MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Earlier this month, I was very happy to spend two days at the Frankfurt Book Fair, promoting the German edition of my book and impressing the German media with my air of misery and depression. I am told that the following headline, from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Feuilleton, alludes to the terrible time I was having (full text up here):

The photo caption, according to Google Translate: “Elif Batuman, just before the bad mood was.”

I do remember being puzzled by that interview, since the interviewer didn’t actually ask any questions; he mostly just wanted to discuss his theory that the attendees of the Frankfurt Book Fair are possessed by literature. Historically, of course, it is a very thin line separating the possessed from the grouchy.

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Thanks to Kaya Genç, who recently sent along Sam Leith’s review of Michael Moore’s new book, with the following note:

Look at the last sentence of the essay! That’s even stronger than ”douchebag“, right?

I think it is!

I quite enjoyed Leith’s review, which includes both bumf and a put-down of the Vietnam short-story in favor of Hegelianism:

Like a short-story writer (rather than, say, a left-wing historian), Moore sees history advancing through personal epiphanies and turning points. Nixon’s behaviour in Vietnam, for instance, acts on the nation like original sin: “We lost our moral compass with him and we’ve never gotten it back … Before Nixon there was so much hope. Since Nixon we have known only the Permanent War.”

When I checked out some more of Leith’s work, I was really pleased to learn yet another new word: wilfing. Desultory reader! may this not be how you reached these pages!

THE MAGIC OF LANGUAGE

Germanophilic readers! I’m really happy to share with you the cover designs for the German (Swiss) and Swedish editions of The Possessed.

Die Besessenen comes out this fall with the super-cool Kein & Aber. I love the image of some chick prostrated, clearly by the power of literature, on a green grass-like background:

I believe this is a visual allusion to the story of my first-ever magazine photo shoot:

I had to lie on my back on a piece of fluorescent green imitation fur, clutching to my bosom a Russian-language volume of Dostoevsky. The photographer stood over me on a ladder, snapping pictures. His assistant… opined that the pictures were coming out “too sultry”. She said I was showing “too much neck”. Overcoming a sense of injustice – if I hadn’t been lying on my back on some kind of pornographic fur carpet, maybe my neck wouldn’t have looked so sultry – I changed into a higher collar. Because the cover of the Dostoevsky was so brown, we switched to a green leatherette Pushkin. “Look like you’re reading,” the photographer suggested. Opening the book at random, I found myself staring at the epilogue to “The Gypsies”: “There is no defence against fate.”

(You can see the resulting photo on this page – scroll down, or just do a text search for “CAN’T SAY NYET.”)

There is no defense against fate, but against sultriness of the neck, that girl is protected by her upraised arm – just another example of the inimitable Swiss touch of class.

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Anglophone readers!  In response to recent comments regarding asshole vs. arsehole, listen – this whole thing is a mystery to me. Or rather, a series of mysteries.

1. The first OED quotation for “arse-hole” (slang) is by an American: “This place [sc. Los Angeles] is the one true and original arse-hole of creation. It is at least nine times as bad as I expected” (H. L. Mencken, 1926).

2. Dylan Thomas apparently went both ways, because in addition to the shocking “asshole” quote of 1935 (see previous post), the OED also lists the following: “This arsehole of the universe… this… fond sad Wales” (1950).  What happened between 1935 and 1950?  The consolidation of Stalinism?

3. As for this gem from New Zealand, “It’s absolute comfort from arse-hole to breakfast-table,” Landfall (1948)… I like it very much, but what does it mean?

4. Personally, I first learned the word “arse” from a Canadian-American(!) author, Gordon Korman, in a novel called A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag, which includes a humorous acronym-related misadventure: a girl creates the acronym ARSE and, not realizing what it means, puts it on posters all over the school. It is an American school. Nonetheless, one of the girl’s friends knows what “arse” means, and changes the acronym to EARS.

5. I loved A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag at age 12, to the extent that I recently bought a used copy and reread it. I still thought it was great. For this reason, I tried, twice, at intervals a month apart, to post a 5-star review of Semester on Amazon (part of my campaign of posting 5-star reviews of books by living authors).  Well, here’s the biggest mystery of all: my review has yet to show up on the site! All the other reviews appeared immediately, so I have no idea what’s going on. Is it that hard for Amazon to accept my love of A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag? Maybe they’re still busy comparing the review(s) to the rest of my body of work?

6. You’re going to think I’m crazy but I just looked on Amazon right now, and the Garbage Bag review is up – but it’s the review I wrote yesterday, and it’s dated June 28. I feel like I’m reading The Moonstone or something. Seriously, does any of this make sense to any of you people? Because if so, man, you’re on your own.

Forward-thinking readers! You don’t need me to tell you that our language is a living, growing organism. So, in an effort to stay with the times, I recently attempted to use the word “douchebags” in print. The context was an essay on Dante, which is scheduled to run in the September issue of Harper’s, albeit probably with some minor revision to the following sentence: “Dante goes to the afterworld, and everyone is there: Homer, Moses, Judas, Jesus, Brunetto Latini, Beatrice, all the thousand and one douchebags of Florence.”

This line elicited the following wonderful query from the managing editor:

“douchebags”: This feels out of place, which is sort of the point, but it feels a little too out of place. It’s a word that’s been ruined by the Internet, Kanye West, et alii, ad nauseam. You’re writing for the ages, and to me there’s something slightly stale and stroppy about using that term in such an important place. “Assholes”? Less anachronistic, and a word and concept that certainly existed in Dante’s time and tongue.

So many thoughts went racing through my mind when I read this, e.g.:

1. “They aren’t letting me say ‘douchebags.’”
2. “What a thoughtful response to ‘douchebags’!”
3. “Assholes?”

I realized that, familiar as Dante doubtless was with assholes, and meaningful as this consideration may be, “douchebags,” to me, better expresses both the sleazy political small-timeyness and the frenzied contemporaneity conveyed by the portrayal of Florence politicos in The Inferno.

I also realized that, maybe thanks to Kanye who made them loveable again, I have a soft spot for the douchebags—more so than for the assholes.¹  And although I concluded that, for Dante essay purposes, “sleazebags” will suit the purposes just as well, I begin to wonder whether the title of my next book shouldn’t really be The Douchebags. Thinking ahead to the foreign editions, I imagine it being untranslated, like Les Misérables, or Mein Kampf…

But I’m getting ahead of myself, as usual. For now, I will just raise a parting glass to the douchebags.  Alla salute, gentlemen!

P.S. Another five-star Amazon review here.