My Life and Thoughts

In the continuing story of my beautiful friendship with German literary culture, I am happy and honored to report my participation in the 2008 Krautgarden literary series, comprising two sets of readings by young German and American writers, on March 7 at the “Krautgarden Loft” in Chinatown (New York), and on March 14 at Leipzig’s Baumwollspinnerei, former site of the Continent’s largest cotton mill.

Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei

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Could the world survive one more day without learning the further developments in the story of my beautiful friendship with the German literary establishment?  I thought it was safer not to find out.  

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Why exactly am I so popular in Germany? I actually wrote about this phenomenon—the literary “big in Japan” effect—in my article about Franco Moretti (forthcoming, as “Abenteuer eines Mannes der Wissenschaft,” in a German-language n+1 anthology by Suhrkamp Verlag).  It sometimes happens that works virtually unknown in their country of production become inexplicably popular, or even canonical, in some other national literature.

In my article, I mentioned the example of Michel Zévaco’s Les Pardaillan: a family saga beloved by many Turkish schoolchildren of my parents’ generation, but completely unknown to any of the French people I asked, and also unknown to the former chair of the Stanford French and Italian department, who is not French but has written a well-received book on Proust.

A while after my article came out, I even received an email in Turkish from a student who was preparing for the TOEFL, and wanted me to help her locate an English translation of volume 2 of Les Pardaillan. (She had already read vol. 1 in Turkish.)  As far as I could determine, there is no English translation.

In short, Michel Zévaco is truly, by near-unamious international standards, a D-list writer, who has somehow made it onto the Turkish B-list; and I feel a certain affinity with him in that, while I remain totally unheard-of in my native USA, I am slowly but surely working my way onto the German literary C-list.  In the continuing saga of the Teutonic demand for my literary services…

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I was recently delighted to learn that my dear friend, the teen fiction sensation Lauren Mechling, now has a blog where you can read about her pursuit of flawless social functioning, and also about the time she spilled a cup of coffee on famous actor Jeffrey Tambor and didn’t feel bad about it. After spending an enjoyable half hour poking around Mechling’s website, I made an amazing discovery about our shared past. “My mother,” Mechling writes,

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Because of my abiding interest in our nation’s youth, I was really happy to meet Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig and his girlfriend Sara last month in San Francisco.

Here is a picture where you can see how charming they looked, with their scarves, and also their entrance stickers from the Asian Art Museum. That is a Polo logo on Koenig’s sweater, BTW… but before you go starting the hateration machine on him I just want you to stop for a minute and ask yourself: WIKDI?

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