MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Proliferating readers! It was a joy and an honor to meet so many of you last week in New York and Boston. Over 100 people turned up at McNally Jackson where I had a long conversation with my first editor, Keith Gessen, during which my oldest childhood friend, the prominent novelist Dara Horn, was so carried away by the emotion of the moment that she threw a small plastic dinosaur at my head.

Wednesday’s reading at Brookline Booksmith was also attended by numerous valued readers of My Life and Thoughts, including my aunt Deniz and her oldest childhood friend, who doesn’t believe in pasteurization, and who had commemorated the occasion by baking a wonderful chocolate cake made with nonpasteurized buttermilk.  We were joined for cake by super-guest-blogger Peli Grietzer, who attended the Manhattan event and the Brookline event, and asked questions on subjects ranging from Shklovsky’s Third Factory to a paragraph from my dissertation which it turned out I had sent him in like 2007, so you just tell me if he deserved some cake.

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THE UNKNOWABLE FUTURE

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1/20/12 – New York, NY
Center for Fiction, 7PM
Criticism Beside Itself (with Rivka Galchen and Mark Athitakis)

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THE IRRETRIEVABLE PAST

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2/24/10 – San Francisco, CA
City Lights Books

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3/3/10 – Los Angeles, CA
ALOUD at the LAPL
In conversation with David Ulin

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3/10/10 – Corte Madera, CA
Book Passage

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3/11/10 – Menlo Park, CA
Kepler’s Books

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3/15/10 – New York, NY
McNally Jackson
In conversation with Keith Gessen

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3/17/10 – Boston, MA
Brookline Booksmith

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3/19/10 – Brooklyn, NY
Brooklyn Book Court

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4/6/10 – Chicago, IL
Seminary Co-op (57th St. Books)

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4/22/10 – La Jolla, CA
D.G. Wills Books

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4/25/10 – Los Angeles, CA
LA Times Festival of Books

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5/5/10 – Berkeley, CA
Moe’s Books

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5/30/10 – New Orleans, LA
Faulkner House Books, 3:30PM

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6/8/10 – New York, NY
Strand Bookstore, 7PM
Book launch for Android Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy and Ben Winters

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6/10/10 – New York, NY
Housing Works Bookstore, 7PM
Death: A Literary Celebration of the Bitter End (with Joseph O’Neill and Dianne Williams)

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6/21/10 – Seattle, WA
Washington University Bookstore, 7PM

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6/26/10 – San Francisco, CA
The Believer All-Acoustic Summer Festival of Language and Thinking
Amnesia (853 Valencia), 6–8pm

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8/28/10 – Melbourne, Australia
How Russia Changed My Life, 11:30AM
Melbourne Writers Festival

8/29/10 – Melbourne, Australia
Critical Writing Masterclass, 10AM–4PM
Melbourne Writers Festival

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8/29/10 – Melbourne, Australia
Dog’s Tales
The Toff in Town, 7PM

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8/30/10 – Sydney, Australia
Gleebooks, 6pm (with Jane Gleeson-White)

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9/2/10 – Brisbane, Australia
Strange Encounters with Russian Writers, 2:30
Brisbane Writers Festival

9/3/10 – Brisbane, Australia
Queensland University of Technology, 11am-1pm
Brisbane Writers Festival

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9/4/10 – Brisbane, Australia
Obsession, 1:30pm
Brisbane Writers Festival

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9/23/10 – San Francisco, CA
Voices of the World Series, 6PM
World Affairs Council of Northern California (312 Sutter Street, Suite 200)

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9/25/10 – Santa Rosa, CA
Sonoma County Book Festival, 11:30AM

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10/7/10 – San Francisco, CA
Litquake 2010
Feminine Wiles, 7PM

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10/11/10 – Yale University
St. Anthony Hall, 483 College St.
4:30PM

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10/13/10 – Boston College
Lowell Humanities Lecture Series
7PM

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10/14/10 – Wellesley College
Pendleton Atrium, 21 Wellesley College Rd.
4:15PM

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10/15/10 – Harvard University
Davis Center (3rd Floor), 1730 Cambridge St.
4PM

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12/16/10,  Istanbul, Turkey
Koç University Founders Hall, 6:30PM

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1/20/11 – 1/23/11, The Hague, Netherlands
Winternachten Literary Festival

2/16/11 – London, UK
Event with Molly Parkin, hosted by Damian Barr
Aubin & Wills, 7PM

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2/21/11 – London, UK
“Cervantes, Balzac, and Double-Entry Bookkeeping”
London Review of Books Winter Lectures series
The British Museum – BP Theatre, 6:30PM

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2/24/11,  Istanbul, Turkey
Talk on Literary Journalism
Koç University, 6:30PM

