I’m just back in San Francisco from a particularly strenuous trip to the East Coast, where I attended, among other more-or-less Dostoevskian social functions, a twelve-hour Italian-language performance of The Demons on Governor’s Island.  I urge you all to check out the riveting minute-by-minute account, “My Twelve-Hour Blind Date, With Dostoevsky,” on the Paris Review blog.

Forthright readers!  I’m not going to sit here and tell you all that those twelve hours (actually fifteen hours, if you count transit time) were one unmitigated whirlwind of delight, because they weren’t.  Nonetheless, perhaps Dostoevsky put it best when he wrote the epigraph to The Brothers Karamazov: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24).  By which I mean to say that, even though something in me died during that performance, slowly, over the course of 12-15 hours, my cultural martyrdom did subsequently yield several non-negligible benefits, three of which I would like to share with you today.

1.  My fellow-sufferer Paul Roossin (the one who observed that the fat man had no decorum) sent along a really great photograph of The Possessed in an exotic location:

2. I received the following communication from Millions intern Ujala Sehgal:

Dear MS. Batuman,

I’m currently interning at the literary website “The Millions,” [where]… I recently posted the following: “At the Paris Review Daily, Elif Batuman walks us through part one of HIS 12-hour blind date with Dostoevsky.”

Shortly afterwards, “Allison” posted the following comment: “Elif Batuman is a woman.”

Doom, I thought, for several reasons. First and foremost, I myself do not possess an Anglo-sounding name, so to me such mistakes are personal… As waves of shame from cultural insensitivity washed over me, I comforted myself with the fact that I did not make the hetero-normative assumption that just because you were on a blind date with a male in your piece, you must obviously be female. So there! I will tell that to my detractors. [...]

[Our full correspondence on this subject is reproduced on Ms. Seghal's blog.]

Naturally, I was delighted by this testament to the virility of my authorial voice, which is evidently such that young people would sooner believe me to be a gay man than entertain the possibility of my not having a penis at all.

3. Lastly, my esteemed colleague Damion Searls asked me to a screening of Kurosawa’s adaptation of The Idiot, which apparently “translates very well to a setting in the snow country of Hokkaido” (a source of many “stunning visuals”).  My first response was, needless to say, “where do I sign up?”—until I found out that Kurosawa’s Idiot is only 166 minutes long, the unreleased 266-minute original having been lost to posterity in the 1950s.  166 minutes??  Come on, guys!  Did you ever hear of giving a text room to breathe?  Is this Dostoevsky we’re talking about, or a beer commercial?

Literate readers!  If you haven’t already, now is the time to vote in the Google/ Gogol pun contest.  Gogol Documents and Gogol Maps have been neck to neck for the past 48 hours—and it isn’t too late for Gogolplex to make an amazing comeback either!

In the meantime I am happy to share with you yesterday’s OED word of the day.  The D-list has made it to the A-list of dictionaries!

D-list, n. and adj.

DRAFT ENTRY June 2010

orig. U.S.

Brit. /dilst/, U.S. /dilst/  [< D n. + LIST n.⁶ , after A-LIST n., B-LIST n., C-LIST n.]

A. n.

1. The fourth in a series of lists, esp. lists ranked in order of preference or significance.

1951 White Bk. Aggressive Activities towards Yugoslavia (Yugoslav Min. Foreign Affairs) II. iii. 301 They had instructions to put through the proposed ‘D’ list in its entirety. They refuse to lift the ‘export ban’. 1957 B. HIGGINS Indonesia’s Econ. Stabilization & Devel. i. 3 Imports were divided into four categories: an ‘A’ list of free imports, a ‘B’ list requiring payment of 100 percent ‘inducement’, a ‘C’ list requiring payment of 200 percent inducement, and a prohibited ‘D’ list. 1987 in T. McCourt Conflicting Communication Interests in Amer. (1999) ii. 52 ‘What kind of cuts..are you considering for CPB?’ Stockman said, ‘Well, let’s see. We have an A, a B, a C, and a D list. They’re on our D list. That’s a 50 percent cut.’

2. Any (notional) list comprising only the least celebrated or important members of a particular group, esp. in the entertainment industry or the media.

1988 Orange County ( Santa Ana, Calif. ) Reg. 6 Mar. L20 The D list, which would encompass younger conductors on the way up, may be the most intriguing of all. 1997 Spy (N.Y.) Sept.-Oct. 49 He organized the very cream of Manhattan’s D-list into a moveable prix fixe bruncheon salon that haunted a waning constellation of downscale eateries. 2001 USA Today (Electronic ed.) 30 Mar., America is shifting from a voyeuristic society to one in which everyone wants to be the object that’s being viewed. Never mind Hollywood’s A-list and B-list. The hotter action is on America’s C-list and D-list.

