My Life and Thoughts

Recently, while listening to Frank Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year,” I noticed something strange. As Sinatra listeners will remember, seventeen is a very good year for small-town girls and soft summer nights, while twenty-one is a very good year for city girls who lived up the stairs… but after that, there isn’t another good year until thirty-five (for blue-blooded girls of independent means)! What happened to the rest of the twenties?

Believe me, dear readers, nobody is readier than myself to view artistic content as the byproduct of formal constraints; and it is inarguably a nice rhyme: “Their chauffeurs would drive/ When I was thirty-five.” On the other hand… its niceness is not really such as to merit waiting 14-years.  What’s wrong with “We’d sip sparkling wine/ When I was twenty-nine”? Or: “Their butlers would wait/ When I was twenty-eight”? 

No, truly I believe that ”It was a very good year” finds its appropriate context only within the contemporary discourse of squandering one’s twenties. (I nominate “Squandering Their Twenties” for Stuff White People Like #116.) How familiar is the story imparted by the autocrat of the Rat Pack: the brief period of sex and excitement at twenty-one, followed by the long empty years of graduate school!  

(more…)

Well, there is good news and bad news. The good news is, the 11/20 issue of the LRB came out today. The bad news (at least, bad for those non-subscribers to the LRB who still wanted to read my article) is that my 8,000+ word discursion on Elisabeth Roudinesco’s Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida (Columbia UP, $26.50) is only available by online purchase, or possibly by cutting a deal with the Widener minotaur. Imagine my feelings when, as I was writing the previous sentence, I experienced a moment of doubt about whether discursion was really the word I wanted, and, upon looking it up, found that the very definition is also only available to paying subscribers!

discursion can be found at Merriam-WebsterUnabridged.com.

Click here to start your free trial! Click here to search for another word in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.

Learn more about “discursion” and related topics at Britannica.com
See a map of “discursion” in the Visual Thesaurus
Find Jobs in Your City

It is certainly very thoughtful of them to help you find a job, so you can afford to use the secret fatcat dictionary. On the other hand, if you, like me, don’t have a real job, then you may enjoy whiling away some minutes by typing in random words, to see which ones constitute the true discourse of power and privilege as defined by Merriam-Webster. On still another hand, the fact that you are unemployed is probably a reflection of the fact that you don’t know any of those words: I personally tried all the most obscure and aristocratic words I could think of, and all of them were in the free version of the dictionary accessible to any homeless dude in the SFPL. Finally, in despair, I looked in Google for a list of “ten-dollar words,” and although most of them were also in the free dictionary, one of them, croodle, is, like discursion, reserved for the elite.

But the class system never has been able to confine the intellectuals, who hover so ambiguously between the toilers and the exploiters! Take me for example. Although I don’t exactly have a real job with health insurance, I do have a part-time teaching job with unlimited OED access, and so am in a position to inform you that “The cushat croodles amourously” (TANNAHILL Bonnie Wood Poems (1846) 132), meaning that it produces a “continued soft low murmuring sound.” You read it here and you read it for free.

Philosophy in Turbulent Times	Cushat (Columba palumbus)

Issue 7 of n+1 magazine, which contains Part One of my memoir about Samarkand, is returning from the printers today.  Let me clarify that when I say “returning from the printers,” I don’t mean it will happen by magic or thanks to a federal bail-out, but, rather, that the editors are going to drive to Pennsylvania in a U-Haul to get them.  Subsequently there will be an “unloading party” at the n+1 offices in Dumbo.  They will ply their writers and subscribers and the readers of their writers’ blogs with beer, in the effort to get them to unload the truck.  Needless to say this is just the kind of literary-proletarian evening I myself particularly relish, but to my dismay I somehow find myself 3000 miles away.  But the truck will be at 68 Jay Street, #405 (the corner of Front and Jay, a block from the F station), ETA 8pm, and those of you in New York are warmly invited.

In other news, I also have a piece called “On Complaining” in the upcoming issue of the LRB.  It’s kind of ironic because “On Complaining” takes a generally negative attitude towards complaining, whereas in the Samarkand memoir I myself kind of do a lot of complaining.  This is another example of the complexity of the human condition.  Still, you definitely don’t want to miss that issue of the LRB because I hear it will also contain Keith Gessen’s “notes about his grandmother.”  And you don’t even have to unload their truck.

Dear readers, I leave you with an image unrelated to this post, except maybe in some deeper, metaphysical sense.  But I just can’t stop thinking about these Siberian hamsters:

Well, yes, OK, this might not be the last time I ever write about cats. Still, I definitely promise at least a moderate cat hiatus—right after this post, which is about modern-day cat literature classic Why Cats Paint: A Theory of Feline Aesthetics.

The existence of Why Cats Paint was first revealed to me early in 2007, when I happened to attend a calendar sale at Kepler’s Books in the company of n+1 editor Mark Greif, who purchased a Why Cats Paint calendar, as a gift for the mother of a certain young person. “The genius of the thing,” Greif later observed, of the Why Cats Paint calendar,

is that they never tell you why cats paint—they just show you that cats paint. Which they don’t. But there is this further horizon of promise that distracts you from the original problem.

I remember thinking that this was an ingenious formulation, and that I could be the calendar girl for a Why People Dissertate calendar… but would it successfully distract my committee from the “original problem”? My committee of course was made up entirely of benevolent schnauzers:

(more…)

OK dear readers, I don’t want you to think I’m evading the difficult subject of literary production in our times, but you’re going to have to sit through one more post about cats. Not counting this post, which is a response to the comments about the last post about cats. After that I promise, no more cats.

Dear Burcu! Yes, Friday is exactly what I named my cat. Thank you very much for the reference to Gürcan Yurt, whom I did not know. It’s funny, I reread Robinson Crusoe a couple of years ago, when I was working on sidekicks, and was so disappointed to realize how little there was about Friday! In my mind I had turned Friday into another Dr. Watson… but really he was in what, like three chapters?  In short you can imagine how delighted I was to discover that, in the comic books of my ancestral homeland, Friday has been elevated to a title character.

Although the only excerpts I found online were all illegibly small, I am already encouraged by what appears to be a remarkably equitable distribution of lines between Crusoe and Friday:

(more…)