Unlike the explosive growth seen in the US and Western Europe, Turkey’s eBook industry is just getting started.
Mehmet İnhan, general manager of the web retailer idefix.com (also Turkey’s leading ebookstore), beleives that Turkey is still in the early stages of eBook growth, and he estimated that around 1,500 eBooks are produced natively in Turkey each year out of a total of 30thousand titles published.
“In Turkey, we have not yet reached a level that is statistically significant,” said İnhan. “In the countries mentioned, hundreds of thousands of e-books are in circulation, whereas in Turkey, the number of books that have been released in e-book format [in one year] is only 1,500.”
He also noted that there was a limited supply of eReaders in Turkey, which also would affect eBook growth. He doesn’t expect Turkey to catch up to the West for another four to five years.
via eBooks Are Off to a Slow Start in Turkey – eBookNewser.
Shane McCauley / Gallery Stock Evliya Çelebi relates a magical version of the Islamic empire.
Evliya Çelebi relates a magical version of the Islamic empire.
There are important reasons why we should all learn more about life during the Ottoman Empire. It was the last era in which a sultan-caliph, a sort of Islamic emperor-pope, held sway over virtually the entire Muslim geosphere. Many Islamists today explicitly yearn for the return of such a unified Muslim super-state. At the Ottoman Empire’s zenith, roughly between 1600 and 1700, Sharia dominated human affairs from India to Morocco and deep into Europe, stopping just short of Vienna. That era could furnish clues to what it might be like again if the Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk gain widespread momentum. Furthermore, with Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan banging on about his party’s “neo-Ottoman” approach to foreign policy, it behooves us to know what coherent world view, if any, he and other nostalgists are drawing on for their grand designs.
The most exhaustive chronicle of the Ottoman world and environs was recorded by Evliya Çelebi (b. 1611), a figure celebrated in the Muslim world as one of history’s greatest travel writers, on par with Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo. A Turk born in Istanbul to a privileged court family, Çelebi traveled for about 45 years, from 1640 up to the year he died in Cairo. He spent those decades crisscrossing the sultan’s dominions, completing pilgrimages to Mecca and Jerusalem and even entering “infidel” Vienna as an ambassador. A native Istanbullu, his intricate portrait of the costumes and conventions of his hometown remains the richest source text for historians. He wrote 10 long volumes of his Seyahatname, or travelogue, in the ornately archaic Arabic-scripted Ottoman language of his day, a language as remote to modern Turks as Latin to Italians. Turks know all about him, name parks after him, but very few read him at any length.
A volume of outtakes from his work, titled An Ottoman Traveller: Selections From the Book of Travels of Evliya Çelebi, was recently published to coincide with the 500th anniversary of Çelebi’s birth. Selected and translated by Ottoman experts Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim, it gives us the most accessible glimpse to date into Çelebi’s text, itself a window onto a highly cultivated sensibility living at a peak moment in Islamic civilization. Çelebi embarked on his travels two years after the brutally efficient Sultan Murat IV reconquered Baghdad from the Persians in 1638. (The honorific title of Çelebi denoted a gentleman or esquire of Sultan Murat’s era, and indeed the ancestors of Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi originally came from Turkey with the sultan’s invasion forces.) In various campaigns Murat had stamped out revolts in Anatolia and stabilized the empire’s borders. The ensuing order made the Seyahatname possible, though Murat died the same year that Çelebi set out.
The book can be enjoyed on many levels—for its descriptions of towns, natural wonders, and ancient monuments such as the Parthenon and the Kaaba; for its Sufi-dervish notions of “mystical” love; for its nutty take on history, such as the bios of Jesus and Plato; and for the pleasant company of its unreliable narrator. But one’s first reaction is to marvel at the utter strangeness of the world on view. From Istanbul’s guilds of lion tamers and snow procurers to sorcerers and torturers in far-flung provinces, the unfolding panorama teeming with marvels and superstitions seems closer to the world of antiquity than to our own day.
via The Arab World’s Greatest Travel Writer – Newsweek.
Series Ticket (7 concerts, 4 masterclasses): £47 (£36)
Tickets available from The Box, 0121 245 4455 orwww.birmingham-box.co.uk
Beethoven: Sonata in B flat major, Op.22
Liszt: Un Sospiro (from Trois etudes de concert, S.144)
Rachmaninov: Etude Tableau in G minor, Op.33, No.8
Rachmaninov: Etude Tableau in E flat, Op.33, No.7
Chopin: Ballade No.1 in G minor, Op.23
A photography exhibition tracing urban change in Istanbul, Beirut, Amman, Cairo and Dubai will open in Townhouse Gallery of contemporary art next Sunday
Ahram Online, Tuesday 14 Jun 2011
Bas Princen
On Sunday 19 June, the Refuge–Five Cities’ Portfolios exhibition will open at Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary art.
The exhibition features photography by Bas Princen, an architect and photographer of public spaces based in Rotterdam. Through his photographs, Princen captures urban landscape in Istanbul, Beirut, Amman, Cairo and Dubai, tracing the changes these cities have undergone.
