, more than Maupassant, Kipling, and Chekhov combined.

So Michael Dirda begins his NYRB review of four new Joyce Carol Oates books, including her journal. I read the review hoping that the journal might reveal something about her productivity. I wasn't disappointed.

Her journal tells us that she writes from 8 till 1 every day, then again for two or three hours in the evening. And she revises and polishes and reworks page after page after page. Such commitment, coupled with her literary fecundity, unnerves many people. Surely so many books can't be that good, that deeply felt, truly authentic?

Dirda answers with an emphatic No: "there can be no question of [her major novels'] power and conviction". But he can't help but return to the reception!

Still, Joyce Carol Oates distresses more than a few writers and critics. She can raise doubts and misgivings ... in nearly any novelist or essayist. Similarly, critics — on the printed page or in conversation — all too frequently deride Oates's work for its copiousness; some suggest it is the product of obsessive-compulsive behavior. Often, I suspect, this crude reductionism derives from reviewer's angst.

Dirda is almost certainly right in this latter suspicion (though it would have been nice to have some evidence). How can any reviewer possibly have a grasp of this novelist's oeuvre without devoting himself to weeks of research? Yet no matter how accurate, to me this remains a superficial answer. All productive artists generate a despairing envy of some kind, even in those who love what they produce. They are loved because they both mark stages on the way to one's own realisation and resented because they also close off another route.

Joyce Carol Oates' work evokes the same paradoxical despair one feels in a library, or when faced by the list of classics one has failed to read. Precious hope for one's realisation in a book is not diminished but dispersed. The task then becomes to write in every genre and in every form, and then to write every book ever written. For only in this way can one realise the hope of the book, the hope to say everything at last. Yet if one of the most prominent self-realisers cannot achieve this, what hope is there for us?

More Remainder

Tom McCarthy talks to Ed Champion about Remainder and repetition in a rich, two part makes-you-feel-stupid-but-inspired-too interview. I was enacting my own repetitive behaviour as I listened: cycling the same 26-mile route which includes what the great Miguel Indurain called "the côte de Ditchling Beacon“, a fourth category climb on the 1994 Tour de France (beat that cycling litbloggers!).

Just after reaching the summit, Tom spoke of how trauma, noted by both Freud and anti-Freudian neuroscientists, "instils a propensity to repeat, to return to the traumatic scene". In my case, however, the obsessive following of the same route seeks merely to erase uniqueness; I want the same non-experience each time. If anything happens along the way, I change the route. But isn't that what the guy in Remainder is doing too? The question reminds me of an aspect of the novel the interview mentions only once and very briefly yet has always bothered me. How does the trauma from the sky at the beginning of the book relate to its end in the aircraft? It's another way of asking how artistic creation relates to its cause. To me, the ending hints of the traumatic remainder in art's unworldliness.

Bir Başkadır Kırım Toprağı...

Kırım, hemen yanı başımızdaki adeta cennetten bir köşe. İstanbul’dan ortalama bir buçuk saatlik bir uçuşun ardından, Kırım’ın başkenti Akmescit şehrine ulaşabilirsiniz.

Ukrayna’ya bağlı özerk cumhuriyet statüsündeki Kırım 26.140 km²’lik yüzölçümü ve 2.400.000 nüfusuyla küçük sayılabilecek bir toprak parçası. Başkenti Akmescit (Simferopol) dışında en önemli şehirleri askeri üs konumundaki Akyar (Sevastopol), turizm merkezi Yalta, tarihi başkenti Bahçesaray ve ticari liman konumundaki Gözleve (Yevpetoriya)’dır.

Kırım, 15. yüzyılın ortalarından itibaren de Kırım Hanlığı’na yurt olmuştur. Bu kudretli hanlığın sınırları o dönemlerde bir taraftan Moskova önlerinden Kafkas Dağları’nın eteklerine, öte taraftan Hazar Denizi kıyılarından Lehistan (Polonya) ovalarına kadar uzanmaktaydı. Kırım Tatarları, işte bu kudretli Hanlığın günümüze uzanan varisleri, 1783’de vatan toprakları Rus işgaline uğrayınca, kitleler halinde “Ak Topraklar” dedikleri Türkiye’ye göç etmişlerdir. Geride kalanlar ise; Rus işgaline ve baskılara karşı sürekli bir mücadele halinde olmuşlardır. Türk Dünyasına “Dilde, Fikirde, İşte Birlik” fikrini aşılayan, aydınlanma hareketini başlatan İsmail Bey Gaspıralı gibi bir değeri Türk Dünyasına hediye eden Kırım Tatarları, 18 Mayıs 1944'de Stalin'in emriyle Özbekistan çölleri ve Sibirya steplerine sürgün edildiler. Hayvan vagonlarında gönlerce süren bu sürgünün sonunda Kırım Tatarlarının %46'sı hayatlarını kaybetti. 1989'dan itibaren yeniden vatanları Kırım'a dönmeye başlayan Kırım Tatarları Kırım Tatar Millî Meclisi’nin çatısı altında ve Mustafa Abdülcemil Kırımoğlu’nun önderliğinde toplandılar.

