MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

I was so honored earlier this month to receive the first annual Terry Southern Prize for Humor from the Paris Review (for a five-installment blog post titled My Twelve-Hour Blind Date with Dostoevsky). Sadly, I was unable to accept the award in person at the Paris Review Revel, which coincided with the UK launch of The Possessed.  This caused a few small logistical problems, the subject of some correspondence I share with you today, between myself and Paris Review super-editor Lorin Stein.

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1. Stein to Batuman:

…Would you like to write a short (like, three sentence or whatever) acceptance note for me to read at the Revel?… Also: do you want your two-foot mahogany B52 sent to you in Istanbul, or shall we store it? I was thinking Nile Southern would probably be happy to give it a temporary home till you get back. But maybe you want it to look at—for inspiration???.

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2. Batuman to Stein:

…re: b52, i don’t think i could be any more inspired in its physical presence than i already am by the powerful idea, thank you. if the object could be placed in storage, either with nile southern or even less illustriously, that would be wonderful – alternatively it could be sent care of my mother.  whichever is least trouble.

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3. Stein to Batuman:

We will totally deliver the plane to your moms!!!

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4. Batuman’s mom, to Batuman (in response to a request to accommodate what I still somehow naively believed to be a “B52-sized plaque of some kind”):

I am now really apprehensive about the b52 (joke), will it be the size of the painting of the bull in Holland or even grander??

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5. Stein to Batuman (after the Revel):

…In the end I wasn’t able to read your wonderful letter because [names redacted] went way over their allotted time slots.¹ BUT I did manage to work in the shout-out to Fyodor. Now, will you please give me your mom’s address (does she have a doorman?)?…

…I’m sorry that your mother is soon going to have a large model of a B52 “flying fortress” in her living room…

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6. Batuman to Stein:

“flying fortress” is a joke, right?

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7. Stein to Batuman:

One sort of B52 was called the “flying fortress” – but I think maybe that one wasn’t outfitted with bombs. Yours is outfitted with bombs.

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Many thanks to all who ordered The Possessed,which has, at the time of writing, edged ahead of the greatest novel ever written to #1 on the Amazon Russian bestsellers list! After a long, hard week, my interns are finally enjoying some R&R.

Enjoy, guys—you deserve it!

(more…)

Well guys, it looks like all that hope finally paid off: “Safe Laughs,” my two-year-old article about comedy traffic school, runs in the August 31 issue of the New Yorker!  On newsstands tomorrow!  I still can’t believe it—I really thought I would go to the grave with the story of Mr. Traffic on my chest, like Dr. Watson with the mystery of the Giant Rat of Sumatra.

As soon as I have a bit more time I will post some of the editorial outtakes (they cut out a whole character—Mr. Traffic’s Swedenborgian foil, Dr. Driving). In the meantime, I leave you with two brand new get-rich schemes:

1. Elegy Traffic School, conducted in odes
2. Comedy Psychoanalysis, specializing in hysterical cases

How is it that I’m not a millionaire yet??

Well, there is good news and bad news. The good news is, the 11/20 issue of the LRB came out today. The bad news (at least, bad for those non-subscribers to the LRB who still wanted to read my article) is that my 8,000+ word discursion on Elisabeth Roudinesco’s Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida (Columbia UP, $26.50) is only available by online purchase, or possibly by cutting a deal with the Widener minotaur. Imagine my feelings when, as I was writing the previous sentence, I experienced a moment of doubt about whether discursion was really the word I wanted, and, upon looking it up, found that the very definition is also only available to paying subscribers!

discursion can be found at Merriam-WebsterUnabridged.com.

Click here to start your free trial! Click here to search for another word in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.

Learn more about “discursion” and related topics at Britannica.com
See a map of “discursion” in the Visual Thesaurus
Find Jobs in Your City

It is certainly very thoughtful of them to help you find a job, so you can afford to use the secret fatcat dictionary. On the other hand, if you, like me, don’t have a real job, then you may enjoy whiling away some minutes by typing in random words, to see which ones constitute the true discourse of power and privilege as defined by Merriam-Webster. On still another hand, the fact that you are unemployed is probably a reflection of the fact that you don’t know any of those words: I personally tried all the most obscure and aristocratic words I could think of, and all of them were in the free version of the dictionary accessible to any homeless dude in the SFPL. Finally, in despair, I looked in Google for a list of “ten-dollar words,” and although most of them were also in the free dictionary, one of them, croodle, is, like discursion, reserved for the elite.

But the class system never has been able to confine the intellectuals, who hover so ambiguously between the toilers and the exploiters! Take me for example. Although I don’t exactly have a real job with health insurance, I do have a part-time teaching job with unlimited OED access, and so am in a position to inform you that “The cushat croodles amourously” (TANNAHILL Bonnie Wood Poems (1846) 132), meaning that it produces a “continued soft low murmuring sound.” You read it here and you read it for free.

Philosophy in Turbulent Times	Cushat (Columba palumbus)

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.”)