Life on the pornographic fur carpet

Elif Batuman's essay at the Guardian on life after a bestseller: very strongly recommended! I did actually laugh out loud a few times, although really and truly I am so much this essay's target audience that it is perhaps not fair to generalize that everyone will love it as much as I did...

Here is a taste of its charms, though. The before:

I was young when I wrote "Babel in California." "As a 6ft-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew": I would never write something like that now. I would never have written something like that if I hadn't been a graduate student, riding around on a bicycle, falling asleep in libraries, living on lentils and feeling myself to be, rightly or wrongly, and despite the genuine kindness and generosity of most of my professors, perpetually enmeshed in a low-grade opposition with a world that considered me unprepared – by youth, if not nationality or anything more sinister – for dialogue with the great chroniclers of the human condition.

"Babel in California" appeared in the small – at the time, tiny – magazine, n+1 in 2005. It caught the attention of the editor of the New Yorker. In 2006, I published my first New Yorker article: a profile of a Thai champion kick-boxer who had opened a school in San Francisco. I started getting emails from literary agencies. I settled on my current agent, whom I like very much. My agent thought it would be nice if I wrote my first book about America's growing women's mixed martial arts scene; I, meanwhile, wanted to write a novelistic retelling of Dostoevsky's Demons, set in a Stanford-like literature department.

The after:

I particularly remember my first magazine photo shoot, where I had to lie on my back on a piece of fluorescent green imitation fur, clutching to my bosom a Russian-language volume of Dostoevsky. The photographer stood over me on a ladder, snapping pictures. His assistant, peering through thick plastic glasses at the digital screen, opined that the pictures were coming out "too sultry". She said I was showing "too much neck". Overcoming a sense of injustice – if I hadn't been lying on my back on some kind of pornographic fur carpet, maybe my neck wouldn't have looked so sultry – I changed into a higher collar. Because the cover of the Dostoevsky was so brown, we switched to a green leatherette Pushkin. "Look like you're reading," the photographer suggested. Opening the book at random, I found myself staring at the epilogue to "The Gypsies": "There is no defence against fate."

Drunk-dialing Agatha Christie

A delightful piece by Elif Batuman at the Guardian about the Kindle's influence on her drinking and reading habits (via Megan McArdle, forwarded to me by Brent).

Whip-smart

Via Maud Newton, a hilarious and persuasive piece by Elif Batuman at the LRB on Mark McGurl's book about creative writing programs and American literature:

Literary writing is inherently elitist and impractical. It doesn’t directly cure disease, combat injustice, or make enough money, usually, to support philanthropic aims. Because writing is suspected to be narcissistic and wasteful, it must be ‘disciplined’ by the programme – as McGurl documents with a 1941 promotional photo of Paul Engle, then director of the Iowa workshop, seated at a desk with a typewriter and a large whip. (Engle’s only novel, McGurl observes, features a bedridden Iowan patriarch ‘surrounded by his collection of “whips of every kind”, including “racing whips”, “stiff buggy whips”, “cattle whips”, “riding crops” and one “endless bullwhip”’.) The workshop’s most famous mantras – ‘Murder your darlings,’ ‘Omit needless words,’ ‘Show, don’t tell’ – also betray a view of writing as self-indulgence, an excess to be painfully curbed in AA-type group sessions. Shame also explains the fetish of ‘craft’: an ostensibly legitimising technique, designed to recast writing as a workmanlike, perhaps even working-class skill, as opposed to something every no-good dilettante already knows how to do. Shame explains the cult of persecutedness, a strategy designed to legitimise literary production as social advocacy, and make White People feel better (Stuff White People Like #21: ‘Writers’ Workshops’).

A snippet

from The Possessed, about a recurring nightmare that began to plague Elif Batuman during a stressful homestay in Samarkand:

I had applied for a grant to go to Russia on a homestay, and the household I got assigned to was a family of penguins in Antarctica. "But penguins don't even have a language!" I protested. In fact, those penguins did have a language, with two branches, one epic-narrative and one lyric-folkloric. I was jerked awake by the pounding of my own heart.

Miscellany redux

I was lucky enough the other night to read two books of utter captivating charm. Both are strongly recommended!

They came in a box from Amazon, ordered by me (unlike many of the books which come my way from publicists and publishers - some of these are delightful too, but some of them are not at all what I would ever read...).

I had an Amazon hiatus earlier this year, in an attempt to adopt habits of frugality (John Waters: "Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it's the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it" [!]), but it did not really stick, I am trying to get a higher proportion of things from the library but there are occasional brand-new books that I really cannot get from the university library system and that I must have....

In this case, it was Diana Wynne Jones's latest book, Enchanted Glass, which is so very much exactly the sort of book I most like to read that I was almost ready to weep when I finished it - but fortunately what awaited was Elif Batuman's extraordinarily appealing The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.

The Samarkand essays are particularly moving and funny (the descriptions of her two teachers there are especially well-written), but really there is something on almost every page that made me laugh out loud - a thoughtful and moving and hilariously amusing book that for reasons I cannot quite explain (something about the diction and also the argument about the relationship between life and literature?) reminded me of my favorite novel of all time, Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows.

I am in a sense the perfect audience for this book - I too was bit by the Russia bug long ago, only in my case the thing I found enchanting in elementary Russian language classes was the nature and range of the answers one is allowed to give to the question "How are you doing?" (Kak dela?) The cheeriest permissible is "Not bad," but really all the words in the textbook range from "Pretty awful" to "Absolutely ghastly"! (I paraphrase.) Elif's book is really a delight from start to finish - it will definitely go on my notional and/or actual best-of list at the end of the year.