MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Enterprising readers!  Thanks to those of you who have already submitted Gogol/ Google puns, many of which made my head explode.  Please note that there are still two days left of the contest.  Yes, dark horses, that means you!

Meanwhile, I am proud to inform those of you who weren’t in Iowa this afternoon that I was a featured guest on today’s edition of Great Taste, a food-themed talk show on KRUU, the voice of Fairfield. I talked about, and read an editorial outtake from, my New Yorker profile of chef Musa Dağdeviren.  (The outtake is up here.)  The incredibly kind host, Steve Boss, honored the venerable Turkish culinary tradition by preparing white bean soup and mücver in the studio kitchen. Or at least he said he did; and those who would like to try to distinguish the sound of white bean soup with their own ears will have their chance tomorrow (Thursday) morning at 7AM Central Time when the show will be rebroadcast and streamed live.  In the meantime, here is a recipe for mücver (zucchini fritters) by my comp-lit colleague Burcu.

In other outtake news, I was recently asked by Time magazine to write 100-200 words about what I’m reading this summer.  (Actually, the email forwarded to me by my publicist read as follows: “I’d love to get Elife [sic.] Batuman to talk to us about what’s in her beach bag.”  I later shared this communication with a colleague, whose reply provided much food for thought: “Time wants you to tell America what’s in your beach bag?  Holy shit.  That’s amazing.  So many ways to answer that. Perhaps you should just keep it simple and say ‘a big black dildo,’ which pretty much covers the bases.”)

As it happens, what I was reading at the time was Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), written by John Cleland while he was in debtor’s prison.  Personally, I found Fanny Hill to be a page-turner, but it isn’t for everyone.  I realized this, conclusively, when I got to the part where the teenage prostitute narrator and her teenage prostitute friend rape a mentally disabled guy in order to determine empirically whether it’s true that mentally disabled guys are particularly well-endowed.  According to their findings, it is true.  “Its enormous head seemed, in hue and size, not unlike a common sheep’s heart,” Cleland writes, in a generous descriptive passage which goes on for like three pages before concluding: “Nature, in short, had done so much for him in those parts, that she perhaps held herself acquitted in doing so little for his head.”  I guess, that time he meant the one on his shoulders.

I decided that America would be more interested to learn what I had read the last time I was at the beach, which was in Tel Aviv in May, where I was researching a story about Kafka.  I won’t tell you about it now, because I don’t want to interfere with Time’s circulation. (That was supposed to be a joke.)  But they did cut the last 100 words, so I reproduce them here:

By chance, the first book I came upon when I got back from the airport in the middle of the night was Raymond and Hannah, by Canadian novelist Stephen Marche: a wonderful beach read, and also very good for jet-lagged people who wish they were on a beach. It’s a love story between a Toronto PhD student writing a dissertation on The Anatomy of Melancholy, and his assimilated-Jewish six-night-stand who subsequently rushes off to an egalitarian yeshiva in Jerusalem to get in touch with her roots. It has a great balance of sex scenes, lovers’ emails, and vivid Israeli backdrops—“The sexiest people on the earth, that’s all there is to it” Marche wrote of the Israelis, in response to my fan email—plus just the right number of insights into subjects such as Robert Burton and the Jewish Problem.

In a big media week for me, I not only made my Iowa radio debut, but also recorded an Ipad special feature, as one of several Bay Area writers who discuss their Time summer reading picks with the extremely entertaining Katherine Lanpher in a variety of homey settings.  An honor for me, and a rare treat for you, provided that you (a) have an Ipad, and (b) want to know what I look like when I’m perched on a windowsill pretending to read Mary Wollstonecraft and trying not to think about big black dildos, while a cameraman holds a foil reflector in front of my face.  Airs July 4.

The Rake in a Debtors’ Prison (1735)

Tags: academic life, contest, dissertation, food, Israel, Kafka, non-publications, publications, puns, recipes

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