"Sayaka Murata’s Alien Eye"

Elif Batuman's transnational adventure meeting Sayaka Murata several times on various continents ends with Murata's conclusive "People are out of their minds."

Helen Stuhr-Rommereim Interviews Elif Batuman at Full Stop

"Well, I have been thinking about how a lot of the writers that I know are incredibly good email writers and a lot of the time I find their emails more compelling than the things they are writing at the time. It is connected to this thing that I quoted from Chekhov in The Possessed, about how everyone has two lives and one is the open one that is known to everyone and one is the unknown one, running its course in secret. The email is kind of the unknown life, and the published writings are the known life. This is something that I tried to do in The Possessed, especially in the 'Ice Palace' piece. I tried to take the piece that I wrote for The New Yorker and fill out the human dimension that didn’t make it into the New Yorker story. I want to go back to some of the stuff that I wrote, and fill in the personal story that contextualizes it. Otherwise, you have this New Yorker journalist, a professional dilettante, who is just going from thing to thing to thing, and none of them are connected to each other. When you’re lucky enough to like your work it’s a huge part of your thinking. And one of the things that I really like about the classic novel is that it shows you all of the layers of thought that people have; their job, their marriage, their friends and their thoughts about politics are all woven together. But I want to write more about sex in this one; I think sex is a really big problem that people don’t acknowledge enough. And I wasn’t able to do that in The Possessed because it was non-fiction."

from Turkey and Armenia to Russia and Ukraine

** Elif Batuman's The Possessed takes us everywhere from Stanford to Russia to Uzbekistan.

** I feared Batuman failed to mention any of my favorites from Russian literature (Shalamov, Olesha, and Biely among others), and then, like magic, Biely showed up in a footnote a few pages after this anxiety set in. So, yes, it was more like a doubt or disappointment, not a genuine fear.

** Arthur Nersesians's Dogrun has a Yuri Olesha reference!

** I read Turkish-American Batuman just before Armenian-American Nersesian, and, like a naive American-American dip shit, I imagine myself resolving the history of their ancestors.

** On Easter Sunday, we ate with people who described themselves as Ukrainians raised in Russia. The father came from the town that "Gooseberries" takes place in.

** An interpretation of Yuri Olesha's Envy is that it is equally critical of both capitalism and communism, Russia and its "foreign devils," and this is consistent with how I teach Ha Jin's "After Cowboy Chicken Came To Town."

** As you can see, I'm in a jam, and this sort of superficial listing is the best I can do.

** Also, I promised myself, I'd try to stop blogging and begin writing short little pieces I could then submit to journals and zines.

** I can't prove that the global news headlines continue to insist we are sliding into sustained global conflict, or World War III, but I can't prove that we're not.

** But blogging is easy and addictive.

** I must return to typing in more corrections I've made by hand.

** So I'll add detail to this another time.

** Fight for your long weekend!

briefly on Balzac and bussing dishes

"One Step Forward" from Philadelphia's Rodin Museum

I've never read Balzac, and have had always had mixed feelings for prolific novelists who were widely read while they were alive, but I just read past Elif Batuman's mention of the French writer in her The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, and it reminded me that I'd shared "One Step Forward" on facebook earlier in the day. An imagined essay I've drafted but never completed is on my brief literary tour of Philadelphia's Rodin Museum. This "tourism" includes a statue and "statuette" of Balzac: Rodin's "Colossal Head of Balzac," which I have always called, "Bust of Balzac" and the parody, "One Step Forward," which I have called "Balzac in the Shape of a Seal."

The Batuman is fun reading, and I've just made it to the Dostoevsky section toward the end. His novel The Possessed is important to me because the old hardcover Constance Garnett translation of it is one I borrowed from Shakespeare and Company when I was "un commis," bussing dishes in Paris, France many moons ago. On Wednesday in Clemson, I'll be reading from a story that includes some detail from those travels as an undergrad taking time off from college.