MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Caroline Kennedy vs. Giant Russian Bell: similar, but not quite the same.

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Уважаемые читатели!  I’m really happy to say that my profile of director Timur Bekmambetov came out in the January issue of Snob (a magazine targeted at moderately but not excessively rich Russian people), in a beautiful Russian translation, with beautiful photography.  Unfortunately it isn’t available online, and I don’t even have a hard copy.  But there is a preview on their website—here is a screen shot, or part of one anyway:

You can’t tell from that picture but he was actually a really nice guy, and not accompanied by a floating man-sized pistol (or at least not always accompanied by a floating man-sized pistol). 

For English-reading readers, I’m putting up the first 1000 words.  For Russian-reading readers, that picture was worth 1000 words!  Спасибо, что пришли!

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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.”)

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In my capacity as a relatively obscure writer, people come to me with all kinds of questions. “Will I enjoy Infinite Jest?” they ask me. Or: “Does Turkey belong in the EU?” Sometimes, they send me pictures of bearded men to identify—for example, this one, from the cover of a Korean book about IQ:

I have no idea who he is.

The other day I received another bearded man image, from n+1 web editor Charles Petersen who, when not web-editing n+1, also works at the New York Review of Books. This bearded man was made of bronze, and was located in Sahaflar Çarşısı (the book market near the Istanbul Grand Bazaar), and the NYRB had chosen his likeness to illustrate an essay by Orhan Pamuk, titled “My Turkish Library.”

Pamuk’s essay appears in the December 18 holiday issue… which I already received by FedEx, in recognition of how I successfully identified the bronze man as İbrahim Müteferrika (d. 1745), who ran the first Ottoman Turkish printing press using movable Arabic type! Based on Müteferrika’s achievements, Bob Silver even instructed the editors to “make room for an extra large caption”:

But even though the caption was extra large, it still couldn’t fit all the interesting information about İbrahim Müteferrika, so it’s a good thing I have a blog.
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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)