Her Yıl Kırım’dayız

Her yıl olduğu gibi bu yıl da Kırım’a 20-27 Temmuz 2004 tarihleri arasında 7 gece-8 günlük bir gezi düzenledik. 20 Temmuz 2004 Salı günü İstanbul’dan 309 sefer sayılı Ukrayna Havayolları uçağı ile başlayan yolculuğumuz, göz açıp kapayıncaya kadar bitiverdi. Uçağımız, göz alabildiğine uzanan yeşilliklerin ve bereketli ovaların üzerinden alçalarak Kırım’ın başkenti Akmescit’e iniverdi. Ukrayna havaalanı gümrüğünden dışarı çıktığımızda, bizleri Türkiye-Ukrayna Dostluk Derneği Başkan Yardımcısı Necmettin Yalta ve eşi ile gezimiz müddetince mihmandarlığımızı yapan Vasfiye Aliyeva karşıladı. Havaalanı şehrin biraz dışında olduğu için, eğer sizi karşılayan yok ise, taksiye binmek zorunda kalınacağını bilmeniz lazım.

Konaklama ve Yemek

Kırım, yüzölçümünün küçüklüğüne rağmen Sovyetler Birliği döneminde olduğu gibi günümüzde de bu coğrafyanın en önemli turizm merkezi biri olarak kabul edilmekte. Her yıl milyonlarca turistin geldiği Kırım’da dolayısıyla her keseye uygun pek çok otel bulmak mümkün. Ancak otellerin hizmet kalitesi ile fiyatları arasında herhangi bir ilginin olmadığını bilmek lazım. Türkiye’de kanıksadığımız standartları ve hizmet kalitesini buralarda beklememek lazım. Bizler bu yılki gezimiz müddetince Akmescit şehrindeki Turbaza Tavriya Oteli’nde konakladık. Yeşillikler içerisindeki otel, Türkiye standartlarına göre oldukça mütevazı bir görünüme sahip. Fazla lüks aramayanlar için ideal bir yer.

Gezi programımız yoğun ve her gün farklı bir şehri gezecek olmamızdan dolayı, yemeklerimizi de farklı farklı restoranlarda yedik. Kırım genelinde artık her yerde her türlü damak tadına uygun kafeler ve restoranlar bulunabiliyor. Yemekler bol kepçe ve çok lezzetli. Aman dikkat! perhizi bozabilirsiniz... Restoranlarda Tatar ve yerel müziklerin eşliğinde neşe içerisinde yemeğinizi yiyebilirsiniz.

Bahçesaray ve Hansaray

Kırım Yarımadası, coğrafi olarak küçük görünmesine rağmen tahminlerinizin de ötesinde pek çok tarihi ve doğal güzelliği bünyesinde barındırmakta. Bir kez gelmenin asla yetmeyeceğini bilerek gitmelisiniz Kırım’a.

Kırım’ı gezinize Kırım Hanlığı'nın başkentliğini yapmış Bahçesaray’dan başlamanızı tavsiye edeceğim. Bahçesaray, bizden, Anadolu’dan bir parça gibidir... Sokaklarında yürürken asla yabancılık çekmezsiniz. Safranbolu’da veya Kastamonu’da geziyormuş gibi hissedersiniz kendinizi. Vaktiyle zengin ve büyük bir şehir olsa da şimdilerde sakin ve küçük ama alımlı bir kasaba görünümünde. Bu şehri mutlaka bir rehber eşliğinde gezmelisiniz. Gezilecek çok yer ve de size anlatılması gereken pek çok tarihî eser mevcut bu şehirde.

Bahçesaray’ın en meşhur yeri hiç şüphesiz Hansaray’dır. Kırım Hanlarının sarayı Hansaray, Topkapı Sarayı’nın küçük ama zarif bir benzeri gibidir. “Tatar Elhamrası” da denilen Hansaray, içinde barındırdığı birbirinden kıymetli sanat eserleriyle ve hikayeleriyle sizi de derinden etkileyecektir.

