My Life and Thoughts

This Thanksgiving, I am especially thankful to all the erudite readers of My Life and Thoughts: to SW Fosca, for the edifying gloss on müteferrika (sounds to me like İbrahim was the Ottoman chief of morphology!); to Webreader7, for sending me a second-century-BC Chinese poem called Rhyme-Prose on the Owl (written by Chia-yi, a scholar-bureaucrat-poet who had been exiled “to the south” and was in this sense a second-century-BC Chinese müteferrika); to LK, RMcC, and Tara, for their kind and witty comments; and to Tom Hansen, for identifying the previously unidentified bearded guy as… Rodin photographed by Nadar! Vous êtes tous chouettes!

I leave you with my favorite couplets from “Rhyme-Prose on the Owl”:

Profound, subtle, illimitable
Who can finish describing it?

Today I would like to salute some of the diverse and accomplished commenters to My Life and Thoughts, for example Michelle of The Maltese Bacon (a recipe blog—check out this beautiful tomato confit); as well as Gregory Freidin of the Stanford Slavic department (who, in his latest blog entry, shrewdly observes that, even if you live in Gori, you probably don’t hang your portrait of George W. Bush over a sliding glass door). 

In this recent, admirably concise comment, Freidin expresses solidarity with my father on the subject of creeping desecularization. Those of you who were disappointed by the Times’s decision not to air my father’s thoughts about creeping desecularization will be relieved to learn that they did publish the very next letter he wrote them, the following week.  This letter was in response to “My Literary Malady,” in which novelist Geoff Nicholson mulls over his recent gout diagnosis.  

James Gillray, The GOUT (1799)

But I would like to pause here to share with you my all-time favorite gout anecdote…

(more…)

Last week I got an email from my father, who was working on a letter to the editors of the New York Times about their editorial, “Democracy’s Close Call in Turkey.”  He had written a 250-word draft, but letters are supposed to be only 150 words… and who did he ask to help him reduce the word count?  Me, his graphomaniac daughter!  This was a wonderful change for me, since usually I am the one sending enormous files to my long-suffering editors. 

First I read the editorial, which was about the Turkish Constitutional Court’s ruling last week not to ban the Islamist AKP party—an event reported in a sane and balanced fashion by the LA Times.  The New York Times, on the other hand, described the court case as “the culmination of an epic battle” between a “powerful coterie of judges and generals” and the “broadly popular” Erdoğan, who apparently isn’t actually an Islamist, because his “supporters say that his past as a political Islamist is firmly behind him.”  That was the news coverage.  In the editorial, they got to express their genius even more freely:

The court ruling is a victory for Turkey, for democracy and for the politics of moderation in the volatile Near and Middle East. That makes it a victory for the United States as well.

Had it gone the other way, Turkey’s chances of joining the European Union would have been demolished and the clearly expressed will of Turkish voters outrageously thwarted.

(more…)

Having recently learned that two independent Google searchers arrived at my blog via the search phrase “elif enima,” I decided to try this search myself… and discovered that My Life and Thoughts is the very first hit!  w00t!  In the spirit of good sportsmanship, though, I would like to cite some of the runners-up in the competitive “elif enima” informational sector:

Unal, E
Unal E (Elif) …. Management of enema tip-induced rectourethral fistula with gluteus maximus flap: report of a case. [My paper] O Krand, E Unal.

Islam Will Replace Collapsing American Empire – alt.religion.islam …
Jul 23, 2008 …. Up your ass mohammad – Elif air ab tizak! …. As the old Arab proverb goes, “My enema’s enema is my friend”….

Atlas Shrugs: Turkey’s Re-Islamization
When its hands, feet and chest are pressed Elif recites various sura from the Koran in … Accessories to Elif doll, such as a toy laptop, teach toddler to …

Well, I wish Elif Unal the best of luck with what sounds like a fascinating program of research.  And I am grateful to learn the old Arab proverb, “My enema’s enema is my friend.”  It must be a very severe rectourethral fistula indeed, if even your enema needs its own enema.  But I was most interested by the item about the Elif doll (cf. Barbie is out, Elif is in) on Atlas Shrugs, a blog about Islam in Turkey.  (Where, you might be wondering, do enemas enter (so to speak) into this subject?  Check out the 110 posts tagged Kofi Annan a.k.a. Coffee Enema, e.g.: “The UN and more specifically Kofi Enema is a Jihadi tool.”)

Inspired by the example of a certain pobrecito anónimo, I’m writing my third blog entry in as many days!  This is about my latest adventure as a D-list writer. OK so a couple of months ago I was contacted by a very dear friend—an A-list writer of YA fiction, and an editor at the weekend edition of a well-known American newspaper—who asked if I might like to write something about my escapades in grad school, for a series of 2000-word “fun” pieces by “serious” writers, including, but not limited to, “Mamet on buying a house.”  Naturally this appealed to my spirit of challenge: as if I couldn’t make my experience in grad school sound at least as fun as David Mamet’s experience buying a house!  “You’re on, Mamet!” I thought, hitting the Send button.

(more…)