My Life and Thoughts

Inexorable readers!  I write to you with wonderful news!  It looks like FSG finally caved under the pressure of all those 3-star reviews… because The Possessed is now available on Kindle!  My one regret is that there is now pretty much no incentive to develop the S W Foska’s brilliant idea about making the paperback edition convertible into a Brita filter.  I guess it’s proof that great minds think alike, because my my smartest intern, Friday, who is also in charge of R&D here at My Life and Thoughts, actually explored this idea a few months ago by spilling a large glass of water onto my copy of The Brothers Karamazov, which promptly expanded to approximately 250% of its original, already non-negligible, size.  Notwithstanding these spectacular results, there are still a few bugs that have to be ironed out before we can go commercial—e.g., the water that actually made it through the “filter” looked sort of gray and unpalatable (I guess these are the visible traces of literary knowledge).

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OK OK, I know what you’re all probably thinking: “Ohh, now that Elif has clawed her way to the C-list, she must spend all her time doing cocaine with hedge-fund managers and being too much of a big-shot to write on her blog anymore.”  Well au contraire, chers lecteurs: in fact I have been prevented from blogging, not by hours of yelling at the interns for messing up the triple-organic fair-trade cappuccinos, but by the relentless pursuit of journalistic truth, to the extent that I even spent all afternoon yesterday plucking turkeys in a village near the Sea of Marmara.

Here you can see me hanging out with my new friend Duygu, who is 12 years old and wants to be a nurse when she grows up. She is definitely an A-list turkey-plucker. (I think I am somewhere on the H-list.)

Duygu’s rents are also pretty cool:

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Let me begin by thanking Ryan for the link to the Roudinesco conference, which does indeed include such promising titles as: "‘In Pursuit of the Nazi Mind?’ The Deployment of Psychoanalysis in the Struggle against Fascism." I am also curious about who decides the ad placement in the LRB print edition. The last piece I wrote for them, on graphic novels, ran with an ad for Turkey: The Space of the Mind(d)Field, a special issue of the art journal Third Text, including articles like "Parrhesiastic Games in the Turkish Art Scene" (by Süreyyya Evren, who really spells it with 3 y’s, possibly to convey the eternal question of contemporary academic discourse: "Why? Why? Why?"), and: "Dear Europe, Dear Turkey: Why are You Making Us So Depressed [Why why why]?" (by Kevin Robins).

I remember when that LRB came out, a certain prominent YA author wrote to me that she was puzzled "by the decision to advertise Turkish language lessons (or was it Genghis Khan garden gnomes?) at the bottom of your first page."  and, although I initially thought "Genghis Khan garden gnomes" was really funny, I soon I realized it’s no laughing matter, because guess who introduced garden gnomes—in fact, "models of Central Asian dwarves that were kept as house pets by wealthy families during China’s glorious Tang Dynasty"—to the ignorant West?  That’s right… the Mongols!

This important discovery into the genealogy of garden gnomes (viz., they too are related to Genghis Khan) was made by Bu Congming, professor of archeology and finance at the Urumqi Institute of Desert Exploration and Real Estate Development, and his colleague Xuan Zhang, on the basis of "a letter written in Sogdian, an extinct Central Asia language, [discovered] in a garbage pit at Dunhuang":

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This Thanksgiving, I am especially thankful to all the erudite readers of My Life and Thoughts: to SW Fosca, for the edifying gloss on müteferrika (sounds to me like İbrahim was the Ottoman chief of morphology!); to Webreader7, for sending me a second-century-BC Chinese poem called Rhyme-Prose on the Owl (written by Chia-yi, a scholar-bureaucrat-poet who had been exiled “to the south” and was in this sense a second-century-BC Chinese müteferrika); to LK, RMcC, and Tara, for their kind and witty comments; and to Tom Hansen, for identifying the previously unidentified bearded guy as… Rodin photographed by Nadar! Vous êtes tous chouettes!

I leave you with my favorite couplets from “Rhyme-Prose on the Owl”:

Profound, subtle, illimitable
Who can finish describing it?

In my capacity as a relatively obscure writer, people come to me with all kinds of questions. “Will I enjoy Infinite Jest?” they ask me. Or: “Does Turkey belong in the EU?” Sometimes, they send me pictures of bearded men to identify—for example, this one, from the cover of a Korean book about IQ:

I have no idea who he is.

The other day I received another bearded man image, from n+1 web editor Charles Petersen who, when not web-editing n+1, also works at the New York Review of Books. This bearded man was made of bronze, and was located in Sahaflar Çarşısı (the book market near the Istanbul Grand Bazaar), and the NYRB had chosen his likeness to illustrate an essay by Orhan Pamuk, titled “My Turkish Library.”

Pamuk’s essay appears in the December 18 holiday issue… which I already received by FedEx, in recognition of how I successfully identified the bronze man as İbrahim Müteferrika (d. 1745), who ran the first Ottoman Turkish printing press using movable Arabic type! Based on Müteferrika’s achievements, Bob Silver even instructed the editors to “make room for an extra large caption”:

But even though the caption was extra large, it still couldn’t fit all the interesting information about İbrahim Müteferrika, so it’s a good thing I have a blog.
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