MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Since the publication of The Possessed, I have occasionally received emails from readers in exotic locations, offering to send me things.  To such readers I have been replying that what I would really like is a picture of my book in said exotic location(s)—much as George Clooney’s sister in Up in the Air asks wedding guests to take pictures of a cardboard cutout of herself and her fiancé, as a substitute for the honeymoon they can’t afford.  It’s like double-entry bookkeeping: I have to stay here at my desk, but at least my book can have some fun, right?

Well, dear readers, today I am really happy to share with you the first such pictures I received, from Israel via Avi Steinberg, author of the forthcoming Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian.  I’m reading Running the Books now, with great enjoyment, and also with increasing amazement at how simultaneously extremely similar and extremely different it is from The Possessed.  In both books, an unemployed Harvard graduate, having attempted unsuccessfully to write a novel, is driven by lack of health insurance to seek a semi-permanent position in a hermetic community where books are taken very seriously, leading to seriocomic adventures.  In Steinberg’s case, the hermetic community was, not graduate school, but a prison library.

At the St. Louis Airport	At Gadara, Israel

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Dear readers!  I am still greatly chagrined about having to miss not only the Chicago reading but also the visit to Redlands University, where I had been enormously looking forward to meeting Alisa Slaughter, Joy Manesiotis (author of a very beautiful and apropos poem about lamenting women), and their students, whom I thank for their interest in The Possessed, and whom I very much hope to meet at some point in the future.

In the meantime, tolerant readers, you may or may not be filled with admiration to learn that I was able to spare a moment from my rigorous program of swamp-related activity in order to deliver a 200-word opinion on the future of evolutionary-psychological literary criticism, for which purpose I temporarily assumed the form of a miniscule talking head:

The original of that tiny photograph was taken by super-chef Musa Dağdeviren and, in its uncropped version, shows me holding a bunch of greens known in Turkish as “snake’s pillow” or “heathen’s beet.”

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Many thanks to all who ordered The Possessed,which has, at the time of writing, edged ahead of the greatest novel ever written to #1 on the Amazon Russian bestsellers list! After a long, hard week, my interns are finally enjoying some R&R.

Enjoy, guys—you deserve it!

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OK OK, I know what you’re all probably thinking: “Ohh, now that Elif has clawed her way to the C-list, she must spend all her time doing cocaine with hedge-fund managers and being too much of a big-shot to write on her blog anymore.”  Well au contraire, chers lecteurs: in fact I have been prevented from blogging, not by hours of yelling at the interns for messing up the triple-organic fair-trade cappuccinos, but by the relentless pursuit of journalistic truth, to the extent that I even spent all afternoon yesterday plucking turkeys in a village near the Sea of Marmara.

Here you can see me hanging out with my new friend Duygu, who is 12 years old and wants to be a nurse when she grows up. She is definitely an A-list turkey-plucker. (I think I am somewhere on the H-list.)

Duygu’s rents are also pretty cool:

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I recently received some back copies of Vice magazine, kindly sent to me by Vice magazine, because I might write something for them. I had never previously read Vice magazine, and although I had heard of it, I had somehow imagined it to be called Vise magazine (as in, “we really know how to grip our public”).

Youthful readers! As you apparently know already, Vice magazine is actually full of pictures of naked girls doing some crazy stuff.  Naked girls in the 2008 fiction issue alone included, but were not limited to: a naked girl running through a supermarket aisle; a naked girl doing cartwheels around a bonfire; and an otherwise-naked girl wearing pasties and a thong made out of pizza. (Apparently it was the model’s own pizza.)

To learn more about Vice magazine, I consulted the Internet, which is famous for its sober and balanced treatment of controversial subjects. There I found the recent Vice magazine interview with Brazilian sculptor Zé Carlos Garcia, who reconstructs pig heads to resemble human faces:

Q. And then you started to turn pigs’ heads into human heads. Do you have any experiences in plastic surgery? It’s completely different to work with flesh, isn’t it?

A. Yes, but as I said, I did sculptures all my life. Also I just love animals, so that wasn’t a big problem.

Sculpture by Zé Carlos Garcia	Photo by Jamie Taete

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