Endless adventures and subterfuges avoiding detection.
All I want to do
is get drunk with my wife
An endless glass of wine
both of us on the floor
So what if squares
look down on us?
Boring and misguided
are their miserable lives
When my wife is in the city
and I’m home
I want to cry
The moonlight
on the cypress tree
is a bitter light
No book has ever kissed me
like she does
—
Hafiz, 14th century Persian mystic/poet/nerd comes to the ultimate nerd realization
translation by Matthew Rohrer
Source: aprweb.org
The imperative to understand life and describe it provides an urgent moving refrain in the 1920 diary [of Isaac Babel].
‘Describe the orderlies—the divisional chief of staff and the others—Cherkashin, Tarasov.’
‘Describe Matyazh, Misha. Muzhiks, I want to penetrate their souls.’
Whenever Babel meets anyone, he has to fathom what he is. Always ‘what,’ not ‘who.’
‘What is Mikhail Karlovich?’ ‘What is Zholnarkevich? A Pole? His feelings?’
‘What are our soldiers?’ ‘What are Cossacks?’ ‘What is Bolshevism?’
‘What is Kiperman? Describe his trousers.’
‘Describe the work of a war correspondent, what is a war correspondent?’ (At the time he wrote this sentence, Babel himself was technically a war correspondent.)
Sometimes he seems to beg the question, asking, of somebody called Vinokurov: ‘What is this gluttonous, pitiful, tall youth, with his soft voice, droopy soul, and sharp mind?’
‘What is Grishchuk? Submissiveness, endless silence, boundless indolence. Fifty versts from home, hasn’t been home in six years, doesn’t run.’
‘I go into the mill. What is a water mill? Describe.’
‘Describe the forest.’
‘Two emaciated horses, describe the horses.’
‘Describe the air, the soldiers.’
‘Describe the bazaar, baskets of cherries, the inside of the tavern.’
‘Describe this unendurable rain.’
‘Describe “rapid fire.”’
‘Describe the wounded.’
‘The intolerable desire to sleep—describe.’
‘Absolutely must describe limping Gubanov, scourge of the regiment.’
‘Describe Bakhturov, Ivan Ivanovich, and Petro.’
‘The castle of Count Raciborski. A seventy-year-old man and his ninety-year-old mother. People say it was always just the two of them, that they’re crazy. Describe.’
— Elif Batuman, “Babel in California”
Source: twitter.com
In prognostication, identity and destiny are inextricably linked. This is because we can only understand human identity as a narrative — and the meaning of a narrative depends on its ending. Without knowing what happens to us, we don’t know who we were all along. Hence the last line of ‘Oedipus Rex’: ‘Count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.’
The ancient Babylonians practiced divination by haruspicy: interpretation of the entrails of animals. The shape of intestines is believed to have suggested to ancient Mesopotamians the form of the first labyrinth. In the demonic resonance between the labyrinth and the intestines, we see the mystery of the future. Is it something outside us, in the world, or is it hidden deep in our own bodies?
There’s an amazing haruspicy scene in Virgil’s ‘Aeneid.’ Dido, realizing that she’s in love, sacrifices some sheep, supposedly to favor a marriage with Aeneas. Deep down, she already sees how everything is going to end for her. It’s going to end the same way as for the sheep (with a knife in the gut). When she stands ‘gazing into their quivering entrails for signs from the gods,’ she sees the answer to two questions: What will happen to me? and, still more terrifying, Who am I?
— Elif Batuman, “The Role of ‘Who Am I?’”
Source: The New York Times
His father liked to moon people and had ‘three major styles’ of doing so. No child, Mr. Anastas suggests, should have to contemplate his father’s furry anus on an even semiregular basis. ‘It leads to nightmares,’ he writes. ‘It is like seeing your own death.’
— New York Times review of “Too Good to be True” by Benjamin Anastas (Elif Batuman recommends as “a harrowing read”)
Source: The New York Times
It occurred to me that the novel, though fiction, isn’t uniformly fictional. Endings are fake, because nothing in real life ever ends; characters are composites, because real people are either too close to you or too far. But the furniture and clothes: that stuff must almost all be real. There’s no way Balzac invented all that furniture. All those soaring ambitions and human destinies are just a pretext for telling the truth about the sofas and the clocks.
Source: lrb.co.uk
The rationale is that people these days are no longer interested in novels, because we live in a newsy age, we care about facts, we care about the truth. But I mean, why did people ever like novels to begin with? Because they used to love lies? No way.
— So many good parts in this Rumpus interview with Elif Batuman
Source: therumpus.net