B. adj. Of or belonging to a D-list; spec. designating or relating to a (notional) roster of the least celebrated or important individuals, esp. in the entertainment industry or the media. Usu. attrib.

1989 Chicago Tribune 25 Oct. (Style section) 28/5 Except for movie eminence Jack Valenti,..the guest list was pure D-list. 1997 Interzone Nov 37/3 The quality cast of B-list stars and D-list upcomers speak some very silly dialog with uncanny conviction. 2002 Evening Standard (Nexis) 1 Feb. 42 Or you could pop over to the Met Bar… I know it’s very D-list these days, but they might be able to knock you up a cocktail, such as a Slow Comfortable Screw.

---

DERIVATIVES

D-lister n. a person on a (notional) D-list.

1998 Guardian 30 Jan. (Friday Review section) 24/4 *D-listers proffer polite opinions on the questionable progress of Jack Docherty’s nascent moustache. 2001 Los Angeles Times (Nexis) 30 Nov. A1/1 Paparazzi started showing up at smaller events they previously would have ignored… All I saw this week were C-listers and D-listers.

Many many thanks to everyone who participated!  Honorable mention goes regretfully to Lev Blumenfeld for pointing out that the real winner was, as usual, Google, because on April 1, 2009 (Gogol’s 200th birthday), they replaced the Google logo with a Gogol logo.  (The same BBC article includes a poll in which readers voted on whether Gogol is Russian, Ukrainian, or belongs to the whole world.  Read it and weep, nationalists.)  I’m not considering them eligible for prizes, though, because they already have too many books for their own good.

A belated shout-out is also due to all the San Franciscans who tore themselves away from the Dyke March long enough to attend the Believer All-Acoustic Summer Festival of Language and Thinking last Saturday. I had a great time representing the world’s non-Jewish peoples, in a fantastic billing with Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Justin Taylor, Damion Searls (whose wife brought a vuvuzela), and a wonderful musical group identified as “the Jews of Citay” (a subset of the musical group Citay).

I leave you now with some amazing images, courtesy of esteemed reader/ contest finalist Kate Romatowski, depicting “The Possessed bravely tracking some of Yellowstone Park’s more fearsome wildlife, as well as touring Strasbourg’s monuments to those great French literary heroes, Goethe and Gutenberg.”

Happy Fourth of July to all my democratic readers!

Meanwhile, I am proud to inform those of you who weren’t in Iowa this afternoon that I was a featured guest on today’s edition of Great Taste, a food-themed talk show on KRUU, the voice of Fairfield. I talked about, and read an editorial outtake from, my New Yorker profile of chef Musa Dağdeviren.  (The outtake is up here.)  The incredibly kind host, Steve Boss, honored the venerable Turkish culinary tradition by preparing white bean soup and mücver in the studio kitchen. Or at least he said he did; and those who would like to try to distinguish the sound of white bean soup with their own ears will have their chance tomorrow (Thursday) morning at 7AM Central Time when the show will be rebroadcast and streamed live.  In the meantime, here is a recipe for mücver (zucchini fritters) by my comp-lit colleague Burcu.

In other outtake news, I was recently asked by Time magazine to write 100-200 words about what I’m reading this summer.  (Actually, the email forwarded to me by my publicist read as follows: “I’d love to get Elife [sic.] Batuman to talk to us about what’s in her beach bag.”  I later shared this communication with a colleague, whose reply provided much food for thought: “Time wants you to tell America what’s in your beach bag?  Holy shit.  That’s amazing.  So many ways to answer that. Perhaps you should just keep it simple and say ‘a big black dildo,’ which pretty much covers the bases.”)

As it happens, what I was reading at the time was Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), written by John Cleland while he was in debtor’s prison.  Personally, I found Fanny Hill to be a page-turner, but it isn’t for everyone.  I realized this, conclusively, when I got to the part where the teenage prostitute narrator and her teenage prostitute friend rape a mentally disabled guy in order to determine empirically whether it’s true that mentally disabled guys are particularly well-endowed.  According to their findings, it is true.  “Its enormous head seemed, in hue and size, not unlike a common sheep’s heart,” Cleland writes, in a generous descriptive passage which goes on for like three pages before concluding: “Nature, in short, had done so much for him in those parts, that she perhaps held herself acquitted in doing so little for his head.”  I guess, that time he meant the one on his shoulders.

I decided that America would be more interested to learn what I had read the last time I was at the beach, which was in Tel Aviv in May, where I was researching a story about Kafka.  I won’t tell you about it now, because I don’t want to interfere with Time’s circulation. (That was supposed to be a joke.)  But they did cut the last 100 words, so I reproduce them here:

By chance, the first book I came upon when I got back from the airport in the middle of the night was Raymond and Hannah, by Canadian novelist Stephen Marche: a wonderful beach read, and also very good for jet-lagged people who wish they were on a beach. It’s a love story between a Toronto PhD student writing a dissertation on The Anatomy of Melancholy, and his assimilated-Jewish six-night-stand who subsequently rushes off to an egalitarian yeshiva in Jerusalem to get in touch with her roots. It has a great balance of sex scenes, lovers’ emails, and vivid Israeli backdrops—“The sexiest people on the earth, that’s all there is to it” Marche wrote of the Israelis, in response to my fan email—plus just the right number of insights into subjects such as Robert Burton and the Jewish Problem.