Vaktiyle atlı süvarilerin volta attığı sarayın avlusunda, artık sarayı gezebilmek için sırasını bekleyen kalabalık turist grupları beklemektedir. Sarayı rehberiniz eşliğinde gezmeye başladığınızda her köşede size anlatılacak ayrı bir tarihin ve hikayenin olduğunu göreceksiniz. "Gözyaşı Çeşmesi"nde mermere işlenen bir sevdayı, Puşkin’in Bahçasaray Çeşmesi şiirinin mısralarında ise, bu büyük aşkın ölümsüz izlerini bulursunuz. "Demirkapı" size Kırım Hanlığı’nın haşmet ve gücü hakkında ipuçları verecektir. "Altın Çeşme", geçmişteki zenginliğinden izlerini taşırken, "Altın Oda"da azamet ve ihtişamı, "Harem"de geçmişin gizemlerini derinden derine teneffüs edersiniz aslında. İki minareli "Hancamii" ise, estetiğin semaya açılan zarif elleridir. Dedik ya Hansaray bu, anlatması zor, mutlaka görmek lazım.

Hemen bir kaç yüz metre ötede yolun kenarındaki taş bina, İsmail Bey Gaspıralı’nın 1883’de yayınlamaya başladığı Tercüman gazetesine ev sahipliği yapmıştır. Işığını bütün Türk ve İslâm dünyasına yayan bu gazetenin basıldığı yer artık Gaspıralı Müzesi olmuş, ziyaretçilerini beklemekte.

Birkaç adım daha attınız mı "Zincirli Medrese"desiniz. İnşaatında Kırım Hanı I. Mengli Geray Han’ın bile bizzat çalıştığı Zincirli Medrese’ye geldiğinizde, kapısındaki asılı zincir, geçmişte olduğu gibi bugün de ilmin önünde eğilmek gerektiğini hatırlatacaktır size. Zincirli Medrese, şimdilerde yeniden restore edilmeye çalışılmakta...

Bahçesaray’a yapacağınız ziyaret sizi acıktırdığında hemen Hansaray’ın girişinde köprünün üzerinde sıralanan tezgahlarda satılan sıcacık nefis Tatar Börekleri (Çibörek) ve tatlılar ile açlığınızı yatıştırabileceğiniz gibi, yakınlardaki pek çok nezih alternatiften birini de rahatlıkla tercih edebilirsiniz. Bizim tercihimiz Ali Baba veya Markur adlı restoranlardan yana...

“Dünyanın Paylaşıldığı Yer”... Yalta

Kırım’ı anlatan herkes, öncelikle bu toprakların yeşil olduğundan bahseder. Doğrudur da... Hele hele bir tarafı Karadeniz’e bakan yarımadanın sahilleri ayrı bir güzelliktir. Yeşili ayrı bir yeşildir.

Karadeniz sahiline indiğinizde Aluşta’da kulağınıza 1944 sürgününde Özbekistan çöllerinde söylenen “Aluşta’dan Esken Yeller Yüzüme Urdu” şarkısının nağmesi gelecektir. Gurzuf’ta artık meşhur yazar Cengiz Dağcı’nın yurdundasınız. Yaşadığı toprakların her bir karesini, her bir taşını romanlarında en ince ayrıntısına kadar anlatan bu büyük insanın doğduğu, çocukluğunun geçtiği üzüm bağlarıyla donanmış bu bereketli topraklar sizi de kendine çekecektir. Destanlara konu olan "Ayu Dağ"ı "Gelin Kaya" ile "Damat Kaya"yı seyretmek ayrı bir zevk verecektir size.

Yalta, her bir yanı ayrı bir güzelliğe ve doyumsuz manzaralara sahip Kırım’daki en önemli tatil ve turizm merkezidir. Bütün Sovyet coğrafyasının en ünlü turizm merkezi olarak kabul edilen Yalta, elbette ki bunu hak edecek pek çok zenginliklere sahiptir.

“Dünyanın Paylaşıldığı Yer” olarak bilinen Yalta, bu yakıştırmayı 1945’deki meşhur Yalta Konferansı’na ev sahipliği yapmasından dolayı almış. Çar II. Nikolay için 1911’de yazlık saray olarak yaptırılan "Livadiya Sarayı"nda bu tarihi konferansın izleri itina ile korunmakta.

"Kırlangıç Yuvası", kayaların ucunda kanatlanıverecek masalsı bir yapı gibidir. Almanya’nın Ren Nehri kıyılarındaki Rittenburg Şatosu’nun minik bir kopyası olan Kırlangıç Yuvası’nın gezinti terasından Karadeniz’i bütün ihtişamıyla seyretmek, ayrı bir haz verecektir ziyaretçisine.

