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

Connected readers!  I’m just back from an idyllic week in Urfa, sacred carp capital of all four hemispheres.

Because the state of internet was not as well-developed as the local cyprinid species, I was unable to post a couple of videos I’d been meaning to share, from a dramatic reading of Lightning Rods (the new novel by Helen Dewitt).  The reading, which was sponsored by n+1 and the Center for Fiction, took place on September 10. By chance I was in town then visiting my mother – just imagine how honored my mom and I were, when I was asked to participate!

I was especially honored once I received the script, and saw that I got all the best lines:

His first fantasy was about walls. The woman would have the upper part of her body on one side of the wall. The lower part of her body would be on the other side of the wall. Sometimes, in fact most of the time, the upper part of the body would be fully clothed. There would be nothing to show what was going on on the other side of the wall.

Sometimes the woman would be naked from the waist down. Most of the time she would be wearing a short tight skirt that could be pushed up and underpants that could be pulled down. Sometimes he would have trouble deciding whether it was better with or without the pants. The high point was pushing the skirt slowly up to reveal a firm, tight, unsuspecting ass. Later a cock would go in and the vantage point of the fantasy would shift to the other side of the wall, where you would not know from the fully clothed upper body of the woman that a cock was hard at work on the other side of the wall. For some reason or other she would need to pretend that nothing was happening.

My mom suggested I should demand a small surcharge every time I said “cock.”  She is always looking out for her little girl.

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Because of my great love of monuments, I was really touched to read about the Isaac Babel monument unveiled last week in Odessa.  It represents Babel seated on some steps, a moderate distance away from a large enigmatic wheel.

According to sculptor Georgii Frangulyan, the steps represent Babel’s front stoop, and also the famous Potemkin stairs.

The wheel represents the tachanka wheels in Red Cavalry, the wheels of Mendel Krik’s horse cart in the Odessa Stories, the wheel of fate, the Red Wheel, and the wheel of history that ran off the track and crushed the writer.

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Esteemed readers! I just returned to Istanbul yesterday, after some sorely needed downtime. The weather is beautiful, the three-inch-long locusts seem to have gone back wherever they came from, Ramadan is over, and I’m happy to be back!

If you’re also in Istanbul these days, please come to the super-cool SALT gallery this Wednesday, where I will be participating in a program called 90, consisting of “lectures, tours, and presentations seeking to answer questions about contemporary Istanbul.” I personally will be seeking to answer the important question of how Istanbul is shaped by football fanaticism.

In other news, I have a couple of short new publications out: a Talk of the Town item on 9/11, in this week’s New Yorker, and a blog post on Solzhenitsyn at Salon. Also, I don’t remember if I posted already this writerly musing about my workplace, but can anyone ever get enough about interior decoration?

There is also some nice news about The Possessed, which has not only been named a runner-up for a PEN/ Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award (for exemplifying the dignity and esteem of the essay form!), but was also recently longlisted for the Guardian First Book award.

Lastly, I’m honored to relate to Swiss and other readers that I will appear next month in Zurich’s Salongespräche series, which my publisher charmingly translated as “Saloon Talks,” and which I imagine going down like this:

OK compadres, that’s all for now… hope to see some of you soon!

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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