MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Big thanks to everyone who came out to the panel at the Center for Fiction last Friday! It was wonderful to attach so many cute faces to colorful names. I learned very much from my fabulous co-panelists, particularly the amazing and lovely Rivka Galchen, that I now watch the video every night before I go to sleep.

In other news, I’ve been meaning for a while to share some writing from the nonfiction writing class I  taught last term at Koç University. I’m so proud of my students (all of whom are native Turkish speakers writing in English)! Today I have for you “The Calendar of the Old Button Collector,” by Naz Cuguoğlu, a senior majoring in psychology.

The assignment was to write about an old photo, in the style of Geoff Dyer’s “On the Roof” (from Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, which I was really happy to announce the other night as a 2011 NBCC Finalist!). Here are Naz’s photo and essay.

THE CALENDAR OF THE OLD BUTTON COLLECTOR

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World-weary readers! Once again I find myself, really briefly, in the city of broken dreams and shattered promises. If you are in the hood, please swing by the Center for Fiction tomorrow (Fri) evening, where I will be participating, with Rivka Galchen and Mark Athitakis, in a panel titled Criticism Beside Itself.

Speaking of criticism, my former grad school classmate, Enrique Lima, has just started a pop music blog which I warmly recommend to all my world-weary readers. I will quote only the opening line from the brilliant post on the use of sampling by Flo Rida, Jay Z, and Kanye West: “Jameson is right: we live in an age that has forgotten how to think historically.”

CRITICISM BESIDE ITSELF

Tonight, reading the final papers from my nonfiction class, I was saddened to discover that one student had not abandoned the habit, which I had critiqued in the past, of using smiley faces in her work. I crossed them out, explaining (again) that powerful writing should generate emotion without emoticons.

Slashing through the third beaming little face, I had a terrible flashback to a moment from my own youth, when an English teacher told me not to use so many exclamation points, because vigorous writing generates energy through language and not punctuation.

I didn’t listen to this teacher. Today I use exclamation points all the time! I don’t think they’re a crutch, so much as another tool in the box. Now I begin to wonder: is that how the next generation will view emoticons? Is one generation’s crutch the next generation’s useful, crutch-shaped mallet?? Have I become an obstruction in the path of literary progress??? Am I now the monster????

After working hard in my office until relatively late at night, I was walking home and listening to NPR podcasts when I noticed, standing under a streetlamp, what I initially mistook for a motionless child in a snowsuit, and then thought was a snowman, and finally identified, using the ace recognition skills I bring to my work at the New Yorker and elsewhere, as an ithyphallic monument. Here is the video I resourcefully made using my iPod:

I guess it goes to show that, if you put in the hours, you will see results.

Merry Christmas to all my diligent readers!

Did you think I had forgotten about the living writers?  I hadn’t!  This one goes out to the living writers, and their fathers!

First a shout-out for Ms. Mohamed’s debut novel, Black Mamba Boy, based on the larger-than-life life story (larger-than life story?) of her father, starting in 1930s Yemen and ending 1000 miles later…  I had the good fortune to hear Mohamed talk about Black Mamba at a really fantastic panel on fathers and daughters at last year’s Brisbane Writers’ Festival (held on (Australian) Father’s Day). All the participants were great but I was especially moved by the very amazing Soviet revisionist historian Sheila Fitzpatrick who read from her revisionist history of her father.

Apropos of amazing books about Australian fathers, another 5-star Amazon review is up here; and, apropos of amazing books about non-Australian fathers, I haven’t read Hisham Matar’s latest yet, but In the Country of Men was excellent, and I bet this one is too.

I leave you with some images of my highly valued youngest reader, Lars, whose father is the excellent living writer (and translator) Damion Searls (“Samarkand rug,” and I quote, “for extra Batumania”).  Even babies love it!