"Botanik Parkı", biraz bakımsız da olsa bu kadar çok bitki ve çiçek örneğinin nasıl bir araya getirildiğini sorduracaktır size. "Alupka-Vorontsov Sarayı" bu toprakların ihtişamına zarif bir katkıdır. "Massandra Şatosu", masalsı bir ülkeden gelen minik bir örnek gibidir. "Uçan-su Şelalesi", suyun kanatlanmış halidir. "Mishor" ise, destanlara konu olmuş, efsanevi Arzı Kız’ın vatanıdır.

Yalta başlı başına bir gezi ülkesidir. Adım başı farklı bir güzellik çıkacaktır karşınıza. Ay-petri Dağı’dan, Simeiz’e, Foros’dan Gaspra’ya pek çok tarihî ve doğal güzellik ziyaret edilmeyi beklemektedir.

Yalta aynı zamanda deniz demektir aslında, Karadeniz’in belli olmaz denilen havası şansınıza eğer o gün uygunsa Yalta ve çevresindeki her yerde rahatlıkla denize girebilirsiniz. Hemen şehrin merkezindeki limanın kenarındaki Halk Plajı size zaten bu konuda yeterince fikir verecektir. Yalta geceleri de hareketli bir şehirdir. Mutlaka kendinize bu saatler için boşluk yaratmalı ve kendinize bir konser veya bir havai fişek gösterisi veya bir müzikli gece ayırmalısınız bu şehirde...

"Sevastopol Önünde Yatar Gemiler..."

Kırım denilince akla ilk gelen yerlerden biri de Sevastopol şehridir. Sovyet döneminin dünyaca meşhur bu askeri üssü o yıllarda bünyesinde barındırdığı 800 parçalık muazzam donanma ile bütün dünyanın gözlerinin dikip takip ettiği bir şehir idi. Şimdilerde ise yavaş yavaş bu vasfından sıyrılmaya çalışmakta.

1996 yılına kadar “yasak şehir” konumundaki Sevastopol bu askeri kimliğinin yanında müzeleri ile de meşhurdur aslında. Bunların içinde hiç şüphesiz en önemlisi Panorama’dır.

"Panorama", 1854 Kırım Harbi’nde İngiliz-Fransız ve Osmanlı Orduları tarafından kuşatılan Sevastopol şehri ve çevresinde yaşanan çarpışmaların ve önemli olayların resmedildiği bir müzedir. Çevresinde de yine o döneme ve Kırım Harbi’ne ait pek çok materyal sergilenmekte. Toplam 115 metreye 14 metre ebatlarındaki devasa resimleriyle Panorama, dünya çapında bir üne sahiptir. Önünde uzanan kuyruklar bu konuda size bir fikir verecektir. Mutlaka görülmeli ve bir mağlubiyetten nasıl zaferle çıkmışçasına gururlanma ve propaganda malzemesi yapılabildiğini biraz da imrenerek izlemelisiniz.

Sevastopol’u gezerken rıhtıma inen merdivenlerden karşılara baktığınızda, sıra sıra dizilmiş savaş gemileri gördüğünüzde aklınıza Kırım Harbi için söylenen “Sevastopol Önünde Yatar Gemiler” türküsü gelecektir.

Limanın birkaç adım ötesinde "Hersones Antik Kenti"nin kalıntılarını gezebilir, günün yorgunluğunu bu arkeolojik kalıntıların hemen yanı başında Karadeniz’in serin sularında atabilirsiniz.

Sevastopol’da 2004 yılında Kırım Harbi’nin 150. yılı münasebetiyle büyük bir törenle açılan Türk Şehitliği’ni de ziyaret edebilirsiniz. Şehitlik, Akmescit’ giderken yolunuzun üzerindedir.

Başkent Akmescit...

380.000’lik nüfusuyla Kırım’ın en büyük şehri olan Akmescit, aynı zamanda da Ukrayna’ya bağlı Kırım Özerk Cumhuriyeti’nin de başkentidir. Kırım Tatarlarının tek resmi temsil organı olan ve başkanlığını Mustafa Abdülcemil Kırımoğlu’nun yaptığı Kırım Tatar Millî Meclisi bu şehirdedir. Yine Kırım Tatarlarına ait pek çok kurum (Kırım Tatar Pedagoji Üniversitesi, Gaspıralı Kırım Tatar Millî Kütüphanesi, Kırım Tatar Akademik Drama Tiyatrosu, Kırım Tatar Dans ve Müzik Topluluğu, Kırım Tatar Yazarlar Birliği, Kırım Tatar Ressamlar Birliği, Kırım Tatar Hanımlar Birliği, Qardaşlık Gençlik Teşkilatı, vd.) yine bu şehirde yer almaktadır. Gururlanmamak elde değil.

