MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Earlier this month, I was very happy to spend two days at the Frankfurt Book Fair, promoting the German edition of my book and impressing the German media with my air of misery and depression. I am told that the following headline, from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Feuilleton, alludes to the terrible time I was having (full text up here):

The photo caption, according to Google Translate: “Elif Batuman, just before the bad mood was.”

I do remember being puzzled by that interview, since the interviewer didn’t actually ask any questions; he mostly just wanted to discuss his theory that the attendees of the Frankfurt Book Fair are possessed by literature. Historically, of course, it is a very thin line separating the possessed from the grouchy.

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Shout-outs to three valued readers:

1. Anya von Bremzen, for her observation that the spectral tarsier basically just is Cheburashka.

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2. Carolyn Drake, for more amazing pictures from her Kars trip, which coincided, somewhat-luckily for posterity, with an illegal bear shooting at a garbage dump in Sarıkamış:

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3. Bernard Schwartz of the Unterberg Poetry Center, for sending along “Loving a Saint” by Sarah Lindsay – he was reminded of this beautiful poem while reading my article about Kars:

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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!

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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Fans of Kafka and kittens may (must?) enjoy the following:

My intern was particularly impressed by the artistic use made of the hairball: clearly something “in the air” at the current historical moment.  See, for example, the recent excellent article in Modern Cat on how to Celebrate National Hairball Awareness Day in Style:

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