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Alexander Christie-Miller
ALEXANDER CHRISTIE-MILLER  is a writer and journalist based in Istanbul. His writing about Turkish politics and culture has been published in Newsweek, the Times, the Atlantic, and other publications. He is a regular contributor to The White Review.


Articles Available Online


Ada Kaleh

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Issue No. 17

Alexander Christie-Miller

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Issue No. 17

When King Carol II of Romania set foot on the tiny Danubian island of Ada Kaleh on 4 May 1931, it was said among...

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October 2015

War is Easy, Peace is Hard

Alexander Christie-Miller

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October 2015

At around midday on 19 July, Koray Türkay boarded a bus in Istanbul and set off for the Syrian...

Film is a bully It wants to make its viewers feel, and it has the tools to do so It deploys the visual, musical, dramatic and verbal all at once, in a barrage, and there is something about this multi-sensory overload that gives the viewer little critical room for manoeuvre Reading, by contrast, is very much a halfway house The reader and book need each other to complete the circuit of signification; as Rebecca Solnit has it, ‘The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed’ The book and the reader hold each other at arm’s length Film pins the viewer in her comfy chair and batters her with impressions   Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden (tr Natasha Lehrer & Cécile Menon; Les Fugitives, 2015) is a book that puts the ambiguity back into film, and restores a productive critical distance between viewer and screen Léger’s book is an account of a film, Wanda, written and directed by, and starring, the little-remembered American stage and screen actor Barbara Loden, who died of cancer in 1980, aged 48 Wanda was her only film I’ve never seen it – not many people have, in recent times, although it won the International Critics Prize at Venice in 1970 and was shown at Cannes Here’s how the book opens:   Seen from a distance, a woman, etched against the darkness Whether it is a woman, in fact, is hard to tell, we’re so far away Framed by mountains of rubble, a tiny white figure, barely more than a dot against the dark expanse, slowly and steadily picks its way through this huge mass of debris: a vast, towering slagheap, intersected with great mounds of excavated rock, stony depressions, muddy tracks waiting to be ploughed up by the lorries In a wide-angle shot, we follow this minute ethereal figure as it makes its way intently along the forbidding horizon   The book, then, is in part an extended ekphrasis, ‘a verbal representation of a visual representation’ in the definition of James W Heffernan, a telling of a

Contributor

August 2014

Alexander Christie-Miller

Contributor

August 2014

ALEXANDER CHRISTIE-MILLER  is a writer and journalist based in Istanbul. His writing about Turkish politics and culture has been...

Forgotten Sea

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Issue No. 11

Alexander Christie-Miller

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Issue No. 11

I. As I stood on the flanks of the Kaçkar Mountains where they slope into the Black Sea near the town of Arhavi, the...
Occupy Gezi: From the Fringes to the Centre, and Back Again

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July 2013

Alexander Christie-Miller

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July 2013

Taksim Square appears at first a wide, featureless and unlovely place. It is a ganglion of roads and bus routes, a destination and a...

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fiction

November 2014

The Ovenbird

César Aira

TR. Chris Andrews

fiction

November 2014

The hypothesis underlying this study is that human beings act in strict accordance with an instinctive programme, which governs...

Interview

May 2015

Interview with Catherine Lacey

Will Chancellor

Interview

May 2015

Catherine Lacey is a writer who came to New York by way of Tupelo, Mississippi. She is a New...

poetry

September 2015

She-dog & Wrong

Natalia Litvinova

TR. Daniela Camozzi

poetry

September 2015

She-dog   He wrote to tell me his dog had died. I wanted to be her, I wanted him...

 

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