Her iki yanı park ve bahçelerle bezenmiş olan Salgır Nehri’nin ikiye böldüğü Akmescit, yeşillikler içerisinde bir şehirdir. Otelinizin penceresinden baktığınızda bunu daha iyi anlayacaksınız. Temiz havanın o insanı dinç tutun etkisini yaşayarak göreceksiniz. Akmescit’te akşamları Kırım Tatar Akademik Tiyatrosu’nun konser ve tiyatro programlarını izleyebileceğiniz gibi, çeşitli müzikli restoran ve kafelere de gidebilirsiniz. Ayşe Restoran, Gys Kafe, Kafe Maestro ilk akla gelenler...

Gözleve’de Mimar Sinan’ın İmzası...

Gözleve’deki "Han Camii", Kırım Tatarlarının yaşadıkları acı ve çektikleri zulmün şahidlerinden biridir. Kırım Hanı I. Devlet Geray Han’ın Moskova’ya düzenlediği seferden zaferle dönmesinin şerefine 1552 senesinde İstanbul Fatih Camii'nin küçük bir kopyesi olarak yaptırılan bu cami, Mimar Sinan’ın Kırım’da yaptığı tek eserdir. Yanı başındaki parktaki "Kırım Tatar Sürgün Anıtı" ise, sizi 18 Mayıs 1944’e götürecek ve bir milletin yok edilmek istenmesine rağmen hala ayakta olduğunu hissettirecektir size.

Eğer Gözleve’deki kalış saatlerini daha da uzatabilecekseniz, Han Camii’nin yanındaki parkın kenarındaki Cafe Mustafa’da müzik ve dans programı eşliğinde akşam yemeğinizi yiyebilirsiniz.

Sudak Şehri ve Kalesi

Kalesi ile meşhur Sudak aynı zamanda göz alabildiğini uzayan doğal ve temiz plajları ile önemli bir sayfiye merkezidir. Bu şehrin yanı başındaki tepe üzerine kurulan Sudak Kalesi’nden çevrenin manzarasını seyredebilir, ardından da kendinizi Karadeniz’in serin sularına bırakabilirsiniz.

Sudak’a gelirken yolunuzu biraz uzatmak pahasına Eskikırım’a uğrayıp Sultan Baybars Camii’nin harabelerini ve de Özbek Han Camii ile Medresesi’ni de görebilirsiniz. Eskikırım’ın öneminin Kırım Hanlığı’nın ilk başkenti olmasından geldiğini de unutmamak lazım.

Seneye Yine Kırım’dayız...

Gezimiz nihayete erdiğinde bize yetmediği hususunda herkes fikir birliği etmişti. Bir daha gelmeyi planlayarak Türkiye’ye döndüğümüzde hatırımızda pek çok güzelliğin kaldığını gördük. Yalta’da dünya siyaseti tarihinin en önemli anlarının geçtiği Livadiya Sarayı'nı, Gurzuf’ta deniz ile doğanın o güzel birlikteliğini, Gözleve Han Camii’nde Sinan’ın sanatının yüceliğini, Hansaray’da bir imparatorluğun geçmişteki azametli günlerinin izlerini görebilmenin hazzına yaşadık.

Kırım Tatarların deyimiyle “Ak Topraklar” denilen Türkiye’den Kırım’a düzenlediğimiz gezimizin bu kadar güzel geçmesindeki katkılarından dolayı, mihmandarlığımızı yapın Vasfiye Aliyeva’ya, Niyara Mecitova’ya, Yalta sokaklarında Ayyıldızımızı gururla taşıyan sevgili Elmira Abibulla’ya ve kıymetli ağabeyim Necmettin Yalta’ya sonsuz teşekkürler...

Bir dahaki Kırım gezimizde buluşmak dileğiyle...

M. Akif ALBAYRAK

Not: M. Akif Albayrak bu yazıyı bize gönderdikten sonra 6 Haziran 2007 tarihinde vefat etmiştir. Allah rahmet eylesin...

Bolaño's Last Evenings on Earth

In the back of this week's TLS there's an advertisement for The VS Pritchett Memorial Prize 2008 run by the Royal Society of Literature.

