MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Connected readers!  I’m just back from an idyllic week in Urfa, sacred carp capital of all four hemispheres.

Because the state of internet was not as well-developed as the local cyprinid species, I was unable to post a couple of videos I’d been meaning to share, from a dramatic reading of Lightning Rods (the new novel by Helen Dewitt).  The reading, which was sponsored by n+1 and the Center for Fiction, took place on September 10. By chance I was in town then visiting my mother – just imagine how honored my mom and I were, when I was asked to participate!

I was especially honored once I received the script, and saw that I got all the best lines:

His first fantasy was about walls. The woman would have the upper part of her body on one side of the wall. The lower part of her body would be on the other side of the wall. Sometimes, in fact most of the time, the upper part of the body would be fully clothed. There would be nothing to show what was going on on the other side of the wall.

Sometimes the woman would be naked from the waist down. Most of the time she would be wearing a short tight skirt that could be pushed up and underpants that could be pulled down. Sometimes he would have trouble deciding whether it was better with or without the pants. The high point was pushing the skirt slowly up to reveal a firm, tight, unsuspecting ass. Later a cock would go in and the vantage point of the fantasy would shift to the other side of the wall, where you would not know from the fully clothed upper body of the woman that a cock was hard at work on the other side of the wall. For some reason or other she would need to pretend that nothing was happening.

My mom suggested I should demand a small surcharge every time I said “cock.”  She is always looking out for her little girl.

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I was so honored earlier this month to receive the first annual Terry Southern Prize for Humor from the Paris Review (for a five-installment blog post titled My Twelve-Hour Blind Date with Dostoevsky). Sadly, I was unable to accept the award in person at the Paris Review Revel, which coincided with the UK launch of The Possessed.  This caused a few small logistical problems, the subject of some correspondence I share with you today, between myself and Paris Review super-editor Lorin Stein.

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1. Stein to Batuman:

…Would you like to write a short (like, three sentence or whatever) acceptance note for me to read at the Revel?… Also: do you want your two-foot mahogany B52 sent to you in Istanbul, or shall we store it? I was thinking Nile Southern would probably be happy to give it a temporary home till you get back. But maybe you want it to look at—for inspiration???.

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2. Batuman to Stein:

…re: b52, i don’t think i could be any more inspired in its physical presence than i already am by the powerful idea, thank you. if the object could be placed in storage, either with nile southern or even less illustriously, that would be wonderful – alternatively it could be sent care of my mother.  whichever is least trouble.

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3. Stein to Batuman:

We will totally deliver the plane to your moms!!!

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4. Batuman’s mom, to Batuman (in response to a request to accommodate what I still somehow naively believed to be a “B52-sized plaque of some kind”):

I am now really apprehensive about the b52 (joke), will it be the size of the painting of the bull in Holland or even grander??

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5. Stein to Batuman (after the Revel):

…In the end I wasn’t able to read your wonderful letter because [names redacted] went way over their allotted time slots.¹ BUT I did manage to work in the shout-out to Fyodor. Now, will you please give me your mom’s address (does she have a doorman?)?…

…I’m sorry that your mother is soon going to have a large model of a B52 “flying fortress” in her living room…

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6. Batuman to Stein:

“flying fortress” is a joke, right?

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7. Stein to Batuman:

One sort of B52 was called the “flying fortress” – but I think maybe that one wasn’t outfitted with bombs. Yours is outfitted with bombs.

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Long-suffering readers!  As I unpacked my hard-won suitcase earlier this week, I was delighted to re-encounter a “bookmark” I had been using last month – a gift from a very kind Slavic professor at Boston College (where I had the honor of giving a Lowell humanities lecture in October), who had found it in the BC library copy of The Possessed.  ”I thought you might like to have it,” she told me, handing over this small slip of cardboard, adding that perhaps I shouldn’t over-interpret whatever it said about the possibly bilious condition of my readership:

As I turn this box top over in my hands, hoping that the loss of the UPC barcode didn’t prevent any of my esteemed readers from getting any kind of mail-in rebate, I am moved to think of the many and diverse uses that a book may fill for its public, if it is lucky enough to find one in this world.  Appreciated readers!  This Thanksgiving season, I am grateful to all those who have ever found in my work anything to bring them comfort, of any degree or kind.  To paraphrase the immortal Onegin:

…Whatever end
You may have sought in these reflections—
Tumultuous, fond recollections,
Relief from gassy pain and bloating,
Live tableaux, bons mots for quoting,
Or maybe merely faults of grammar—
God grant that in my careless art…
You’ve found at least a crumb or two.
And so let’s part; farewell—adieu!

