MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Today I would like to salute some of the diverse and accomplished commenters to My Life and Thoughts, for example Michelle of The Maltese Bacon (a recipe blog—check out this beautiful tomato confit); as well as Gregory Freidin of the Stanford Slavic department (who, in his latest blog entry, shrewdly observes that, even if you live in Gori, you probably don’t hang your portrait of George W. Bush over a sliding glass door). 

In this recent, admirably concise comment, Freidin expresses solidarity with my father on the subject of creeping desecularization. Those of you who were disappointed by the Times’s decision not to air my father’s thoughts about creeping desecularization will be relieved to learn that they did publish the very next letter he wrote them, the following week.  This letter was in response to “My Literary Malady,” in which novelist Geoff Nicholson mulls over his recent gout diagnosis.  

James Gillray, The GOUT (1799)

But I would like to pause here to share with you my all-time favorite gout anecdote…

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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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I am really happy and honored to report that Vampire Weekend and I are featured in a joint profile in today’s issue of Sabah (Morning): the Istanbul publication recently determined by a Nielsen survey to be Turkey’s “most recognized newspaper brand.” (The most recognized brands overall were Arçelik, manufacturer of “wardrobe-style refrigerators” and other appliances; and Ülker, manufacturer of Cola Turka, and also of something called Badem Kraker (Almond Crackers), which as a child I used to feed to the swans in Ankara’s Swan Park. The thing that made a big impression on me at the time is that the almond crackers didn’t actually contain any almonds at all—rather, they were shaped like almonds. This was my first introduction to metaphor versus metonymy.

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The other day I was really happy to receive a comment on my post about Kamal, from none other than Bernardo Winson, Ph.D., the editor-in-chief of Immortal Muse publishing!   Winson provided some really useful bibliographic background on the “masses/ ass is” passage, reproduced on the bookmark.  It turns out that the poet Zireaux uses this rhyme, not only with reference to Eminem’s ass in Kamal, but also with reference to J-Lo’s ass in an entirely different work called Res Publica (full stanza here).

Subsequently, my indefatigable web master informed me that my site was getting some incoming links from Bernardo Winson’s blog.  Imagine my feelings when I checked it out and saw there is a whole post about me (w00t!).  So what if it’s mostly about what a superficial person I am? 

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Despite my mixed feelings about music reviews, I encourage you all to read my piece on Vampire Weekend in today’s UK Guardian.

My first step in researching this piece was to enter “Vampire Weekend” on the Guardian search form, and see what had already been published. In this way, I learned that the Guardian had in previous months published several items on the subject in question, including, but not limited to: an audio interview with the members of Vampire Weekend; a print interview with the members of Vampire Weekend; a review of a Vampire Weekend concert at the Hoxton Bar & Grill; and a review of Vampire Weekend, the album by Vampire Weekend.

I was reminded of a certain P. G. Wodehouse story, in which Jeeves extricates Wooster’s friend from a romantic entanglement with an opera singer, by arranging for the opera singer to be the fourth consecutive performer of the song “Sonny Boy” at a “clean, bright entertainment” in the East End. The costermongers are so enraged that they throw potatoes at her, and she breaks off the engagement.

“Just whom are these guys trying to get me not to marry?” I found myself wondering.

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