December 29, 2007 -- Saturday evening

Reading The Black Book, by Orhan Pamuk. He's also read Orhan Pamuk's Snow and something else which I can't remember right now.

His favorite book--Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson.

If he were going to write a book, it'd be about travel. Maybe in Istanbul, where he plans to go within the next couple of years. It'd be a story about the place and the people, but told with his eyes.

The paintings in the background are by San Francisco artist, Mark Monsarrat--check out MarkMonsarrat.com. Two hours after our conversation, after a leisurely dinner of saki and side dishes, in order to supply the painter's name to this blog, I'd gone back to the Sundance Kabuki theater where this picture was taken, to find the plaque next to the artwork and, on my way up the theater staircase, after snaking past the line to enter the theater, there, proceeding up the staircase four stairs in front of me, in black coat and hat, also coming in from the rain, was, strangely and serendipitously, the reader himself, there to see, and I'm guessing, not the name plaque of the paintings he'd been sitting in front of, but another movie. He was with company, and I was in hurry to rejoin my friend, but, as I just said, how serendipitous.