MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

February: is it me or does it seem to roll around once every 9 months these days.  I’m just back from the Writers Unlimited festival in the Hague, where I was promoting the Dutch edition of my book.  It looks very different from the US edition.

There was a wonderful photographer who took all these wonderful photographs that subsequently appeared on a bulletin board, so I took some photographs of the bulletin board.  This one is my favorite because there’s just so much going on:

Pictured, from left to right, are Abdelkader Benali, Elif Batuman, Maaza Mengiste, and David Van Reybrouck, floating over a giant hamburger.  We were discussing the internationalization of literature (in response to a super-smart lecture by Tim Parks).

I had been deposited at the theater directly from the Amsterdam airport, with only time to change my shoes.  This was all a wonderful surprise since I had misread the schedule and somehow thought the discussion wasn’t until the following morning.  But as you can see from the picture, I was playing it really cool.

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A quick response to this fascinating item of trivia re: Tolstoy and the RNC (thank you, Chad!):

…This really has nothing to do with Turkish women/tea glasses, but I was wondering if you had heard about Michael Steele’s response when asked what is his favorite book at the RNC chair debate. He said “War and Peace” but then added, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Somehow everything I ever hear about Michael Steele brings back to me the pathos of the human condition, I guess largely through Jon Stewart’s image of him as the Muppet who always has a fly in his soup – actually a kind of Tolstoy-like detail, when you think about it.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times!”

[Note to self: could the entire dissatisfied-Muppet/ Grover relationship be based on the tense interchange between Oblonsky and the Tatar waiter (AK I, 10)?]

Mostly though I feel like this is a valuable object lesson to all of us in not trying to spontaneously produce the first sentence of WP on national television, because let’s be honest,  it’s a great book and everything, but Tolstoy didn’t exactly bust out his catchiest lines on the opening:

“Eh bien, mon prince, Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des country estates, de la famille Buonaparte.”

Or, for those who prefer the original Russian:

“Eh bien, mon prince. Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des поместья, de la famille Buonaparte.”

The other day I went to a teahouse near Taksim with the promising young novelist/ journalist Kaya Genç.  As we sat down, Genç asked which size tea glass I wanted: a small one, or an Ajda one.

“You know Ajda, right?” he asked.

I did know Ajda (a big favorite with me and my mom), but not her tea glasses. “Does she drink a lot of tea?” I asked.

Genç explained that Ajda glasses are named for their shape – i.e., because they resemble Ajda, and not because she loves tea so much.

Ajda Pekkan	Ajda tea glass

So, Turkey continues to be the place where I receive valuable lessons in metonymy versus metaphor.¹

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Long-suffering readers!  As I unpacked my hard-won suitcase earlier this week, I was delighted to re-encounter a “bookmark” I had been using last month – a gift from a very kind Slavic professor at Boston College (where I had the honor of giving a Lowell humanities lecture in October), who had found it in the BC library copy of The Possessed.  ”I thought you might like to have it,” she told me, handing over this small slip of cardboard, adding that perhaps I shouldn’t over-interpret whatever it said about the possibly bilious condition of my readership:

As I turn this box top over in my hands, hoping that the loss of the UPC barcode didn’t prevent any of my esteemed readers from getting any kind of mail-in rebate, I am moved to think of the many and diverse uses that a book may fill for its public, if it is lucky enough to find one in this world.  Appreciated readers!  This Thanksgiving season, I am grateful to all those who have ever found in my work anything to bring them comfort, of any degree or kind.  To paraphrase the immortal Onegin:

…Whatever end
You may have sought in these reflections—
Tumultuous, fond recollections,
Relief from gassy pain and bloating,
Live tableaux, bons mots for quoting,
Or maybe merely faults of grammar—
God grant that in my careless art…
You’ve found at least a crumb or two.
And so let’s part; farewell—adieu!

Immanent readers!  I address you now, free of worldly belongings, untethered to worldly concerns, divested of my bed and other housewares, separated indefinitely from my loyal intern…

I was really happy to spend part of these disembodied days making a tour of some of the East Coast’s most venerable educational institutions.  A huge thanks to Carlo Rotella at Boston College, Natalie Rouland and Tom Hodge at Wellesley, and Cris Martin and Svetlana Boym at Harvard, among the many others who made this possible.

Special thanks are also due to undergraduates Madeleine Schwartz, who invited me to the Harvard Advocate, and Alexandra Dennett, who brought me to Yale’s Saint Anthony Hall. Ms. Dennett and a classmate can be seen below reading The Possessed on the shores of Lake Lagoda Ladoga:

The two friends were on a Russian summer study program together and didn’t realize they were both reading my book until they happened to sit down at the beach that afternoon!

Because I love pictures of girls gone wild for Russian literature, I was also very happy to receive the following from Amy Knowles (a calculus teacher in North Carolina), who appears below with her friend Shannon at the time of their college graduation. Amy had just written a thesis on Andrei Bolkonsky; Shannon had written about The Brothers Karamazov.

Ladies, I salute you!