Many happy returns
Democratic readers! Thanks to all who voted in the epic Google/ Gogol pun contest, which, due to technical problems, raged on for a full week longer than I had intended (sorry, Bibliomosquito). But the results are finally in: Gogol documents (Kate Romatowski) came in first with 54 votes, just one vote ahead of Gogol maps (Peli Grietzer); Gogolplex (Isabel Brown) placed in a respectable, Nader-like third, with 15 votes. In recognition of the very close outcome, book prizes will be sent to both Kate and Peli, and I salute all three finalists for their hard work and ingenuity!
I’m just back in San Francisco from a particularly strenuous trip to the East Coast, where I attended, among other more-or-less Dostoevskian social functions, a twelve-hour Italian-language performance of The Demons on Governor’s Island. I urge you all to check out the riveting minute-by-minute account, “My Twelve-Hour Blind Date, With Dostoevsky,” on the Paris Review blog.
Forthright readers! I’m not going to sit here and tell you all that those twelve hours (actually fifteen hours, if you count transit time) were one unmitigated whirlwind of delight, because they weren’t. Nonetheless, perhaps Dostoevsky put it best when he wrote the epigraph to The Brothers Karamazov: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24). By which I mean to say that, even though something in me died during that performance, slowly, over the course of 12-15 hours, my cultural martyrdom did subsequently yield several non-negligible benefits, three of which I would like to share with you today.
1. My fellow-sufferer Paul Roossin (the one who observed that the fat man had no decorum) sent along a really great photograph of The Possessed in an exotic location:
2. I received the following communication from Millions intern Ujala Sehgal:
Dear MS. Batuman,
I’m currently interning at the literary website “The Millions,” [where]… I recently posted the following: “At the Paris Review Daily, Elif Batuman walks us through part one of HIS 12-hour blind date with Dostoevsky.”
Shortly afterwards, “Allison” posted the following comment: “Elif Batuman is a woman.”
Doom, I thought, for several reasons. First and foremost, I myself do not possess an Anglo-sounding name, so to me such mistakes are personal… As waves of shame from cultural insensitivity washed over me, I comforted myself with the fact that I did not make the hetero-normative assumption that just because you were on a blind date with a male in your piece, you must obviously be female. So there! I will tell that to my detractors. [...]
[Our full correspondence on this subject is reproduced on Ms. Seghal's blog.]
Naturally, I was delighted by this testament to the virility of my authorial voice, which is evidently such that young people would sooner believe me to be a gay man than entertain the possibility of my not having a penis at all.
3. Lastly, my esteemed colleague Damion Searls asked me to a screening of Kurosawa’s adaptation of The Idiot, which apparently “translates very well to a setting in the snow country of Hokkaido” (a source of many “stunning visuals”). My first response was, needless to say, “where do I sign up?”—until I found out that Kurosawa’s Idiot is only 166 minutes long, the unreleased 266-minute original having been lost to posterity in the 1950s. 166 minutes?? Come on, guys! Did you ever hear of giving a text room to breathe? Is this Dostoevsky we’re talking about, or a beer commercial?
Tags: contest, death, photographs of THE POSSESSED in exotic locations, publications, puns, reviews, Russian literature, THE POSSESSED
July 21st, 2010 at 1:08 pm
Congratulations Kate!
Your win is WELL deserved and no doubt reflects the merit of your ideas and not that the OSCE was absent from this election process. (Your victory has also secured my $3.31 win in the office pool.) Now that Elif has come out as a gay man, you may want to lobby for the big, black dildo instead of some international left-over of The Possessed – (much as we love it, Elif!)