MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Esteemed readers!  I am very honored and excited to share with you another effort of the tireless Batumanologist Kaya Genç, appearing in the June issue of Turkish Vogue:

The title, “Şatodaki Yazar” (“The Writer in the Castle”), alludes both to a certain famous depressing writer, and also to my Gothic situation as writer-in-residence at Koç University, which I am happy to say has been extended through June 2012(!).

Many thanks to Kaya for the sympathetic reporting, and also to Korhan Karaoysal (no shortage of K’s here) for the equally sympathetic photographs. Those who enjoy Korhan’s work as much as I do are urged to consult his amazing pictures of Turkey’s first sports camp for the disabled.

Speaking of the disabled, the following slogan recently caught my eye on a street in Turkey’s most Kafkaesque city: “EVERY HEALTHY PERSON IS A POTENTIAL DISABLED PERSON.” (more…)

In the attempt to fathom Turkish sports fan culture, I spent this past Sunday at not one but two Istanbul soccer games. I started at Beşiktaş, whose fan organization is renowned for its high levels of political committedness and general enthusiasm.

“You’re going to hear all kinds of curse words,” the taxi driver told me, on the way to the game. “You’re going to hear unheard-of things that nobody should ever hear.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I’m trying to advance my knowledge of the Turkish language.”

“If you’re trying to advance your knowledge of the Turkish language, I’m not sure a Beşiktaş match is the first place I would advise you to go. It seems to me there are other, better places to advance your knowledge of the Turkish language. But of course, you know best,” he said. We drove a while in silence. “Here’s what I really want to know,” the driver resumed. “What are you going to write in your story? That the Beşiktaş fans are spewing curses unfit for the ears of civilized people? Or that Inönü Stadium is united by a warm, intimate, unpretentious atmosphere?”

“Well, whatever I see, that’s what I’ll write,” I said.

“You’re going to write what you see?” The driver looked really depressed. “Well, then we’re done for.”

I’m told there were between 40,000 and 42,000 football fans that day in the stadium, which has a 38,000 capacity. I had bought a ticket in the cheapest section and literally every seat had someone standing on top of it and directly in front of it. Getting into the stands was no joke. The low point for me was when some particularly solid-looking dudes in leather jackets shouldered me out of the crowd and it looked like I wasn’t going to make it into the gate.  But just then a magical gust of wind blew off my hood, and one of the solid dudes exclaimed: “There’s a lady here! Back off, man, let the lady through.” Everyone standing near me stepped aside and let me through! Say what you will about Beşiktaş fans, they know how to treat a girl (sort of).

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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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Thanks to the inexorable Dave Lull for the link to this amazing A-to-Z insomnia cure by the Possessed super cover artist, Roz Chast. Apparently, when Chast is lying awake nights (probably, from wondering whether The Possessed will drop from the Amazon top-1,000 list), she passes the time by trying to think of physical afflictions starting with each letter of the alphabet. I forwarded her list to my father, a nephrologist, with a note to check out the letter K:

I just received the following response:

Elif, thanks!! And today is world kidney day, really.

dad

Yes, dear readers, March 11 is really World Kidney Day and has been officially recognized by French president Nicolas Sarkozy, American rock icon Meat Loaf, world superpower China, and now C-list writer Elif Batuman.

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Arghh, dear readers—I can’t keep up with you guys! I did finally reply to the comments. But I keep receiving such amazing additions to the beard bibliography! All Russian readers with an interest in beard semiotics are urged to consult Gregory Freidin’s 1993 article about his own beard, in the context of Gogol’s Overcoat, and the larger question of cultures and subcultures in Russia during the late ’80s and early ’90s (“Dve shineli, ili anekdot s borodoi,” Znamia 2 (1993)). The footnotes alone include many promising additions to the field of beardobibliography… I mention here only A. D. Leach’s “Magical Hair (Curl Bequest Prize Essay, 1957),” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 80.2 (1958).

“My beard is a part of nature—and yet, it is also a sign,” writes Freidin, who grew a beard at the end of the ’60s, with the intention of embracing a Bohemian subculture. But there remained the problem of all the famous non-subcultural beards, like those of Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Engels, Marx, the Academician Timiryazev, and nearly all the “classic” Russian writers. (“On the symbolic map crossed by the demarcation line between Russian and Soviet literature, the surname Tolstoy was an invariant sign, while the beard was a sign of differentiation”: Alexei Tolstoy has a zero-value beard, but Lev Tolstoy has a “beard approaching infinity.”)

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