MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Connected readers!  I’m just back from an idyllic week in Urfa, sacred carp capital of all four hemispheres.

Because the state of internet was not as well-developed as the local cyprinid species, I was unable to post a couple of videos I’d been meaning to share, from a dramatic reading of Lightning Rods (the new novel by Helen Dewitt).  The reading, which was sponsored by n+1 and the Center for Fiction, took place on September 10. By chance I was in town then visiting my mother – just imagine how honored my mom and I were, when I was asked to participate!

I was especially honored once I received the script, and saw that I got all the best lines:

His first fantasy was about walls. The woman would have the upper part of her body on one side of the wall. The lower part of her body would be on the other side of the wall. Sometimes, in fact most of the time, the upper part of the body would be fully clothed. There would be nothing to show what was going on on the other side of the wall.

Sometimes the woman would be naked from the waist down. Most of the time she would be wearing a short tight skirt that could be pushed up and underpants that could be pulled down. Sometimes he would have trouble deciding whether it was better with or without the pants. The high point was pushing the skirt slowly up to reveal a firm, tight, unsuspecting ass. Later a cock would go in and the vantage point of the fantasy would shift to the other side of the wall, where you would not know from the fully clothed upper body of the woman that a cock was hard at work on the other side of the wall. For some reason or other she would need to pretend that nothing was happening.

My mom suggested I should demand a small surcharge every time I said “cock.”  She is always looking out for her little girl.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Last night I saw Carol Reed’s The Thin Third Man again.  It’s one of those masterpieces where you find something different in it on each viewing.  The last time I saw it, as a literature graduate student, I was particularly struck by the scene in which Holly Martins, fearing for his life, is picked up by an unknown taxi driver, spirited through noir Vienna, and deposited with screeching brakes at the British Cultural Reeducation Service, where he is forced to answer questions like “Do you believe in the stream of consciousness?” and “Where would you place James Joyce?” before an audience of literary expatriates who keep walking out in disgust.  “How like life,” I remember thinking.

(more…)

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.”)

(more…)

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)