MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Irrepressible readers!  My loyal intern and I are well into month 14 of promoting The Possessed, which comes out in May in both Spain and Turkey.  Guess what this means?  It means more interviews!  I was just chatting over tea with Milliyet’s very lovely Zeynep Miraç Özkartal.  It is a rare Turkish interview that goes by without my being invited to talk smack about national treasure Orhan Pamuk.  Today, I got so excited talking about why Gogol is funnier than Orhan Pamuk that I somehow caused my tea glass (an Ajda glass, as it happens) to shatter into several pieces, covering me with both tea and broken glass.  (That is how I was occupied at the beginning of the royal wedding – I know because, when I went to get napkins, I saw it on TV.)

Shortly thereafter the photographer came, and the next thing I knew I was sitting on a stone parapet, my shirt (and a few glass splinters) stuck to my body with tea. I had to surrender my jacket for aesthetic purposes.  Bracing myself against a rather strong wind, I thought: “What if I fall off this stone parapet and break my head open?”  It was one of the many, many occasions I have found in the past weeks to take comfort in the words of Marcus Aurelius: “The good man’s only singularity lies in his approving welcome to every experience the looms of fate may weave for him.”

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I was so honored earlier this month to receive the first annual Terry Southern Prize for Humor from the Paris Review (for a five-installment blog post titled My Twelve-Hour Blind Date with Dostoevsky). Sadly, I was unable to accept the award in person at the Paris Review Revel, which coincided with the UK launch of The Possessed.  This caused a few small logistical problems, the subject of some correspondence I share with you today, between myself and Paris Review super-editor Lorin Stein.

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1. Stein to Batuman:

…Would you like to write a short (like, three sentence or whatever) acceptance note for me to read at the Revel?… Also: do you want your two-foot mahogany B52 sent to you in Istanbul, or shall we store it? I was thinking Nile Southern would probably be happy to give it a temporary home till you get back. But maybe you want it to look at—for inspiration???.

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2. Batuman to Stein:

…re: b52, i don’t think i could be any more inspired in its physical presence than i already am by the powerful idea, thank you. if the object could be placed in storage, either with nile southern or even less illustriously, that would be wonderful – alternatively it could be sent care of my mother.  whichever is least trouble.

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3. Stein to Batuman:

We will totally deliver the plane to your moms!!!

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4. Batuman’s mom, to Batuman (in response to a request to accommodate what I still somehow naively believed to be a “B52-sized plaque of some kind”):

I am now really apprehensive about the b52 (joke), will it be the size of the painting of the bull in Holland or even grander??

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5. Stein to Batuman (after the Revel):

…In the end I wasn’t able to read your wonderful letter because [names redacted] went way over their allotted time slots.¹ BUT I did manage to work in the shout-out to Fyodor. Now, will you please give me your mom’s address (does she have a doorman?)?…

…I’m sorry that your mother is soon going to have a large model of a B52 “flying fortress” in her living room…

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6. Batuman to Stein:

“flying fortress” is a joke, right?

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7. Stein to Batuman:

One sort of B52 was called the “flying fortress” – but I think maybe that one wasn’t outfitted with bombs. Yours is outfitted with bombs.

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Satiated readers!  Please join me in getting excited again about The Possessed, in honor of next week’s UK launch! Conveniently, the book now looks completely different. I thought I would never like any cover as much as Roz Chast’s FSG paperback - but check out the new Granta hardcover, designed byMichael Salu:

I love the original paperback, because it’s so scary and cheap, two of my favorite qualities.  But I also love the new hardcover, because it’s so trippy and classy, two more of my favorite qualities.

The new cover illustration is based on the dream sequence in “Who Killed Tolstoy?”:

I dreamed I was playing tennis against Tolstoy. As Alice in Wonderland plays croquet with a flamingo for a mallet, I was playing tennis with a goose for a racket. Lev Nikolayevich had a normal racket. I served the ball, producing a flurry of fluffy gray down. Tolstoy’s mighty backhand projected the ball far beyond the outermost limits of the tennis lawn, into the infinite dimension of total knowledge and human understanding. Match point.

It is, as Salu explains, “a dual cover, with either Elif or Tolstoy winning the rally depending on how the book is held”:

Last year, I enrolled this site in the Amazon Associates program.  This means I get a 4% kickback on any purchase that anyone ever makes on Amazon after following a link from my blog.  E.g. if, after toying with the idea of buying my book, you realize that what you really wanted was a hand-signed item of Packers Patriots memorabilia, that’s still like 3 oz. of tartar-fighting dental snacks for my intern right there!¹

Having received my January 2011 earnings report, I wanted to take a moment to thank those of you who, over the past month, found occasion to take care of any small shopping needs through these pages.  Your support is greatly appreciated! I’d also like to both thank and wish a speedy recovery to the nameless reader who, having entered Amazon from one of my links, proceeded to purchase a set of lightweight aluminum crutches.

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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