LITERATURE & ART

I want a softer and democratic leadership in politics and business, and, by contrast, I want rowdy, uproarious, colorful, irreverent individualism/opposition/anger in arts.

The interpretation by Ant Aksan focuses on the futility of the revolution and the continuity of repression: The actress, Ayşegül Sünetçioğlu – mad, outraged, dangerous –knows that torture has not been abolished and that the same enemies of 1793--war profiteers, religious bigots, and capitalist overlords--also prosper in 1808. The audience is reminded that much holds true over time.

For the sake of my youthful love of the writer Pınar Kür, I will forget that her last book “Sadık Bey” – written after a silence of ten years – exists. If anybody asks, I have never read it and I still think of Kür as the brilliant creator of/writer for angry young women, not impotent old men.

Unlike the description of September in MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, I shall not have a fire and trees without leaves – only a windy sea and lots of books as I sit on a sunny porch and re-read the Autumn Journal and equally beautiful Autumn Sequel in the next nine days of holidays. Like the Autumn Journal, I shall hear the buzz around me and hope that I am wrong and that the sequel will not look anything like Louis MacNeice’s.

Grab your last chances to visit “Byzantium’s Other Empire: Trebizond” at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations on Istiklal Caddesi, Istanbul.  The exhibition shows the Hagia Sophia Church in this Black Sea city, which was a museum between 1968 and 2013, but was reconverted into a mosque, with the restored frescoes covered.

A male figure, totally naked, points a white stick at a murder of crows at his feet, keeping you guessing about whether he is a blind man with a stick groping his way through a complex puzzle or a tyrant trying to force the birds into a pattern. The name “Hierarchy” seems to favor the second interpretation.