hom returns istanbul pamuk ron

HOM returns: Istanbul, Pamuk, Ron Rosenbaum, SAR

A week ago Sunday I got lost in Cihangir, an Istanbul neighborhood of

windy little streets and cul-de-sacs sloping down toward the

Bosphorus. The hour was early. There were many cats in the street but

few people, and even the cats, staking out their spots in the shade,

seemed to be sleeping in. I knew I couldn't be far from the main drag

on Istiklal Caddesi. Yet the morning heat and the crazy-quilt

topography kept throwing me off course. I passed certain landmarks

several times--a vertiginous staircase, a small-to-medium size mosque

with the usual loudspeakers mounted at the top of the minaret--and

wondered at one point whether I would spend the rest of my life in

Cihangir.

As it happens, that's where Orhan Pamuk has spent much of his life,

and where he wrote Istanbul: Memories and the City, which I began

reading shortly after my floundering visit to his neighborhood. I

haven't finished it yet. What strikes me so far is the pervasive sense

of melancholy, which the Turks call h�z�n. Pamuk is careful to

differentiate this emotion from the solitary blackness described by,

say, Robert Burton. H�z�n is a communal feeling--an equal-opportunity

brand of desolation--shared by all Istanbullus, living as they do amid

the wreckage of a great past. The double-decker ruins of the Byzantine

and Ottoman empires, he writes, "are reminders that the present city

is so poor and confused that it can never again dream of rising to its

former heights of wealth, power, and culture. It is no more possible

to take pride in these neglected dwellings, which dirt, dust, and mud

have blended into their surroundings, than it is to rejoice in the

beautiful old wooden houses that as a child I watched burn down one by

one."

Nobody likes the post-imperial blahs, of course. The mighty, having

fallen, are apt to be peevishly nostalgic. But after reading a couple

of hundred pages, you begin to wonder whether Pamuk isn't seeing the

city through h�z�n-colored spectacles and projecting his personal

sense of woe onto everything in sight. At one point during the trip I

encountered an American woman who had lived in Istanbul during the

late 1950s and early 1960s: the exact period Pamuk describes in the

first half of his book. She had read not only parts of Istanbul but

some of Pamuk's fictional output (she mentioned Snow), and found his

morose portrait of the city almost unrecognizable. No doubt the author

would reply that h�z�n is an indigenous emotion, not something to be

glommed onto by a Western visitor. Still, when Pamuk writes about

Resat Ekram Kocu, author of the Istanbul Encyclopedia (which sounds

like a vaguely homoerotic variation on Ripley's Believe It Or Not), he

seems to acknowledge that sorrow might be a personal matter after all:

"I'm left feeling that Kocu's sadness is less the result of the fall

of the Ottoman Empire and the decline of Istanbul than of his own

shadowy childhood in those yalis and k�sks." Well, I'll keep reading.

Next: I share many of Ron Rosenbaum's enthusiasms. (Three cheers for

Charles Portis!) I admire his smarts and polemical zeal. But he seems

to have gone temporarily off the rails in his latest New York Observer

piece, where he begins by disclosing a link between the opening of

Nabokov's Pale Fire and a fairly obscure poem by Robert Frost. No

problem there--especially since the brilliant Brian Boyd has signed

off on this bit of textual sleuthing. It's all downhill from there,

though. The long poem at the heart of Pale Fire, Rosenbaum argues,

is one of the most underrated American poems of the past

century.... Some have mistakenly called it a parody; some have

shown that it demonstrates the justness of [fictional poet John]

Shade's self-deprecatory characterization of himself as an 'oozy

footstep' behind Frost. In fact, taken on its own, it surpasses in

every respect anything that Frost has ever done. Deal with it,

Frostians.

It takes an ear of the purest tin--a kind of metallurgical wonder--to

make these assertions. Nabokov was a great novelist but a minor poet.

The diction of "Pale Fire" dips into poetic flabbiness with the very

second line ("false azure" indeed), and while there are passages of

tremendous beauty and cutting wit, VN just isn't in the same ballpark

as top-drawer Frost. No comparison. Deal with it, Nabokovians.

Finally, I've been listening to the lavish two-disc delight that is

Sam Cooke's SAR Records Story 1959-1965. SAR was Cooke's own label, a

hothouse-cum-laboratory where he reigned as producer, songwriter, and

impresario. The first disc is gospel (which the canny Cooke kept

nudging toward pop), the second disc is pop (which he tried to infuse

with at least a hint of gospel ardor), and there's plenty of wheat

amidst the chaff. Hell, even the chaff is pretty damn great. You get

the Soul Stirrers--with Paul Foster, Jimmie Outler, and Johnnie Taylor

all laboring mightily to fill the departed Cooke's shoes--and R.H.

Harris and three excellent cuts by the youthful Womack Brothers. Note

their stirring version of "Somewhere There's A God," with Curtis

Womack pulling out all the stops. Then, on the pop side, note the

quasi-identical "Somewhere There's A Girl," sung by Cooke

himself--talk about turning on a secular dime! All this plus the Simms