MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

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!

Tasteful readers!  Many thanks to everyone who submitted Kafka porn contest entries!  Frankly I received a few that were maybe a teeny bit more literal than I had been expecting, but I believe this is what makes the internet great.  I am delighted to announce the winning entry, by Lydia Kiesling: “Kafka porn is snuff porn that you didn’t actually watch but got arrested for anyway.”  An honorable mention goes to Dimiter Kenarov, for “undressing a person only to find new and new layers of clothing underneath.”  Unfortunately, neither Kiesling nor Kenarov wants the grand prize (my bed), so they get book prizes and I’m trying to sell the bed on Craigslist; big thanks to Andrew Leland of the Believer for already purchasing my (and my intern’s) favorite red chair, as well as two lamps, an ottoman, a saucepan, a carpet steam-cleaner, some geranium-scented laundry detergent, and approximately eight pounds of rice.  Buon appetito, Mr. Leland!

In other exciting news from the C-plus-list, I recently got my first magazine story killed!  It was a searing personal memoir of my Kindle drunk-dialing problem, commissioned by O, the Oprah Magazine, a publication to which I will always be grateful for its support of The Possessed. Unfortunately, as Oprah herself will tell you, no relationship is 100% smooth sailing, and O and I just weren’t able to see eye-to-eye on my Kindle drunk-dialing problem.  As a result, I recently received my first kill fee: a strange experience, because you realize at a certain point that what they are saying to you is basically “Take the money, take the money—just don’t make us publish it!”  For this reason, when I read the invoice that said “KILL FEE/ DRUNKEN KINDLE,” a tiny part of me felt like I had extorted Oprah. It was a strange, not un-empowering feeling.

In further empowering news, I am honored and happy to report that the Guardian ran a version of the Kindle piece on Saturday, so  nobody has to suffer in suspense regarding my super-classy ebook habits.  Read it and weep!  I mean it—it’s all very sad.

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Hi Elif,
to my delight I stumbled across a copy of The Possessed at a bookshop last night in Sydney and purchased it. A slight mystery is that it has an inscription in it: “To Okan Orhan, Gok memnan oldum!”. I don’t want to cast aspersions on Okan, but it was intriguing how it wound up in the new books and what the inscription meant.
thanks
Andrew

Dear Andrew,

Thank you for your kind message, and for your purchase of The Possessed!

Re: Okan Orhan, it’s a funny story.  I did an event at Gleebooks in Sydney a few weeks ago (in conversation with the lovely Jane Gleeson-White, who—another funny story—turns out to be the author of a forthcoming book about double-entry bookkeeping, in which capacity she is also, to the best of my knowledge, the only person who has ever quoted from my unpublished dissertation on double-entry bookkeeping and the novel!  The organizers didn’t know about this connection when they set up the event.)

At the book signing afterwards, a bearded, slightly distracted-looking young man in a leather jacket introduced himself and, speaking in Turkish, told me that he grew up in Istanbul and that he used to be roommates with the critic Walter Pater.  I was very tired, since I had spent the morning at ABC studios in Melbourne, doing a radio show with the amazing David Astle, “Sergeant Pepper of cryptic crosswords,” after which my incredibly heroic Australian publicist and I headed to the airport to catch a plane to Sydney.  The flight departed not only with a delay but also from the international terminal, which meant that on the way out we had to go through customs and passport control, whence we rushed to the hotel and immediately to the bookstore, the reason I bring all this up is being that I might well have misunderstood the exact nature of the relationship between Okan Orhan (for it was he) to Walter Pater, because Walter Pater died in 1894.

Okan Orhan then asked me to inscribe a copy of The Possessed to him, which I did. “Çok memnun oldum” means “I’m very happy [to have met you].”

At that point I really had to get something to eat, because two hours later I had to be at the Sydney ABC (where I was a guest on Late Night Live, right after an expert on the Australian elections, and also another expert on cyber-terrorism).  Whereas O.O. was trying, quietly but persistently, to tell me the story of his life.  It was probably an interesting story but I was not in the right frame of mind to appreciate it.  The whole thing ended with the organizer gently but firmly inviting him to leave.  I then lost track of his strand of the story—forever… or so I thought.

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Democratic readers!  Thanks to all who voted in the epic Google/ Gogol pun contest, which, due to technical problems, raged on for a full week longer than I had intended (sorry, Bibliomosquito).  But the results are finally in: Gogol documents (Kate Romatowski) came in first with 54 votes, just one vote ahead of Gogol maps (Peli Grietzer); Gogolplex (Isabel Brown) placed in a respectable, Nader-like third, with 15 votes.  In recognition of the very close outcome, book prizes will be sent to both Kate and Peli, and I salute all three finalists for their hard work and ingenuity!

I’m just back in San Francisco from a particularly strenuous trip to the East Coast, where I attended, among other more-or-less Dostoevskian social functions, a twelve-hour Italian-language performance of The Demons on Governor’s Island.  I urge you all to check out the riveting minute-by-minute account, “My Twelve-Hour Blind Date, With Dostoevsky,” on the Paris Review blog.

Forthright readers!  I’m not going to sit here and tell you all that those twelve hours (actually fifteen hours, if you count transit time) were one unmitigated whirlwind of delight, because they weren’t.  Nonetheless, perhaps Dostoevsky put it best when he wrote the epigraph to The Brothers Karamazov: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24).  By which I mean to say that, even though something in me died during that performance, slowly, over the course of 12-15 hours, my cultural martyrdom did subsequently yield several non-negligible benefits, three of which I would like to share with you today.

1.  My fellow-sufferer Paul Roossin (the one who observed that the fat man had no decorum) sent along a really great photograph of The Possessed in an exotic location:

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