MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

On September 28, I and the other 2007 Rona Jaffe winners were invited to read from our work, for 10 minutes each, at NYU’s Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House.

Inconveniently, my total written output in the previous 18 months consisted of (1) my important scholarly work on graphomania and double-entry bookkeeping; and (2) the first draft of an important article on the California institution of “comedy traffic school,” forthcoming in the New Yorker (you know, when the world is ready for it), and addressing such audience-stimulating topics as traffic law, road safety, and Swedenborgianism.

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The awards ceremony for the Rona Jaffe award was held on September 27 at the Lotos Club in New York, not to be confused with the Lotos Club in Prague (“If you have enough money come and you will not be disappointed”). There was an open bar. The novelist Joan Silber gave an interesting speech about “venerability,” and then I think somebody played the saxophone.

I was really happy to meet the other five emerging women writers: Sarah Braunstein, Alma García, Robin Ekiss, Jennifer Grotz, and Holly Goddard Jones. Here is a picture of us (with Joan Silber), all wearing black, as befits the somber brides of Literature.

The shoes I wore to this event (not pictured) were purchased in Boston on the day after Slobodan Milošević was elected President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Now Milošević is dead, and Yugoslavia no longer exists, but I still wear those shoes.

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This September, I was honored to receive a writing award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation. I had never previously heard of Rona Jaffe (1931–2005) and was interested to learn that, unlike many philanthropists, she was a bestselling novelist. In the 1960s–70s, Jaffe’s popularity extended all the way to Ankara, where her readers included my own mother. My mother particularly remembered The Best of Everything, a novel about four single girls in New York, for its “humane” treatment of one of the girls going through her ex-boyfriend’s garbage: “not as if she’s a huge loser, but as if something very unfortunate happened to her.”

On reading The Best of Everything, I discovered that the abovementioned girl actually develops a single-minded obsession with this garbage, to the extent that she sits on the back stairs of his apartment every night, waiting for his maid to take out the trash and then scavenging it for traditional garbage-type items. From these items, she deduces the complexion, hair color, menstrual cycle, and name of her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. (more…)

In September, I finally filed my dissertation in the Stanford department of comparative literature. The dissertation is called “The Windmill and the Giant: Double-Entry Bookkeeping in the Novel” and is full of just the kind of big ideas you would expect, on subjects including graphomania and the professionalization of the writer. Texts discussed include: Don Quijote, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Anna Karenina, and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

You can read the first chapter here; there is a relatively low-theory summary here. Acknowledgements junkies may click here.

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