Merci, chouettes!
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?
Tags: animals, beards, birds, bureaucracy, comparative literature, graphomania, poetry, translation, Turkey
November 27th, 2008 at 9:26 am
Tu es très mignon. Enjoy the day.
I would tend to change the ending to Camus’ musing to “… of books and simply life.” BUT, within this/his concept — you are a book, Elif.
November 29th, 2008 at 4:10 am
Dear Elif,
(Long-time listener etc)
“On Complaining” was great!
Whether or not Roudinesco is overreaching by commuting Cavailles’s heroism with his intellectual labor, she def. blunders by buying into the ‘authorial’ interpretation of the Althusser tragedy. It’s interesting that we’ve been able to skirt this problem in American letters–’Yes, Hemingway was a dreadful guy, but his books are great!’ (On the other hand, the same LRB issue contains Michael Wood’s review of the Kafka paperwork anthology! Where should one draw the line?)
Plus, I couldn’t help but notice that LRB ran an ad around your article promoting a conference to which Roudinesco is a headlining delegate (http://www.freud.org.uk/Fundamentalism.html), and that this conference would be sort of refuting your point about divorcing the critique of psychoanalysis from the critique of fascism…
December 1st, 2008 at 9:45 am
Elif,
i. I’m thankful for your writing and still can’t believe I have to wait for the next n+1 to finish your Uzbek tale; damn the biannual hoo-ha.
ii. Think I saw the Urban Outfitters you referenced while in Georgetown on Saturday, plus another in D.C., not the one I first mentioned. Ubiquity. Speaking of, after this comment I’m hitting YouTube for a monkey tokat fix.
iii. I adore how the personal comes out in your essay. No hyper-self-consciousness or overwrought language. The mental leaps in the graph beginning, “As a less strenuous concession to the idea of ‘local color’” are fantastic: from Pushkin to Jesus to Blake to feet to boots, etc.
iv. Lastly, your n+1 piece half-sated (to be continued) my curiosity about your feelings regarding studying Russian and being Turkish. I had my own issues, back in undergrad, with that too. My first Russian teacher was Korean however, so that softened my internal identity weirdness and ambivalence, somewhat.
Dance on,
Tara
December 1st, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Dear readers!
Thank you so much for the kind comments and interesting questions and observations (both here and from the feedback form). In further news of erudition, one generous reader is mailing me an article he wrote about Sigmund Freud’s evening jacket! From Rome! And SKF has emailed me about 15 .pdfs about Muteferrika in German and French and Turkish!
Anyway, I wish I could answer everyone in detail now, but I am running behind on a whole bunch of different deadlines… hopefully next week…
P.S. Tara, are you telling me you are a fellow Turkish Russianist?? My first Russian teacher was from (East) Germany.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:40 am
Elif,
My comment wasn’t very clear; I meant “I had my own issues, back in undergrad, with [studying Russian and being non-Russian] too.”
I recommended your writing to a fellow Asian-American Russianist who’s now teaching at C.U. and finishing her dissertation on Tolstoy. She is impressed.
Random aside: my Turkish coworker Elif is officially changing her name to Lisa. Says that when she applies for work, employers call her “Elf.”