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3/9/11,  New York, NY
NBCC Finalists’ Reading
The New School, 6PM

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4/10/11,  Oxford, UK
Oxford Literary Festival talk
Christ Church, Festival Room 2, 10AM

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4/11/11,  London, UK
The Russian Classics (with Pavel Basinsky)
Southbank Centre, Level 5 Function Room, 7:45PM

4/13/11,  London, UK
Literary Death Match
Concrete, 56 Shoreditch High Street, 8:15PM (Doors at 7)

4/15/11 – Galway, Ireland
Cúirt International Festival of Literature
Event with Geoff Dyer, 3PM

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4/30/11 – Beyoğlu, Istanbul
ANAMED (Anadolu Medeniyetleri Araştırma Merkezi), 4PM
“Blogging: Genre and Practice,” with Kaya Genç

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9/14/11 – Istanbul, Turkey
SALT Gallery, 6:30PM
How does sports obsession shape a city?

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10/16/11 – Zurich, Switzerland
Salongespräche, Theatre Neumarkt, 6:30PM

Dear readers!  It took some time, but I finally outsmarted those turkeys and am back at my desk, just in time for the impending release of The Possessed, which you can preorder right now from Amazon for the low, low price of $10.12.  Those with concerns about my interns’ nutritional intake are particularly encouraged you to order from one of the links on this page: that way, thanks to the Amazon Associates program, we get 4% extra per copy.

That means for every copy you buy, we get $0.40: the cost of approximately 1.78 fl. oz. Ensure High Protein Complete Balanced Nutrition Drink!

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Arghh, dear readers—I can’t keep up with you guys! I did finally reply to the comments. But I keep receiving such amazing additions to the beard bibliography! All Russian readers with an interest in beard semiotics are urged to consult Gregory Freidin’s 1993 article about his own beard, in the context of Gogol’s Overcoat, and the larger question of cultures and subcultures in Russia during the late ’80s and early ’90s (“Dve shineli, ili anekdot s borodoi,” Znamia 2 (1993)). The footnotes alone include many promising additions to the field of beardobibliography… I mention here only A. D. Leach’s “Magical Hair (Curl Bequest Prize Essay, 1957),” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 80.2 (1958).

“My beard is a part of nature—and yet, it is also a sign,” writes Freidin, who grew a beard at the end of the ’60s, with the intention of embracing a Bohemian subculture. But there remained the problem of all the famous non-subcultural beards, like those of Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Engels, Marx, the Academician Timiryazev, and nearly all the “classic” Russian writers. (“On the symbolic map crossed by the demarcation line between Russian and Soviet literature, the surname Tolstoy was an invariant sign, while the beard was a sign of differentiation”: Alexei Tolstoy has a zero-value beard, but Lev Tolstoy has a “beard approaching infinity.”)

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Well, there is good news and bad news. The good news is, the 11/20 issue of the LRB came out today. The bad news (at least, bad for those non-subscribers to the LRB who still wanted to read my article) is that my 8,000+ word discursion on Elisabeth Roudinesco’s Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida (Columbia UP, $26.50) is only available by online purchase, or possibly by cutting a deal with the Widener minotaur. Imagine my feelings when, as I was writing the previous sentence, I experienced a moment of doubt about whether discursion was really the word I wanted, and, upon looking it up, found that the very definition is also only available to paying subscribers!

discursion can be found at Merriam-WebsterUnabridged.com.

Click here to start your free trial! Click here to search for another word in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.

Learn more about “discursion” and related topics at Britannica.com
See a map of “discursion” in the Visual Thesaurus
Find Jobs in Your City

It is certainly very thoughtful of them to help you find a job, so you can afford to use the secret fatcat dictionary. On the other hand, if you, like me, don’t have a real job, then you may enjoy whiling away some minutes by typing in random words, to see which ones constitute the true discourse of power and privilege as defined by Merriam-Webster. On still another hand, the fact that you are unemployed is probably a reflection of the fact that you don’t know any of those words: I personally tried all the most obscure and aristocratic words I could think of, and all of them were in the free version of the dictionary accessible to any homeless dude in the SFPL. Finally, in despair, I looked in Google for a list of “ten-dollar words,” and although most of them were also in the free dictionary, one of them, croodle, is, like discursion, reserved for the elite.

But the class system never has been able to confine the intellectuals, who hover so ambiguously between the toilers and the exploiters! Take me for example. Although I don’t exactly have a real job with health insurance, I do have a part-time teaching job with unlimited OED access, and so am in a position to inform you that “The cushat croodles amourously” (TANNAHILL Bonnie Wood Poems (1846) 132), meaning that it produces a “continued soft low murmuring sound.” You read it here and you read it for free.

Philosophy in Turbulent Times	Cushat (Columba palumbus)