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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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!

It’s snowing at Koç – great for anyone holed up on campus trying to jump-start a Gothic novel.

Dear readers! I am happy to relate that my article on Göbekli Tepe is on (U.S.) newsstands right now, in the December 19 – 26 issue of the New Yorker.

As a special online supplement, I have decided to share with you today a glimpse into the writer-editor negotiating process (a recurring theme in my life and thoughts). I submit for your consideration an excerpt from an email in which my super-heroic editor was trying to get me to cut some lines that he said were confusing (he was right, they were confusing):

… Do you think you could reconsider on this last matter? I did everything else… and, by way of compromise, restoring the balance back toward subjectivity and misreading, I’ve added back a penis joke elsewhere! The one about the samovar… x L

This kind and tactful message really made me think about how I am perceived as a writer, viz. as someone who is always trying to include more penis jokes. It’s not an unjust perception. My first New Yorker piece this year, a profile of Istanbul football fanatics, referenced a penis-related viral video phenomenon; next I wrote a rather melancholy excursus on birdwatching in Kars, which nonetheless included a lighthearted mention of the duck holding the highest vertebrate penis-to-body-length ratio.

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Big thanks to Eugene Ostashevsky for introducing me to Vasily Kamensky’s immortal “Constantinople”: “a milestone,” as Ostashevsky observes, “in the history of Russian travel writing about Turkey.”

“Constantinople” originally appeared in Ferro-Concrete Poems (1914),“a work… famous primarily for being made entirely of commercially produced wallpaper.”

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