My Life and Thoughts

This Thanksgiving, I am especially thankful to all the erudite readers of My Life and Thoughts: to SW Fosca, for the edifying gloss on müteferrika (sounds to me like İbrahim was the Ottoman chief of morphology!); to Webreader7, for sending me a second-century-BC Chinese poem called Rhyme-Prose on the Owl (written by Chia-yi, a scholar-bureaucrat-poet who had been exiled “to the south” and was in this sense a second-century-BC Chinese müteferrika); to LK, RMcC, and Tara, for their kind and witty comments; and to Tom Hansen, for identifying the previously unidentified bearded guy as… Rodin photographed by Nadar! Vous êtes tous chouettes!

I leave you with my favorite couplets from “Rhyme-Prose on the Owl”:

Profound, subtle, illimitable
Who can finish describing it?

In my capacity as a relatively obscure writer, people come to me with all kinds of questions. “Will I enjoy Infinite Jest?” they ask me. Or: “Does Turkey belong in the EU?” Sometimes, they send me pictures of bearded men to identify—for example, this one, from the cover of a Korean book about IQ:

I have no idea who he is.

The other day I received another bearded man image, from n+1 web editor Charles Petersen who, when not web-editing n+1, also works at the New York Review of Books. This bearded man was made of bronze, and was located in Sahaflar Çarşısı (the book market near the Istanbul Grand Bazaar), and the NYRB had chosen his likeness to illustrate an essay by Orhan Pamuk, titled “My Turkish Library.”

Pamuk’s essay appears in the December 18 holiday issue… which I already received by FedEx, in recognition of how I successfully identified the bronze man as İbrahim Müteferrika (d. 1745), who ran the first Ottoman Turkish printing press using movable Arabic type! Based on Müteferrika’s achievements, Bob Silver even instructed the editors to “make room for an extra large caption”:

But even though the caption was extra large, it still couldn’t fit all the interesting information about İbrahim Müteferrika, so it’s a good thing I have a blog.
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Kia ora, dear readers! Many thanks for the kind and interesting responses to “On Complaining” (now universally accessible for £0). These responses have come from locations as diverse as New Zealand—“Kia ora” is not only a citrusy soft-drink, but also a Maori greeting!—and Norway. (Here is the message I received from a reader in Norway: “Interesting article, but I will not read the book.”)

My personal correspondents will forgive me for being a bit slow with my personal correspondence, since I just got back from L.A., where I was interviewing an internationally renowned film director. This was my first time interviewing an internationally renowned film director. That said, the last time I was in L.A., I did interview a nationally renowned comedy-traffic expert, for the New Yorker, which proceeded not to publish the story for the next 15 months (and counting). They also have yet to publish the story I wrote for them in June, about some Russian church bells… even though those bells weighed 26 tons!  I guess they are waiting for a story about some bigger bells. 

Anyway… I’m going to postpone revealing the identity of the extremely interesting movie director, who I am writing about for an exciting new magazine called Snob, or should I say: Сноб.  But in the meantime, I will share with you my impressions of L.A. 

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Recently, while listening to Frank Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year,” I noticed something strange. As Sinatra listeners will remember, seventeen is a very good year for small-town girls and soft summer nights, while twenty-one is a very good year for city girls who lived up the stairs… but after that, there isn’t another good year until thirty-five (for blue-blooded girls of independent means)! What happened to the rest of the twenties?

Believe me, dear readers, nobody is readier than myself to view artistic content as the byproduct of formal constraints; and it is inarguably a nice rhyme: “Their chauffeurs would drive/ When I was thirty-five.” On the other hand… its niceness is not really such as to merit waiting 14-years.  What’s wrong with “We’d sip sparkling wine/ When I was twenty-nine”? Or: “Their butlers would wait/ When I was twenty-eight”? 

No, truly I believe that ”It was a very good year” finds its appropriate context only within the contemporary discourse of squandering one’s twenties. (I nominate “Squandering Their Twenties” for Stuff White People Like #116.) How familiar is the story imparted by the autocrat of the Rat Pack: the brief period of sex and excitement at twenty-one, followed by the long empty years of graduate school!  

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Well, there is good news and bad news. The good news is, the 11/20 issue of the LRB came out today. The bad news (at least, bad for those non-subscribers to the LRB who still wanted to read my article) is that my 8,000+ word discursion on Elisabeth Roudinesco’s Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida (Columbia UP, $26.50) is only available by online purchase, or possibly by cutting a deal with the Widener minotaur. Imagine my feelings when, as I was writing the previous sentence, I experienced a moment of doubt about whether discursion was really the word I wanted, and, upon looking it up, found that the very definition is also only available to paying subscribers!

discursion can be found at Merriam-WebsterUnabridged.com.

Click here to start your free trial! Click here to search for another word in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.

Learn more about “discursion” and related topics at Britannica.com
See a map of “discursion” in the Visual Thesaurus
Find Jobs in Your City

It is certainly very thoughtful of them to help you find a job, so you can afford to use the secret fatcat dictionary. On the other hand, if you, like me, don’t have a real job, then you may enjoy whiling away some minutes by typing in random words, to see which ones constitute the true discourse of power and privilege as defined by Merriam-Webster. On still another hand, the fact that you are unemployed is probably a reflection of the fact that you don’t know any of those words: I personally tried all the most obscure and aristocratic words I could think of, and all of them were in the free version of the dictionary accessible to any homeless dude in the SFPL. Finally, in despair, I looked in Google for a list of “ten-dollar words,” and although most of them were also in the free dictionary, one of them, croodle, is, like discursion, reserved for the elite.

But the class system never has been able to confine the intellectuals, who hover so ambiguously between the toilers and the exploiters! Take me for example. Although I don’t exactly have a real job with health insurance, I do have a part-time teaching job with unlimited OED access, and so am in a position to inform you that “The cushat croodles amourously” (TANNAHILL Bonnie Wood Poems (1846) 132), meaning that it produces a “continued soft low murmuring sound.” You read it here and you read it for free.

Philosophy in Turbulent Times	Cushat (Columba palumbus)