MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Big thanks to Eugene Ostashevsky for introducing me to Vasily Kamensky’s immortal “Constantinople”: “a milestone,” as Ostashevsky observes, “in the history of Russian travel writing about Turkey.”

“Constantinople” originally appeared in Ferro-Concrete Poems (1914),“a work… famous primarily for being made entirely of commercially produced wallpaper.”

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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”:

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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Distinguished readers!  I‘ve been scrambling a bit lately with various things, so I wasn’t able to report right away what a wonderful time I had last week in London. First I went to a Boots shop, where I practically had a heart attack, having spent the previous three weeks in my bunker in the forest, staring at the Black Sea (when it wasn’t obscured by fog), while writing about soccer hooligans. The only shopping I did that whole month was at the Koç campus grocery store, where there is always a special on ramen and old quinces. There is nowhere to buy aspirin on the Koç campus. If you get a headache, it’s a 20-minute bus ride to the historic fishing community of Sarıyer.

Historic Sarıyer fishermen

I won’t go into all the useful and inspiring purchases I made at Boots, except insofar as they relate to a mystery that has been baffling me for months now, namely: I can’t find women’s shaving cream anywhere in Istanbul. I won’t say I’ve scoured the city from top to bottom, like the guy in that Orhan Pamuk novel, but I did drop in on numerous pharmacy and beauty stores in Sarıyer, Taksim, and Beşiktaş.  Everyone sells depilatory cream and wax, and men’s shaving cream – which is what I’ve been buying, because I like to think of myself as the kind of independent, self-sufficient woman who doesn’t need her legs to smell like jojoba mango margaritas. But it turns out I’m not independent or self-sufficient enough not to mind that my legs now always smell like some guy’s chin.

Anyway, the first Boot’s I walk into—maybe they didn’t have quite the rich panoply of women’s shaving products offered by my once-local Safeway, but that’s probably for the best, because then I really would have had a stroke. What I’m saying is, I found everything I was looking for.

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Stylish readers!  I’m London bound for a series of really promising events.  Tomorrow evening I will be heading straight from the airport to the Auburn & Wills clothing store in Notting Hill, for a double-booking with the visibly fabulous Molly Parkin:

“the queen of bohemia resplendent in her urban turban”

This event must not be missed by anyone who (a) is in London, (b) loves literature, and (c) needs to pick up some light yachting wear.

Seriously when we were going over the schedule, my publicist mentioned that I should pack something elegant for a photo shoot.  I immediately got demoralized, because all two of my pairs of leggings now have holes in them – and then I was like, “Wait – if I’m reading in a clothing store, can I just buy something there?”

“Oh, yes – I believe you get a discount,” my publicist said, a shade hesitantly.  “It’s just, the clothes might be a bit preppy.”

STONEYFOLD CARDIGAN, £189

Clearly Ms. Parks and I are gonna fit right in.  I actually have my eye on this rather attractive duvet cover to wear to my next engagement:

BELLERBY DUVET COVER (DOUBLE), £119

This will be at the British Museum on February 21, where I will talk about Cervantes, Balzac, and Double-Entry Bookkeeping, as part of the LRB Winter Lecture Series, the other two speakers in which series being, hilariously, Judith Butler (who spoke on the Kafka papers controversy) and TJ Clark (who spoke on Picasso).  A huge honor and I plan to dress accordingly.

Apropos of all my hard work researching Kafka and kittens last year, I was delighted to note that Quirk Classics, the visionaries who brought us Android Karenina, are finally putting out a Kafka-kitten mash-up:

Looking sharp, little guy!