MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

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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Leipzig was so great! Marco and I were really happy to meet the novelist Kevin Vennemann (our German translator), to whom I had mentioned an abbreviated version of the Krautgarden Loft banana incident, and who subsequently suggested that we meet for a pre-reading dinner in Auerbachs Keller, the basement tavern where Mephistopheles took Faust, and where the sixteenth-century prototypical Dr. Faustus supposedly once transported himself from the basement up to street level, by riding on a diabolically possessed wine barrel. “Terrible place,” Vennemann wrote, “but very… hearty food [original ellipses] made for tourists and probably the best way to keep you from starving once again. They might be serving a lot of kraut as well.”

To be totally honest, my caloric intake isn’t actually anything out of the ordinary, but I was of course delighted to have acquired the reputation of an insatiable devourer of hearty tourist food. Verily my friends, it is better to be feared than loved!

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Patient readers! Since I got back to San Francisco last week I have been going about my business, waiting for the moment when a beautiful beaming woman would come up to me and exclaim: “Du hast einen Blog geschrieben!” But, contrary to cultural stereotype, this beautiful German woman is not very punctual.

My recent travels began in New York where I was delighted to see all the sad young literary men. On March 7, I visited Keith Gessen and Marco Roth at n+1’s new offices in Dumbo. Gessen, whose new book, All the Sad Young Literary Men, comes out in two weeks (it is really good!) was engaged in: spackling.

Marco and I headed out into some torrential rain and made our way to our reading in the “Krautgarden Loft,” which had the most amazing bathtub:

I would like to thank all the friends and readers who attended the New York Krautgarden event, which featured no fewer than 13 unheard-of German and American authors. I especially salute Hayley, Vadim, my mom, and Tara from Columbia, who stayed all the way to the end. (I was scheduled for 11PM but, contrary to cultural stereotype, didn’t actually read until after midnight.)

The situation was made kind of more piquant and interesting by the fact that there was absolutely nothing there to eat in the Krautgarden Loft. There was a kitchenette, where some German girls were selling $3 drinks, and it was eventually brought to my attention that if you stood to one side and looked into the kitchenette, you could kind of see a plate of bananas. Around 11PM, I made my way over and asked how much a banana cost. The girls stared at me as if I had landed from the moon.

“Are the bananas for sale?” I asked.

“No, no,” they said. “It’s a private kitchen!” I explained that I had been at this reading for over 3 hours, there were still 5 authors scheduled before me, etc.; but, they insisted that they couldn’t give me a banana unless I got explicit permission from the owner of the loft. By this time a small group of onlookers had gathered at the counter. Some onlookers appeared to think that I should be given a banana; others disagreed. A petite woman elbowed her way to the front of the crowd. “Wass does she want?” she demanded.

“She wants a banana,” one of the girls replied.

“Well, for heaven’s sake give her a banana! And give me one too!” said the apartment’s owner, for it was she, and I would like to thank her here for her generosity. Probably if you are Philip Roth or someone, people are always giving you all kinds of fruits and vegetables all the time; but, as a D-list writer, it is all too often that people are like: “No, go get your own banana.” Apropos of which, thanks are also due to one German guy who not only stayed to the end of the reading and complimented my story, but even offered me a German chocolate! I am quite fond of German chocolates.

Stay tuned for the next installment of My Life and Thoughts, when I will write about my trip to Germany, which is where German chocolates come from.

In the continuing story of my beautiful friendship with German literary culture, I am happy and honored to report my participation in the 2008 Krautgarden literary series, comprising two sets of readings by young German and American writers, on March 7 at the “Krautgarden Loft” in Chinatown (New York), and on March 14 at Leipzig’s Baumwollspinnerei, former site of the Continent’s largest cotton mill.

Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei

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Why exactly am I so popular in Germany? I actually wrote about this phenomenon—the literary “big in Japan” effect—in my article about Franco Moretti (forthcoming, as “Abenteuer eines Mannes der Wissenschaft,” in a German-language n+1 anthology by Suhrkamp Verlag).  It sometimes happens that works virtually unknown in their country of production become inexplicably popular, or even canonical, in some other national literature.

In my article, I mentioned the example of Michel Zévaco’s Les Pardaillan: a family saga beloved by many Turkish schoolchildren of my parents’ generation, but completely unknown to any of the French people I asked, and also unknown to the former chair of the Stanford French and Italian department, who is not French but has written a well-received book on Proust.

A while after my article came out, I even received an email in Turkish from a student who was preparing for the TOEFL, and wanted me to help her locate an English translation of volume 2 of Les Pardaillan. (She had already read vol. 1 in Turkish.)  As far as I could determine, there is no English translation.

In short, Michel Zévaco is truly, by near-unamious international standards, a D-list writer, who has somehow made it onto the Turkish B-list; and I feel a certain affinity with him in that, while I remain totally unheard-of in my native USA, I am slowly but surely working my way onto the German literary C-list.  In the continuing saga of the Teutonic demand for my literary services…

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