My Life and Thoughts

The other day, my intern Friday and I were home working and started to get a bit fretful and snappy.  Normally I pride myself on maintaining a positive work environment so I was really disappointed with myself for letting things slide like that, and resolved to take drastic steps. Given that it was a beautiful sunny day, the natural course of action seemed to be for me to take Friday outside for a stimulating walk.

Here at My Life and Thoughts, we are all about occasionally letting the staff see the light of day—but only when they feel like it.  Join us on our three-part epic journey:

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Let me begin by thanking Ryan for the link to the Roudinesco conference, which does indeed include such promising titles as: "‘In Pursuit of the Nazi Mind?’ The Deployment of Psychoanalysis in the Struggle against Fascism." I am also curious about who decides the ad placement in the LRB print edition. The last piece I wrote for them, on graphic novels, ran with an ad for Turkey: The Space of the Mind(d)Field, a special issue of the art journal Third Text, including articles like "Parrhesiastic Games in the Turkish Art Scene" (by Süreyyya Evren, who really spells it with 3 y’s, possibly to convey the eternal question of contemporary academic discourse: "Why? Why? Why?"), and: "Dear Europe, Dear Turkey: Why are You Making Us So Depressed [Why why why]?" (by Kevin Robins).

I remember when that LRB came out, a certain prominent YA author wrote to me that she was puzzled "by the decision to advertise Turkish language lessons (or was it Genghis Khan garden gnomes?) at the bottom of your first page."  and, although I initially thought "Genghis Khan garden gnomes" was really funny, I soon I realized it’s no laughing matter, because guess who introduced garden gnomes—in fact, "models of Central Asian dwarves that were kept as house pets by wealthy families during China’s glorious Tang Dynasty"—to the ignorant West?  That’s right… the Mongols!

This important discovery into the genealogy of garden gnomes (viz., they too are related to Genghis Khan) was made by Bu Congming, professor of archeology and finance at the Urumqi Institute of Desert Exploration and Real Estate Development, and his colleague Xuan Zhang, on the basis of "a letter written in Sogdian, an extinct Central Asia language, [discovered] in a garbage pit at Dunhuang":

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Today marks the first solo book release by my colleague Lauren Mechling—you know, the one who was delivered by the same obstetrician as me.  It hasn’t been out for 24 hours yet and already Dream Girl is challenging my poor battered gender stereotypes (I think they’re part of my decrepit worldview).  So remember the relatively recent post when I was like, “Oh, girls would be embarrassed to talk about the gross things they eat made out of peanut butter?”  Well, I was really wrong, because check out this excerpt from the “Lauren Mechling extravaganza” on the blog YA New York, in which Lauren and the author of said blog, Sabrina Banes, take turns asking each other twenty questions:

Question Sixteen

LM: What’s the embarrassing thing you regularly eat by your lonesome? It has to be something that no sane human would ever serve in a restaurant.
YA NY: Oh my God. You’re really trying to torture me, aren’t you, asking questions like these? Okay, here’s the thing I eat when I’m sick: Peanut butter rice soup. Basically, you take leftover rice (the kind used in making sushi, which is short-grained and what Koreans eat on a daily basis) and you cover it with water and let it boil. Add two tablespoons of peanut butter, and simmer until you get a weird brown porridge. It’s like chicken soup for the crazy half-Korean girl.

Question Seventeen

YA NY: Fine, Ms. Lauren. What embarrassing food do YOU eat on your lonesome?
LM: Oh, I was hoping you’d ask! I like instant couscous, boiling hot water, worsterschire sauce, a pat of butter, and a sprinkle of salt.

I mean, true, confessing these “recipes” is described as “embarrassing,” “torture,” etc… but if the discussants were really embarrassed, they could always have said “ice cream sundaes.”  In short: if you can figure out gender stereotypes, dear reader, may they bring you much happiness; personally, I give up. 

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I was recently delighted to learn that my dear friend, the teen fiction sensation Lauren Mechling, now has a blog where you can read about her pursuit of flawless social functioning, and also about the time she spilled a cup of coffee on famous actor Jeffrey Tambor and didn’t feel bad about it. After spending an enjoyable half hour poking around Mechling’s website, I made an amazing discovery about our shared past. “My mother,” Mechling writes,

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