MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Dear readers!  I am still greatly chagrined about having to miss not only the Chicago reading but also the visit to Redlands University, where I had been enormously looking forward to meeting Alisa Slaughter, Joy Manesiotis (author of a very beautiful and apropos poem about lamenting women), and their students, whom I thank for their interest in The Possessed, and whom I very much hope to meet at some point in the future.

In the meantime, tolerant readers, you may or may not be filled with admiration to learn that I was able to spare a moment from my rigorous program of swamp-related activity in order to deliver a 200-word opinion on the future of evolutionary-psychological literary criticism, for which purpose I temporarily assumed the form of a miniscule talking head:

The original of that tiny photograph was taken by super-chef Musa Dağdeviren and, in its uncropped version, shows me holding a bunch of greens known in Turkish as “snake’s pillow” or “heathen’s beet.”

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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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I was so happy, entertained, and confused to receive a response from pro-Kindle Amazon reviewer T. Mercer regarding my last post (Kindle Schmindle), that I decided to answer as a new post.

Dear T. Mercer,

Thank you for your kind message, and for your interest in The Possessed.  I was deeply gratified to learn of your willingness to pay $15 to read it electronically.  As it happens, I don’t have an electronic version to send you.  The last few rounds of editing are done on paper proofs that are literally sent back and forth via UPS.  In the end, the marked-up proofs are shipped to Ghana to be retyped by orphans.  So if you really want to “cut through all this middle-man bullshit,” you’d probably better get in touch with those orphans.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about whether I would send Kindle fans an electronic copy if I had one… and I’m really not sure!  I don’t know who is right and who is wrong in the standoff between Amazon and Macmillan (which owns FSG)—from what I see, it’s two huge corporations pursuing their huge corporate interests, far from the realm of ordinary human existences like yours and mine.

So let’s leave that out.

In general, of course, I’m in favor of books being made available electronically and at a low price, and it seems that in the future this will happen according to the model you suggest, with authors releasing material directly to the public.  But, the state of the world today being what it is, I’m actually really grateful that FSG published my book—and I’m super-grateful to my super-editor Lorin and his super-assistant Georgia and the super-publicist Brian, and the numerous super copy-editors, who are all such great people and worked so hard to make The Possessed as good as it could be, and to get it out there.  And if you and I cut out the middleman, what do they get? I mean, guess I could give them their cut myself, but I’m a writer, not an HR manager—I don’t have the time, training, or temperament to go around dividing up checks.

Furthermore, I’m also grateful to Amazon for selling my book under the list price.  (I am disappointed that they’ve now hiked it up to $10.20, which can still get you a single Brita replacement filter with $.04 left over—and needless to say I would love The Possessed to be on Kindle—but still, a $10 paperback is not bad at all.)  But, at the same time, I’m also definitely in favor of independent bookstores, and I know they can’t afford to give $5 discounts whenever they feel like it.  So maybe I’m wrong to send people to buy a cheap copy on Amazon (which giant sinister corporation now gives me 6.5% of the price of every book sold through the URL on this website, so I’m extra-compromised!).

In the end I decided it’s OK to leave the question of Amazon vs. independent up to individual readers to work out between their ideals and their pocketbooks. But of course if I go around selling the book myself, that’s bad for independent booksellers and Amazon!

In short, T. Mercer, the more I think about it, the more I realize the only thing I’m really sure of in this mess is that you should definitely read Oblomov. I notice it’s available in multiple Kindle editions.

Всего лучшего!
Elif

By guest-blogger Peli Grietzer

Just give it to us straight, Ezra Koenig. Are you saying rich girls deserve their money, or are you saying rich girls are dumb whores? Do you taunt the 57% of America that can’t take real summer vacations, or do you mock the 43% that go on holidays? Was “Mansard Roof” an endorsement of roofs or an anti-roof satire?

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OK OK, I know what you’re all probably thinking: “Ohh, now that Elif has clawed her way to the C-list, she must spend all her time doing cocaine with hedge-fund managers and being too much of a big-shot to write on her blog anymore.”  Well au contraire, chers lecteurs: in fact I have been prevented from blogging, not by hours of yelling at the interns for messing up the triple-organic fair-trade cappuccinos, but by the relentless pursuit of journalistic truth, to the extent that I even spent all afternoon yesterday plucking turkeys in a village near the Sea of Marmara.

Here you can see me hanging out with my new friend Duygu, who is 12 years old and wants to be a nurse when she grows up. She is definitely an A-list turkey-plucker. (I think I am somewhere on the H-list.)

Duygu’s rents are also pretty cool:

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