Pamuk lecture in Portland, OR

Just read the notes on the Pamuk lecture in Portland, Oregon by James Tata.

The fact that he's distanced himself from the American Congress statement on the nearly century old Armenian genocide, saying that it's an internal matter is only slightly disappointing. Turkey is under enormous strain right not. Turkish troops entering northern Iraq, into Kurdish controlled regions, are going to cause even more strain between American and Turkish relations. As much as i loathe to say it, i'm not sure that making this an issue at this moment in history in Congress of all the times it has been and will be possible is all that wise. Bush might actually be right.

(I can be convinced otherwise though.)

As an American, my favorite Pamuk book is The Black Book, not Snow, and oddly, i believe that prefer the Guneli Gup translation to the Maureen Freely one.

Want to know a dirty little secret of mine? Of Pamuk's greatest novelists, Tolstoy, Mann, Dostoevsky, and Proust, i have read only Dostoevsky, and of him, only Notes from Underground and The Idiot. I barely remember either one, as those were in my chemical years.