A prize of £1,000 will be awarded for an unpublished short story of between 2,000 and 5,000 words.

Usually, I wouldn't even read any further, but this time I was reminded of Last Evenings on Earth, a collection of Roberto Bolaño's wonderful stories. Is it the first, Sensini, in which the narrator corresponds with a reclusive author with whom he shared a short story prize? My copy is back in the library so I can't check. Anyway, in either that story or the next the narrator tells of their correspondence, how they prompt each to enter short story competitions, sometimes entering the same story in separate competitions, merely changing the title. Nobody notices even if they win. It's a beguiling tale. Yet I was also frustrated with the silence about the stories themselves. Both authors seem to write them with matter-of-fact ease. What are the stories about? Did the writers care about them or consider them confections for a gullible audience? Of course these questions must be what makes it so beguiling. That and £1,000.

It probably isn't a coincidence that all Bolaño's stories, in this collection at least, are on an odd kind of cruise control, giving the impression of having being written in one go, without revision or reflection, never lingering over description, moving relentlessly forward, using initials as names perhaps to camouflage unadorned autobiography, and then stopping, as if a word count or deadline had been met. Still, for all the nagging sense of having been taken for a ride, it's no surprise the narrator won some prizes.

PS: The New Yorker has just published his story Álvaro Rousselot's Journey.

Sylvia Plath at the ICA

One of the manuscripts in the permanent exhibition at the British Library that sticks on my memory of Tuesday's brief visit is Sylvia Plath's handwritten note to a publisher about the poem attached, Insomniac. Set aside the aura of the antiquities, it evoked a sharper melancholy for marking our own time with ancient death.

By coincidence, next Monday (December 3rd) the ICA has an evening revisiting Plath's life and work "focusing on the relationship between the visual and verbal". Be warned, folk around town, that the event clashes with the one at the British Library I mentioned the other day, and that both also charge for attendance.

The question of Modernism

What has happened to our culture such that serious critics and intelligent well-read reviewers, many of whom studied the poems of Eliot, the stories of Kafka and the plays of Beckett at university, should go into ecstasies over Atonement or Suite Française, while ignoring the work of marvellous novelists such as Robert Pinget and Gert Hofmann?

This was one of the more provocative questions from last March when at least three literary bloggers attended Gabriel Josipovici's lecture What Ever Happened to Modernism? in Russell Square, London. Read about it and the stir it caused in the audience here and at The Sharp Side. But even better, read an abridged version in this week's TLS (unfortunately not online). Alone it's worth the cover price, but you also get to read the Books of the Year choices of TLS writers. One notable choice: The Archbishop of Canterbury recommends William T Vollmann's Poor People.

Leaning and peering

God, we seem to have had substantially this same thread so many times and it's still boring. Who cares what someone hasn't read?

So asks the first commenter to Stephen Moss's blog about "guilty" omissions from one's reading history. One can only concur. I've said it before: I am not ashamed. Reading shouldn't a game of cultural awareness or oneupmanship but of personal happiness (in the widest sense). But one thing does trouble me: not having read books whose pages I have turned to the end. Yes, I've read each word and even noted down significant lines, yet something remains out of reach. I sense that I need to read it again. The book still awaits me, still awaits revelation. Again, will I ever read it?

Yesterday, in the British Library, in the new and permanent exhibitions, I browsed handwritten words from famous hands: Jane Austen, Captain Cook, Sir Philip Sidney, Wordsworth, Sir Paul McCartney. People blocked my view to lean closer to the glass and study the pages. What are they searching for, I wondered. Do the printed documents conceal something revealed by their personal scribbles of ink? No, probably not. But still this leaning over, this long peering. Is it perhaps a manifestation of a deep unease, that we haven't begun to read at all?

In this space ...

In this space ... the real is already imaginary and detached from its truth, its identity. In this space, the plasticity of matter no longer refers to the substance to which qualities cling but to the arrested death that is the rigorous immobility of the statue. It is ambiguous space and it is the most subtle of bodies, for it is neither substance nor image but rather the liquidation of the elemental distance that separates the two. This space belongs neither to art nor to philosophy, neither to the image nor to the concept. In contrast to the philosopher, the artist is allied with the very weakness of space itself: communication or sheer communication - the pure “there is”.

from Radical Passivity by Thomas Carl Wall.

