My Life and Thoughts

OK dear readers, I don’t want you to think I’m evading the difficult subject of literary production in our times, but you’re going to have to sit through one more post about cats. Not counting this post, which is a response to the comments about the last post about cats. After that I promise, no more cats.

Dear Burcu! Yes, Friday is exactly what I named my cat. Thank you very much for the reference to Gürcan Yurt, whom I did not know. It’s funny, I reread Robinson Crusoe a couple of years ago, when I was working on sidekicks, and was so disappointed to realize how little there was about Friday! In my mind I had turned Friday into another Dr. Watson… but really he was in what, like three chapters?  In short you can imagine how delighted I was to discover that, in the comic books of my ancestral homeland, Friday has been elevated to a title character.

Although the only excerpts I found online were all illegibly small, I am already encouraged by what appears to be a remarkably equitable distribution of lines between Crusoe and Friday:

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Last week I got an email from my father, who was working on a letter to the editors of the New York Times about their editorial, “Democracy’s Close Call in Turkey.”  He had written a 250-word draft, but letters are supposed to be only 150 words… and who did he ask to help him reduce the word count?  Me, his graphomaniac daughter!  This was a wonderful change for me, since usually I am the one sending enormous files to my long-suffering editors. 

First I read the editorial, which was about the Turkish Constitutional Court’s ruling last week not to ban the Islamist AKP party—an event reported in a sane and balanced fashion by the LA Times.  The New York Times, on the other hand, described the court case as “the culmination of an epic battle” between a “powerful coterie of judges and generals” and the “broadly popular” Erdoğan, who apparently isn’t actually an Islamist, because his “supporters say that his past as a political Islamist is firmly behind him.”  That was the news coverage.  In the editorial, they got to express their genius even more freely:

The court ruling is a victory for Turkey, for democracy and for the politics of moderation in the volatile Near and Middle East. That makes it a victory for the United States as well.

Had it gone the other way, Turkey’s chances of joining the European Union would have been demolished and the clearly expressed will of Turkish voters outrageously thwarted.

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Having recently learned that two independent Google searchers arrived at my blog via the search phrase “elif enima,” I decided to try this search myself… and discovered that My Life and Thoughts is the very first hit!  w00t!  In the spirit of good sportsmanship, though, I would like to cite some of the runners-up in the competitive “elif enima” informational sector:

Unal, E
Unal E (Elif) …. Management of enema tip-induced rectourethral fistula with gluteus maximus flap: report of a case. [My paper] O Krand, E Unal.

Islam Will Replace Collapsing American Empire - alt.religion.islam …
Jul 23, 2008 …. Up your ass mohammad - Elif air ab tizak! …. As the old Arab proverb goes, “My enema’s enema is my friend”….

Atlas Shrugs: Turkey’s Re-Islamization
When its hands, feet and chest are pressed Elif recites various sura from the Koran in … Accessories to Elif doll, such as a toy laptop, teach toddler to …

Well, I wish Elif Unal the best of luck with what sounds like a fascinating program of research.  And I am grateful to learn the old Arab proverb, “My enema’s enema is my friend.”  It must be a very severe rectourethral fistula indeed, if even your enema needs its own enema.  But I was most interested by the item about the Elif doll (cf. Barbie is out, Elif is in) on Atlas Shrugs, a blog about Islam in Turkey.  (Where, you might be wondering, do enemas enter (so to speak) into this subject?  Check out the 110 posts tagged Kofi Annan a.k.a. Coffee Enema, e.g.: “The UN and more specifically Kofi Enema is a Jihadi tool.”)

Inspired by the example of a certain pobrecito anónimo, I’m writing my third blog entry in as many days!  This is about my latest adventure as a D-list writer. OK so a couple of months ago I was contacted by a very dear friend—an A-list writer of YA fiction, and an editor at the weekend edition of a well-known American newspaper—who asked if I might like to write something about my escapades in grad school, for a series of 2000-word “fun” pieces by “serious” writers, including, but not limited to, “Mamet on buying a house.”  Naturally this appealed to my spirit of challenge: as if I couldn’t make my experience in grad school sound at least as fun as David Mamet’s experience buying a house!  “You’re on, Mamet!” I thought, hitting the Send button.

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I am really happy and honored to report that Vampire Weekend and I are featured in a joint profile in today’s issue of Sabah (Morning): the Istanbul publication recently determined by a Nielsen survey to be Turkey’s “most recognized newspaper brand.” (The most recognized brands overall were Arçelik, manufacturer of “wardrobe-style refrigerators” and other appliances; and Ülker, manufacturer of Cola Turka, and also of something called Badem Kraker (Almond Crackers), which as a child I used to feed to the swans in Ankara’s Swan Park. The thing that made a big impression on me at the time is that the almond crackers didn’t actually contain any almonds at all—rather, they were shaped like almonds. This was my first introduction to metaphor versus metonymy.

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