My Life and Thoughts

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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The other day I was really happy to receive a comment on my post about Kamal, from none other than Bernardo Winson, Ph.D., the editor-in-chief of Immortal Muse publishing!   Winson provided some really useful bibliographic background on the “masses/ ass is” passage, reproduced on the bookmark.  It turns out that the poet Zireaux uses this rhyme, not only with reference to Eminem’s ass in Kamal, but also with reference to J-Lo’s ass in an entirely different work called Res Publica (full stanza here).

Subsequently, my indefatigable web master informed me that my site was getting some incoming links from Bernardo Winson’s blog.  Imagine my feelings when I checked it out and saw there is a whole post about me (w00t!).  So what if it’s mostly about what a superficial person I am? 

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In my capacity as a D-list writer, people sometimes mail me books of poetry.  I don’t always know why this happens.  Usually there is some form of an advance warning, like, “Heads up!  I’m gonna send you the first English translation of the works of the twentieth-century Chuvash national poet!”  On the other hand, I recently received, out of the clear blue sky, with no note or anything, a fiftieth anniversary edition of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind—I am still confused about this, but of course very grateful. 

Well, a couple of months ago I got an email from a certain Preeti Majumdar, suggesting that I might enjoy a book called Kamal: Book One: “a novel in verse of five cantos, in structured, mostly iambic tetrameter or pentameter rhyme, totaling 5,472 lines,” written by a New Zealand poet called Zireaux, and edited by “Bernardo Winson, Ph.D., New York City.”  (You can read an excerpt here.)

The Turkish people have a very wise saying: “Free vinegar is sweeter than honey.”  In fact it is very rare that I say “no” to free anything.  So I sent along my mailing address, and it was a matter of time before I received the volume in question, generously shrink-wrapped in some 300 layers of shrink wrap, which I eventually penetrated in order to reveal an interesting cover illustration, depicting what appears to be some kind of human piano-hammer (right).

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Truly New York is the city of constant drama.   I had been in this magical city for scarcely 12 hours (8 of which I had spent asleep), when my mother’s iPhone was stolen while she was on the elliptical trainer; then we somehow both ended up getting haircuts. 

So, this will not be a long post—but I did want to share with you a piece of wonderful news for Bach impersonators (brought to my attention by the promising young Germanist, Na’ama Rokem).  Finally, twenty-first-century computer modeling techniques have been put to the task of producing a historically accurate three-dimensional reconstruction of the head of Johann Sebastian Bach.  Not a moment too soon, gentlemen!

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Why exactly am I so popular in Germany? I actually wrote about this phenomenon—the literary “big in Japan” effect—in my article about Franco Moretti (forthcoming, as “Abenteuer eines Mannes der Wissenschaft,” in a German-language n+1 anthology by Suhrkamp Verlag).  It sometimes happens that works virtually unknown in their country of production become inexplicably popular, or even canonical, in some other national literature.

In my article, I mentioned the example of Michel Zévaco’s Les Pardaillan: a family saga beloved by many Turkish schoolchildren of my parents’ generation, but completely unknown to any of the French people I asked, and also unknown to the former chair of the Stanford French and Italian department, who is not French but has written a well-received book on Proust.

A while after my article came out, I even received an email in Turkish from a student who was preparing for the TOEFL, and wanted me to help her locate an English translation of volume 2 of Les Pardaillan. (She had already read vol. 1 in Turkish.)  As far as I could determine, there is no English translation.

In short, Michel Zévaco is truly, by near-unamious international standards, a D-list writer, who has somehow made it onto the Turkish B-list; and I feel a certain affinity with him in that, while I remain totally unheard-of in my native USA, I am slowly but surely working my way onto the German literary C-list.  In the continuing saga of the Teutonic demand for my literary services…

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