MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

A quick response to this fascinating item of trivia re: Tolstoy and the RNC (thank you, Chad!):

…This really has nothing to do with Turkish women/tea glasses, but I was wondering if you had heard about Michael Steele’s response when asked what is his favorite book at the RNC chair debate. He said “War and Peace” but then added, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Somehow everything I ever hear about Michael Steele brings back to me the pathos of the human condition, I guess largely through Jon Stewart’s image of him as the Muppet who always has a fly in his soup – actually a kind of Tolstoy-like detail, when you think about it.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times!”

[Note to self: could the entire dissatisfied-Muppet/ Grover relationship be based on the tense interchange between Oblonsky and the Tatar waiter (AK I, 10)?]

Mostly though I feel like this is a valuable object lesson to all of us in not trying to spontaneously produce the first sentence of WP on national television, because let’s be honest,  it’s a great book and everything, but Tolstoy didn’t exactly bust out his catchiest lines on the opening:

“Eh bien, mon prince, Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des country estates, de la famille Buonaparte.”

Or, for those who prefer the original Russian:

“Eh bien, mon prince. Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des поместья, de la famille Buonaparte.”

The other day I went to a teahouse near Taksim with the promising young novelist/ journalist Kaya Genç.  As we sat down, Genç asked which size tea glass I wanted: a small one, or an Ajda one.

“You know Ajda, right?” he asked.

I did know Ajda (a big favorite with me and my mom), but not her tea glasses. “Does she drink a lot of tea?” I asked.

Genç explained that Ajda glasses are named for their shape – i.e., because they resemble Ajda, and not because she loves tea so much.

Ajda Pekkan	Ajda tea glass

So, Turkey continues to be the place where I receive valuable lessons in metonymy versus metaphor.¹

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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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Forsaken readers!  Please excuse the long silence of a C-list writer who has spent the past few weeks in a dark, dark place. Not only was I immersed to an Orwellian degree in the life and work of you-know-which master of the Kafkaesque (hint), but there was literally an enormous cloud sitting on top of my house.  Honestly it’s a mystery to me why I still live on this godforsaken mountain.  At least it was a mystery until I realized it was probably so I could convert Friday to Christianity.  Now I can say, with the immortal Crusoe:

when I reflect that, in this solitary life which I have been confined to, I… am now… made an instrument, under Providence, to save the life, and, for aught I know, the soul of a poor savage, and bring him to the true knowledge of religion and of the Christian doctrine, that he might know Christ Jesus, in whom is life eternal… a secret joy runs through every part of My soul, and I frequently rejoice that ever I was brought to this place, which I so often thought the most dreadful of all afflictions that could possibly have befallen me.

Friday, as you can see, was able to find great comfort in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior:

I too am slowly returning to normal life and, as a first step, I am happy and honored to report that I will be a guest tomorrow (Friday) on “Common Threads,” an open-mic show hosted by esteemed reader and San Francisco beat poet sensation Diamond Dave Whitaker.  Those who are in the neighborhood and not gainfully employed should please come at 3pm to the Pirate Cat Radio Cafe, 2781 21st Street (between Florida and Bryant); others are warmly encouraged to stream Pirate Cat Radio live or download the podcast.

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As a C-list writer, one has to wear many hats, including, it turns out, the hat of someone who knows something about movies.  In February, for example, I was really happy to be asked to write something for The Believer, because I had never written for them before.  In fact this was my first time writing for any publication in San Francisco, a city apparently famous for having such a friendly literary scene that guests at a roast for Amy Tan were literally unable to think of anything insulting to say about her, even as a joke.  “This is San Francisco literary life in a nutshell,” reported the New York Times:

a willingness to honor and an unwillingness to undermine. You could probably find mean-spirited, competitive writers here, the kind who make literature a blood sport and the literary life a conniving enterprise and a purely mercenary pursuit. But not without a serious hunt.

Hey guys!  Yoo-hoo!  I might be up here on a mountain, living on oatmeal and pretending that my cat can talk, but I do exist! (more…)