habemus ceterus

On writing

ceterus — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 06:48:47 +0000

What on earth does it take to write a good piece, to empty the bowels of your brain onto a white sheet or a computer screen? How do writers yield what they usually yield in loads? Do they follow plans, set daily limits and deadlines? Or is writing done spontaneously, as it is for me, by everyone who usually works with pen and paper?

I thought I personally need a fresh, well-rested head, first of all, to produce anything worthy of spending your precious time reading. And, secondly, inspiration is crucial. Not just inspiration in the general sense, but the one you receive from reading an article or another piece of printed work, when the article is so good as you cannot think about anything else but its subject, that you scribble the witty phrases and well-suited parallels so that you can re-use them some time in your own writing. Such pieces are quite rare. I am talking not about the general quality of articles you find in the upmarket newspapers – they’re all good in terms of quality, the usage of language and facts. Only once or twice in a month, if I’m lucky, do I come across a really good article, the one that – with all the criteria of a well-written article being met – can simply inspire. Inspire to re-read it many more times. To memorise the patterns and the specificities of structure. To dig in between the lines in search of things that make the statements sound and the language impeccable.

I will have fulfilled the mission of my life if I write something that good some time in the future.

On the value of human life

ceterus — Thu, 10 May 2007 04:59:09 +0000

I watched Knockaround Guys last night, and for the first time since I watched Donnie Brasco, it made me think about the genre of gangster movies and, more particularly, about a question worth devoting whole volumes to: the value of human life for “wisemen,” “goodfellas,” “reservoir dogs” and, after all, “knockaround guys.” You may say this smells of the good old habit of looking for hardcore philosophy in the mainstream culture, but I could not help writing about it. Maybe this was the underlying purpose for Brian Koppelman and David Levien, the directors, and it might have been so for Tarantino and Scorsese, and if this is the case, then I am ready to raise my both hands and confess that all of these directors have succeeded in tricking me into their traps. I am not a very impressionable guy when it comes to Hollywood movies, however high they might hit on the ‘extreme graphic violence’ ratings (I can boast I have seen tons of less child-friendly pieces of filmed shit so far in my life), but these scenes make me lose some of my control and yell, “Why is it so fucking easy to kill a human being, with all his feelings, dreams, memories, and all for money?” I guess my inner eye of the critic which beholds the screen along with the eye of a normal movie-goer guy gets blurred by some veil, and it’s probably its tears that close the view. I cannot judge such movies, because the scenes of useless killing of human beings – and these scenes are, you know, very much different from others, where no special accent is paid to the death, like the ones with war scenes where the death of people is taken as a matter of fact – occupy my mind and blur other, better parts of the film.

What would these movies be without those scenes? Collections of rude jokes, witty robbery plots, and pricky guys fussing around with some other big dude that can blow your head up for a minute mistake, like in the case of the poor Marbles in the Knockaround Guys. Would these films turn into boring shit if the director cut the scenes where Vic Vega, played by Michael Madsen, cuts the unlucky policeman’s ear, or where Nicky Santoro, personified by Joe Pesci, is buried alive along with his brother? This is the question I will be thinking till the next gangster movie I happen to watch in the future.

On Istanbul

ceterus — Thu, 03 May 2007 07:22:23 +0000

What is it in a city you were not born in, you did not spend your childhood in, and you don’t know very well, that creeps into your heart, finds a warm and cosy place, and settles there for the rest of your life? What makes you shiver with excitement when you look through the photos you took there on your last visit? What is it, that makes your heart thump every time you see a familiar street on TV or on a friend’s photo, or when you read a novel set in that city and you can follow the streets with the narrator? Can a man fall in love with a city?

