MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Loyal readers! I have been greatly moved by the outpourings of support for my blog, and of execration for Twitter. I feel like a tiny bit like Arthur Conan Doyle after he killed off Sherlock Holmes.

“I have been much blamed for doing [Holmes] to death,” Conan Doyle said… “but I hold that it was not murder, but justifiable homicide in self-defense, since, if I had not killed him, he would certainly have killed me.”

A STRUGGLE: BLOG V. BATUMAN

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Youthful readers! I am proud to announce that today I finally broke into the Istanbul high-school circuit, with a reading/ workshop at the British International School—many thanks to Russell Gunnell and loyal super-reader Ebru Kesen for making it happen!

Here is what I learned about the British International students of Istanbul: they are really astute judges of human character. In the Q/A, right between “What’s harder, fiction or nonfiction?” and “Do you ever have writer’s block?”, one young person proved that she had me all figured out by asking, “Do you have a cat?” When I asked how she was able to tell, she tactfully replied: “I know that cats sometimes help people write books.”

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Media-savvy readers! I’m really excited to share with you some recent press mentions. The first was in Jennifer B. McDonald’s NYBTR review of The Lifespan of a Fact, a book I keep wondering whether or not to read. On the plus side, it sounds super-interesting (“An innovative essayist and his fact-checker do battle about the use of truth and the definition of nonfiction”). On the minus side, it apparently looks like this:

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Adventurous readers! Those of you who are in Istanbul this Saturday (Feb 25) are warmly encouraged to attend the first-ever Koç University International Artist-in-Residence Workshop, where I will be appearing in my capacity as a living specimen of the writer-in-residence. Come gape at me between 16:20 and 16:50 in the ANAMED library (Istiklal 181, Taksim), right before “Example of an Artist Residency Program from Göteborg, Sweden.”

I am also super-proud to share with you today my international photography debut, in the forthcoming Czech translation of Dimiter Kenarov’s Apocryphal Animals (a bestseller in its native Bulgarian). I am planning to borrow “Apocryphal Animal” as the title for my talk about being a writer-in-residence.

Click on the image to enlarge and admire both my masterful photography, as well as the elusive image of a blue deer shedding tears of blood!

“I agree with the view that writing novels is an unhealthy type of work. When we set off to write a novel… like it or not, a kind of toxin that lies deep down in all humanity rises to the surface. All writers have to come face-to-face with this toxin and, aware of the danger involved, discover a way to deal with it, because otherwise no creative activity in the real sense can take place.”

Haruki Murakami
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

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Writing novels, to me, is basically a kind of manual labor.

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