Orhan Pamuk on his newest book

(Thanks Jenny!)

Kitchen portrait

Making fresh lasagna for dinner.

Rice fields, Syauli Bazar

Rice fields, Syauli Bazar, originally uploaded by timurhammond.

At work on other things, but another shot of Nepal.

Call for Papers AAG 2010

Call for Papers: 2010 Meeting of the Association of American Geographers
Representing Place: Methods, Tensions, and the Problem of Authenticity

“What I am describing may not, in the end, be special to Istanbul, and perhaps, with the westernization of the entire world, it is inevitable. Perhaps this is why I sometimes read Westerners’ accounts not at arm’s length, as someone else’s exotic dreams, but drawn close by, as if there were my own memories. I enjoy coming across a detail that I have noticed but never remarked upon, perhaps because no one else I know has either.”
- Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City

Part of Orhan Pamuk’s project in his memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, is the authentic representation of Istanbul as a place of vibrant experience. Yet in his representation of Istanbul, Pamuk encounters two related problems: First, almost all of the historical accounts of Istanbul during the Ottoman Empire were penned by Westerners, visitors to the city of sultans. Second, Pamuk remains self-conscious about the non-Turkish origins of his own literary craft. Is it possible, he asks, for a Turk to write a memoir (itself a mode of representation with its own specific Western geography) about Istanbul that relies on Western accounts?

Pamuk answers in the affirmative, but his memoir raises a set of questions of broad importance to geographers. How do we come to be able to represent a place? What is at stake in the representation of a place? Do modes of representation (novels, paintings, photography, film) have their own geography? If so, what are the issues raised by taking those modes of representation elsewhere?

Broadly, this session is organized around the recognition that any representation of place - be it image, text, or sculpture - does not simply emerge from an essential experience of place. Rather, representations of particular places (like Pamuk’s Istanbul) come from somewhere else. Thus, to represent a place is to both search for a genius loci and to articulate relationships with other places. In the case of Pamuk’s Istanbul, his memoir is both an authentic representation of Istanbul and an argument that Istanbul can only be represented by drawing on Western writers and modes of representation. Istanbul: Memories and the City introduces what might be a necessary tension in any representation of place: They always come from somewhere else.
This session aims to gather a diverse set of methodological and conceptual approaches. Possible specific topics might include (but are certainly not limited to):

* Seeing the desert: ecology and imagination in the American West
* Bollywood and Hollywood: representations of India on the silver screen
* Representing jihad: the Middle East on film after 9/11
* Representations of the self in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North
* Learning to paint the world: Mughal painting under the rule of Jahangir
* Poetry and place: Robert Frost and “The Gift Outright”
* On the outside looking in: Representations of the United States in foreign media

The session will include 5 papers; presenters will have 20 minutes for their presentation and discussion. Interested parties should send a CV and a 250-word abstract to Timur Hammond at timur.hammond@gmail.com no later than October 25, 2009. Preference will be given to papers with a non-European focus, but papers exploring “Western” representations of place in a comparative dimension are also welcome. All questions will be responded to as quickly as possible.

Some explanation for an absence...

Annapurna South from Ghandruk, originally uploaded by timurhammond.

I took a trip to Nepal. The centerpiece of the trip was 7 days trekking to Annapurna Base Camp (which sits a shade over 14,000 feet, but well below the summit of Annapurna itself). This photo is from our second day on the trail, a glimpse of Annapurna South before the sky filled in with clouds.

A world on fire

We were driving east out of Santa Monica yesterday afternoon when we caught a glimpse of the clouds generated by the Station Fire. The heat is so intense that it's generated its own microclimate and sent plumes of smoke billowing into the sky. By the time we made it to Mar Vista, the clouds weren't nearly as dramatic, but there was something still almost apocalyptic about the view. Waking up this morning to news of the possible loss of radio transmission towers on Mt. Wilson didn't help.



But two other videos that I stumbled across today give a much better sense of the size and the scope of the fire:

Station Fire from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

And Will Campbell's time lapse:

Framing the world

I've been lucky enough to see both Lawrence of Arabia and West Side Story in their original 70 mm format, and it's a completely different experience. This video explains some of the reasons for that difference.



via kottke

Traffic arrives on LA streets

Not sure whether to be thrilled or worried by the ability to now see how the surface streets are doing. On the one hand, it's great: It's a visual confirmation of apocryphal wisdom (like, don't ever take Wilshire through Beverly Hills unless you have to) and kind of convenient. On the other, it's always possible to worry: How will this new version of Traffic continue to change how people live and navigate in Los Angeles? Moving through the city becomes much less about a narrative experience of place and much more about a kind of schematized efficiency.

(via LAist and Google LatLong)