Princen studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven and the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam and has exhibited in various international group and solo shows. He contributed to the research project ‘Shrinking Cities’ and the art project Atelier HSL. In 2004 he published his book Artificial Arcadia and received the Charlotte Köhler prize for promising young artists and architects. Together with Milica Topalovic in 2006 he was nominated for the shortlist of the Prix de Rome Architecture.
The opening will host a discussion with the artist.
The exhibition will be on-going until 6 July at the first floor in Townhouse Gallery of contemporary art located in Hussein El Me’mar Pasha street, off Mahmoud Bassiouny street in Downtown Cairo.
via Refuge–Five Cities’ Portfolios to open at Townhouse Gallery – Visual Art – Arts & Culture – Ahram Online.
After months of doubt, Amy Winehouse fans can finally see a light at the end of the tunnel with less than a week to go before the troubled diva of soul music takes to İstanbul’s Küçükçiftlik open-air stage next Monday.
In what will be Winehouse’s first performance in Turkey, fans are being urged to snap up the few remaining tickets for a rare opportunity to see the eccentric English singer-songwriter perform live.
Winehouse, who sent waves of relief echoing through her considerable Turkish following when she checked out of rehab at the start of June, began her European tour in Serbia last week.
Experimental London group Oi Va Voi, whose sound draws on traditional Jewish music with contemporary electronic influences, will open for Winehouse in her İstanbul stint.
Winehouse with her infamous weave of black hair shot to stardom with her “Back to Black,” studio album in 2006, with which she became the first British singer to win five Grammys. Tickets are available at www.biletix.com.
The show centers on the famous artist’s films and polaroids, which are coming to Turkey’s largest city for the first time
Displaying works that captured the beauty of the glamorous in the everyday, Istanbul’s Galerist is hosting a much-anticipated exhibition of iconic 20th-century artist Andy Warhol throughout June.
The show centers on the famous artist’s films and polaroids, which are coming to Turkey’s largest city for the first time
“The films and film portraits were very important for Warhol’s career,” Geralyn Huxley, curator of film and video at New York’s Andy Warhol Museum, as well as the curator of the Istanbul show, told the Hürriyet Daily News last week. “He spent five years totally concentrated on filming people. It was during the 1960s, when he first started the change over from commercial art to fine art.”
“I only wanted to find great people and let them be themselves and talk about what they usually talk about,” Warhol once said. Duly, the artist filmed famous people, aiming to show them as beautifully as they were in their daily lives while doing everyday activities.
In fact, the “real,” inner meaning behind the legendary Warhol works, such as of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, unravels itself. The videos, which reveal the hidden aspect of Warhol, also show the viewers how the artist’s interest in celebrities rose over time. Warhol transformed celebrities and created unique works with his film portraits.
“As a child, around the age of 8, Andy started to collect photographs of movie stars,” said Eric C. Shiner, acting director of the Andy Warhol Museum, told the Daily News.
“He sent letters to Hollywood studios and contacted Shirley Temple. Temple sent her photograph to Andy Warhol,” he said.
Warhol had a book of movie stars and celebrities, whom he adored; as a result, he fed his hunger for celebrities by painting and filming them.
Musician Lou Reed, writer Susan Sontag, socialite Edie Sedgwick, poet Allen Ginsberg, artist Dennis Hopper and others are featured in the films.
Warhol’s iconic works, such as Soup Cans, Elvis, and Marilyn started to gain fame as Warhol began working on his film projects. The films show a different aspect of Warhol’s art, according to Huxley.
Whereas the people and his paintings were iconic and glamorous, the people in his films were natural. Beauty had a deeper meaning for Warhol; while he valued beauty, his understanding was different than the beauty of the stars he filmed. He liked them to talk and to do everyday activities.
“Talkers are doing something. Beauties are being something. Which isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just that I don’t know what it is they’re being,” Warhol said in the book “The Philosophy of Warhol.”
“I really don’t care that much about ‘Beauties.’ What I really like are Talkers. To me, good talkers are beautiful because good talk is what I love,” he said.
In such a way, Warhol was able to rediscover the stars’ real beauty – the beauty that viewers had become acquainted with before.
Noting that his videos not only showed beautiful celebrities, Huxley said: “People were still beautiful in Warhol’s videos but you could see them doing everyday activities like eating at a restaurant, cutting their hair, or talking. The films showed another aspect of Andy Warhol’s interests.”
It is possible to see Edie Sedgwick, Mario Montez and Gerard Malang in Warhol’s movies as they act normally, talk, smoke and hang out.
Galerist’s branches in Galatasaray and Pera are featuring such Warhol films as “Lupe,” starring Sedgwick and made in 1965; “Empire,” a 16-millimeter film from 1964; “Blow Jo,” another 16-millimeter film from 1964; “Camp” from 1965; “Horse,” also from 1965, and “Mario Banana No.1” from 1964.
The exhibition will continue until July 9. k HDN
via Warhol’s beauties and celebrities come to life in Istanbul – Hurriyet Daily News and Economic Review.
Unlike the explosive growth seen in the US and Western Europe, Turkey’s eBook industry is just getting started.
