My Life and Thoughts

This story begins last Friday, when I went to the Stanford library to check out some books about the Musin-Pushkin family.  (I think I might write a novel about someone who is obsessed with the Musin-Pushkins.)  And let me tell you, it took a long time to round up all those books.  My webmaster can confirm this since he was waiting for me outside, drinking espressos and getting really bored. 

Then when I finally got to the check-out desk, I got stuck behind a crazy old lady in a bright red Chanel suit and matching lipstick, who not only checked out like a million books but also prolonged the transaction with a 10-minute commentary about how she will only read books whose call numbers start with PR, because they “come from the Commonwealth.”  “Forbearance,” I counseled myself: “Someday you, too, may be a crazy old lady who is obsessed with call numbers.”

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I ‘ll tell you what’s wrong with academia.  I just got a letter from ProQuest, trying to sell me three copies of my own dissertation for $125.  Their PR people, no dummies, easily anticipated my first question, viz. what on earth would I do with three bound copies of my own dissertation.  Turns out, I could keep one copy for “my own use” (viz., doorstop), and give the other two as gifts to “colleagues” or “my family.” An interesting idea: vingt ans après, I could finally get my revenge on the great-aunts who knitted me all those peculiar sweaters when I was small.

Anyway, this amazing 40% discount off of ”regular academic pricing” was apparently already offered to me at the time of filing, but I didn’t take advantage of it—either out of sheer pigheadedness or, as ProQuest charitably suggests, because I was distracted by “the final rush of paperwork and completion of other degree requirements.”  Lucky for me, ”opportunity knocks again.”

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Inspired by the example of a certain pobrecito anónimo, I’m writing my third blog entry in as many days!  This is about my latest adventure as a D-list writer. OK so a couple of months ago I was contacted by a very dear friend—an A-list writer of YA fiction, and an editor at the weekend edition of a well-known American newspaper—who asked if I might like to write something about my escapades in grad school, for a series of 2000-word “fun” pieces by “serious” writers, including, but not limited to, “Mamet on buying a house.”  Naturally this appealed to my spirit of challenge: as if I couldn’t make my experience in grad school sound at least as fun as David Mamet’s experience buying a house!  “You’re on, Mamet!” I thought, hitting the Send button.

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Remember how in an earlier post I said that the sad young literary men didn’t supply any recipes to the Muskogee Daily Phoenix, and only the resourceful young literary women came through?  Well, this was not entirely accurate.  The situation, it seems, is more complicated than I thought.

I recently received an email from Melony Carey, author of the combined book-review–recipe column in the abovementioned Phoenix (check out her latest: NASCAR-themed recipes to accompany a novel narrated by a dog belonging to a Formula One racer), to the effect that Guillermo Martínez, former grad student and current writer of math-themed mystery thrillers, had, in fact, contributed a recipe for “almond chicken baked on a bed of salt,” which had been blocked, for reasons yet unexplained, by the Norton anti-spam software.   

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In my capacity as one of our prominent internet resources on Keith Gessen, I was recently contacted by Melony Carey, author of a column called “Food by the Book” (in the Muskogee Daily Phoenix), which combines book reviews with recipes from the books’ sociohistorical milieux.  Carey was working on a review of All the Sad Young Literary Men and wanted to know what the sad young literary men ate.  I wrote to Keith, asking what he cooked in grad school; in this way, I learned that Keith apparently didn’t cook a whole lot in grad school:

Oh gosh Elif! While I was in Syracuse I mostly took to dipping black bread into pasta sauce and calling it pizza. You are going to have to carry the load on this one, I’m afraid. If I think of anything else…. but I’m fairly certain that’s all I ate the entire time. That and coffee. And beer. I’m afraid. And yet here I am. 

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