Discoveries: Arts and Culture

This author is a genius.  He is teaching at Columbia Univerisity in NYC. He was in conversation with Steven winn, at the Arts and Lecture Series at the Nourse Theater on Hayes, in SF.  November 2. The description with which I agree is the following:  " He writes vivid and lyrical works, often set in the changing and political and cultural landscape of his native country of Turkey .  "  Turkish Americans were among those who stood up in the audience and queried him about Turkey's political elections.  He said he liked being in America, as he did not require body guards and could speak freely to his friends.  Humorously,he also remarked that his students at Columbia are very ambitious and talented and intelligent and "scare" him, but then he laughed, "But they are also scared of me." "Istanbul:  Memories and the City : Pamuk's  nostalgic autobiographical work of his childhood in Istanbul was a point of refence.  I visited Istanbul ...

Introduced by San Francisco State Univesrity Professor, Dr. ar Calkins, and marking the 75th year of Vladimir Nabokov's arrival in America, Robert Roper's new book finds its narrative heart in the Nabokov's sojourns with his wife Vera and son Dimitri over twenty years. He went  into the mountainous West and Middle West on  butterfly expeditions. They drove over 200,000 miles.  His first position in America was cataloguing the butterfly collection at Harvard's comparatyive zoological museum and teaching at Wellsley College where he was very popular. .  In his research for the novel, "Lolita", he observed teens, listened to their music, rode busses to overhear their conversations, "to get it right", to put it to his own purposes.  Nabokov saw that in this era in America there was censorship about sexual frankness , but at the same time, such books sold really well. Having lived in France and Germany and being Russian, Nabokov he said he had to...