MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

World-weary readers! Once again I find myself, really briefly, in the city of broken dreams and shattered promises. If you are in the hood, please swing by the Center for Fiction tomorrow (Fri) evening, where I will be participating, with Rivka Galchen and Mark Athitakis, in a panel titled Criticism Beside Itself.

Speaking of criticism, my former grad school classmate, Enrique Lima, has just started a pop music blog which I warmly recommend to all my world-weary readers. I will quote only the opening line from the brilliant post on the use of sampling by Flo Rida, Jay Z, and Kanye West: “Jameson is right: we live in an age that has forgotten how to think historically.”

CRITICISM BESIDE ITSELF

Big thanks to Eugene Ostashevsky for introducing me to Vasily Kamensky’s immortal “Constantinople”: “a milestone,” as Ostashevsky observes, “in the history of Russian travel writing about Turkey.”

“Constantinople” originally appeared in Ferro-Concrete Poems (1914),“a work… famous primarily for being made entirely of commercially produced wallpaper.”

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A brief outtake from “Natural Histories” (New Yorker, 24 October 2011):

Although Çağan and I both eventually went to Stanford for grad school, we rarely crossed paths. One day, however, I received an announcement for a lecture he was giving on the wildlife of Sulawesi, Indonesia, where religious warfare had overshadowed the endemic fauna, including “tiny primates that look like gremlins.” As I contemplated the attached image of a spectral tarsier—its enigmatic little face, meek half-smile and gigantic eyes—I was deeply impressed by the range of human and nonhuman endeavor on earth. Right across campus in the literature department, I was studying the mimetic theory of religious and sacrificial violence. Had it ever occurred to me to think of the saucer-eyed creatures living out their parallel existences in the underbrush?

SPECTRAL TARSIER / PHOTO BY ÇAĞAN ŞEKERCIOĞLU

This one goes out to contemporary Canadian nonfiction writer Tom Jokinen, from whom I recently received the following word-picture of The Possessed in an exotic location:

In Grange Park, Toronto. Arctic snap over. Trees pushing green. Labradoodle to small dog ratio about even. Old Chinese couple with styrofoam cooler in a bundle buggy because they bought fish. Young Indian gentleman carrying a tuba. Hipsters with oversized headphones. Didn’t know this was a thing. Man in tweed reading The Possessed. Thought you should know.

I was so happy to hear this, although not as happy as I will be the day the Labradoodle-to-Possessed ratio finally reaches parity.  Still, big thanks to the man in tweed, for doing his part!

Jokinen, whom I had the privilege of meeting in an elevator in Melbourne, is the author of the fascinating and creepy Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training, which I am currently reading as part of an intensive program of Gothic research. I think it is a great public service for a super-smart, funny, and talented writer to spend a year examining what actually happens to dead people in our culture, what befalls their mustaches and teeth, how and under whose stewardship they get in and out of their clothes.

Frequently, while reading Curtains, I am brought to mind of a conversation between Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel, regarding Babel’s persistent socializing with members of the Soviet secret police:

Was it a desire to see what it was like in the exclusive store where the merchandise was death? Did he just want to touch it with his fingers? “No,” Babel replied. “I don’t want to touch it with my fingers—I just want to have a sniff and see what it smells like.” (From Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope)

I may add that Curtains looked really great the other day against the view from my bedroom window (the forest near the Black Sea), back when it was actually sunny and people thought spring had finally reached Istanbul.

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Today the skies are again Kindle-gray…

Disembodied readers!  I was so happy to meet several of you at my and Kaya Genç’s blogging talk on Saturday.  Those who couldn’t make it missed an opportunity to watch me knock over a largeish glass of water, but don’t worry, I’m sure it will happen again.

At the conclusion of the event, which I personally enjoyed a great deal, I was gently but firmly escorted to the roof of the building, where I had a nice long interview with Aktüel magazine, followed by a 1.5-hour photo shoot during which I was immortalized: (a) leaning playfully over the bannister at the top of a long flight of stairs; (b) perched on a wall; and (c) ensconced inside some kind of gigantic avant-garde porthole.  During the porthole stage, as I was trying very hard to turn my aggrieved expression upside-down, I overheard one of the publicists tell her colleague: “I think we are going to read about this on Elif’s blog tomorrow.”

These exertions made me really enthusiastic to get back to Pilates class on Monday. Imagine my feelings when I sat down on my foam mat, in a sea of young people sitting on identical foam mats, and the instructor looked right at me and said: “I read your interview in Milliyet over the weekend.”  “Did you,” I said.  We began to discuss my writing career and plans for the future. At some point, she asked a question whose answer depended on my having read the interview, which I hadn’t. 

“I’m not able to read interviews,” I explained.

“You’re… not able to??” she repeated, with a look of shock.  In this way I realized that the Pilates instructor thought I was confessing to illiteracy.

“Alas, I have not yet been bitten by the black stallion of literacy.”

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