MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

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!

O readers, dear readers!  where does the time go?  There is so much I wanted to tell you, and the things to write keep on filling up the time to write them in.  My article on the Kafka papers controversy ran in Sunday’s New York Times magazine and, because of the many kind emails I received about the episode set in the heiress’s front yard, and in honor of the proliferation of alternate texts in the world of letters, I am posting a longer draft version of that scene, which includes more cats, more lawyers, more Kafka, more Brod, and more about Avi Steinberg’s hair.

Of the many incredible emails since Sunday (including the tale of Eva Hoffe’s erstwhile teenage cat-sitter, “a story for which,” as Dr. Watson would say, “the world is not yet prepared”), I would like to share two with you tonight.

1. Re: cats, from Jamie C.

My boyfriend, Itai, lives in Tel Aviv (a 10 minute drive from 23 Spinoza). I live in the United States. We meet via Skype during the long periods we aren’t together in the same time zone. During our Skype meet-ups, we find interesting articles to read aloud while simultaneously playing Scrabble. On Thursday of last week, your article was the featured read. Afterward, with your quotations in hand, my thoughtful and sweet Itai headed to Spinoza street to photograph the vignettes beautifully described in your article. I’m inserting the result here.

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Enterprising readers!  Thanks to those of you who have already submitted Gogol/ Google puns, many of which made my head explode.  Please note that there are still two days left of the contest.  Yes, dark horses, that means you!

Meanwhile, I am proud to inform those of you who weren’t in Iowa this afternoon that I was a featured guest on today’s edition of Great Taste, a food-themed talk show on KRUU, the voice of Fairfield. I talked about, and read an editorial outtake from, my New Yorker profile of chef Musa Dağdeviren.  (The outtake is up here.)  The incredibly kind host, Steve Boss, honored the venerable Turkish culinary tradition by preparing white bean soup and mücver in the studio kitchen. Or at least he said he did; and those who would like to try to distinguish the sound of white bean soup with their own ears will have their chance tomorrow (Thursday) morning at 7AM Central Time when the show will be rebroadcast and streamed live.  In the meantime, here is a recipe for mücver (zucchini fritters) by my comp-lit colleague Burcu.

In other outtake news, I was recently asked by Time magazine to write 100-200 words about what I’m reading this summer.  (Actually, the email forwarded to me by my publicist read as follows: “I’d love to get Elife [sic.] Batuman to talk to us about what’s in her beach bag.”  I later shared this communication with a colleague, whose reply provided much food for thought: “Time wants you to tell America what’s in your beach bag?  Holy shit.  That’s amazing.  So many ways to answer that. Perhaps you should just keep it simple and say ‘a big black dildo,’ which pretty much covers the bases.”)

As it happens, what I was reading at the time was Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), written by John Cleland while he was in debtor’s prison.  Personally, I found Fanny Hill to be a page-turner, but it isn’t for everyone.  I realized this, conclusively, when I got to the part where the teenage prostitute narrator and her teenage prostitute friend rape a mentally disabled guy in order to determine empirically whether it’s true that mentally disabled guys are particularly well-endowed.  According to their findings, it is true.  “Its enormous head seemed, in hue and size, not unlike a common sheep’s heart,” Cleland writes, in a generous descriptive passage which goes on for like three pages before concluding: “Nature, in short, had done so much for him in those parts, that she perhaps held herself acquitted in doing so little for his head.”  I guess, that time he meant the one on his shoulders.

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Dear readers!  I am just back from Tel Aviv, where I went to interview some important world literary-historical cats.  They are literally sitting on some invaluable manuscripts!  Neither they nor their caretakers (the daughters of Max Brod’s late secretary) have been especially forthcoming to the press.  But that didn’t stop me and my colleague Avi Steinberg from creepily lurking around their front yard for like an hour.

Because I am a professional and think of everything, I had an artificial mouse in my pocket, with which I was able to attract the attention of one of the archival interns:

Although this “opening gambit” of the mouse enjoyed a certain self-contained success, it failed to spark the lively debate I had been anticipating about the legal and cultural battle surrounding Kafka’s legacy. Rather, the intern seemed somehow unable to move beyond what one might call the pourparlers, so that really all I learned from our encounter was his position on artificial mice.  (pro)

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Since the publication of The Possessed, I have occasionally received emails from readers in exotic locations, offering to send me things.  To such readers I have been replying that what I would really like is a picture of my book in said exotic location(s)—much as George Clooney’s sister in Up in the Air asks wedding guests to take pictures of a cardboard cutout of herself and her fiancé, as a substitute for the honeymoon they can’t afford.  It’s like double-entry bookkeeping: I have to stay here at my desk, but at least my book can have some fun, right?

Well, dear readers, today I am really happy to share with you the first such pictures I received, from Israel via Avi Steinberg, author of the forthcoming Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian.  I’m reading Running the Books now, with great enjoyment, and also with increasing amazement at how simultaneously extremely similar and extremely different it is from The Possessed.  In both books, an unemployed Harvard graduate, having attempted unsuccessfully to write a novel, is driven by lack of health insurance to seek a semi-permanent position in a hermetic community where books are taken very seriously, leading to seriocomic adventures.  In Steinberg’s case, the hermetic community was, not graduate school, but a prison library.

At the St. Louis Airport	At Gadara, Israel

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