Wednesday evening habitus post

I am auditing our Media MA course on research methodologies at the back seat, participating sometimes, losing myself in the web or thoughts in other times. My friends wait me for a card-playing session and I have half an hour more to go. It is not necessary to be here in the class, but i actually like it to audit. Nice theoretical discussion, a nice group of students and Halil hoca is a playful lecturer.

For more than 10 days, I have the hype mode but sometimes I fell hard like this afternoon. Now I recover again. Too much work to do but in general I am productice. I am getting back at my usual reading pace, working on some vital issues like necessary documentation to become an Assistant Professor. Anyway, still good news from Beşiktaş follow and a bunch of unrelated stuff I have come accros to towards the end of this post….

Aids awareness campaign from Barcelona Spain with a very obvious but also very strong tagline “Fuck You SIDA” (Fuck You Aids).
The organisation Federació d’Associacions Coordinadora Gai-Lesbiana says: Hate this disease and fight it with the use of condoms.FOUND IN Fuck You SIDA!

Step by step, Kurdish initiative continues….

We were expecting more fist-fighting in the parliament meeting on Friday but relatively civilized quarrels dominated Friday’s meeting. Main opposition CHP is gone all crazy- literally indeed- and their reaction is ridiculous and beyond reason. Their childlike reaction and nearly criminal discourse (one higher official of CHP explicity stated that the best solution is what the State did during Dersim Rebellion, that is outright massacre…) have to be contained. I believe that AKP, DTP and a few liberals with possible indirect support from MHP can further the Initiative. Yes, MHP, nationalist party, does in fact acted quite civilized yesterday and despite their harsh criticism on the Kurdish Initiative their love of and support for the State may turn out to be a positive sign in this case. Because they wery well realized that this initiative may help unite the nation again. Armed suppression did not work as the the three decades had demonstrated…

Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Deniz Baykal addresses members of parliament as Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan (L) and his Education Minister Nimet Cubukcu listen in the background during a debate at the Turkish Parliament in Ankara, November 13, 2009. Turkey’s parliament is set to discuss on Friday reforms designed to boost the rights of the country’s Kurdish minority and end a 25-year separatist conflict, moves seen boosting its European Union membership ambitions.REUTERS/Umit Bektas

Turkey unveils reforms for Kurds

from BBC News

The Turkish government announces plans to expand the rights of Kurds, who for years have alleged discrimination.

 

A full list of reforms in Turkish here.

Museum of Innocence is out in English…

Museum of Innocence

last updated: 19 Dec 2009: 10:30

I have read the novel, The Museum of Innocence,  in Turkish last year. In strictly literary terms, this is his weakest novel. However, a very different sort of project intended here. An actual museum has been built in Istanbul and will be opened soon. This book  is a novel-catalogue that actual museum and a great documentary of a particular section of Istanbul’s everyday life. Another intervention to the lives of republican Turkish elites. In the mean time, I have a plan to assign the first 100 pages to my first year students which has a very rich account of approaches to relations, sex and gender roles which are still valid in contemporary Turkish lives.

I was not in love with the literary level of narratives particularly but towards the end I fell in love and in the last pages  I remember feeling sad and crying… Thank you Orhan Pamuk. You do enrich our lives.

Social fabric roundup

trilemma: rotten, soldier, objector

A documentary from Turkey examining how gays and the Turkish military view each other in a complex and changing society in which military service is considered a rite of passage for every man. The Turkish army regards gays as sick or diseased and issue medical exemption reports to gays known as “rotten” reports. Gays have to decide whether to try to get such a report, do their military service, or become conscientious objectors.

LINKS to DOWNLOAD HERE.

“The century of Claude Lévi-Strauss

How the great anthropologist, now approaching his 100th birthday, has earned a place in the prestigious Pléiade library

Patrick Wilcken

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In 1938, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss drove a mule train up a derelict telegraph line, which wound its way across the scrublands of Mato Grosso state in Brazil. He headed an ethnographic team conducting fieldwork among the semi-nomadic Nambikwara who roamed the plains through the dry season. Photographs from the journey look dated even for their era. Men in pith helmets mingling with virtually naked tribesmen, mules heaving crates of equipment through the wilderness, laden-down canoes and jungle campsites – it all has the feel of some grand nineteenth-century scientific expedition. Yet, after the Second World War, Lévi-Strauss would add a modern twist to anthropology with the development of a completely new way of thinking about ethnographic data.

“Reuters sues academic for making a Firefox plugin that lets you annotate and reference articles

By Cory Doctorow on Copyfight

Espen sez, "In a move leading me to suspect they have hired laid-off lawyers from RIAA, Endnote (owned by Reuters) has sued GMU and Dan Cohen for the latest version of Zotero (a Firefox plugin that lets you save, annotate and academically reference articles you find online). This is an amazingly stupid market move: Suing an academic for making software for other academics because the software allows you to convert styles (which in turn were freely contributed by other academics) – when your main market is academics."

“Orhan Pamuk: Characters pull me along in their own directions…

By ABDULLAH KILIÇ

These days Turkey is abuzz about Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk and his new book, “Masumiyet Müzesi” (Museum of Innocence), with a first printing of 100,000 copies. Pamuk is quite pleased with the initial reactions from the press and from the first readers of this new work.

Sun Aug 31, 6:46 AM ET

A woman holds a copy of the new book by Turkey’s first Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk at a bookshop in Istanbul. The book, entitled "The Museum of Innocence", is a love story between a rich man and a poor girl set in Istanbul.

(AFP/Lydia Mutschmann)

Orhan Pamuk: Winning the Nobel Prize Made Everything Political
Deutsche Welle – Germany
Ahead of the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair in October with Turkey as the guest country, Nobel Prize winning author Orhan Pamuk spoke to Deutsche Welle about …

Orhan Pamuk Focuses On Love This Time In His Latest Novel
Turkish Press – Plymouth,MI,USA
ISTANBUL – World-famous Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, focuses on love as well as details in

New Orhan Pamuk novel released today and Erkan republishes his piece on Pamuk novels

Turkey’s Nobel laureate Pamuk to release new novel

World-famous Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, focuses on love as well as details in daily life in his latest novel ‘Masumiyet Muzesi’, (the Museum of Innocence)."

 

Originally published on October 20, 2006

A brief -recent- history of Erkan thru Orhan Pamuk’s novels…

Here is my most personal take with Orhan Pamuk. I had always a particular taste for his literary talents- I know this will annoy some of my loyal readers though:(- and here is an experiment of writing inspired by Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch

I don’t exactly know when the first time I read a Pamuk novel. It was probably in my first or second year in the college and I should have worked hard to go beyond the intellectualist consensus not to read him. That is, there was already a Pamuk buzz and “intellectuals” do not read the popular. His current publisher in Turkey, Iletisim, had transferred him from another, Can, and though I hadn’t read him yet, I already heard the transfer price, that was a first in the history of Turkish literature I guess, and this had a negative affect on some of his would be readers. But things change and I have a taste for the popular anyway. When I started to read Pamuk I had realized that he didn’t deserve to be popular (!), and hence Erkan’s infatuation with Pamuk novels begins.