My Life and Thoughts

In my capacity as one of our prominent internet resources on Keith Gessen, I was recently contacted by Melony Carey, author of a column called “Food by the Book” (in the Muskogee Daily Phoenix), which combines book reviews with recipes from the books’ sociohistorical milieux.  Carey was working on a review of All the Sad Young Literary Men and wanted to know what the sad young literary men ate.  I wrote to Keith, asking what he cooked in grad school; in this way, I learned that Keith apparently didn’t cook a whole lot in grad school:

Oh gosh Elif! While I was in Syracuse I mostly took to dipping black bread into pasta sauce and calling it pizza. You are going to have to carry the load on this one, I’m afraid. If I think of anything else…. but I’m fairly certain that’s all I ate the entire time. That and coffee. And beer. I’m afraid. And yet here I am. 

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I am really happy and honored to report that Vampire Weekend and I are featured in a joint profile in today’s issue of Sabah (Morning): the Istanbul publication recently determined by a Nielsen survey to be Turkey’s “most recognized newspaper brand.” (The most recognized brands overall were Arçelik, manufacturer of “wardrobe-style refrigerators” and other appliances; and Ülker, manufacturer of Cola Turka, and also of something called Badem Kraker (Almond Crackers), which as a child I used to feed to the swans in Ankara’s Swan Park. The thing that made a big impression on me at the time is that the almond crackers didn’t actually contain any almonds at all—rather, they were shaped like almonds. This was my first introduction to metaphor versus metonymy.

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Dear readers!  I’m sorry to have been slacking off on the blog these days.  I am extra ashamed because you know who hasn’t been slacking off is, my secret benefactor, the one who keeps mailing me volumes of poetry.  The latest arrival is Firefly under the Tongue, by Coral Bracho.  There is a foreword by translator Forrest Gander who, in Providence in 1994, gave a Dia de los Muertos dinner—”a disastrous event since for some inexplicable reason I decided to serve an ‘authentic’ Mexican meal”—attended by the writer Carlos Fuentes who, when conversation turned to Coral Bracho, proceeded to sketch Bracho’s portrait on a napkin, undissuaded by the fact that he had never met Bracho or even, apparently, seen her photograph.  What I find particularly remarkable about Fuentes’s Coral Imaginaria, is her resemblance to Disney’s Pochahontas, only with a Kahlo-esque unibrow. 

If you are curious about what Coral Bracho really looks like, you can see her picture (and bio) here. 

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