About this blog
My name is Elif Batuman and I am a relatively obscure writer. I have written three articles for the New Yorker, two of which have actually been published: “Cool Heart” (1/16/06), about Thai kickboxing champion Bunkerd Faphimai; and “The Ice Renaissance” (5/29/06), about the historical replication of an ice palace originally built by the Russian empress Anna Ioannovna (r. 1730–1740).
The third article, which is about “comedy traffic school” in Los Angeles, went through one round of editing in September, and then was never heard of again. My editor is a really good editor, and also I think a really nice guy, but, he doesn’t always answer my emails. Evidently, the story of comedy traffic school is, as Dr. Watson observed about the adventure of “the giant rat of Sumatra,” “a story for which the world is not yet prepared.”
The reader may or may not be wondering what I was doing between May 2006, when I published “Ice Renaissance,” and September 2007, when I turned in the comedy traffic article. Well, it’s a funny story. I was finishing a dissertation in comparative literature at Stanford University. I warmly invite you to read either a summary or the first chapter of the dissertation, which is titled: “The Windmill and the Giant: Double-Entry Bookkeeping in the Novel.”
September was an exciting month for me because, in addition to getting my Ph.D. and completing my future classic text on comedy traffic school, I also had the good fortune to receive a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. These awards, which carry a cash prize of $25,000, enable “emerging women writers” to devote themselves full-time to writing.
So, thanks to Rona Jaffe, I have finally embarked upon the life of a writer, and I am keeping this blog so people can keep track of what promises to be a suspenseful and well-documented career. Will I “make it” before the money runs out? And what exactly goes on in the “D-list” of the literary establishment? These and other questions will be addressed at least once a week.
Thanks for stopping by!
