MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Concerned readers! I was deeply moved by the recent international outpouring of sentiment, both pro and con, regarding the potential use of “douchebag” in my forthcoming essay on Dante. In the past week I’ve given a lot of consideration to the different views that were expressed. Frankly, I don’t think I’ve struggled more over any single mot juste in my whole career.

At first, I was feeling pretty good about “sleazebags.”  So was my editor.  He said he had intended “assholes” less as an actual substitution for “douchebags,” than as “a prompt to a third way”—and we had found it!

As the days went by, though, I started to feel less confident.  I was increasingly bothered by the connotation, with “sleazebags,” of criminal slickness—an issue raised by several readers. What if “the thousand and one sleazebags of Florence” was understood to play on some image of Italian corruption or, worse yet, greasiness?  That was the last thing I wanted!  And didn’t “sleazebags” designate a particular kind of behavior or vocation, by contrast with the more existential “douchebags” (the inevitable douchebags, regardless of class or income)?

I began casting about for an alternative.  Although I did appreciate the many piquant suggestions I received from readers, none, to my ear, was quite right in context. That is, the historical moment may come when it sounds OK to refer to “Homer, Moses, Judas, Jesus, Brunetto Latini, Beatrice, all the thousand and one asswizards of Florence,” but I’m pretty sure it isn’t here yet.

One night I lay awake “brainstorming” about all the nimrods, ass-hats, jerks, jerk-offs, knuckleheads, fuckups, fuckwits, et alii, ad nauseam, but only succeeded in giving myself terrible dreams about an exboyfriend.

In the morning, I realized it was time to reevaluate the objections to “douchebag.” These seemed to fall into two categories:

1. Shelf-life: We should avoid fad words of recent coinage, because they might go obsolete.
2. Staleness/ annoyingness: We should not join annoying, repetitive people in overusing their favorite words.

Interestingly, Objection 2 has been around since at least 2006 when Gawker called a moratorium on “douchebags,” offering, as an reward for the reader who came up with the best alternative, a bottle of Balneol Perianal Cleansing Lotion (“it may not seem like much, but according to a commenter at drugstore.com, ‘it will last at least 6 to 8 months even in the most busy of households’”). What was the result? Choads, twatwaffles, snatches… nothing suitable. The unclaimed bottle of Balneol ended up in the Gawker lavatory.

In 2008-09, the death of “douchebag” was again announced/ called for by various publications, on revamped charges: the word was not only “completely played out,” but was now being bandied about for purposes other than its “true intention”; “the douches themselves” had sinisterly coopted it for use against less deserving candidates; its very transcendent historic-philosophical conditions had expired, along with the financial bubble that brought us the platonic douchebags; etc.

Oh readers—it’s a thankless, dreary task to separate the issues at hand. But did I go into this line of work for the yucks?  Let’s start with the “shelf life” objection. Here, I think there’s been a conflation of normative and prescriptive: people say that douchebag is on the brink of extinction, because they believe it should be on the brink of extinction. Yet the very insistence that it should be extinct is proof that it’s still here.  People have been trying to exterminate this word for 5+ years, and not even the massive incentive of a bottle of Balneol could elicit a viable alternative… these things mean something.

As for overuse: since when is being used a bad thing, for a word?  “Asshole” is obviously used way more than “douchebag,” and nobody says it’s time to retire “asshole.” The view seems to be rather that “asshole” is time-tested—a classic.

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Frugal readers! Are you looking for a classy graduation gift that won’t break the bank?  Great news!  At the time of writing, The Possessed has become an Amazon bargain book and will set you back scarcely the price of a Venti Mocha Coconut Frappuccino!

In other Amazon news, it was recently been brought to my attention that the Possessed reader rating has dropped to 3-point-something stars. Looking over the stats, I saw that, although 5-star ratings has a large plurality (thank you, friends!), there are also quite a few 1-stars, which can’t all be from Orlando Figes.

I found myself wondering why the Amazon reader reviews were, on average, less positive than the reviews in the press.  My guess is that satisfied readers of a well-reviewed book are less likely than unsatisfied readers to post on Amazon.  One group thinks to itself, “Why should I write a good review when the Times already did,” while the other thinks, “Aha, a venue to express my outrage at the Times for hyping this book.”  I found support for this hypothesis in the fact that many particularly well-reviewed books tended to have relatively low reader ratings.  So… it’s the old dialectic of hype vs. backlash.

I remember when “hype” used to be a pre-publication phenomenon.  Hype was inherently unreliable, because it came out before anyone had actually read the book. Today, pretty much any good review counts as “hype,” which has thus become a codeword for any positive opinion that you don’t share – a way of disguising a difference of opinion as a conspiracy theory.

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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”:

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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Thanks for the great responses to the prev post, which I reproduce here:

1. From mikeym:

patriots love, not packers
*bless*

2. From SW Foska:

Particularly intrigued by the idea of a set of 3 crutches. But presumably, as one who takes koalas, fellating hedgehogs and anatomically impossible cows in your unimpeded quotidian stride, you’re less fazed by this than me.

3. From Libbie+:

You were right the 1st time — it’s those Cheeseheads, the Packers, but more importantly the Steelers. Can one buy a Terrible Towel through Amazon? That would be a great way to aid the dental health of your intern. Any thoughts on Egypt? Or Egyptian literature? And I am starting a grassroots NM movement to get you to visit and speak in The Land of Enchantment… L in ABQ

In response:

1. Huge thanks/ much respek to both mikeym for the correction, and Libbie+ for the nuanced contextualization!

2. Dear SW Foska – I know, I know. Here is a riddle for you: what uses one tiny crutch in the lateish morning, a medium-sized crutch around noon, and a larger crutch after that? I’m not sure what the answer is, but I think it is probably very sad and possibly congenital.

(Another interpretation, emailed by an anonymous reader: “I like how they have them sized for the whole family, like for the three little bears (post drunk-driving accident).”)
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