The driver, Mehmet Bey, drove me to Mahmutköy early the next morning, weaving in and out of traffic with no apparent regard for the incredibly violent bouts of coughing that racked his body every few minutes. I have never seen someone with such a philosophical attitude toward such a terrible cough. All day, whenever he would park and get out of the car, he would immediately lit a cigarette, sometimes only managing two or three drags before we reached whatever building we were headed to and he had to throw it out.

At the central FedEx depot, before I had identified myself in any way, I was greeted by an official as “the writer.” (“Wow, you guys know everything!” I exclaimed in alarm, to which he cryptically replied: “It’s easy when you have the Internet.”)  My job at FedEx was basically to sit in a chair and sign a lot of forms, and then they gave me a huge pile of papers and Mehmet Bey drove us to the airport.  There I signed more forms, paid someone $150, and, having been escorted through a series of increasingly-important looking offices, found myself standing before the desk of a purple-faced official.

“Don’t let him out of your sight!” the purple-faced man was shouting into the telephone. “What he’s doing is clear to no one.  First he says, ‘I’m a businessman.’ Then he says, ‘No, sir, those are my own belongings, I’m an artist, sir, a musician, I play the davul.’  Keep him under the closest observation, from the minute he enters.  What? No, you can’t miss him—a long-haired type.”

He slammed down the telephone, glared at me, opened a dossier that had been placed on his desk and, to my astonishment, produced a piece of paper in my handwriting: the packing form I had filled out back at Jensen’s Mail & Copy in San Francisco. It was strangely touching to see it here, halfway across the world. As it turned out, this document was the source of all my problems: because it contained the text “Commercial Shipping Invoice” and referred to a payment of $550, the purple-faced man had concluded that my suitcase contained commercial goods with a resale value of $550, and was thus subject to $400 import tax and $200 penalties. When I tried to tell him how far it was from my plans to sell anyone my towels, he kept interrupting and pointing at the word “commercial.” “’Commercial’! ‘Commercial’! Why has Jensen written this, if these items aren’t intended for sale?”

Stepping back a moment from the scene, it occurred to me how remarkable it was that fate had brought me face to face in this way with the author of my bureaucratic troubles. All too often, such struggles just wind to an end without you ever finding out what the deal was, or what human interest was concealed in the heart of the machine.  And the nature of such ordeals is that, by the end, you don’t care anymore, anyway. What a rare treat then for me, as a writer, to actually meet my secret opponent, and to thereby be able to contextualize my own particular situation within the broader field of human activity—within, for example, the life-story of a purple-faced man whose mission was to shut down smugglers, and who believed that I was trying to sell my used towels to the Turkish people without paying import taxes.

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Hi Elif,
to my delight I stumbled across a copy of The Possessed at a bookshop last night in Sydney and purchased it. A slight mystery is that it has an inscription in it: “To Okan Orhan, Gok memnan oldum!”. I don’t want to cast aspersions on Okan, but it was intriguing how it wound up in the new books and what the inscription meant.
thanks
Andrew

Dear Andrew,

Thank you for your kind message, and for your purchase of The Possessed!

Re: Okan Orhan, it’s a funny story.  I did an event at Gleebooks in Sydney a few weeks ago (in conversation with the lovely Jane Gleeson-White, who—another funny story—turns out to be the author of a forthcoming book about double-entry bookkeeping, in which capacity she is also, to the best of my knowledge, the only person who has ever quoted from my unpublished dissertation on double-entry bookkeeping and the novel!  The organizers didn’t know about this connection when they set up the event.)

At the book signing afterwards, a bearded, slightly distracted-looking young man in a leather jacket introduced himself and, speaking in Turkish, told me that he grew up in Istanbul and that he used to be roommates with the critic Walter Pater.  I was very tired, since I had spent the morning at ABC studios in Melbourne, doing a radio show with the amazing David Astle, “Sergeant Pepper of cryptic crosswords,” after which my incredibly heroic Australian publicist and I headed to the airport to catch a plane to Sydney.  The flight departed not only with a delay but also from the international terminal, which meant that on the way out we had to go through customs and passport control, whence we rushed to the hotel and immediately to the bookstore, the reason I bring all this up is being that I might well have misunderstood the exact nature of the relationship between Okan Orhan (for it was he) to Walter Pater, because Walter Pater died in 1894.

Okan Orhan then asked me to inscribe a copy of The Possessed to him, which I did. “Çok memnun oldum” means “I’m very happy [to have met you].”

At that point I really had to get something to eat, because two hours later I had to be at the Sydney ABC (where I was a guest on Late Night Live, right after an expert on the Australian elections, and also another expert on cyber-terrorism).  Whereas O.O. was trying, quietly but persistently, to tell me the story of his life.  It was probably an interesting story but I was not in the right frame of mind to appreciate it.  The whole thing ended with the organizer gently but firmly inviting him to leave.  I then lost track of his strand of the story—forever… or so I thought.

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