Bananagarden
Patient readers! Since I got back to San Francisco last week I have been going about my business, waiting for the moment when a beautiful beaming woman would come up to me and exclaim: “Du hast einen Blog geschrieben!” But, contrary to cultural stereotype, she is not very punctual, this beautiful German woman, so today I take matters into my own hands.
My recent travels began in New York where I was, as always, delighted to see all the sad young literary men. On March 7, I visited Keith Gessen and Marco Roth at n+1’s new offices in Dumbo. Gessen, whose new book, All the Sad Young Literary Men, comes out in two weeks (it is really good!)…
…was engaged in: spackling. Also he was waiting for a Chinese electrician. As we chatted of this and that, Gessen happened to mention the difficulty of enforcing the work hours of unpaid interns; he appeared briefly to entertain the thought of asking the Chinese electrician to install a close-circuit monitoring device. GESSEN: “And the first person I want you to monitor is… yourself, Chinese electrician!”
Subsequently, Marco and I headed out into some torrential rain and made our way to our reading in the “Krautgarden Loft,” which turned out to be somebody’s apartment. It had the most amazing bathtub:
At this point I would like to thank all the friends and readers who attended the New York Krautgarden event, which had a $5 cover and featured no fewer than 13 unheard-of German and American authors. I especially salute Hayley, Vadim, my mom, and Tara from Columbia, who stayed all the way to the end. (I was scheduled for 11PM but, contrary to cultural stereotype—seriously I don’t know when I last saw such an inaccurate cultural stereotype—the schedule was all sort of fuzzy and idealistic, so I didn’t actually read until after midnight.)
The situation was made kind of more piquant and interesting by the fact that there was absolutely nothing there to eat in the Krautgarden Loft. (Personally, I hadn’t eaten anything all day except for a tablespoon or two of hummus at the n+1 offices, many hours earlier.) There was a kitchenette, where some German girls were selling $3 drinks, and it was eventually brought to my attention that if you stood to one side and looked into the kitchenette, you could kind of see a plate of bananas. Around 11PM, I made my way over and asked how much a banana cost. The German girls stared at me as if I had landed from the moon.
“Are the bananas for sale?” I asked.
“No, no,” they said. “It’s a private kitchen!” I explained that I had been at this reading for over 3 hours, there were still 5 authors scheduled before me, etc.; but, they insisted that they couldn’t give me a banana unless I got explicit permission from the owner of the kitchen. By this time a small group of onlookers had gathered at the counter. Some onlookers appeared to think that the girls should give me a banana; others held the opposite opinion. A petite woman elbowed her way to the front of the crowd. “Wass does she want?” she demanded.
“She wants a banana,” one of the girls replied.
“Well, for heaven’s sake give her a banana! And give me one too!” said the apartment’s owner, for it was she, and I would like to thank her here for her generosity. Probably if you are Philip Roth or someone, people are always giving you all kinds of fruits and vegetables all the time; but, as a D-list writer, it is all too often that people are like: “No, go get your own banana.” Apropos of which, thanks are also due to this one German guy who not only stayed to the end of the reading and complimented my story, but even offered me a German chocolate! I am quite fond of German chocolates.
Stay tuned for the next installment of My Life and Thoughts, when I will write about my trip to Germany, which is where German chocolates come from.
Tags: Bach impersonators, comparative literature, d-list, Elif's mom, events, Germany, Keith Gessen, n+1, n+1 interns
April 1st, 2008 at 10:39 pm
You have acquired Most Favored Writer status for me. We have all had to fend off ourselves in the shoving to grab the last banana in the room. cheers. Indran
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:00 pm
The reading was most enjoyable, thank you. And, I managed to convince this dude sitting next to me to stay and hear you read as well. He asked, “So who are you here to see?” and I replied, rather confidently, “Elif Batuman.” He goes, “Who’s that?” I gave him a look like “have you been living under a rock?” but said, “Oh. Brilliant writer. She did that n+1 piece on the short story?” and so forth.
Anyway, funny about the banana. To think there were “others [who] held the opposite opinion” that you should have one is alarming but whatever. Now I’m off to read your article in the LRB.
Cheers …