In a big media week for me, I not only made my Iowa radio debut, but also recorded an Ipad special feature, as one of several Bay Area writers who discuss their Time summer reading picks with the extremely entertaining Katherine Lanpher in a variety of homey settings.  An honor for me, and a rare treat for you, provided that you (a) have an Ipad, and (b) want to know what I look like when I’m perched on a windowsill pretending to read Mary Wollstonecraft and trying not to think about big black dildos, while a cameraman holds a foil reflector in front of my face.  Airs July 4.

The Rake in a Debtors’ Prison (1735)

Come to think of it, considering Palo Alto’s proximity to Mountain View, Elif really missed the boat on the Google/Gogol puns.

Well, I’m not going to stand here and tell you people that bluefugate isn’t absolutely right, because she is.  In my defense, however, thinking of a good Google/ Gogol pun is not easy.  Either that, or I’m just exceptionally bad at it. I recently devoted a two-hour plane ride to this challenge (big thanks to all the Seattleites who made it out to the University Bookstore on Monday!), and you will get an idea of my success when I tell you that the most promising avenue, by far, involved the factorability of the googol by 0000, Gogol’s early penname.  Subsequently I fell asleep and dreamed that I was searching Petersburg for a nose and got 4.8 million hits.

Can you do better?  I think you can.  Please submit your Google/ Gogol puns by 11:59PM July 2, either in the comments section below, or by writing here.  Don’t forget to include your email.  The winner gets a choice of one of two wonderful prizes:

• A signed Australian edition of The Possessed

OR

• An unsigned (unless you want it signed by me or my intern) edition of Alexandra Popoff’s biography of Sophia Tolstoy, of which I somehow have 3 copies.  It looks great!

Bay Area readers!  You people should definitely consider swinging by Amnesia in the Mission (853 Valencia) on Saturday (tomorrow) evening at 6 for the Believer All-Acoustic Summer Festival of Language and Thinking, featuring me, Damion Searls, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, and Justin Taylor.

In honor of language and thinking, two of my favorite human endeavors, I would now like to devote the rest of this post to over-clarifying my response to the SF Examiner summer reading questionnaire we filled out for event publicity.  OK, here is the thing.  You’re gonna have to take my word for it, but one of the questions they sent us really was “6. Fill in the blank: Everyone should read my book this summer because _______.”  Nonetheless, on the website, (a) I’m the only one of the four writers who actually answers this question, which (b) is not itself reproduced, producing the impression that I have just spontaneously decided to explain why everyone should read my book this summer.  Not like I especially mind coming across as even more of a self-promotional jerk than I really am—I mean, whatever, guys, I’ll be laughing all the way to the bank—but frankly I was kind of proud of the smooth segue I thought of between questions 1 and 6.  So, I’m reproducing my answers here, and you can admire how ladylike I was.

1. Best book you ever read in the summer?

Anna Karenina, which I read in Ankara in the summer of 1995.  I write about it in my book, The Possessed, which everyone should absolutely read this summer because, as Tolstoy frequently pointed out, we might not live much longer, so there’s really no time like the present.

Furthermore, despite the subject matter (Russian literature), The Possessed is really a deeply summery book.  One episode, “Who Killed Tolstoy?”, takes place at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate, in August, while the descendants of Tolstoy’s favorite horses are having love affairs outside the conference halls.  In “Summer in Samarkand,” I have a terrible realization about human and national destinies, precipitated by the 2002 World Cup Turkey-Brazil match.  Another chapter, “The House of Ice,” is about the reconstruction, in 2006, of a palace made entirely of ice by Empress Anna Ioannovna for the wedding of her jesters in 1740.  This wasn’t so funny when it happened in Petersburg in the cold winter of 1740, but I guarantee it’s the ideal read for relaxing poolside 2010 with a Long Island iced tea.

2. Best park to read in? (SF or your own local if don’t live here.)

3. Best cafe to read in?  (as above.)

4. Best beverage to have at your side when deep in a summer read?

Given how the summer is shaping up in SF, my favorite place to read is hiding in bed with a cup of tea.

5. When you stay up all night reading a good book and people ask you the next day why you’re so tired, what do you tell them?

Are you kidding me?  For once, the reason my hair looks weird is because I was up all night pursuing the life of the mind, as opposed to doing cocaine off the bodies of of hedge fund managers—and I’m going to lie about it??  No way—I tell them the truth!!

See you tomorrow, if we’re still alive!