MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Fans of Kafka and kittens may (must?) enjoy the following:

My intern was particularly impressed by the artistic use made of the hairball: clearly something “in the air” at the current historical moment.  See, for example, the recent excellent article in Modern Cat on how to Celebrate National Hairball Awareness Day in Style:

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Which would you rather be – endemoniado or poseído? I saw both of these Spanish covers on separate occasions, before I knew which was being used.

I am so happy and excited to share with you the result…

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Disembodied readers!  I was so happy to meet several of you at my and Kaya Genç’s blogging talk on Saturday.  Those who couldn’t make it missed an opportunity to watch me knock over a largeish glass of water, but don’t worry, I’m sure it will happen again.

At the conclusion of the event, which I personally enjoyed a great deal, I was gently but firmly escorted to the roof of the building, where I had a nice long interview with Aktüel magazine, followed by a 1.5-hour photo shoot during which I was immortalized: (a) leaning playfully over the bannister at the top of a long flight of stairs; (b) perched on a wall; and (c) ensconced inside some kind of gigantic avant-garde porthole.  During the porthole stage, as I was trying very hard to turn my aggrieved expression upside-down, I overheard one of the publicists tell her colleague: “I think we are going to read about this on Elif’s blog tomorrow.”

These exertions made me really enthusiastic to get back to Pilates class on Monday. Imagine my feelings when I sat down on my foam mat, in a sea of young people sitting on identical foam mats, and the instructor looked right at me and said: “I read your interview in Milliyet over the weekend.”  “Did you,” I said.  We began to discuss my writing career and plans for the future. At some point, she asked a question whose answer depended on my having read the interview, which I hadn’t. 

“I’m not able to read interviews,” I explained.

“You’re… not able to??” she repeated, with a look of shock.  In this way I realized that the Pilates instructor thought I was confessing to illiteracy.

“Alas, I have not yet been bitten by the black stallion of literacy.”

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Irrepressible readers!  My loyal intern and I are well into month 14 of promoting The Possessed, which comes out in May in both Spain and Turkey.  Guess what this means?  It means more interviews!  I was just chatting over tea with Milliyet’s very lovely Zeynep Miraç Özkartal.  It is a rare Turkish interview that goes by without my being invited to talk smack about national treasure Orhan Pamuk.  Today, I got so excited talking about why Gogol is funnier than Orhan Pamuk that I somehow caused my tea glass (an Ajda glass, as it happens) to shatter into several pieces, covering me with both tea and broken glass.  (That is how I was occupied at the beginning of the royal wedding – I know because, when I went to get napkins, I saw it on TV.)

Shortly thereafter the photographer came, and the next thing I knew I was sitting on a stone parapet, my shirt (and a few glass splinters) stuck to my body with tea. I had to surrender my jacket for aesthetic purposes.  Bracing myself against a rather strong wind, I thought: “What if I fall off this stone parapet and break my head open?”  It was one of the many, many occasions I have found in the past weeks to take comfort in the words of Marcus Aurelius: “The good man’s only singularity lies in his approving welcome to every experience the looms of fate may weave for him.”

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Prolific readers!  I am happy to announce a new accretion to the growing folklore of how tall I am, via email from super-novelist Jim Harrison.

Harrison, to Batuman:

I felt so bad to hear from a friend that you were very tall and didn’t see your little dog that you sat on and crushed. The dog will either forgive you in heaven or not which is a possibility. Dog heaven is the size of Missouri. Sometimes a million of them swim across the Mississippi at once.  Obviously they no longer poop. […]

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Batuman, to Harrison:

that dog-crushing story is pure apocrypha!!  may i put it on my blog?

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Harrison, to Batuman:

A relief to find you didn’t murder the little fellow.  Tall people go through the world inadvertently kicking little creatures.  They shall be judged.  Put it on your blog since I don’t really know what a blog is.  An elephant turd?

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Well there you have it, inscribed on the giant elephant turd that is My Life and Thoughts. Ironically, or maybe unironically, I am giving a talk to explain what blogs are, this very Saturday at the Koç University Anatolian Research Institute in Beyoğlu (info here chez my heroic copanelist, Kaya Genç) – a great chance for people in Istanbul to spot me not-in-the-forest, and also of course to learn what a blog is.  In English/ Turkish with simultaneous translation.

I return now to my important blog-related researches, though not without a worry in the corner of my mind: what if I really did sit on a tiny dog and didn’t even notice it because I am so very tall?