MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Esteemed readers!  I am very honored and excited to share with you another effort of the tireless Batumanologist Kaya Genç, appearing in the June issue of Turkish Vogue:

The title, “Şatodaki Yazar” (“The Writer in the Castle”), alludes both to a certain famous depressing writer, and also to my Gothic situation as writer-in-residence at Koç University, which I am happy to say has been extended through June 2012(!).

Many thanks to Kaya for the sympathetic reporting, and also to Korhan Karaoysal (no shortage of K’s here) for the equally sympathetic photographs. Those who enjoy Korhan’s work as much as I do are urged to consult his amazing pictures of Turkey’s first sports camp for the disabled.

Speaking of the disabled, the following slogan recently caught my eye on a street in Turkey’s most Kafkaesque city: “EVERY HEALTHY PERSON IS A POTENTIAL DISABLED PERSON.” (more…)

Irrepressible readers!  My loyal intern and I are well into month 14 of promoting The Possessed, which comes out in May in both Spain and Turkey.  Guess what this means?  It means more interviews!  I was just chatting over tea with Milliyet’s very lovely Zeynep Miraç Özkartal.  It is a rare Turkish interview that goes by without my being invited to talk smack about national treasure Orhan Pamuk.  Today, I got so excited talking about why Gogol is funnier than Orhan Pamuk that I somehow caused my tea glass (an Ajda glass, as it happens) to shatter into several pieces, covering me with both tea and broken glass.  (That is how I was occupied at the beginning of the royal wedding – I know because, when I went to get napkins, I saw it on TV.)

Shortly thereafter the photographer came, and the next thing I knew I was sitting on a stone parapet, my shirt (and a few glass splinters) stuck to my body with tea. I had to surrender my jacket for aesthetic purposes.  Bracing myself against a rather strong wind, I thought: “What if I fall off this stone parapet and break my head open?”  It was one of the many, many occasions I have found in the past weeks to take comfort in the words of Marcus Aurelius: “The good man’s only singularity lies in his approving welcome to every experience the looms of fate may weave for him.”

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I was so honored earlier this month to receive the first annual Terry Southern Prize for Humor from the Paris Review (for a five-installment blog post titled My Twelve-Hour Blind Date with Dostoevsky). Sadly, I was unable to accept the award in person at the Paris Review Revel, which coincided with the UK launch of The Possessed.  This caused a few small logistical problems, the subject of some correspondence I share with you today, between myself and Paris Review super-editor Lorin Stein.

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1. Stein to Batuman:

…Would you like to write a short (like, three sentence or whatever) acceptance note for me to read at the Revel?… Also: do you want your two-foot mahogany B52 sent to you in Istanbul, or shall we store it? I was thinking Nile Southern would probably be happy to give it a temporary home till you get back. But maybe you want it to look at—for inspiration???.

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2. Batuman to Stein:

…re: b52, i don’t think i could be any more inspired in its physical presence than i already am by the powerful idea, thank you. if the object could be placed in storage, either with nile southern or even less illustriously, that would be wonderful – alternatively it could be sent care of my mother.  whichever is least trouble.

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3. Stein to Batuman:

We will totally deliver the plane to your moms!!!

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4. Batuman’s mom, to Batuman (in response to a request to accommodate what I still somehow naively believed to be a “B52-sized plaque of some kind”):

I am now really apprehensive about the b52 (joke), will it be the size of the painting of the bull in Holland or even grander??

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5. Stein to Batuman (after the Revel):

…In the end I wasn’t able to read your wonderful letter because [names redacted] went way over their allotted time slots.¹ BUT I did manage to work in the shout-out to Fyodor. Now, will you please give me your mom’s address (does she have a doorman?)?…

…I’m sorry that your mother is soon going to have a large model of a B52 “flying fortress” in her living room…

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6. Batuman to Stein:

“flying fortress” is a joke, right?

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7. Stein to Batuman:

One sort of B52 was called the “flying fortress” – but I think maybe that one wasn’t outfitted with bombs. Yours is outfitted with bombs.

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Globalized readers!  I’m just back from my first visit to Ireland, where I was really happy and honored to read at the Cúirt Festival in Galway with Geoff Dyer, one of my favorite writers about books.

In light of the recent kind comments from Anthony Powell fans, I will cite one line I particularly admired in Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi:

In some ways the [Venice] Biennale was like A Dance to the Music of Time condensed into four days: the same people cropping up, expectedly and unexpectedly, generally looking somewhat the worse for wear.

I remembered this line when I reached the description of the Biennale in Temporary Kings (Volume Eleven of Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time): it isn’t clear why Ada is there with Glober, and whether the artifact made of “zinc, horsehair, patent leather and cardboard” in the French pavilion is supposed to look German-African or German-Japanese, and I thought that Dyer must have had this passage in mind, that there must have been the idea on some level of collapsing the whole twelve novels into the Biennale scene.  But he told me in the taxi from the airport that he never actually got past volume five!

Anyway, I had an amazing time in Galway. I had barely been in town fifteen minutes when a kind editor bought me a pint of something called a Galway Hooker. Later, a wonderful local artist drove me and Dyer to a beach in Connemara, where we climbed on some rocks and looked at the Aran Islands.¹  The local artist found some seaweed that she was pretty sure was the kind of seaweed which, if you soak it in very hot bath water and squeeze it, produces a lovely aloe-vera-like gel, although she wasn’t positive, it might have been just ordinary seaweed.  She offered some to me and Dyer to put in our baths, but we both declined.

I greatly enjoyed our reading and discussion, which took place that afternoon at the super-old and potentially haunted Druid Theater, to a fantastic crowd with names like Fionnghuala and Saoirse.  It was a pleasure and a privilege to inscribe copies of one’s book to people with such beautiful names!

I was also very moved by the combined monument to Oscar Wilde and Eduard Vilde, a gift to Galway from the Estonian people (the original is in Tartu). It commemorates a meeting that did not take place in 1892.

Here’s to conversations between writers, both the ones that really happened and the ones that didn’t!

Valued readers!  I am just back from a visit to our nation’s publishing capital, where I had a fabulous time representing Tolstoy at the Strand.  In one week I managed to see three rats, and also to purchase and lose two umbrellas.  Satisfying as these canonical New York experiences were, I’m still really happy to be back in San Francisco and reunited with my loyal intern, who has spent the past month crashing with my webmaster—I believe, mostly eating cold pizza and occasionally helping out with some coding.

I will be making a brief trip to Seattle next week.  If you happen to be in Seattle, or perhaps embedded in the floor of the Puget Sound, living the long, slow, decadent life with my new role model, the geoduck clam, I warmly encourage you and your friends to stop by the University Bookstore, where I will be reading this upcoming Monday.

I’m also happy to report that, as my poor body shuttles between SF and Seattle, my book is apparently having a great time in Sydney and Stockholm.  Thanks to Mike Wong for these beautiful pictures of The Possessed enjoying a view of the Sydney Harbor Bridge (left), and then unwinding at high tea with Wong’s mother and great-aunt (right; the tea pictured is Russian Caravan blend).

A shout-out is also due to Nancy Miller who sent the following beautiful images from Stockholm, which show The Possessed teetering perilously between a municipal garbage can (left) and what looks like the Stockholm City Hall, where they hold the Nobel Prize banquets (right)… a poignant metaphor for the uncertain destiny of all literary production.