MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Issue 7 of n+1 magazine, which contains Part One of my memoir about Samarkand, is returning from the printers today.  Let me clarify that when I say “returning from the printers,” I don’t mean it will happen by magic or thanks to a federal bail-out, but, rather, that the editors are going to drive to Pennsylvania in a U-Haul to get them.  Subsequently there will be an “unloading party” at the n+1 offices in Dumbo.  They will ply their writers and subscribers and the readers of their writers’ blogs with beer, in the effort to get them to unload the truck.  Needless to say this is just the kind of literary-proletarian evening I myself particularly relish, but to my dismay I somehow find myself 3000 miles away.  But the truck will be at 68 Jay Street, #405 (the corner of Front and Jay, a block from the F station), ETA 8pm, and those of you in New York are warmly invited.

In other news, I also have a piece called “On Complaining” in the upcoming issue of the LRB.  It’s kind of ironic because “On Complaining” takes a generally negative attitude towards complaining, whereas in the Samarkand memoir I myself kind of do a lot of complaining.  This is another example of the complexity of the human condition.  Still, you definitely don’t want to miss that issue of the LRB because I hear it will also contain Keith Gessen’s “notes about his grandmother.”  And you don’t even have to unload their truck.

Dear readers, I leave you with an image unrelated to this post, except maybe in some deeper, metaphysical sense.  But I just can’t stop thinking about these Siberian hamsters:

I am just back from my polling location at the garage of 238 Glenview, where I was able to express my opinion on such important matters as Proposition R, which would change the name of the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant to the George W. Bush Sewage Plant:

Just as France presented the Statue of Liberty as its gift to the nation, the citizens of San Francisco may now bestow their own special gift to the country by renaming our award winning waste water treatment plant in honor of outgoing President George W Bush. We think this is a fitting memorial for a truly outstanding Commander-in-Chief. On matters ranging from diplomacy to fiscal and environmental stewardship, no other President has had such a dramatic impact on the country and the Constitution in such a short time…

Critics of this measure point out that the initiative… memorializes an administration best forgotten. To this we simply say that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. President Bush has left us with a gigantic mess, and this facility symbolizes the city’s deft ability to clean up its share of the financial and diplomatic mess left in this administration’s wake. It will also become the world’s first presidential sewage plant, a potential tourist attraction, and therefore an opportunity for the dedicated plant workers to educate visitors about this essential and heretofore unknown public works.

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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.

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Remember how in an earlier post I said that the sad young literary men didn’t supply any recipes to the Muskogee Daily Phoenix, and only the resourceful young literary women came through?  Well, this was not entirely accurate.  The situation, it seems, is more complicated than I thought.

I recently received an email from Melony Carey, author of the combined book-review–recipe column in the abovementioned Phoenix (check out her latest: NASCAR-themed recipes to accompany a novel narrated by a dog belonging to a Formula One racer), to the effect that Guillermo Martínez, former grad student and current writer of math-themed mystery thrillers, had, in fact, contributed a recipe for “almond chicken baked on a bed of salt,” which had been blocked, for reasons yet unexplained, by the Norton anti-spam software.   

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In my capacity as one of our prominent internet resources on Keith Gessen, I was recently contacted by Melony Carey, author of a column called “Food by the Book” (in the Muskogee Daily Phoenix), which combines book reviews with recipes from the books’ sociohistorical milieux.  Carey was working on a review of All the Sad Young Literary Men and wanted to know what the sad young literary men ate.  I wrote to Keith, asking what he cooked in grad school; in this way, I learned that Keith apparently didn’t cook a whole lot in grad school:

Oh gosh Elif! While I was in Syracuse I mostly took to dipping black bread into pasta sauce and calling it pizza. You are going to have to carry the load on this one, I’m afraid. If I think of anything else…. but I’m fairly certain that’s all I ate the entire time. That and coffee. And beer. I’m afraid. And yet here I am. 

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