Breaking the rules

There was something slightly illicit about browsing the British Library's Breaking the Rules exhibition subtitled The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900 – 1937. It was, I later realised, because someone had turned the lights out. Many of the artefacts - such as scores by Schoenberg - are protected by the gloom of the vault. It's like you shouldn't really be there. Those that weren't in the dark included one of Joyce's notebooks for Finnegans Wake, a first edition of Ulysses and an edition of Bataille's Acéphale magazine. I was particularly pleased to see these. But, generally, I'm not one for exhibitions. I have no patience just too stand and look. And as I hurried around the space, I couldn't help but sing along with our very own avant garde.

By the way, if you're in the area, next Monday evening (3rd of December), the library hosts a debate What happened to the Avant Garde? lead by AS Byatt and Gabriel Josipovici.

Spectral presences

How can a book so absorbed in the minutiae of daily life be so thoroughly imbued by a sense of loss?

Vertigo: Collecting WG Sebald asks the question of Jacques Roubaud's novel The Great Fire of London and, in another post, compares the relation of photographs in this book to those used by Sebald in his. It also includes quotations from what looks like a fascinating interview with Sebald:

I have always had at the back of my mind this notion that [dead] people aren’t really gone, they just hover somewhere at the perimeter of our lives and keep coming in on brief visits. And photographs are for me, as it were, one of the emanations of the dead, especially those older photographs of people no longer with us. Nevertheless, through these pictures, they do have what seems to me some sort of spectral presence.

Going back to Roubaud though: in a post earlier today, I mentioned the occasional value of books of the year lists. Well, it's 18 years since one in the Independent sparked my interest in Roubaud's great work. It's also four years since I posted an essay about the translation. It's good that the word is spreading.

Chris Morris speaks his brains

'Islamism'. What does it actually mean? For many it means 'political Islam'. Amis calls it a 'murderous ideology', equating it with terrorism. Now look at the following statement: 'The terrorist killings in New York, Madrid and London were wrong. They were indiscriminate, un-Islamic and based on ideas abstracted to the point of insanity.' I was firmly told this by an ex-Mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan 20 years ago. He was an Islamist. I strongly doubt he was murderous.

In a disconcertingly sober mood, comedy god Chris Morris looks at The absurd world of Martin Amis. It's a rare mention for a part of recent history that has been more or less airbrushed from official memory: the West's love affair with Islamic Mujahideen. Oh how I wish ITV would repeat Sandy Gall's adventures in the hills of Afghanistan following the conscript-beheading "resistance”. Now, 25 years later, he's telling another occupier that "the Afghan war is winnable". If only his Mujahideen buddies had known then of his undying loyalty to Afghani independence.

UPDATE: In the latest New Statesman, John Pilger shows how the corporate media's reporting is identical to Soviet reporting of their invasion of Afghanistan.

Listing heavily

Based on the Guardian's nice long list, here are three reasons why I like to read books of the year lists.

Gratification: Toby Litt choosing Pierre Joris' translations of three Paul Celan collections: "I find him more moving than any other 20th-century poet". I knew this already of course, but it's good that someone else is saying it in public.

Curiosity: Peter Ho Davies recommends (in part 2) the work of Charles Baxter, "a quietly profound thinker about art" who has, he says, written "perhaps the single best book about writing". Never heard of him but this certainly intrigues me (even if he looks suspiciously commonsensical).

Revelation: After reading the dismaying first sentence of Geoff Dyer's entry, I realised why, at the end of his fine book on US American photography, the inclusion of James Nachtwey's work seemed so incongruous and ill-judged.

Sivrihisar'ın Önünden Geçip Giderken...

Ankara-Eskişehir arasında hep dikkatimizi çeken kayalıkların önünden geçilerek gidilen bir yol kavşağıdır Sivrihisar çoğu kez. Biraz ilerideki bir şehri uzaktan farkederiz belki... Ama nedense hiç içine girilmez, bir an evvel gidilecek yere yetişmenin acelesiyle... Hemşerim, quo vadis? Belki İzmir, belki Afyon, Antalya, ya da Bursa, Balıkesir, Ayvalık, Akçay, ya da Bodrum, Marmaris, Fethiye, belki de Ege Denizinde bir mavi tur istikamet... Oysa varılacak yer midir önemli olan, yoksa yolculuk mudur yaşamın kendisi... Neyse... Biz girdik... Sizin için keşfettik, fotoğrafladık ve işte paylaştık...

67 Ağaç Sütunlu Ulu Cami

İlçedeki en önemli eserlerden biri, şehir merkezindeki Ulu Cami. 1275 yılında Mevlana’nın müritlerinden Eminiddin-i Mikail tarafından yaptırılmış. Anadolu’nun en büyük ahşap direkli camilerinden. Çatısını 67 adet ağaç sütun tutuyor. Çeşitli geometrik şekillerin ahenkli bir birleşiminden oluşan minberi ise bir sanat şaheseri olarak nitelendiriliyor.