Sezen Aksu‘s İstanbul Hatırası comes pouring into my ears without warning, and I see the Blue Mosque in front of me, magnificent in the morning sun, its minarets plunging deep into the firmament over the Bosphorus. A seagull is flying over my head, the wind of its wings patting my hair, its squeak telling me the sea is near. I turn my head and see the Ayasofya, weary with age but fabulous among its minarets. There I stand, faced with a dilemma – which way to go: take the road up to Istanbul University and the famous Kapalı Çarşı, or go down along the tram way to Sirkeci, Galata Bridge, all the way to Taksim Square?

I take the second option and walk down, mix in the crowd of enchanted tourists, take a glance at a couple of roadside shops, pass through the crowded Sirkeci, eat a caught-and-grilled-at-the-spot fish on the Bosphorus shore. Don’t I love this city, I think to myself, my thoughts getting carried away by a faraway ship’s hooting, overhead seagulls’ squeaking, by fish-mongers chanting tirelessly the welcoming buyrun buyrun! Don’t I like it here? – I gather my thoughts back. If there is a single city in the world that I love the way I love the most unforgettable woman in my life, it is definitely Istanbul.

On the football other

ceterus — Thu, 03 May 2007 05:42:11 +0000

Last night, chewing the hem of my T-shirt with excitement, I witnessed the falling down of the best football club in the world in probably the most important match of the season (although the Stamford Bridge clash is yet to come later in the month), in a night when they were outplayed on all fronts by the Italians. Disappointment aside, I discovered one curious change in me – football put me tête-à-tête with my inner other. I stubbornly refused to acknowledge that AC Milan were far better in many respects, although in the back of my mind I understood that that was the fact. I hated AC Milan and the Italian football (I supported the French in the last World Cup Final), having tried all my life to avoid hating anyone, even for a reason. At one point I felt that I was losing control, cursing the luck, although I had always succeeded in keeping myself calm, even in situations too hot to handle. Shortly, I literally stepped out of my skin, looked at myself from a distance, and saw not the regular me, but a typical United fan, chewing salted peanuts, washing them down with lager, swearing and shouting my lungs out, attracting surprised looks from the roommate around.

Today, with stains washed away with morning coffee, I look at the yesterday experience with a sober head, and feel on my own skin what Nick Hornby so masterfully depicted in his ode to Arsenal. I lack Hornby’s vocabulary, wit, vision, and experience, despite my numerous visits to the Old Trafford (I remember the first time: I walked the five miles between the University and the football ground), otherwise I would produce something similar to one of his chapters on losing European matches. At this stage this post is the best I can produce. Let me then remember last night for the inspiration it produced to look into my inner nature, rather than for the ignominy of the club I feel I belong to.

On Kurt Vonnegut

ceterus — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 11:49:50 +0000

Kurt Vonnegut “has died and will always die” on April eleventh, 2007. So it goes. “A skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares how we are or what we do,” as he described himself in a short story, he was more inclined, as I see now, to accept the Tralfamadorian perception of time. I am – and I believe so are many other readers – more comfortable with the Tralfamadorian truth as long as Vonnegut is concerned; it is nice to think he is always around, alive, smoking his ‘Pall Malls’ in his Cape Cod house, “no matter how dead” he may seem to be at this very moment.

I turn the last page of Slaughterhouse Five with a bitter smile on my face and a strong feeling that I haven’t had enough of this hilarious horror. This is the book in which Vonnegut laughs at the world with tears in his eyes. This laughter is heard in every line, on every page. Slaughterhouse Five is too short for a book that makes one feel so good, and, at the same time, too long for the one that reveals so much about the world’s true nature.

I must confess – the book had long been on my wishlist and later, on the bookshelf, until the very day when the bad news came. It was the book that I felt I was obliged to read, but never laid my hands upon before April 11. And now that I am writing these lines I am thinking “Do we really have to wait until death comes, to pay tribute to this or that writer or painter?” I feel that I should have read the book before, but find comfort once more in the Tralfamadorian philosophy of life – “to concentrate on the happy moments of his life, and to ignore the unhappy ones-to stare only at pretty things as eternity failed to go by.”