Monday Scramble: King
New at Portico: On Thursday night — knowing that I’d be involved with moving furniture on Friday morning — I went across the street to the movies, and saw Inglourious Basterds. I was very uncertain about what to expect. Although I liked Jackie Browne, there was something about Pulp Fiction that I disliked very deeply, and I never saw either of the Kill Bills. The new movie, however, is hugely fun. Setting the film in Forties Paris instead of Nineties Los Angeles has a lot to do with it. The sad fact is that, washboards notwithstanding, people used to look a lot better.
The week’s New Yorker story is by Orhan Pamuk, and it made me wish that I could read it in Turkish. As languages go, Turkish is like Japanese — very different from English. (Chinese is practically a member of the same linguistic family, by comparison). Maureen Freely, whose father taught at Robert College, Turkey’s most prestigious institution of higher learning, and who therefore grew up speaking Turkish as well as English (and, on the evidence, a rich, literate Turkish to boot), continues to serve as the writer’s alter ego. I read the other day, at Marginal Revolution, that Mr Pamuk’s new book, The Museum of Innocents, has already appeared in German. What’s with that? Is it the generation of Turkish-ancestry Germans who don’t really understand their parents’ language?
The Book Review was very brief this week. Perhaps our rentrée littéraire will pick up next week. Perhaps the cool weather will catalyse the wholly new approach to book reviewing that the Book Review so desperately needs. Does anyone under forty read it, except for professional reasons?
This week’s book, rather cursorily dealt with, is Niall Ferguson’s objectionally usefull history of finance, The Ascent of Money. If it were not against all the commandments of my religion (every single one of them, except for the one banning sex with unequals), I would watch the TV version of the book, just to gloat over its flashy thinness. As it is, I can barely contain the horrified glee that Harvard’s hiring of such a media-savvy professor occasions. As for the book, it’s something that, for all of its problems and drawbacks, ought to be read by every intelligent person.