MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Prolific readers!  I am happy to announce a new accretion to the growing folklore of how tall I am, via email from super-novelist Jim Harrison.

Harrison, to Batuman:

I felt so bad to hear from a friend that you were very tall and didn’t see your little dog that you sat on and crushed. The dog will either forgive you in heaven or not which is a possibility. Dog heaven is the size of Missouri. Sometimes a million of them swim across the Mississippi at once.  Obviously they no longer poop. […]

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Batuman, to Harrison:

that dog-crushing story is pure apocrypha!!  may i put it on my blog?

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Harrison, to Batuman:

A relief to find you didn’t murder the little fellow.  Tall people go through the world inadvertently kicking little creatures.  They shall be judged.  Put it on your blog since I don’t really know what a blog is.  An elephant turd?

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Well there you have it, inscribed on the giant elephant turd that is My Life and Thoughts. Ironically, or maybe unironically, I am giving a talk to explain what blogs are, this very Saturday at the Koç University Anatolian Research Institute in Beyoğlu (info here chez my heroic copanelist, Kaya Genç) – a great chance for people in Istanbul to spot me not-in-the-forest, and also of course to learn what a blog is.  In English/ Turkish with simultaneous translation.

I return now to my important blog-related researches, though not without a worry in the corner of my mind: what if I really did sit on a tiny dog and didn’t even notice it because I am so very tall?

Globalized readers!  I’m just back from my first visit to Ireland, where I was really happy and honored to read at the Cúirt Festival in Galway with Geoff Dyer, one of my favorite writers about books.

In light of the recent kind comments from Anthony Powell fans, I will cite one line I particularly admired in Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi:

In some ways the [Venice] Biennale was like A Dance to the Music of Time condensed into four days: the same people cropping up, expectedly and unexpectedly, generally looking somewhat the worse for wear.

I remembered this line when I reached the description of the Biennale in Temporary Kings (Volume Eleven of Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time): it isn’t clear why Ada is there with Glober, and whether the artifact made of “zinc, horsehair, patent leather and cardboard” in the French pavilion is supposed to look German-African or German-Japanese, and I thought that Dyer must have had this passage in mind, that there must have been the idea on some level of collapsing the whole twelve novels into the Biennale scene.  But he told me in the taxi from the airport that he never actually got past volume five!

Anyway, I had an amazing time in Galway. I had barely been in town fifteen minutes when a kind editor bought me a pint of something called a Galway Hooker. Later, a wonderful local artist drove me and Dyer to a beach in Connemara, where we climbed on some rocks and looked at the Aran Islands.¹  The local artist found some seaweed that she was pretty sure was the kind of seaweed which, if you soak it in very hot bath water and squeeze it, produces a lovely aloe-vera-like gel, although she wasn’t positive, it might have been just ordinary seaweed.  She offered some to me and Dyer to put in our baths, but we both declined.

I greatly enjoyed our reading and discussion, which took place that afternoon at the super-old and potentially haunted Druid Theater, to a fantastic crowd with names like Fionnghuala and Saoirse.  It was a pleasure and a privilege to inscribe copies of one’s book to people with such beautiful names!

I was also very moved by the combined monument to Oscar Wilde and Eduard Vilde, a gift to Galway from the Estonian people (the original is in Tartu). It commemorates a meeting that did not take place in 1892.

Here’s to conversations between writers, both the ones that really happened and the ones that didn’t!

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!

Satiated readers!  Please join me in getting excited again about The Possessed, in honor of next week’s UK launch! Conveniently, the book now looks completely different. I thought I would never like any cover as much as Roz Chast’s FSG paperback - but check out the new Granta hardcover, designed byMichael Salu:

I love the original paperback, because it’s so scary and cheap, two of my favorite qualities.  But I also love the new hardcover, because it’s so trippy and classy, two more of my favorite qualities.

The new cover illustration is based on the dream sequence in “Who Killed Tolstoy?”:

I dreamed I was playing tennis against Tolstoy. As Alice in Wonderland plays croquet with a flamingo for a mallet, I was playing tennis with a goose for a racket. Lev Nikolayevich had a normal racket. I served the ball, producing a flurry of fluffy gray down. Tolstoy’s mighty backhand projected the ball far beyond the outermost limits of the tennis lawn, into the infinite dimension of total knowledge and human understanding. Match point.

It is, as Salu explains, “a dual cover, with either Elif or Tolstoy winning the rally depending on how the book is held”:

February: is it me or does it seem to roll around once every 9 months these days.  I’m just back from the Writers Unlimited festival in the Hague, where I was promoting the Dutch edition of my book.  It looks very different from the US edition.

There was a wonderful photographer who took all these wonderful photographs that subsequently appeared on a bulletin board, so I took some photographs of the bulletin board.  This one is my favorite because there’s just so much going on:

Pictured, from left to right, are Abdelkader Benali, Elif Batuman, Maaza Mengiste, and David Van Reybrouck, floating over a giant hamburger.  We were discussing the internationalization of literature (in response to a super-smart lecture by Tim Parks).

I had been deposited at the theater directly from the Amsterdam airport, with only time to change my shoes.  This was all a wonderful surprise since I had misread the schedule and somehow thought the discussion wasn’t until the following morning.  But as you can see from the picture, I was playing it really cool.

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