MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

My new go-to Kindle drunk-dialing author these days is Anthony Powell, whose twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time I cannot over-recommend for those needing to unwind in bed, with or without a drink.  When you finish one volume, you press a button, and there’s a new one right there!  Eleven times!  It’s like the future!  Not to show off, but, the way my memory is going, by the time I get to volume 12 I’ll probably have forgotten what happened in volume 1 anyway, so this could potentially keep me entertained for the rest of my days.

I’m also happy to report that Anthony Powell is improving my vocabulary, as I discovered yesterday when I got an email attachment from my super UK publicist, with the note: “More bumpf from [institution deleted].”

I realized that I knew the meaning of “bumpf,” i.e., pointless paperwork.  But, how did I know?  Was it metempsychosis?  No, it was Anthony Powell.  When I searched for “bumpf” (bumf, bumph) on the Kindle, I got like 14 hits, including this one from Volume 10 (Books Do Furnish a Room):

“I had quite enough of shuffling the bumf round when I was in the army. As a result I’ve developed a positive mania these days against pushing paper.”

As you can see, Powell is really good at conveying the meaning of a potentially unfamiliar word through context clues.  In this way, you can enrich your personal lexicon even when you are drunk and half-asleep.

In honor of my rapidly impending trip to the United Kingdom, I decided to look up bumf in a dictionary.  It turns out to be a contraction for “bum fodder,” originally used to designate toilet paper. Interestingly, the word seems to have retained its literal meaning primarily in China.

See also here.

Sorry to British readers, who knew all about bumf already!

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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The problem of my towels originated in San Francisco last month, when I had the great idea of mailing a suitcase of non-urgent items (namely, summer clothes and some towels) ahead of me to Istanbul.

Hoping to avoid my customary bad luck with luggage, I used FedEx, which ended up costing $550. Those of you who have seen my summer clothes and towels know they aren’t worth that much. On the other hand, who can put a price on girlish dreams? One of mine happened to involve sitting by the banks of the Bosphorus in a $12 H&M shirt-dress that, among its other excellent qualities, already belongs to me, and the wearing of which thus does not require me to visit the Istanbul H&M, subjecting myself to potentially traumatic encounters.

Istanbul’s first H&M opened last week

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O readers, dear readers!  where does the time go?  There is so much I wanted to tell you, and the things to write keep on filling up the time to write them in.  My article on the Kafka papers controversy ran in Sunday’s New York Times magazine and, because of the many kind emails I received about the episode set in the heiress’s front yard, and in honor of the proliferation of alternate texts in the world of letters, I am posting a longer draft version of that scene, which includes more cats, more lawyers, more Kafka, more Brod, and more about Avi Steinberg’s hair.

Of the many incredible emails since Sunday (including the tale of Eva Hoffe’s erstwhile teenage cat-sitter, “a story for which,” as Dr. Watson would say, “the world is not yet prepared”), I would like to share two with you tonight.

1. Re: cats, from Jamie C.

My boyfriend, Itai, lives in Tel Aviv (a 10 minute drive from 23 Spinoza). I live in the United States. We meet via Skype during the long periods we aren’t together in the same time zone. During our Skype meet-ups, we find interesting articles to read aloud while simultaneously playing Scrabble. On Thursday of last week, your article was the featured read. Afterward, with your quotations in hand, my thoughtful and sweet Itai headed to Spinoza street to photograph the vignettes beautifully described in your article. I’m inserting the result here.

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Dear readers!  I am just back from New Orleans where I had a completely fabulous time at Faulkner House Books—big thanks to the terrific staff and all the attendees!  I got to sit behind a huge, incredibly important-looking desk, pictured below.  The format was meet-and-greet, an interesting challenge since I was sitting behind this amazing desk.  At some point I tried firing one of my readers, as a joke (”You’re fired!”), but he didn’t seem to think it was funny.

Later I started fantasizing about getting such a desk in my apartment: I could fire my intern, and he would be so sad and wonder what he had done wrong; then I would realize it had all been a big mistake and rehire him, with tearful embraces on both sides.  This initially struck me as a really fun game that we could play over and over again on the long winter evenings.  Then I got a hold of myself and realized the desk had made me drunk with power.  By then, everyone looked so confused that I just ended up reading from the book and answering questions, same as always.

Resignation of the soul	Loyal readers

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