MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Germanophilic readers! I’m really happy to share with you the cover designs for the German (Swiss) and Swedish editions of The Possessed.

Die Besessenen comes out this fall with the super-cool Kein & Aber. I love the image of some chick prostrated, clearly by the power of literature, on a green grass-like background:

I believe this is a visual allusion to the story of my first-ever magazine photo shoot:

I had to lie on my back on a piece of fluorescent green imitation fur, clutching to my bosom a Russian-language volume of Dostoevsky. The photographer stood over me on a ladder, snapping pictures. His assistant… opined that the pictures were coming out “too sultry”. She said I was showing “too much neck”. Overcoming a sense of injustice – if I hadn’t been lying on my back on some kind of pornographic fur carpet, maybe my neck wouldn’t have looked so sultry – I changed into a higher collar. Because the cover of the Dostoevsky was so brown, we switched to a green leatherette Pushkin. “Look like you’re reading,” the photographer suggested. Opening the book at random, I found myself staring at the epilogue to “The Gypsies”: “There is no defence against fate.”

(You can see the resulting photo on this page – scroll down, or just do a text search for “CAN’T SAY NYET.”)

There is no defense against fate, but against sultriness of the neck, that girl is protected by her upraised arm – just another example of the inimitable Swiss touch of class.

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Forward-thinking readers! You don’t need me to tell you that our language is a living, growing organism. So, in an effort to stay with the times, I recently attempted to use the word “douchebags” in print. The context was an essay on Dante, which is scheduled to run in the September issue of Harper’s, albeit probably with some minor revision to the following sentence: “Dante goes to the afterworld, and everyone is there: Homer, Moses, Judas, Jesus, Brunetto Latini, Beatrice, all the thousand and one douchebags of Florence.”

This line elicited the following wonderful query from the managing editor:

“douchebags”: This feels out of place, which is sort of the point, but it feels a little too out of place. It’s a word that’s been ruined by the Internet, Kanye West, et alii, ad nauseam. You’re writing for the ages, and to me there’s something slightly stale and stroppy about using that term in such an important place. “Assholes”? Less anachronistic, and a word and concept that certainly existed in Dante’s time and tongue.

So many thoughts went racing through my mind when I read this, e.g.:

1. “They aren’t letting me say ‘douchebags.’”
2. “What a thoughtful response to ‘douchebags’!”
3. “Assholes?”

I realized that, familiar as Dante doubtless was with assholes, and meaningful as this consideration may be, “douchebags,” to me, better expresses both the sleazy political small-timeyness and the frenzied contemporaneity conveyed by the portrayal of Florence politicos in The Inferno.

I also realized that, maybe thanks to Kanye who made them loveable again, I have a soft spot for the douchebags—more so than for the assholes.¹  And although I concluded that, for Dante essay purposes, “sleazebags” will suit the purposes just as well, I begin to wonder whether the title of my next book shouldn’t really be The Douchebags. Thinking ahead to the foreign editions, I imagine it being untranslated, like Les Misérables, or Mein Kampf…

But I’m getting ahead of myself, as usual. For now, I will just raise a parting glass to the douchebags.  Alla salute, gentlemen!

P.S. Another five-star Amazon review here.

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?

My article about the Beşiktaş JK soccer fan group Çarşı just came out in the March 7 issue of the New Yorker, on newsstands now, with two really beautiful photographs by Kate Brooks.  There’s also a podcast online.

One of my favorite Beşiktaş banners wasn’t mentioned in the piece, so I will share it with you here.  It was unveiled in 2009 after the untimely passing of the King of Pop:

“YOU WHO LIVED HALF OF YOUR LIFE BLACK AND THE OTHER HALF WHITE, GREAT BEŞIKTAŞLI MICHAEL JACKSON, MAY YOUR SOUL REST IN PEACE.”

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Dear readers!  I am still greatly chagrined about having to miss not only the Chicago reading but also the visit to Redlands University, where I had been enormously looking forward to meeting Alisa Slaughter, Joy Manesiotis (author of a very beautiful and apropos poem about lamenting women), and their students, whom I thank for their interest in The Possessed, and whom I very much hope to meet at some point in the future.

In the meantime, tolerant readers, you may or may not be filled with admiration to learn that I was able to spare a moment from my rigorous program of swamp-related activity in order to deliver a 200-word opinion on the future of evolutionary-psychological literary criticism, for which purpose I temporarily assumed the form of a miniscule talking head:

The original of that tiny photograph was taken by super-chef Musa Dağdeviren and, in its uncropped version, shows me holding a bunch of greens known in Turkish as “snake’s pillow” or “heathen’s beet.”

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