Ulu Cami’nin kuzeyine düşen Alemşah Kümbeti 1327 - 1328 yılları arasında Melik Şah tarafından kardeşi Sultan Şah için yaptırılmış. Necibiddin Mustafa'nın karısı için yaptırdığı Hoşkadem Camii ve 1492 yılında Şeyh Baba Yusuf tarafından yaptırılan Kurşunlu Camii şehrin diğer önemli Anadolu Selçuklu eserleri.

Nasreddin Hoca'nın Doğduğu Şehir

Sivrihisar şehirle bütünleşmiş ve ilçenin medar-ı iftiharı olan Nasreddin Hoca’nın da doğum yeri. Türk halk mizahının büyük filozofu Nasreddin Hoca, 1208’de Sivrihisar’ın Hortu Köyü’nde doğmuş. Köyün adı 1999’da Nasreddin Hoca olarak değiştirilmiş. Hoca’nın evi halen burada varlığını sürdürüyor. İki katlı ev, belediyeden anahtarı alınarak gezilebiliniyor. Hortu Köyü Sivrihisar’a 26 kilometre uzaklıkta. Köyde, Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı tarafından bir de temsili Nasreddin Hoca evi yaptırılmış. Bu ev de halka açık.

Tabii söz konusu Nasreddin Hoca olunca rivayet muhtelif... Hoca’nın doğduğu evin Sivrihisar’da, türbesinin ise Akşehir’de bulunması iki ilçe arasında, Hoca’yı sahiplenme yönünde, sürekli bir tartışma konusu olmuş.

Anadolu'daki İlk Bakanlar Kurulu

Bakanlar Kurulu Anadolu’da ilk kez Sivrihisar Zaimağa Konağı’nda, Atatürk’ün katılımıyla toplanmış. Konak, şehrin merkezinde yer alıyor. Restorasyon için Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı çalışmalara başlamış .



Sivrihisar’da tarihi yapıların büyük bölümü şehir merkezi etrafında toplanmıştır.Kısa bir gezintiyle hepsini gezip görmek mümkün. Eğer gelmişken biraz da spor yapalım diyorsanız, ilçenin sivri kayalıkları tırmanmak için ideal. Kayalıklar üzerindeki Kayasaat’e tırmanarak buradan bölgeyi kuşbakışı görebilir, fotoğraflayabilirsiniz.

Kibele’nin Büyük Tapınağı

Antik Anadolu'da yeryüzündeki bütün varlıkların doğurucusu olarak bilinen ana tanrıça Kibele’nin büyük tapınağı Sivrihisar sınırları içerisinde. Geçmişi M.Ö 3500’lere dayanıyor. Ana Tanrıça, şehir ilkbahara girerken, büyük tapınağı ziyarete gelenlerle birlikte diz çökerek ve kollarını açarak Arayit Dağı arkasından sabahın ilk ışıklarını beklermiş. İlkbaharda bitkilerin yeni baştan canlanışı kutlanır ve doğanın müziğinin ezgileri duyulurmuş.

Pessinus’u ortaya çıkarmak için ilk kazı çalışmaları 1967 yılında yapılmaya başlandı. Mabet, tiyatro, çarşı, nekropol, mermer su kanalları ve bir kısım bina temelleri ortaya çıkarılmış. Helenistik ve Roma çağına ait olan bu yapılardan yalnızca mabet kalıntıları Frig uygarlığına kadar uzanıyor.

Eti ve Frig uygarlıkların yanı sıra Roma, Bizans ve Anadolu Selçuklu gibi önemli uygarlıklara da ev sahipliği yapan Sivrihisar’da, bu dönemlere ait kalıntılar da var.

Ankara, İzmir ve Eskişehir yollarının keşişme noktası olan Sivrihisar Eskişehir’e 95, Ankara’ya 133 kilometre.

Yemekleri

İlçe’nin geleneksel yiyeceklerinin başında, un ve suyla yapılan, içerisinde tavuk etinin de yer aldığı arap aşı geliyor. Aynı zamanda bamya çorbası, kelem dolması ve helvası meşhur. Bunun yanında meşhur bulgur pilavını ve bazlamasını da unutmamak gerek. Tabii arap aşı Yozgat'ın da meşhur yemeği... Ama anlaşılan Nasreddin Hoca gibi bu konuda da kimse böyle güzel lezzetlerden vazgeçmek niyetinde değil...